Dirt clung to every inch of me by the time Renere took us back. Boots, shirt, teeth. My ribs ached with each breath and I did not let us slow, and Denna followed without a sound. That was its own kind of ache, because there had been a time, four days and one lifetime ago, when she would have complained beautifully the whole way. By the time we reached the Blind Beggar the city had gone dark around us, and the dark of Renere had changed while we were gone. It had a held-breath quality now. Cities know.
I knocked. A shuffle, the scrape of a chair going back, and Bast swung the door open already talking.
"Finally. I was starting to think you'd gone and gotten yourself—" He stopped short, seeing past my shoulder. "Oh!"
Behind him Sim half-rose from his chair. Wil set down the notebook he'd been writing in and did not pick it up again, which was Wilem's equivalent of a shout. For a moment nobody said anything at all.
"Denna," Bast said carefully. His eyes went from her, to me, and back, reading the road-dirt, the missing mare, the distance she kept at my shoulder like a third traveler. He gathered up everything neither of us had offered and filing it where Bast filed things.
"Fell off my horse," Denna said, and brushed past all three of them into the room as though she owned the lease. "Got anything to eat?" She stopped in the middle of the floor, and her empty hands hung loose at her sides for just a moment, and the shadows under her eyes said the rest. "I'm starving."
"Er." Sim was still catching up, half-standing, chivalry and confusion fighting over the wreckage of his posture. "I think Wil has half an onion left. From earlier."
"An onion?" Denna blinked at him. "Just an onion?"
"It is on a stick," Wil said, already holding it out.
"God's body, it might as well be roasted lamb." She held out both hands like a woman at a shrine. "Pass it over."
And she moved through that miserable room trailing that odd unshakable air of hers, eating a cold half-onion off a stick like a countess at a fair, and I watched Sim and Wil and even Bast rearrange themselves around her as rooms always did. I collapsed into a chair and fought my boots, and lost the first fall, and called it a draw.
The Blind Beggar's back room smelled of tallow and old beer. A single lamp burned on the table between Wil's notes and Sim's cup, and the walls leaned in close as if eavesdropping, which in Renere was not a figure of speech I trusted anymore. It was a miserable room. It was the best we had, and by then I had learned to price rooms by their company, which made it a palace.
"Since when has Denna been—" Wil started, low.
"Later," I said.
Sim was looking at me with that hopeful expression he always wore, too kind by half for what I was carrying. So I gave it to him plainly, as you pull a bandage. "The Maer wasn't cruel. Just absent. Drowning in caution, in a house full of maps. He knows something's coming, he's known longer than we have, I'd wager, and he means to be well-dressed and elsewhere when it arrives."
"So he won't help," Wil said, filing the total.
"He'll attend the wedding with a retinue and condole whoever wins." I looked between them. "What about you? Any luck with the letter?"
Sim's voice came out clipped, and clipped was new on Sim. "We got it into Alstair's hands. Taliver helped, one of his under-stewards, an ink-and-oranges man from the old days. But either the letter never left the servants' floor, or Alstair read it and set it in the fire. There's been nothing. Not even a no."
"Then the court is deaf on both ends."
Bast made a low sound in his chest, less growl than weather, and rolled his shoulders. "We are running out of cards." He looked at me and waited, because he had heard something in my voice when I came through the door, and Bast never missed a note he could later collect on.
"It's worse than you think."
"Oh, lovely." Bright, in the register that meant nothing good. "Let me guess. A horde of shamble-men is about to crash the city gates."
"We spotted an army on the way back. Jakis colors on every tent pole. The serpent, silver-trimmed, over a white pavilion. Five hundred men at the least, camped in a ravine less than two hours' ride from where you're sitting. Provisioned. Drilling. Waiting."
Sim leaned back as if the words had weight enough to push him. Wil cursed softly in Siaru, one of the short ones this time, which was somehow worse. Bast's whole posture changed, sharpened, drew taut, a bow remembering its trade.
"If they're that close," he said, "why not take it straight to the king?"
I shook my head. "Roderic is buried under silk. Every word that reaches him passes through six mouths first, and half those mouths are bought. News as bad as ours won't reach the throne inside a month."
"Or ever," Sim said, with a bitterness I had never heard from him. Three days of watching a good letter die in a great house will teach a man things his tutors declined to.
Then Wil and Sim exchanged a look. The kind of look that has a whole conversation in it, with clauses, and a signature at the bottom.
"What?" I said.
Wil cleared his throat and folded his hands on the table, formal as a banker declining to be shocked by his own proposal. "It is not that we don't agree. We agree. It is only that, while you were away, we began cooking something else. It is not elegant. It is not even lawful." He paused. "But it may be the only thing left that works."
"Tell me."
Sim glanced at Denna, she had settled onto the cot with her onion, watching us all over it like theater, then back to me, and squared himself, and said it.
"We start with kidnapping."
Three days we spent on it. Three days of watching and waiting, which is the hardest work there is, because it looks exactly like doing nothing, and feels like it too. Every hour of it was spent listening to a wedding coming up the calendar behind you like hoofbeats.
We learned the king's personal tailor as you learn a song. Artemi Ilario. His habits, his hours, his temper, the coffee-house where he abused his apprentices and the route he walked each morning up to the Citadel with his chin leading. On the second night we took what we needed from his shop, took it gently, professionally, leaving silver where we took cloth. I steal many things but never from craftsmen without paying. We have that much guild-feeling between us. And by the third morning Denna had re-cut the tailor's spare uniform to fit me, working half the night with pins between her teeth and a fixed, furious precision I recognized. It was the same attention she gave to Yllish knots. Denna did not sew a seam. She interrogated it.
I have been many things in my life. Musician, student, beggar, thief, arcanist, and several occupations with no polite name. I had never been a tailor, and I learned on that third morning that I had no gift for it, the role sat on me close enough to wear, wrong enough to notice. Which is precisely as wrong as a disguise can afford to be, and no wronger, and we were about to spend the whole margin.
I drank my cup that morning, cold and bitter, before Bast set to work on my face. I record it because I recorded all the others.
The sound of my boots rang too loud on the cold stone of the Citadel halls. Every step came back off the walls at me like a creditor.
"Not much further, sir," said my escort, a short brisk man named Galeshim, some fourth under-chamberlain who walked as if lateness were a personal insult being done to him continuously, and who cleared our way by snapping at everything that moved. "Out of the way! Move aside! Urgent business of His Majesty's household!" I could not have designed him better. Officious men are a disguise's best friends. They do the believing for the whole hallway.
My skin chafed under Bast's glamourie. It had gone on like cold water and settled like a sunburn, my flame of hair smoothed away to a sensible brown, my eyes dulled to a clerk's patient grey. The bones of my face were politely rearranged for any eye that asked. When I caught my reflection in a polished shield on the wall, it was Artemi Ilario who looked back. A middle-sized man of middle years who had stopped expecting good news and had opinions about hems. I held the stranger's gaze a moment, as you hold a role's face before the curtain, finding where it kept its weight, what it did with its mouth.
Then I walked on, wearing him.
We all wear faces that aren't ours. I had simply gotten better at choosing mine, and had a Fae prince for a costumer, and I want it noted that of all the room's deceits that morning, mine was merely the most literal.
I shifted the bundle in my arms, the gown, boned and vast, impossibly white, smelling faintly of starch and cedar. And here, in hindsight, was the first mistake, and I made it in full knowledge. A master tailor does not carry his own garments. He has a boy for it. The boy is half the rank. I knew this. I had learned this watching tailors for three days. But we had no one to spare for a boy, and I told myself that in the rush of a royal wedding no one would count arms.
It mattered. It always matters. The detail you argue yourself out of is the one they hang you with.
We reached a doorway flanked by two soldiers in the king's crimson and gold, standing with the particular immovability of men who have already refused you in their hearts.
"Open the door," Galeshim commanded, flapping his hands.
Neither guard stirred. The older one's gaze had gone to the bundle in my arms. Then to my hands. Then up to my face, and stayed there, and though he said nothing I could hear him thinking, as you can always hear the audience member who isn't laughing. Something about this picture sits wrong.
"Are you deaf?" Galeshim's voice climbed a register. "This is the king's own tailor! Let us through at once!"
The guards traded a glance and did not budge, and Galeshim's mouth twitched, and his next attempt came out more wary than commanding. I watched my best prop wobble on its stand. "Gentlemen. I assure you, this delay is not merely discourteous, it is dangerous. If His Majesty finds fault in the gown's fit this afternoon, it will not be my name he speaks with displeasure."
Still they held. And Galeshim turned to me with a stiff, apologetic little gesture. Perhaps the master himself might impress upon them.
Everything I had was in the next five heartbeats, so I spent it all. I stepped forward, lifted Ilario's chin as Ilario lifted it at his apprentices, let the torchlight find the face Bast had built me. I spoke in the man's own Renere-and-lemon accent, which I had spent two sleepless nights sanding smooth.
"I would love to waste the morning here, exchanging empty words with the household's finest statuary." I let the consonants bite. "But I have a royal fitting at the next bell, and no patience left for thick-headed guards who confuse stubbornness with duty. Shall we all go and explain the delay together? I'll want your names for it."
The younger guard flinched. The older one looked at me for a heartbeat more, and stepped aside, mumbling something that had an apology's shape.
An accent, a chin, and the promise of paperwork. Kingdoms are held together with less. I know. I have since held one together with less.
Within, lamplight fell from high windows across mirrors edged in gold, and the room was all pale fabric and moving hands, maids at their hemming, ribbons and pins, a fitting in full sail. And at the center of it, seated before the largest mirror with her back to me, a small figure in white.
I shook the thin stick hidden in my sleeve. Two quick flicks. Wil had inscribed it the night before, paired to a twin he carried at the outer gates. Simple sygaldry, motion answering motion, a whisper down a taut string five hundred yards long. At the gates, they would feel it stir and know I was in the room.
"Ladies." My voice found the register the coat required, brisk, put-upon, entitled to the air it used. The maids froze mid-stitch. "His Majesty has sent me to make the final adjustments personally. Unburden yourselves of this task. Quickly, please. The light is already going."
"We weren't expecting—" one began.
I clapped twice. It is remarkable what two claps will do, in a great house, delivered by a man in the right coat. "Go. Now."
They gathered their baskets and hurried out in a rustle of apology, and the door sighed shut, and I stood alone in all that pale light with the figure at the dressing table.
Her head was bowed slightly. Her hands lay folded in her lap, perfectly still, folded as you keep something safe for someone, against their return.
There are moments that refuse to move at the proper speed. Some rush past before you can close your hand on them. Others slow, and go on slowing, until you can feel the grain of the floorboards through your boots and hear the dust settle. This was the second kind. I crossed that room in six steps, and it took a hundred years, and I remember every one of them.
"Auri," I breathed. It came out half a question, though I had not meant it to. The glamourie sat on me whole. The mirror still held Artemi Ilario. The voice was still half his.
Slowly, she turned.
Her wide eyes moved over the face that was not mine, over the brown hair, the grey eyes, the stranger's bones. Glamourie is the art of seeming, and seeming, as I have told you, only asks the eyes to be polite.
Auri's eyes had never once been polite. They had only ever been true.
One heartbeat passed. Another. And then she smiled, small, and certain, the first true thing I had seen in that whole white city.
"You are still you," she said.
The words went through me as her voice had once come through a Haven door. Past every wall I had, straight to the deep place where the names live. Her exact words, handed back across all the ruin between that door and this room. And before the sound of them had left the air she was up and in my arms, and she weighed almost nothing, and she made a sound that was half a laugh and half a thing with no name in any language I've studied, and her arms went tight around my neck, and against my ear, gravely, in her own private grammar, she whispered:
"And what have you brought me?"
"A way out," I whispered back. "If you'll have it."
I felt her nod against my neck. Weighing had never taken Auri long when the gift was true.
Then a heavy crash shook the door on its hinges, and the world resumed its proper speed.
My body tensed and the tremors answered it, right on schedule. I pressed my hands flat against my thighs for the space of one breath until they steadied enough to spend. "We need to leave," I whispered, and pulled out the alchemical vial Sim had pressed on me that morning with far more confidence than any of his explanations had earned.
The liquid inside smelled like vinegar that had died of something. I smeared it across both palms, then knelt and worked what remained into the soles of my boots. When I pressed a hand flat against the stone of the window frame, it held, not firmly. Not reassuringly. As a handshake holds when one party is still deciding.
Auri had climbed to the sill and peered over the ledge, down the long pale drop of the outer wall. She looked at the stone. At the gel on my hands. At the distance, which was the kind of distance that has opinions.
"The stones know you're coming," she said softly, with the calm of a hostess smoothing a guest's worry. "They'll remember where to hold."
The door shuddered again, harder, wood beginning to argue with its own hinges, as I eased myself out onto the face of the wall, and Auri wrapped her arms around my neck and her weight settled against my back, slight and present and entire, the whole of my life in eight stone.
I climbed down.
I will not pretend to make it beautiful. The Citadel sprawled below us in the late-morning sun, pale stone and copper roofs shrinking with terrible slowness. I went one handhold at a time, and the stone was cold against my knuckles, and every time I peeled a palm free the gel let go with a faint wet sound, like a promise deciding, each time, freshly deciding, whether to keep itself.
From above: "There! He's on the wall! After him!"
Then my right hand slipped.
The gel had thinned, gone slick against the rain-smoothed stone, and for one long lurching moment I held our combined weight on three points while my fingers scraped and skated for purchase. And the wind found me there. It pressed my hair flat and stung my eyes and filled up the narrow space between my ribs and the wall, and it came with a thought riding it, whole and shining and not entirely mine. Let go. Trust it. Let it carry you, as it carried Taborlin from the high tower, and the wind loves you, and you know its name—
I considered it. For half a heartbeat, hanging over the copper roofs of Renere with Auri's breath against my ear, I honestly considered it, and my fingers made the decision without consulting me. They tightened on the stone. Such endings suit Taborlin the Great. I was not great. Not yet. And I was carrying something the wind had not been introduced to.
Auri's whisper came small and sure at my ear. "No. The stones won't let you fall." And then, as if explaining the simplest thing in the world, the thing everyone forgets. "They remember how to hold hands."
So I asked the stones.
I made myself see them under my fingers, the same thick grey blocks that held up every wall of the Citadel, quarried together, dressed together, four hundred years shoulder to shoulder in the weather, felt the cold patient weight of them, and then, clear as my own name, it was there. Not one stone but three, and the name that bound them where they touched. My sleeping mind handed it up through the cracks like a workman passing a tool. I spoke, low, and the tension in the rock eased, and the block beneath my toes slid itself out from the wall's face a hand's width.
A step.
I reached for the Name again, and it came slower, the sleeping mind wading now, as a familiar word backs away when you chase it, but it came. Another block shunted out. Then another. Stone by stone the Citadel's wall made us a ladder of itself, quietly, three names at a time, and we crawled down the face of the king's own fortress on handholds that had not existed that morning, my hands trembling against every one of them, the gel whispering its little wet promises, Auri weighing no more than her name on my back.
Below us, a balcony. I dropped the last few feet onto slick stone and let myself breathe twice.
Through the open balcony doors an empty chamber stretched ahead, floors worn to a dull shine, an iron chandelier burning low, one long oak table running the room's length like a sentence nobody had finished. I lowered Auri and took her hand. "Come on." Above us, faint, boots were finding stairs.
The first door I tried was locked. I rattled the handle once and was already moving on when Auri pulled at my sleeve.
"That's the one," she said softly. "There's a passage behind it. It runs north, to the old tower."
"Where does it come out?"
"It doesn't." Her voice went small, apologetic on the architecture's behalf. "The tower sits at the end."
A dead end. I left it and tried the second door. It gave a pitiful inch and stopped, bolted from beyond. And then the third door swung wide before I reached it, and four knights spilled into the chamber with swords already drawn.
I pulled Auri close against me as they fanned out. A man with a captain's sash across his breastplate threw out one hand. "Hold!" And his eyes went between me, the open balcony, and Auri, doing honest arithmetic and getting a dishonest answer, which was precisely what I needed him to have.
"Trust me," I murmured into her ear.
Then, quick as a card turning over, I drew the knife from my boot and set it at her throat.
Understand the craft, because the craft was everything. My hand was shaking, and I knew my hand was shaking, and so the blade never touched her. I held it a careful inch off her skin, angled flat to the room so the torchlight would run along it and every eye would swear it kissed her neck. A trouper's cheat. The audience sees the light, not the distance.
"Stay back!" I filled the room with it, wall to wall.
And Auri, oh, remember this of her, whatever else this story does, Auri performed. She gasped, and trembled against me, and her eyes went glass-bright with terror, and in a voice pitched to carry to the cheap seats she whimpered:
"Oh, please, he'll cut the moon right out of me."
I nearly broke. Half a year among the finest liars in two courts, and the best performance I saw in Vintas was given by a barefoot girl who could not tell an untruth, because she wasn't telling one. She had simply found the version of true that the room required, as she found the rightness of everything. He'll cut the moon right out of me. No line I ever wrote worked half so hard.
The captain froze, hand settling on his hilt and staying there. "Easy," he said, careful as a man on ice. "Easy. No one has to get hurt."
"Over there." I motioned with the knife, herding. "All of you. Backs to the far wall."
The steel-clad men obeyed, boots scraping over the grout until stone stopped them, and I walked us backward toward the third door, the open one, the one they'd come through, the one that led anywhere at all, and I was three paces from it when I heard new footsteps in the passage beyond. Many, and deliberate, and arriving.
Roderic entered with his chest heaving and his crimson cloak dragging like something wounded.
Baron Jakis hovered at his right elbow, flanked by two men in serpent livery. And behind them, half-hidden in the press of armored bodies, I caught one glimpse of an ink-stained apron and a face crimson with outrage. The real Artemi Ilario, produced like an exhibit.
A good thief accounts for the person he has stolen from. He buys him a morning's delay, a false errand, a bottle. We hadn't. We'd had no one to spare, and I had told myself it wouldn't matter, and here was the bill, wearing an apron.
Jakis stood very still at the king's shoulder. His face was composed with tremendous care, the stillness of a liar who knows that his whole fortune rides on the next few minutes and that a single twitch is a confession. I marked it even then. Behind Roderic, more armored men filed in along the walls, metal whispering on metal, like instruments tuning toward the same ugly chord.
"Unhand her!" Roderic's voice cracked clean across the second word, and the crack told the truth the crown could not. A father, arriving breathless, having run. "If she is harmed, if one hair of her is harmed, I will have you opened from throat to navel and left for the dogs."
"You've left me no choices, Your Majesty." My words came out angling instead of striking. Even mid-catastrophe some part of me was still trying to steer. "Your city isn't safe. Your court isn't safe. Your daughter least of all, ask Jakis. Ask him about the army camped two hours from your gates, under his own serpent."
And before the Baron could shape his outrage, Regent Fascino appeared at the edge of the room.
His stride was unhurried. He was smiling. And his guards came in behind him, and did not acknowledge the king. They did not salute, did not take positions along the walls beside the crimson-and-gold. They spread instead to the doorways, all three, and blocked them, and turned to face inward.
Every man in the room saw it. Soldiers know that grammar on sight. I watched it land on the captain's face, on the knights', on Baron Jakis, who did not look surprised, only ready, which told me the last thing I needed to know about the evening's authorship.
Every man in the room saw it. Every man but Roderic.
"Fascino." The king's voice loosened with relief, and the sound of that relief is one of the things I still hear on bad nights. "Thank Tehlu. Secure this room."
Fascino met the king's eyes without deference, without hurry, without fear, and folded his hands.
"Jakis brought his little forces," he said pleasantly. "Mine never truly left."
For a moment Roderic's face held nothing at all. And then it held everything. The whole ledger, every warning dismissed and door closed and honest man exiled, tallied in a single second and paid in full.
"You," he said. "You. After everything I've done—"
"Spare us the lamentations, Roderic." Fascino waved him off, lazy as a man declining a second dessert, and then his voice dropped, and the smile went with it, and underneath was the thing the coat and the rings and the mustache had been upholstering all season. "You ruled with song, when the world demanded flame."
What followed came all at once, and I will give it to you as it came, without order. Screams from somewhere below us, sudden, many. Metal on metal, too close. Roderic shouting a command that no one alive was obeying. Fascino's men drawing together, blades coming out along three doorways at once, and the king's knights turning to meet them, and the room folding in on itself as rooms do when the thing everyone half-knew arrives, and blood, the first of it, spilling mute and black across the pale stone in the lamplight, without any of the ceremony that blood is owed.
I looked for our way out and there was none. The third door was choked with Fascino's men, killing. The second was bolted. That left the first.
The dead end. The tower.
The lock was old iron, heavy in its housing, and there was no time to pick it and no hands to pick it with.
I didn't need either anymore.
"Feralthalien," I whispered, and the old bolt slid itself free with a sound like a long-held sigh. Softly, obligingly, iron remembering me. Twice now. It was getting easier, and I did not have time to be afraid of that, so I filed the fear for later, where it has been drawing interest ever since.
"Through here!" I hauled the door wide and pulled Roderic by the arm, laid hands on the King of Vintas and dragged him like a drunk uncle, and no one in that room of dying etiquette so much as blinked. He saw the corridor beyond and balked, planting his feet.
"That tower is a dead end. We'll be trapped—"
"We're already trapped." I put my face close to his. "At least the tower has walls and a door."
He looked back once at the room where his men were dying for him in the wrong order, the loyal ones first. It is always the loyal ones first, and then he went through. Auri followed, light on her feet, past me and ahead, and Roderic went after his daughter, and I came last and pulled the ruined door to behind us.
The passage beyond ran narrow and north, stones damp, air stale with long disuse. A servants' corridor from some older draft of the Citadel, the kind of space great houses forget they have. Auri ran ahead as though she had walked it before.
Perhaps she had. It occurred to me, pelting through the dark behind her small sure shape, that we had taken a girl out of a palace, and palaces have underneaths. Auri had never in her life met an underneath she did not learn.
As we ran I snapped the sygaldry sticks in my pocket, both at once, breaking them clean. The crack of it stung my palm. At the outer gates, the paired set would not just stir now, it would break in Bast's pocket with the same sharp snap, and Denna and Bast would know. It has all gone wrong. It is running. Come to the falling-back place.
"Kvothe!"
Auri's cry snapped me around. Back down the corridor, filling it wall to wall in the torchlight. Knights. A dozen of them, mailed, helmed, Fascino's sigil bright on every chest, coming on at a trot with the unhurried certainty of men herding something into a sack.
I stopped without deciding to. Planted myself in the middle of that narrow stone throat between them and everything I had left.
"Keep going!" I shouted over my shoulder. "Get to the tower!"
"Kvothe, no—" Auri's voice broke on it, and I heard Roderic, to his lasting credit, the one unqualified credit I can pay the man, grab his daughter and pull her onward.
I turned to face them.
Take the measure of the ground with me, as I took it then, because the ground was all I had. The passage ran narrow, three men abreast at the widest, and they would have to come to me down its length. Iron torch brackets jutted from the walls at shoulder height, six of them in sight. Low ceiling. No armor on me, no shield, a sword my hands could no longer be sworn to, and one thing more. I could feel the Name of the wind as you feel a word caught in your throat. Not yet spoken. Already true.
They came, and I let it go.
The walls themselves seemed to lean away from the sound of it. The wind hit that passage like a river handed a channel too small for it. Tearing forward with nowhere to go but through, and it went through. It ripped the torch brackets from the stone and sent them scything. It caught the front rank of soldiers like leaves off a table and flung them back into the men behind, armor crashing on armor, bodies on stone, helms ringing off the low ceiling. And somewhere in the middle of that tangle a window I had not even marked burst outward, and a man went with it, out into all that bright morning air. His arms were reaching for something that was not there and had never been there.
Then the wind passed, and what it left was dust, and groaning, and me.
But not all of them were down. Even as the front ranks flew, the second had knelt, trained men, curse them, drilled for wizardry or lucky beyond forgiveness, knelt behind their falling fellows with crossbows braced against the floor.
One of them fired.
I did not see the bolt. You never see the bolt. I felt it. A punch below my left collarbone, absurdly blunt, like the kick of a cart-horse delivered by a fist, and it drove me backward off my feet, and then came the second impact as the bolt's head struck the wall behind me and bit deep into the mortar seam.
And held.
For a moment I hung there. Pinned between the bolt and the stone, my boot-toes just brushing the floor, my mind still two heartbeats behind my body, filing the wrong reports. You have been pushed. You have snagged your coat on something.
Then the pain arrived, all of it at once, filling the entire left side of my chest with a bright wrongness that made thinking feel like swimming through sand. My left arm went heavy as wet rope. My fingers stopped answering entirely.
The remaining knights were picking themselves up out of the wreckage, and the kneeling bowman was recranking his string with terrible professional calm, and I reached for what I had left, not wind. There was no breath in me for wind, and found stone.
The floor. The same grey blocks, four hundred years shoulder to shoulder. I spoke what I could of the Name with the air I could spare, and the floor beneath their boots remembered, briefly, that it was solid all the way through and always had been, and the mortar flowed like cold honey around two men's boots and set. They stumbled mid-stride, caught fast, ankle-deep in stone that had never let go of anything, and their shouts went up an octave.
Then something moved at the edge of my sight. Low, and fast, and coming from behind me, where there was nothing but empty corridor and the way to the tower.
Steel caught torchlight.
The bowman who had shot me looked down, folded over with a sound like a small cough, and did not rise.
I tried to turn my head and the bolt held me short, so I heard the rest before I saw any of it. Quick breathing, a scuffle, a blade withdrawn. And then Sim's hands found me. Sim, white to the lips, his knife red to the guard and his eyes not looking at it, not looking at the man behind him, not looking at anything but me. One hand braced flat against my chest. The other gripped the bolt's shaft where it met the wall.
He hesitated half a breath, searching the stranger's face Bast had built over mine. And then our eyes met through the glamourie, and whatever Auri had seen he saw too, or enough of it, and he set his jaw and twisted the head free of the mortar.
I came off the wall like a nail out of green wood. Sim caught me before the floor could, both arms, staggering.
I want one thing marked here, in its place, before the story runs on, because the story always runs on and some debts get trampled. Simmon killed a man that morning. His first, and, I would learn much later, not his last. But the first is the one that changes the money. The gentlest soul I have ever known came down a corridor into blood and wind and wreckage, saw a stranger pinned to a wall, worked out in one heartbeat who the stranger had to be, and put his knife into a trained soldier from behind without a word, for me. He never spoke of it after. He fumbled his cup at supper for a span, and hummed more than usual, and once I woke in the night to hear him being quietly sick, and we never once discussed why. There is a price the gentle pay for our wars that the rest of us never fully see. It does not appear in any song about me. It appears here.
Wil arrived beside him out of the same shadows, a short-handled hatchet in a grip that said he knew its weight and its work, his dark eyes running the corridor behind us, the wreckage, the two men mewling ankle-deep in stone, and coming back to me with a scriv's flat assessment.
"Charred body of Tehlu," he said. "I thought you would be dead by now."
"So did I," I croaked.
Sim was scanning the corridor, stopping on every shadow, his voice not entirely his yet. "Where's Auri?"
"With Roderic. Ahead of us, the tower." I coughed, and tasted iron, and declined to think about what that meant with a hole below my collarbone.
Wil's eyes went to the corridor behind, to the shouting rising through the Citadel's bones, the metal-on-metal now general, spreading floor to floor like fire in a granary. "The coup is happening," he said. "Now. All of it, everywhere at once."
"Denna and Bast are at the gate." Sim was already working his shoulder under my good arm, hauling me upright with a strength none of us ever gave him credit for. "The signal broke, they'll be moving. Kvothe, we need to run."
The screaming above us went on. Somewhere below, something vast fell over. And ahead, up the narrow dark, a dead-end tower with a king and Auri in it and every sword in Renere coming.
"Not without them," I said.
And with steel crashing at our backs, we ran toward what remained.