The Wise Man's Fear

  I also bought a sturdy brass drop-bar and screwed it to the window frame in my tiny garret room. I could circumvent it fairly easily, but it would keep my few possessions safe from even the most well-intentioned thieves.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Without Word or Warning

  I STARED OUT THE FRONT window of Anker’s, looking at the falling snow and idly turning Denna’s ring over in my fingers. Winter lay heavy over the University, and Denna had been gone for more than a month. I had three hours before class with Elodin, and I was trying to decide if the slim chance of finding Denna was worth the long, cold walk to Imre.

  As I stood at the window, a Cealdish man came through the door, stomping the powdery snow from his boots and looking around curiously. It was still early in the day, and I was the only person in the common room.

  He walked over to me, snowflakes melting in his beard until they were bright beads of water. “Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for a fellow.” he said, surprising me with his utter lack of anything resembling a Cealdish accent. He reached inside his long coat and pulled out a thick envelope with a blood-red seal. “Ka-voth-ee.” He read slowly, then turned the envelope toward me so I could see the front.

  Kvothe—Anker’s Inn.

  University. (Two miles west of Imre.)

  Belenay-Barren

  Central Commonwealth.

  It was Denna’s handwriting. “It’s Kvothe, actually,” I said absentmindedly. “The e is silent.”

  He shrugged. “You him?”

  “I am,” I said.

  He nodded, satisfied. “Well, I got this down in Tarbean about a span back. Bought it off a fellow for a hard penny. He said he bought it off a sailor in Junpui for a Vintish silver bit. He couldn’t remember the name of the town where the sailor had got it from, but it was inland a ways.”

  The man met my eye. “I’m tellin’ you this so you don’t think I’m trying to shim you on the deal. I paid a full hard penny, then came over myself from Imre though it was out of my way.” He looked around the common room. “Though I’m guessing a fellow with a fine inn such as this won’t quibble about giving a fellow his due.”

  I laughed. “This isn’t my inn,” I said. “I just have a room here.”

  “Oh,” he said, obviously a little disappointed. “You looked kinda proprietorial standing there. Still, I’m sure you see I need to make my money off this.”

  “I do,” I said. “How much do you think is fair?”

  He looked me up and down, eyeing my clothes. “I suppose I’d be happy making my hard penny back and a soft penny besides.”

  I brought out my purse and fished around in it. Luckily, I’d been playing cards a few nights before, and had some Aturan currency. “Seems fair,” I said as I handed over the money.

  He started to go, then turned back. “Out of curiosity,” he asked. “Would you have paid two hard pennies to get it?”

  “Probably,” I admitted.

  “Kist,” he swore, then headed back outside, the door banging behind him.

  The envelope was heavy parchment, wrinkled and smudged with much handling. The seal showed a stag rampant standing before a barrel and a harp. I pressed it hard between my fingers, shattering it as I sat down.

  The letter read:Kvothe,

  I’m sorry to leave Imre without word or warning. I sent You a message the night of my departure, but I expect you never received it.

  I have gone abroad looking for greener pasture and better Opportunity. I am fond of Imre, and enjoy the pleasure of your Occasional, though Sporadic, company, but it is an expensive city in which to live, and my prospects have grown slender of late.

  Yll is lovely, all rolling hills. I find the weather quite to my liking, it is warmer and the air smells of the sea. It seems I might pass an entire winter without being brought to bed by my lungs. My first in years.

  I have spent some time in the Small Kingdoms and saw a skirmish between two bands of mounted men. Such a crashing and Screaming of Horses you have never heard. I have spent some time afloat as well, and learned all manner of sailor’s knots, and how to spit properly. Also, my Cussing has been greatly broadened.

  If you ask politely when we next meet, I may demonstrate my newfound skills.

  I have seen my first Adem Mercenary. (They call them blood-shirts here.) She is hardly bigger than me, with quite the most remarkable grey eyes. She is pretty, but strange and quiet, endlessly twitching. I have not seen her fight and am not sure I wish to. Though I am curious.

  I am still enamoured of the harp. And am currently housing with a skilled gentleman (whom I shall not name) for the furthurinse of my study in this.

  I have drunk some wine while Writing this letter. I mention this to excuse my above spelling of the word Furtherence. Furtherance. Kist. You know what I mean.

  I apologize for not writing sooner, but I have been a great deal traveling and not until now have I had Means to write a Letter. Now that I have done, I expect it might be a while longer before I find a traveler I trust to start this missive on its long road back to you.

  I think of you often and fondly.

  Yours,

  D.

  Pstscrpt. I hope your lute case is serving you well.

  Elodin’s class began strangely that day.

  For one, Elodin was actually on time. This caught us unprepared as the six remaining students had taken to spending the first twenty or thirty minutes of the class gossiping, playing cards, and griping about how little we were learning. We didn’t even notice Master Namer until he was halfway down the steps of the lecture hall, clapping his hands to get our attention.

  The second odd thing was that Elodin was dressed in his formal robes. I’d seen him wear them before when occasion demanded, but always grudgingly. Even during admissions interviews they were usually rumpled and unkempt.

  Today he wore them as if he meant it. They looked sharp and freshly laundered. His hair wasn’t in its normal state of dishevel, either. It looked like it had been trimmed and combed.

  Reaching the front of the lecture hall, he climbed onto the dais and moved to stand behind the lectern. This more than anything made everyone sit up and take notice. Elodin never used the lectern.

  “Long ago,” he said without any preamble, “this was a place where people came to learn secret things. Men and women came to the University to study the shape of the world.”

  Elodin looked out at us. “In this ancient University, there was no skill more sought after than naming. All else was base metal. Namers walked these streets like tiny Gods. They did terrible, wonderful things, and all others envied them.

  “Only through skill in naming did students move through the ranks. An alchemist without any skill in naming was regarded as a sad thing, no more respected than a cook. Sympathy was invented here, but a sympathist without any naming might as well be a carriage driver. An artificer with no names behind his work was little more than a cobbler or a smith.

  “They all came to learn the names of things,” Elodin said, his dark eyes intense, his voice resonant and stirring. “But naming cannot be taught by rule or rote. Teaching someone to be a namer is like teaching someone to fall in love. It is hopeless. It cannot be done.”

  Master Namer smiled a bit then, for the first time looking like his familiar self. “Still, students tried to learn. And teachers tried to teach. And sometimes they succeeded.”

  Elodin pointed. “Fela!” He motioned for her to approach. “Come.”

  Fela stood, looking nervous as she climbed up to join him on the lecturer’s dais.

  “You have all chosen the name you hope to learn,” Elodin said, his eyes sweeping over us. “And you have all pursued your studies with varying degrees of dedication and success.”

  I fought the urge to look away shamefacedly, knowing that my efforts had been halfhearted at best.

  “Where you have failed, Fela has succeeded,” Elodin said. “She has found the name of stone. . . .” He turned sideways to look
at her. “How many times?”

  “Eight times,” she said looking down, her hands twisting nervously in front of her.

  There was a murmur of genuine awe from all of us. She had never mentioned this in our frequent griping sessions.

  Elodin nodded, as if approving of our reaction. “When naming was still taught, we namers wore our prowess proudly. A student who gained mastery over a name would wear a ring as declaration of their skill.” Elodin stretched out a hand in front of Fela and opened it, revealing a river stone, smooth and dark. “And this is what Fela will do now, as proof of her ability.”

  Startled, Fela looked at Elodin. Her eyes flickered back and forth between him and the stone, her face growing stricken and pale.

  Elodin gave her a reassuring smile. “Come now,” he said gently. “You know in your secret heart you are capable of this. And more.”

  Fela bit her lips and took hold of the stone. It seemed bigger in her hands than it had in his. She closed her eyes for a moment and drew a long, deep breath. She let it out slowly, lifted the stone, and opened her eyes so it was the first thing she would see.

  Fela stared at the stone and there was a long moment’s silence. The tension in the room built until it was tight as a harp string. The air vibrated with it.

  A long minute passed. Two long minutes. Three terribly long minutes.

  Elodin sighed gustily, breaking the tension. “No no no,” he said, snapping his fingers near her face to get her attention. He pressed a hand over her eyes like a blindfold. “You’re looking at it. Don’t look at it. Look at it!” He pulled his hand away.

  Fela lifted the stone and opened her eyes. At the same moment Elodin gave her a sharp slap on the back of the head with the flat of his hand.

  She turned to him, her expression outraged. But Elodin merely pointed at the stone she still held in her hand. “Look!” he said excitedly.

  Fela’s eyes went to the stone, and she smiled as if seeing an old friend. She covered it with a hand and brought it close to her mouth. Her lips moved.

  There was a sudden, sharp cracking sound, as if a speck of water had been dropped into a pan of hot grease. There followed dozens more, so sharp and quick they sounded like an old man popping his knuckles, or a storm of hailstones hitting a hard slate roof.

  Fela opened her hand and a scattering of sand and gravel spilled out. With two fingers she reached into the jumble of loose stone and pulled out a ring of sheer black stone. It was round as a cup and smooth as polished glass.

  Elodin laughed in triumph before sweeping Fela into an enthusiastic hug. Fela threw her arms around him wildly in return. They took several quick steps together that were half stagger, half dance.

  Still grinning, Elodin held out his hand. Fela gave him the ring, and he looked it over carefully before nodding.

  “Fela,” he said seriously. “I hereby promote you to the rank of Re’lar.” He held up the ring. “Your hand.”

  Almost shyly, Fela held out her hand. But Elodin shook his head. “Left hand,” he said firmly. “The right means something else entirely. None of you are anywhere near ready for that.”

  Fela held out her other hand, and Elodin slid the ring of stone easily onto her finger. The rest of the class broke into applause, rushing close to get a look at what she had done.

  Fela gave a radiant smile and held out her hand for all of us to see. The ring wasn’t smooth as I’d first thought. It was covered in a thousand tiny, flat facets. They circled each other in a subtle, swirling pattern unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  The Catch

  DESPITE THE TROUBLE WITH Ambrose, my obsession with the Archives, and my countless fruitless trips to Imre hunting Denna, I managed to finish my project in the Fishery.

  I would have liked another span of days to run a few more tests and tinker with it. But I was simply out of time. The admissions lottery was coming up soon, and my tuition would be due not long after. Before I could put my project up for sale, I needed Kilvin to approve my design.

  So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I knocked on the door of Kilvin’s office.

  The Master Artificer was hunched over his personal worktable, carefully removing the screws from the bronze casing of a compression pump. He didn’t look up as he spoke, “Yes, Re’lar Kvothe?”

  “I’m finished, Master Kilvin,” I said simply.

  He looked up at me, blinking. “Are you now?”

  “Yes, I was hoping to make an appointment so I might demonstrate it to you.”

  Kilvin set the screws in a tray and brushed his hands together. “For this I am available now.”

  I nodded and led the way through the busy workshop, past Stocks, to the private workroom Kilvin had assigned me. I brought out the key and unlocked the heavy timber door.

  It was large as workrooms go, with its own fire well, anvil, fume hood, drench, and other assorted staples of the artificing trade. I’d pushed the worktable aside to leave half of the room empty except for several thick bales of straw stacked against the wall.

  Hanging from the ceiling in front of the bales was a crude scarecrow. I’d dressed it in my burned shirt and a pair of sackcloth pants. Part of me wished I’d run a few more tests in the time it had taken to sew the pants and stuff the straw man. But at the end of the day, I am a trouper first and all else second. As such, I couldn’t ignore the chance for a little showmanship.

  I closed the door behind us while Kilvin looked around the room curiously. Deciding to let my work speak for itself, I brought out the crossbow and handed it to him.

  The huge master’s expression went dark. “Re’lar Kvothe,” he said, his voice heavy with disapproval. “Tell me you have not squandered the labor of your hands on the improvement of such a beastly thing.”

  “Trust me, Master Kilvin,” I said, holding it out to him.

  He gave me a long look, then took the crossbow and began to examine it with the meticulous care of a man who spent every day working with deadly equipment. He fingered the tightly woven string and eyed the curved metal arm of the bow.

  After several long minutes he nodded, put one foot through the stirrup, and cocked it without any noticeable effort. Idly, I wondered how strong Kilvin was. My shoulders ached and my hands were blistered from struggling with the unwieldy thing over the last several days.

  I handed him the heavy bolt and he examined it as well. I could see him looking increasingly perplexed. I knew why. The bow didn’t have any obvious modifications or sygaldry. Neither did the bolt.

  Kilvin slotted the bolt into the crossbow and raised an eyebrow at me.

  I made an expansive gesture to the straw man, trying to look more confident than I felt. My hands were sweating and my stomach was full of doves. Tests were fine and good. Tests were important. Tests were like rehearsal. But all that really matters is what happens when the audience is watching. This is a truth all troupers know.

  Kilvin shrugged and raised the crossbow. It looked small braced against his broad shoulder, and he took a moment to carefully sight along the top of it. I was surprised to see him calmly draw half a breath, then exhale slowly as he pulled the trigger.

  The crossbow jerked, the string twanged, the bolt blurred.

  There was a harsh, metallic clank, and the bolt stopped midair as if it had struck an invisible wall. It clattered to the stone floor in the middle of the room, fifteen feet away from the straw man.

  Unable to help myself, I laughed and threw my arms triumphantly into the air.

  Kilvin raised his eyebrows and looked at me. I grinned a manic grin.

  The master retrieved the bolt from the floor and examined it again. Then he recocked the crossbow, sighted, and pulled the trigger.

  Clank. The bolt dropped to the floor a second time, skittering slightly to one side.

  This time Kilvin spotted the source of the noise. Hanging from the ceiling in the far corner of the room was a metal object the size of a large lantern.
It was rocking back and forth and spinning slightly, as if someone had just struck it a glancing blow.

  I took it off its hook and brought it back to where Master Kilvin waited at the worktable. “What is this thing, Re’lar Kvothe?” he said curiously.

  I set it down on the table with a heavy clunk. “In general terms, Master Kilvin, it’s an automatically triggered kinetic opposition device.” I beamed proudly. “More specifically, it stops arrows.”

  Kilvin bent to look at it, but there was nothing to see except for featureless plates of dark iron. My creation looked like nothing so much as a large, eight-sided lantern made entirely of metal.

  “And what do you call it?”

  That was the one part of my invention I hadn’t managed to finish. I’d thought of a hundred names, but none of them seemed to fit. Arrow-trap was pedestrian. The Traveler’s Friend was prosaic. Banditbane was ridiculously melodramatic. I could never have looked Kilvin in the eye again if I’d tried to call it that.

  “I’m having some trouble with the name,” I admitted. “But for now I’m calling it an arrowcatch.”

  “Hmmph,” Kilvin grunted. “It does not catch the arrow, precisely.”

  “I know,” I said, exasperated. “But it was either that or call it a ‘clank.’ ”

  Kilvin looked at me sideways, his eyes smiling a little. “One would think a student of Elodin’s would prove more facile with his naming, Re’lar Kvothe.”

  “Delivari had it easy, Master Kilvin,” I said.“He just made a better axle and stuck his name on it. I can’t very well call this ‘the Kvothe.’ ”

  Kilvin chuckled. “True.” He turned back to the arrowcatch, eyeing it curiously. “How does it work?”

  I grinned and brought out a large roll of paper covered in diagrams, complicated sygaldry, metallurgical symbols, and painstaking formulae for kinetic conversion.