KOTE’S VOICE stopped, the note cut short of its own ending.
The quill in Chronicler’s hand stopped too, the last word only half formed.
Bast’s arms wrapped around his knees and he rocked back and forth, his eyes lifted to the rafters and held there. “Oh, Reshi,” he said. “I never knew.”
Kote studied the wood grain the way a man studies a map of a country where he can no longer go. When he stood, the chair scraped against the floor, harsh in the grieving quiet. “It’s late,” he said, his voice coming out a little too careful. “There are things I need to tend to before dark.”
A smile tried to find its way onto his face. It was the smile of a man putting on a mask he had worn for years, and finding suddenly that it would not fit. “Eat something. We’ve more to get through tonight.”
He turned toward the kitchen, and neither Bast nor Chronicler moved to stop him. The door swung closed behind him with the soft certainty of a book being shut.
Kote moved through the kitchen without seeing it, his feet carrying him past the familiar stations of his daily work. The cutting board. The copper pots. The herbs hanging from their hooks. He pushed through the back door and into a night that smelled of cold earth and old leaves. The crickets had given up days ago, and the silence they left behind was deeper than the cold. He leaned into it.
He walked to the rain barrel that stood in the shadow of the inn’s back wall and gripped its edge, the old wood rough beneath his palms as he let his head hang forward. For a moment he stayed like that. The wood pressed back, and that was something. Then his knees gave way like they had been waiting for permission, and he slid down to sit in the dirt with his back against the barrel.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until he saw stars that weren’t stars. But the particular cruelty of remembering is that the memories come anyway.
The tears came then. They traced hot lines down his cold cheeks, and he let them fall. There was no one here to witness the great Kvothe brought low. Just a man named Kote, sitting in the dirt behind an inn, doing what grieving men do when no one’s watching.
When the worst of it had passed, he drew the small vial from his pocket and took another careful sip. The nahlrout settled into the back of his throat, familiar as folly, and put its quiet distance between him and the grief.
A soft rustling cut through the quiet.
Something in him that had spent years pretending to sleep opened one eye, searching the dark for what had moved.
An owl shifted on a branch above him, its feathers brushing the bark. Kote let out the breath he had been holding. An owl. Of course.
When he stood, something else caught his eye. A splash of color where color had no business being. There, growing beside the inn’s foundation despite the frost that silvered the ground each morning, despite the dying of the year, despite every reason it shouldn’t exist, bloomed a single selas flower. The crimson petals caught what little moonlight filtered through the clouds, holding it like cupped hands hold water.
Kote crouched beside it, his fingers stopping just short of touching the petals. It was the sort of flower a young man might have picked for a girl with a crooked smile. The sort of flower that said what words could not. The sort of flower that bloomed in stories but rarely in life.
“I miss you so much.” The words escaped before he could stop them.
He stood and turned away, leaving the flower and the moon and all the small bright things the world had no business still keeping. He brushed the dirt from his apron and put the innkeeper’s mask back on. This time it fit. The door of the Waystone welcomed him back to warmth that wasn’t quite warm enough, to light that wasn’t quite bright enough, to a life that wasn’t quite life enough.
He locked it behind him.
Outside, the selas flower continued its impossible bloom. A small defiance against the coming winter. Or maybe just a flower, doing what flowers do when no one’s watching.