“RESHI,” Bast said through chattering teeth, “it’s colder than a witch’s tit up here.”
I pressed a finger to my lips. My own teeth wanted to chatter with his, but I held them still. Hours on the roof. Days in the city. And we were no closer than we had been the night I came back.
Below us, torches wound through Renere’s alleys, some carried by late-night revelers, others by the watch, all doubling back through the maze of streets. I tracked each one, searching for patterns, for purpose, for her.
“She needs to be home,” I said, and Bast didn’t argue.
The Counting House roof was no comfortable perch. Loose tiles scraped and shifted beneath our feet, each movement louder than I liked, and the wind cut sharp through every gap in our clothing. But I would have endured worse.
Bast’s shoulders tensed beside me. His blue eyes narrowed, sharp with more than mortal sight. “There,” he said, gesturing with his chin. “More of them every night.”
“Following them might lead us to her,” I said.
“Or to whoever’s leading them. Though no one I asked today could tell me who that was. Same shape of forgetting we found before. I think when Roderic died the Quarter stopped sipping Trenati like wine and started swallowing him by the tankard.” His eyes were steady on mine. “King is a deeper name than Prince.”
“Bast. Queen is a deeper name than Princess. We’re out of time.”
Something lit behind Bast’s eyes. “This is what the hero says, before he saves the moonlit one,” he said, and I could tell he was trying to weave me back into his hero’s story. But I was a man with three fingers gone, who had made nahlrout his crutch, whose every plan turned to shit. My closest friends and my true love were in the ground, and I might as well have been the one who murdered them.
Below us, the painters packed up.
“They’re moving toward Teccam Square,” I said. “We’ve got to go.”
But the painters hadn’t traveled far. They were lifting their bucket when I rounded the corner, the paint on the bakery glass still wet behind them. The one with the bucket noticed me first. Just another beggar in rags, his glance dismissed me. He nudged his companion, who turned with a laugh still on his lips.
I pushed back the hood of the shaed.
For a moment there was nothing. Then the light caught my hair and their laughter died entirely. The one with the bucket took a step backward.
“Where is Princess Ariel?” My voice cut like winter wind.
“Who?” The tall one asked. The word came out flat.
“The girl you stole. The one you’ve wrapped in your cult king’s shroud.”
None of them spoke. The paint on the glass behind him bled. Then the tall one turned to run.
“Stop. Do not run from me.” I raised my ruined hand and spoke a Name. Hounds of fire leapt forth, racing across the square to where the newly built gallows stood. The crossbeam, the ropes, the trapdoor, all engulfed in a long clean breath, and the whole shape of the thing burned white hot.
The one with the bucket dropped it. The youngest made a sound that was not a word.
“Where was she taken,” I said, “and by whom.”
The youngest broke first. “The graveyard. North of the Citadel. The old gate, the black one. Calanthis crypt.”
“Who commands you?”
The boy’s face twisted with effort. “The one with the ring? Please, I don’t know.” Then his eyes cleared suddenly, focusing on me with terrible clarity. “But you,” he whispered. “You’re real. You’re the one they blame for everything.”
I met his gaze and held it steady. “Say my name.”
“Kvothe Kingkiller.” The words barely held together, but they came out whole.
“Good.” I leaned closer, close enough for him to see there was nothing left in my eyes that cared whether he lived. “Take me there.”
He brought us within sight of the graveyard before his courage failed him, and I did not look back as he ran.
The graveyard sprawled north of the Citadel like a stone garden where nothing grew but memory. Some headstones stood clear, their names carved deep and certain. Others bore inscriptions that looked eaten away. Names half-carved, half-forgotten, as if the stone itself had begun to doubt what it was meant to remember.
Bast stopped, his hand hovering over a marker where a name should have been.
“Reshi. The Quarter’s fingers have been here. These names are being eaten.”
For the first time, it occurred to me that the Quarter was not something to be contained.
We picked our way deeper, stepping around the densest pools of fog. The silence here was different. Thicker. Hungrier. As if a hunger old as the city had recently learned that what it had was not enough.
Bast found the gate first. Black iron standing half-open like a mouth paused mid-word. The name Calanthis wound through the metalwork in delicate lettering. We passed through, gravel crunching underfoot. Ahead, voices murmured low and reverent, the sound of prayer or madness or both.
I shared a look with Bast. If I were wise, I would have turned around. But I had never been wise. If I had been, I would have left the four plate door alone. “Stay if you want,” I said. “I’m going.”
Around the final bend, I saw the crypt. A massive stone slab sealed the tomb, and before it knelt five figures in robes that had forgotten their proper color. They swayed without a wind to move them, mumbling words that might have been prayer if the words had remembered their proper order.
Something cold and certain settled in my chest. “Where is she?”
One figure rose with movements that seemed to argue with themselves about which direction was up, and I saw what had become of Prince Trenati. The thing that had been a prince stood there, but standing was all he managed. He had the stillness of the worst patients in Haven, the ones who had stopped looking for a way out. His eyes had gone blind and wet. Like windows painted over from the inside. He looked through me or past me, but never quite at me. His mouth hung open, and he hummed tunelessly to himself, a song that had lost its words and most of its notes.
“Blood and ash,” Bast breathed. His hand found my arm, gripping tight. “The Quarter has him.”
The other cultists looked past him, just a hole in the world shaped like a person. When one turned toward me, I caught a flash of something wrong behind her eyes. Something going milky at the edges. The Quarter had been sipping them too. They followed habit now, not the man, leaving only the hollow ritual behind.
“Too late,” Trenati mumbled. “Dry now. All of it dry.”
The words fell from his mouth like stones down a well.
“Trenati.” I spoke his name clear and sharp, stepping close enough to see the fog drift behind his empty eyes.
He tilted his head at the sound, a puppet whose strings had tangled. His blind eyes rolled in their sockets, seeking something they would never find. “I had a,” he said. “I had. Somebody sang. At me.”
One of the cultists turned to look at Trenati, the way you look at a stranger wearing familiar clothes, someone you’re certain you should know but can’t place.
“Where is Ariel?” I asked, gentling my voice the way you might gentle a frightened animal.
“Ariel.” He tasted the word, rolling it on his tongue like something foreign and familiar at once. “Stone. She was for the stone.”
I stepped forward, and the cultists reached for their weapons, more from instinct than purpose. But the instinct faded before their hands found the hilts. I pushed past them and they shuffled aside, mumbling apologies, as if they had merely been blocking a doorway. They did not know what they had forgotten. Only that something important had slipped away.
Only Trenati remained, swaying slightly on his feet, still humming that tuneless song.
“Is she alive?” I demanded. “Nod if she lives.”
He nodded, the gesture seeming to surprise him, as if his body had remembered what his mind had forgotten.
“Good.” I leaned close enough to smell the forgetting on him, the absence of everything that had ever mattered. “For her sake, you keep breathing. Now go. Run. If I see you again, I won’t be so kind.”
But he didn’t run. He couldn’t. Running requires knowing where you’re going, or at least where you’ve been.
The Whispering Quarter had done worse than kill him. It had made him into nothing while letting him watch it happen.
I turned to face the crypt’s entrance.
I closed my eyes and listened for stone’s true voice. I could have broken this one, but breaking would have been the wrong shape of answer, and would have called the Quarter’s appetite. Instead, I asked the door to set down its long burden, to forget the name of what it had been guarding, and to remember instead that it had always wanted to be something simpler. A hearthstone. A doorstep. A thing that welcomed rather than refused.
The stone shuddered once, a sound like the earth taking a breath. Then it fell, rolling slowly down the gravel path.
Behind me, Trenati collapsed to his knees. His hands rose to touch his own face as if checking whether it was still there. His fingers found his empty eyes, and a sound escaped him that might have been a sob or might have been laughter. It was hard to tell when a voice had forgotten how to shape either one.
Bast touched my shoulder. “We need to move faster, Reshi.” His voice held something I rarely heard from him. Fear. “We’ve stayed too long.”
Inside, I found what I had expected. And worse.
A stone altar stood in the chamber’s heart, candle stubs ringing the base. Symbols had been chalked on the floor but most had smeared beyond reading. Auri lay on the altar, her wrists and ankles bound with rough rope to iron rings set into the stone. Moonlight painted her silver and shadow in equal measure.
On the far wall, someone had carved words into the stone. Prophecy or promise, most of it had been eaten by the same forgetting that had claimed Trenati. Only fragments remained.
...and the king who was never born will be remembered by none...
...and so he fades, barefoot into nothing...
The missing parts pulsed with their own absence, somehow louder than what remained.
“Auri.”
Her head turned at my voice. For a moment she just looked at me.
“Kvothe.” She breathed my name like it was the only word that still mattered. She pulled against the ropes and winced.
“My Ciridae. You came for me.”
I went to her. The knots were crude, tied by hands already forgetting their purpose. I worked them loose with what fingers I had left, the rough rope catching against the gaps where the others should have been. One knot. Then the next. Then her wrists.
When the last rope fell away, Auri sat up slowly and pressed herself against my chest with the weight of rain finally finding earth.
I held her close, felt the bird-bone delicacy of her, the way she seemed made more of light than substance.
“I thought I’d forgotten your face,” she said. Her eyes were wide, and wonderfully Auri. “Everything was coming untrue. The fog would come and tell me I was someone else. Someone with a different name and a crown that didn’t fit. But I kept your name. I said it over and over like a song. And as long as I was holding it properly, I was still me.”
Her hands found mine, and I felt her fingers trace the gaps where my own fingers should have been. She didn’t flinch. She simply held what was left, as if the missing parts were just another kind of presence.
“You are still you,” I said.
Auri smiled, faint and glowing.
“And you are still you,” she said, holding my hands. “Take me home, Kvothe. Back to the Underthing, where everything is proper and safe and true.”