THE HUM OF VOICES and the clinking of tankards seeped upward from the packed common room at Anker’s, muffled but steady, like the pulse of a living thing. It was a sound I should have been part of, thickening the air with chords from my lute, stoking laughter with stories. Instead, I sat on the edge of my narrow bed, staring at the pack I had thrown together in no more than ten minutes.
The bag was too simple, perhaps, but it was the best of what little I owned. Inside, I had shoved a waterskin, a loaf of bread gone dry at the edges, and a tightly rolled blanket. Then, strapped to the side, my lute in its case. Silent. Disapproving.
I hesitated. It was reckless to leave, foolish even. But you have to understand, I had just watched a good man die with his work unfinished. I couldn’t help but wonder, what else remained undone?
I’d seen it in others too. People who spent decades preparing for their dream, only to find when they finally reached for it that their hands had forgotten the shape. The trail they’d meant to walk no longer fit their stride. The story they’d meant to tell had become a stranger’s tale.
The mountains were calling now. Wait a year, maybe two, and I’d still know I should answer. But I’d no longer know why it mattered.
I shouldered my pack. Some stories demand to be lived before you outgrow them. Some songs need to be sung before gravel finds your voice.
I could almost hear Anker, half-accusing, half-laughing, with a smile buried in the words. Leaving already? We’ve a full house tonight.
But I didn’t answer the phantom question. Instead, I scrawled a hasty message and pegged it to my door.
“Anker,”
“A personal matter requires my attention.”
“I’ll return in a few days.”
“My thanks, as always.”
“Kvothe.”
I knew the note would not satisfy him, but Anker was no fool. He would take his irritation and turn it to good use. There would be fuller mugs. There would be thicker slabs of bread. Customers would leave with heavy bellies and light purses, and his scowl would fade in the busy work of the day.
But even so, when I turned to leave, something pressed at me harder than any pack. It was the ache of knowing that this was my home. These were my people. They would help me, as they always had, and they would understand. But my leaving would weigh on them. I would not be here to share the burden, and the work would be no lighter for my absence.
I stepped out into the night, the cool air striking my face. The street was alive with students, their laughter spilling from doorways and corners as they made the most of these final days before the Masters reconvened classes. I left Imre behind. The mountains wouldn’t wait.
I followed the road to Oakholt, watching the sun rise and set and rise again as the Commonwealth’s heartland gave way to its eastern reaches. My feet ached and my shoulders had begun to protest the pack’s weight. The lute case on my back felt like an anchor dragging me down.
But I kept walking. The road wound through farmland and scattered villages, past orchards heavy with late fruit and fields where farmers were bringing in the last of the harvest. I bought an apple from a woman selling them by the roadside and ate it, core and all.
One evening, I spotted a tinker’s wagon ahead, its painted panels bright against the darkening road. A single horse grazed nearby, and the wagon sat atop a low bluff, at the edge of a clearing where standing stones rose pale against the fading sky.
“Ho, tinker!” I called out and waited until an older man emerged from the wagon. He watched me approach. “I’m heading to Oakholt,” I said as I reached him. “Might I share your fire tonight? I can offer a song or two in trade.”
He looked me over, taking in my clothes, my pack, the lute case on my back, and something in his weathered face softened slightly. “You play, do you?”
“A little.”
“Good.” He gestured toward an ax leaning against the wagon. “Make yourself useful with the firewood first. Can’t have songs without supper.”
I set down my pack and went to work, and the tinker introduced himself as I split the first branches. His name was Terrence, and he had been working the circuit between Imre, Oakholt, and the smaller villages in between for more than thirty years. He always stopped at greystones.
“Old roads,” he said when I asked. “Old stones. My father taught me to respect them, and I’ve had no cause to regret it.”
I could have told him that my father had taught me the same. That we had camped by a hundred such stones when I was young, that the Edema Ruh knew the old ways. But I held my tongue.
After dinner, I played for him. Nothing fancy at first. Road songs, traveling tunes, but then as a jest I struck up “Tinker Tanner,” and Terrence just cracked up laughing.
“That’s one no one ever plays for me,” he said, and produced a bottle of spiced whisky from his wagon. “Here’s to old songs and old roads.”
We traded verses by the fire, each more inappropriate than the last. I’ll spare you the worst of them. By the time the bottle was empty, we had exhausted every crude metaphor we could think of and invented several new ones.
Even with the world spinning, I should have slept well that night. Tehlu knows I was tired enough. But something kept me restless, some itch at the edge of my awareness that I could not name.
It was past midnight when I finally placed it.
I opened my eyes. The fire had burned down to embers, casting just enough light to see by. I lay there for a long moment, debating whether relieving myself was worth leaving the warmth of my blanket or if I could simply wait until morning.
Then I saw it.
Beside the nearest greystone, at the edge of the firelight. Someone was standing there.
They were tall, taller than seemed quite right, with a lean, angular frame. They moved with a strange delicacy and grace as if they were close to dancing. But their legs were too thin, or perhaps the wrong shape entirely below the knee, as if the shadows clung to them strangely.
I blinked, and they were looking at me.
Even across the distance, even in the dim light, I felt the weight of that gaze. The way a cat might watch a bird.
I opened my mouth to call out, to challenge, but when I tried, I felt nothing. My lips, my tongue, the words themselves seemed to have fled. In a moment of pure panic I clawed at my face.
I gasped.
My heart hammered in my chest. The greystones stood pale and empty in the darkness. The camp was silent. Nothing moved. I blinked, half expecting the figure to return. Still silent. Still nothing. My mouth was there, as if it had never left.
I stayed there a long while, staring at the empty space beside the stone. My heart refused to slow. Finally, I threw off my blanket and walked to the edge of camp. I needed to move, needed to prove I could. I did not sleep again that night. And in the morning, when I asked Terrence if he had seen anyone near the stones, he gave me an odd look and shook his head.
“Just us,” he said. “Just us and the road.”
I traveled with him for another day, and we parted ways at Oakholt, the tinker heading south to visit the outlying farms while I turned my attention to the mountains rising in the distance. I found an outfitter’s shop and spent the better part of an hour replacing my meager supplies. Dried meat. Hard cheese. Trail bread that would keep for weeks. A small pot for boiling water. A proper flint and steel.
On my way to the counter, I passed a shelf of journals and folios. On a whim, I picked up a small one, its cover plain leather, its pages unlined. I could not have said why. Perhaps I thought I might want to remember what I found in the mountains. Perhaps I simply liked the weight of it in my hand.
I paid for my supplies, found a cheap room for the night, and spread my new provisions across the bed to take stock. The hard loaf of bread from Anker’s sat among them. And since it was already going stale, I ate it that night rather than carry it further.
Before sleep found me, I opened the journal and dipped my pen. The first entry was brief:
“Tomorrow, I climb.”
“The Six Sisters rise to the east, their peaks are lost in the clouds.”
That night I tossed and turned and dreamed of drowning. My face was gone, sealed beneath sticky flesh. I clawed and ripped until my fingers were slick, but I could find no way to breathe, no way to scream.
“Day One”
The foothills rolled gently beneath my boots. The autumn grass cushioned my stride, and the pack rode high on my shoulders. I bounded past the green smell of living things. By evening I had covered perhaps fifteen miles, better than I had any right to expect.
That night I found a hollow between two weathered stones, sheltered from the wind that had begun to speak in whispers. I ate some dried meat and hard cheese, drank from my waterskin, and watched the stars emerge one by one.
The journal grew longer as the days did. I had not expected that. But there is something about being alone with nothing but stone and sky that loosens things you did not know were tight.
I thought of Anker polishing his bar, of the laughter rising from the common room. I thought of Wil and Sim bent over their books, or raising tankards at the Eolian. My people. My friends.
They would wonder where I had gone. Sim would worry, his face creasing with that honest concern he could never quite hide. Wil would shake his head, his accent thickening as he muttered something about my being reckless, about my never listening. Fela might understand. Mola would realize that worrying would not change the outcome.
But I had not told them I was leaving. Not properly. I had left a note for Anker and slipped away like a thief in the night, and now, alone beneath the wheeling stars, I felt the first small sting of that choice.
It was easier to leave than to explain. That much I knew about myself. It was easier to vanish than to say that the place I loved most had started to feel too small.
So I had run. As I always did.
“Day Two”
The gentle foothills steepened into true slopes. The grass gave way to scrub, then to bare rock studded with hardy plants that clung to cracks and crevices. The pack bit into my shoulders. My calves burned. My lungs, accustomed to the lowland air of Imre, began to labor with each breath.
By midday I had climbed perhaps five miles, and I wanted nothing more than to sit down and never stand again.
But I kept walking. One foot, then another. The rhythm of it became a kind of meditation, a drumbeat I could lose myself inside. Step, step, step. Breathe. The world narrowed to the ground before me, to the next stone, the next ridge, the next desperate gasp of thinning air.
I had thought myself strong. I had survived Tarbean, after all. I had endured the Medica, the lash, the cold desperation of poverty. But this was different. This was not a thing to be endured but a thing to be walked through, step by agonizing step, with no end in sight.
The mountains did not care about my cleverness. They did not care about my quick tongue or my talent for sympathy or the songs I could coax from six strings. They cared only that I kept climbing.
“Day Three”
On the third day, the mountains began to speak.
Not in words. But in the howl of wind through narrow passes, in the crack of ice beneath my boots, in the silence that settled when the wind died and left only the sound of my own labored breathing.
I made camp early that night, in a shallow cave barely deep enough to shelter me from the wind. My hands shook as I unrolled my blanket. I had eaten well enough from my new supplies, but my exhaustion had outpaced any recovery my body could muster.
Tomorrow I would need to decide whether to continue climbing or turn back.
But tonight, I had only the cave and the cold and the relentless chatter of my own thoughts.
Herma.
The name rose unbidden, and with it came the memory of his hands trembling over the Yllish knots, of his voice growing thin. The last time I had seen him alive, bent over his work in the Scriptorium, refusing to admit that something was wrong.
I had known. Some part of me had known. I had seen the signs, the small betrayals of a body failing its owner. But I had let him deflect my concern with that gentle humor of his, had let him wave away my questions as if they were gnats rather than warnings.
Why? Because it was easier. Because confronting the truth would have meant admitting that I cared, that his death would leave a wound, and I had grown so skilled at protecting myself from wounds.
I thought of Denna then. I could not help it. In the empty hours between dark and dawn, she came to me as she always did. Her smile, crooked and knowing. Her voice, low and musical.
I loved her. That much was simple. But what I had done with that love was anything but.
I had pursued her across half the world, and I had let her slip away a hundred times. I had watched her with other men and said nothing. I had made her into a mystery to be solved, a song to be written, and in doing so I had missed the simple truth of her. She was not a puzzle to be solved, nor a prize to be won. She was Denna, but I had never let that be enough.
What had I ever given her, really? A few hours of conversation. A song that was never quite finished. The dubious honor of my attention, my obsession, my inability to let go.
The wind howled outside my cave, and I did not try to answer it.
“Day Four”
I filled my waterskin in a stream trickling down from the snowfields above. It was so cold it numbed my hands.
I kept climbing and breached the treeline. Up here it was all bare rock and ice and endless gray sky. There was nowhere to hide. Nothing to distract the mind from itself.
I thought of Simmon.
Dear, earnest Sim, who had cried when I won my talent pipes. Who had worried over me like a mother hen, pushing food across tavern tables when he thought I was not eating enough, staying up late helping me study for examinations I should have failed.
And how had I repaid him? I had taken his friendship as my due. I had kept my secrets locked behind a performer’s smile, had let him believe he knew me when in truth he knew only the version of myself I chose to show.
Sim deserved better. He deserved a friend who would sit with him when he was hurting, who would listen to his poems without judgment, who would let him see the ugly, broken parts and trust that he would not turn away.
Wil too. Steady, stoic Wil, who saw through my nonsense with those dark Cealdish eyes. I had never asked him about his life in Ralien. Never asked about his family, his hopes. He was always there, reliable as stone, and I had taken that reliability for granted.
The mountains did not care about my regrets. They simply continued to rise.
“Day Five”
By the fifth day I was too tired to think in words. My legs moved on their own. Snow formed piles among the rocks. Wind became a constant tugging whisper.
It was only mid-morning when it started to hail.
As for the hail? Well, hail is hail.
“Day Six”
I found myself in a stand of pines, huddled against a trunk with my shaed wrapped tight around me. Every muscle ached. My ribs throbbed where something had struck them. There was a crusted gash on my forearm that I did not remember getting.
Running down the mountain had cost me half a day’s progress. Maybe more.
I sat there for a long time before deciding to try again. I had tried to master the mountain. And the mountain had answered.
But in heading back up, everything had changed.
The wind met me differently now. It still tugged at my cloak, still stung my cheeks with cold. But there was a curiosity in it. It circled me as I climbed, as if trying to determine what manner of creature had wandered into its domain.
I did not try to call it. I did not try to command or coax. I simply walked, and let the wind walk with me.
By late afternoon I had long since re-breached the treeline and reached a rocky ledge perched high above the world. Below, the land fell away in great sweeping folds, forests and fields and distant rivers glinting like threads of silver. Above, the peaks continued their impossible ascent, vanishing into clouds that moved with stately grace across the sky.
I thought of Fela then. She had looked at me with interest once, after I pulled her from the fire in the Fishery. I had seen it in her eyes, felt it in the way she lingered. And I had done nothing. I had let the moment pass, too wrapped up in Denna to notice what was right in front of me.
Simmon saw her. And I was glad for them. Truly. But sitting there on the mountain, I could not help but wonder how many other moments I had let slip away because I was too busy chasing the next bright thing.
I sat on the ledge and let myself simply be.
The wind came then, fierce and wild, battering my chest and legs, whipping my hair into my eyes. I did not fight it. I let it push against me, let it test my balance and my resolve. I breathed with it, matching its rhythm, finding the spaces where stillness lived.
And then, suddenly, it stopped.
The silence was so complete it startled me. My heart pounded in my chest. The wind was still there, I could feel it, coiled around me like a held breath. For the first time, I did not try to pull it closer. I simply listened.
There was something beneath the wind, something deeper than the movement of air across stone. Not quite a name. Perhaps the recognition that names were not the only way to know a thing.
The wind knew me. It had seen me struggle up its mountain, had watched me break and rebuild myself with each agonizing step. It had heard my thoughts, my regrets, my silent confessions. And now, at last, it was willing to acknowledge that I had come not as a conqueror but as a friend.
The wind shifted again, and a wisp remained, lingering a moment longer than it needed to. It circled my hand, nuzzled my knuckles, and wiggled in between my fingers, as if to ask if it could stay.
I reached out with my other hand and plucked the trailing edge between my first two fingers. When it did not squirm I tied it the way my father had taught me to tie a musician’s knot. A thumb pressed down, a twist, a pull.
And then I was alone on the ledge with the world spread out below me and the sky wheeling vast and blue above.
“Day Seven”
I descended the slopes with steps that were lighter, though no less cautious.
The mountains had taken something from me. The arrogance, perhaps. The certainty that I could master anything if I was only clever enough. But they had given me something too. A quietness. A willingness to wait. The knowledge that some things could not be forced, only invited.
I thought of my friends as I walked. I could not change what I had been. I could not undo the times I had been selfish, or blind, or too wrapped up in my own story to see them clearly. But I could choose what I would be from this moment forward.
The foothills unfolded before me, golden in the afternoon light. Somewhere beyond them lay Imre, and the University, and all the complicated messy beautiful work of being alive.
I carried nothing with me but my pack, my lute, and the small, thrilling certainty that when I truly called, the wind would come.