I fell.
The world came undone around me. Wind hammered my ears until hearing was only pressure, and the white walls of the Citadel smeared to chalk overhead, the tower's broken doorway shrinking to a dark mouth, then to a fleck, then to nothing at all. Past the courtyard. Past the walls. The cliff face rushed up along beside me like a road stood on end, and my body understood before my mind did, as bodies do. Legs kicking against empty air, arms reaching for stone that wasn't there, ribs grinding where something had already given way.
Below waited scrub, and rock, and honest ground.
There is a particular terror that belongs to falling and to nothing else. Other fears leave room in you for thought, for bargaining, for prayer. Falling empties the house. Your whole body becomes an instrument playing a single sustained note of panic, and you cannot make it stop, and you cannot even properly hear it, and there is no audience left anywhere in the world except the ground.
But something older than fear stirred in me, down under the note.
My fingers grasped at nothing, and grasped again, because hands are faithful and stupid and keep working long after sense has left. And beneath it all, beneath the terror, beneath the wind's hammering, I felt the Name of the Wind. Not waiting for me. Not willing. Simply there, present as a word sits on the tip of your tongue when your mouth has gone too dry to swallow.
I spoke it. Not gently. Not kindly, not with craft or courtesy or any of the things Elodin had tried for two years to teach me a Name deserves. I wrenched it up out of the deep place where desperate things are born, and I threw it at the sky like a drowning man throwing his own name at a boat.
The wind heard me.
And it sighed.
I want to dwell here a moment, because this is a true thing about power that no story had ever told me and mine will. I had called the wind too many times that day. Called it in wrath at a lakeshore. Called it too late in a tower, where it ate a dying man's last words. Called it like a master who forgets his servant is a living thing and needs rest. I named it and named it until my voice had worn grooves in its nature. And the wind knew me now. It knew me as a horse knows a cruel rider. It came when called, because it must, and it did precisely what was commanded.
And not one breath more.
It did not catch me. It did not cradle me down as some kinder telling would have it, wrapping Taborlin like a blanket and setting him on his feet. It leaned on my fall. Grudging. Exact. A hard hand slowing a cart it had been ordered to slow, with the whole of its opinion in the slowing. My plunge shallowed by degrees, the cliff's base slid away sideways, the ground came up at a slant instead of a point—
The scrub caught me before the ground did.
Branches snapped under me in a long tearing volley. Thorns opened my shirt and then the skin beneath it, raking my back in lines of fire. Something thick and woody drove itself into my side and broke. It, or the rib, or both. The accounting came later. Each layer of brush slowed me and each layer billed me for the service, and then the ground took delivery of whatever was left. My head bounced off something hard. My teeth cracked together. Blood and dirt filled my mouth and I could not have told you which was which, and no longer greatly cared.
Far above me, at the Citadel's broken edge, faces appeared. Impossibly high. Small and pale as dropped coins. Their shouts came down muffled and slow, as though the air between us had thickened into water.
Then the darkness came up, certain as stone, and I stopped being anyone at all.
I came up out of it gasping, burning, my lungs remembering all at once what air was and demanding more of it than the world seemed prepared to issue.
A shape moved above me. Pale skin and ink-dark hair resolved, slowly, into something familiar. Into someone.
"You're alive." Bast's voice had an edge I had rarely heard in it. Words honed sharp with fear pressed flat underneath, as he sounded only when the mask over his own deeps slipped. "Congratulations. You are also broken in more ways than I can count, and several I haven't thought to look for yet. Lie still and let me hold you together before you finish what the fall started."
His hands settled on my shoulders, deliberate, placed, as though he could feel through the skin exactly where the pieces of me no longer met, which, I have since had cause to believe, he could. I tried to say his name. My throat produced the sound a door makes when its hinges have gone entirely to rust.
"Reshi. Stop that. Lie still."
Denna was already there beside him, pulling her cloak free and folding it into something soft beneath my head. They moved around each other with a tight, resentful efficiency, two people who had spent one entire terrible day in each other's company for my sake, and had used up every civility they had packed for the journey.
"His shoulder," Denna said, hands moving down me, checking.
"I can see his shoulder," Bast snapped. "I can also see three ribs that are not where ribs live."
They talked over me as stagehands talk over a broken prop between scenes. Which part is damaged. What can be salvaged. Whether the show can possibly go on. I had run such inventories over props and men alike, in my time, and it is very restful to be the prop, and I recommend it to no one.
"Then we move fast," Denna said. She bent over me, and brushed the hair back from my forehead with two fingers. Quickly, lightly, as you test whether a thing is still too hot to hold. "Kvothe. Can you stand?"
She might as well have asked whether I could fly. Whether I could speak the moon down out of the sky and juggle it. My answer was a groan that only charity could have classed as human.
She didn't wait for better. My arm went over her shoulders and she lifted, and her strength surprised what little of me was still keeping score, Denna was made of wire and will under all that grace. But even she could not manage the whole ruin of me alone.
"Help me." Two words, aimed at Bast like arrows.
He showed his teeth. "If I break what's left of him, remember whose idea this was."
"I've carried heavier burdens than blame," she shot back, already moving.
Between the two of them they handled me with all the tenderness of people folding a map in a windstorm, and draped me at last over the waiting horse like a sack of grain that had learned, late in life, to feel pain. Someone pressed reins into my hands. My fingers declined them.
Between Bast and Denna there passed a look, then, a whole brief argument conducted in a single exchange of eyes, with positions taken and ground given. But I could not hold on to the shape of it. The darkness rose again like water standing up out of a well, and I let it take me, because it asked nothing, and everything else did.
I surfaced once during the ride.
Their voices reached me in fragments, floating things I grabbed at without strength. Bast's voice all edges. Denna's all patience, which with Denna was itself a blade, only worn on the other side.
"How much farther?" It came out of Bast like a snap, but under it, unmistakable to anyone drifting close to death and past politeness, it sounded like desperation.
"Far enough to matter," Denna said. "Not far enough for you to complain about it."
And then she was humming. Low, half to herself, half to me, something that might have been a lullaby and might have been a dirge, and I remember thinking, in the loose-stringed way of the nearly gone, that in Modegan the two are often the same song sung in different keys, and that this told you everything about Modeg and possibly about everything else. Before I could catch the melody and pin it to anything I knew, we stopped. Hands drew me down from the saddle. A door. Stairs, each one its own negotiation. Bast's voice, strained with the awkward weight of me:
"Might as well steady smoke," he muttered. But his hands were there, every time, exactly where Denna needed them, and I noted even then, the noticing part of me dies last, it will be taking notes at my funeral, that for all their sniping, not once that whole long day did either of them let the other take my weight alone.
They laid me down on something soft. A bed, perhaps. It had stopped mattering. Cloth pressed against my chest. Hands packed something into the wound that burned first and soothed after, as everything true does. And then a bitter liquid came, thick as regret, tipped between my lips.
"Drink," Denna commanded. "And don't argue."
I drank. And whatever strength I had been hoarding, the swallow spent it all in a single breath, and the dark leaned in again.
But beneath the exhaustion, beneath everything, down at the very floor of me, a single thought put out its stubborn bloom. For Auri. For Sim. For Wil. My hands closed themselves into fists on the strange bedding. Holding nothing, and holding it fiercely, which was by then the only trade I had left.
The ceiling above me was walnut wood, striped with shadow from a shuttered window, and I studied it for a long while as scholars study dead languages, slowly, and without much hope of understanding.
Light crept through the curtain-gaps like a thief testing locks. The air held dried lavender and clean linen and, under both, the faint tallow-and-beer signature of an inn. Nothing about the room was familiar, and after the season I had been keeping, an unfamiliar room where no one was currently trying to kill me had the feel of extravagance.
"Denna?" It barely escaped my throat.
No answer. Through the half-open door I could see the edge of another room. A table, the corner of a chair, bare swept boards.
I forced myself upright, and my body filed its several formal complaints about the process, every one of them in writing. Everything hurt. Parts of me I had forgotten I owned reported in specifically to hurt.
I took the inventory, because I always take the inventory. My skin was an artist's study worked in purple and gold and green. There, the sharp familiar ache below the collarbone where the crossbow bolt had bitten. Auri's careful stitches were torn in the tower, re-tied since by hands that meant well and had never been taught. I could feel the difference as you feel a bad splice in a good rope. And here, lower, on the left, the deeper throb where Dagon's blade had found its home.
I sat with my hand over that one for a while, doing sums that would not come out. A saber thrust from a man like Dagon does not leave survivors to inventory it. He did not miss. Dagon had never missed anything in his life. Missing was not in him. And yet the wound sat a two-finger span wide of my heart, angled out instead of in, a deep ugly furrow where there should have been a door, as if the point had entered true and then been turned.
It was days before I found them, going through my ruined coat for anything worth keeping. The bone ring and the silver, still folded in the lining over my heart where I had carried them since a market square in Renere. The silver ring bent nearly double, its old sigils sheared. The bone ring cracked through, clean, like something struck by lightning in miniature.
Stapes had told me the ring would open one gate for me, and not one stride more. He had undersold it, as careful men do. I have never told him what his clean thing was finally spent on. If this account ever reaches him, know this. It was not wasted, and I know what it cost, and the debt stands.
My clothes lay folded on a chair. Someone had cleaned them, or tried. There are stains that argue. Caesura rested on the table beside the bed, where someone who understood such things had placed her within reach of my right hand. My shaed hung from a hook by the door, a piece of tame darkness, waiting to be worn.
Dressing took the better part of forever and hurt for most of it. My fingers trembled against the shirt buttons, fumbling work they had done ten thousand times without thought, and I pressed my hands flat against my thighs and waited out the shaking and tried again, and again after that. It is a small thing, buttoning a shirt. I had crossed into the country where there are no small things, and I have never fully emigrated back.
When at last I pulled the shaed around my shoulders, something in me settled. I remembered what it was to be whole. Or at least, and this distinction is my life's whole terrain, I remembered how to pretend wholeness convincingly.
Through the gap in the shutters I could see the inn's sign swinging gently below. A willow tree wound around with a blooming rose, painted with far more care than the weathered building around it deserved. The Willow Blossom.
I knew it as you know a thing you were never told. One of Denna's places. One of the collected sanctuaries, the shuttered teahouses and ivy gardens and unfashionable bridges. A place where a thing could be safe without anyone deciding what that meant, kept off every map that mattered, where the Citadel's men would never think to look because there was nothing here to look for. She had spent her whole life assembling a geography of boltholes, paid for in ways I had never been permitted to ask about.
And she had spent one on me.
I lowered myself into the chair by the window and let the quiet settle. My body wanted sleep with the whole of its broken authority. My mind wanted answers. And underneath both, faint but present, was the plain fact that I was alive, which was not hope, exactly. Hope and I were not on speaking terms just then.
But it was hope's younger sister, and she sat with me a while.
Then the outer door opened, below.
Footsteps crossed the floor of the room beyond mine. Unhurried. Even through boards and a half-shut door I could read that walk, because I had spent a season learning to read exactly that kind of walk in exactly that kind of man. The pace of someone who has never in his life entered a room he did not, in every sense that matters, already own.
And then Denna's voice.
Small. Smaller than I had ever heard it, smaller than I had known that voice could go, and I had heard it whisper across pillows and up through fever and out of the bottom of grief.
"Please. I did what you asked. I just don't understand why it has to be Kvothe."
The chair was behind me before I knew I had risen.