The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)

by Patrick Rothfuss

The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, holding the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

Death was like an unpleasant neighbor. You didn’t talk about him for fear he might hear you and decide to pay a visit.

“Well if I were Kvothe,” the innkeeper said, “I’d fake my death, change my name, and find some little town out in the middle of nowhere. Then I’d open an inn and do my best to disappear.” He looked at the young man. “That’s what I’d do.”

Auri sat on a wide brick chimney, waiting for me. She wore the dress I had bought her and swung her bare feet idly as she looked up at the stars. Her hair was so fine and light that it made a halo around her head, drifting on the faintest whisper of a breeze.

Most things fail with age. Our hands and backs stiffen. Our eyes dim. Skin roughens and our beauty fades. The only exception is the voice. Properly cared for, a voice does nothing but grow sweeter with age and constant use.

So yes. It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.

A small, cool hand brushed the side of my face. “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “Come here.” I began to cry quietly, and she gently uncurled the tight knot of me until my head lay in her lap. She murmured, brushing my hair away from my forehead, her hands cool against my hot face. “I know,” she said sadly. “It’s bad sometimes, isn’t it?”

“I know,” she said. “You have a stone in your heart, and some days it’s so heavy there is nothing to be done. But you don’t have to be alone for it. You should have come to me. I understand.”

It’s like telling a joke. Anyone can remember the words. Anyone can repeat it. But making someone laugh requires more than that. Telling a joke faster doesn’t make it funnier. As with many things, hesitation is better than hurry.

This is why there are so few true musicians. A lot of folks can sing or saw out a tune on a fiddle. A music box can play a song flawlessly, again and again. But knowing the notes isn’t enough. You have to know how to play them. Speed comes with time and practice, but timing you are born with. You have it or you don’t.

Shelves covered every bit of the stone walls. Some hallways were broad and open with high ceilings, while others formed narrow lanes barely wide enough for two people to pass if they both turned sideways. The air was heavy with the smell of leather and dust, of old parchment and binding glue. It smelled of secrets.

But children’s stories are not rich in detail, and what few details I found were obviously fanciful. Where did the Chandrian live? In the clouds. In dreams. In a castle made of candy. What were their signs? Thunder. The darkening of the moon. One story even mentioned rainbows. Who would write that? Why make a child terrified of rainbows?

The Chandrian move from place to place, But they never leave a trace. They hold their secrets very tight, But they never scratch and they never bite. They never fight and they never fuss. In fact they are quite nice to us. They come and they go in the blink of an eye, Like a bright bolt of lightning out of the sky.

“You can divide infinity an infinite number of times, and the resulting pieces will still be infinitely large,” Uresh said in his odd Lenatti accent. “But if you divide a non-infinite number an infinite number of times the resulting pieces are non-infinitely small. Since they are non-infinitely small, but there are an infinite number of them, if you add them back together, their sum is infinite. This implies any number is, in fact, infinite.” “Wow,” Elodin said after a long pause. He leveled a serious finger at the Lenatti man. “Uresh. Your next assignment is to have sex. If you do not know how to do this, see me after class.” He turned to look at Inyssa.

Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.

There are signs which herald their Arrival, but there is no agreement as to these. Blue flame is the most common, but I have also heard of wine going sour, blindness, crops withering, unseasonable storms, miscarriage, and the sun going dark in the sky. Altogether, I have found them a Frustrating and Profitless area of Inquirey.

The secret is to concentrate on what you’re doing. Don’t look at the ground. Don’t look over your shoulder. Ignore the world and trust it to return the favor. This was the real reason I was wearing my cloak. If I was spotted I would be nothing more than a dark shape in the night, impossible to identify. Hopefully.

The wind saved me. It gusted as I teetered on the edge of the roof, giving me just enough of a push that I could regain my balance. One of my flailing arms caught the now-open window and I scrambled desperately inside, not caring how much noise I made.

But I simply couldn’t afford the price of admission. A suit of passably fine clothes would cost at least a talent and a half, even if I bought them from a fripperer. Clothes do not make the man, but you need the proper costume if you want to play the part.

I felt my worries slough away. My music has always been the best remedy for my dark moods. As I sang, even my bruises seemed to pain me less.

“I’m relieved,” I said honestly. “I was worried I’d given myself cadmium poisoning, or I had some mysterious disease. This is just someone trying to kill me.”

They were the best sort of friends. The sort everyone hopes for but no one deserves, least of all me.

So, even though I couldn’t afford it, I began dipping into my thinning purse to buy coffee. Many of the inns and cafés near the University catered to noble tastes, so it was readily available, but coffee is never cheap.

I looked behind the door again. The lute wasn’t behind the door. Then I sat on the bed. If I had been weary before, then I was something else entirely now. I felt like I was made of wet paper. I felt like I could barely breathe, like someone had stolen my heart out of my chest.

“Music explains itself,” I said. “It is the road, and it is the map that shows the road. It is both together.”

No. The simple fact was that with my music, I could cope with the rest. My music was the glue that held me together. Only two days without it, and I was falling apart.

I slowly unrolled the piece of paper and instantly recognized the man she had painted. His eyes were pure black. In the background there was a bare tree, and he was standing on a circle of blue with a few wavy lines on it.

I unrolled the paper further. There was a second man, or rather the shape of a man in a great hooded robe. Inside the cowl of the robe was nothing but blackness. Over his head were three moons, a full moon, a half moon, and one that was just a crescent. Next to him were two candles. One was yellow with a bright orange flame. The other candle sat underneath his outstretched hand: it was grey with a black flame, and the space around it was smudged and darkened.

I nodded again. This was Haliax. The leader of the Chandrian. When I’d seen him he had been surrounded by an unnatural shadow. The fires around him had been strangely dimmed, and the cowl of his cloak had been black as the bottom of a well.

not a place any man has ever found by searching. It is not a place you travel to, it is the place you pass through while on your way to somewhere else.

The old man was going from nowhere to nowhere. He had no hat for his head and no pack for his back. He had not a penny or a purse to put it in. He barely even owned his own name, and even that had been worn thin and threadbare through the years. If you’d asked him who he was, he would have said, “Nobody.” But he would have been wrong.

“What use is care? What good is watching for that matter? People are forever watching things. They should be seeing. I see the things I look at. I am a see-er.”

“Too late!” he exclaimed, looking childlike for a moment. “You looked too hard and didn’t see enough. Too much looking can get in the way of seeing, you see?”

We took the left turning of the path and he drew a breath. “There are two types of power: inherent and granted,” Alveron said, letting me know the topic of today’s conversation. “Inherent power you possess as a part of yourself. Granted power is lent or given by other people.” He looked sideways at me. I nodded.

Shadow took her, and suddenly I was alone. I stood, the smell of her still in the air around me, the warmth of her just fading from my hands. I could still feel the tremor of her heart, like a caged bird beating against my chest.

So rather than risk saying the wrong thing, I said nothing. I knew what happened to the men who clung to her too tightly. That was the difference between me and the others. I did not clutch at her, try to own her. I did not slip my arm around her, murmur in her ear, or kiss her unsuspecting cheek.

IN THE THEOPHANY, TECCAM writes of secrets, calling them painful treasures of the mind. He explains that what most people think of as secrets are really nothing of the sort. Mysteries, for example, are not secrets. Neither are little-known facts or forgotten truths. A secret, Teccam explains, is true knowledge actively concealed.

Philosophers have quibbled over his definition for centuries. They point out the logical problems with it, the loopholes, the exceptions. But in all this time none of them has managed to come up with a better definition. That, perhaps, tells us more than all the quibbling combined.

Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. These secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free.

Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become.

There was a long silence. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on me. The fire snapped, sending a red ember floating upward. “And then what happened?” Hespe finally asked. “Nothing,” I said. “That’s it. The end.”

“Not pointless,” I protested. “It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers.”

Marten shook his head and wandered off, but I was lost in my thoughts and hardly noticed. I had wanted answers, and in spite of all I had thought, Elodin had been trying to give them to me. What I had taken as a malicious crypticism on his part was actually a persistent urging toward the truth. I sat there, silent and stunned by the scope of his instruction. By my lack of understanding. My lack of sight.

“But first you should think this over, boy. When you love something, you have to make sure it loves you back, or you’ll bring about no end of trouble chasing it.”

Realization thundered into me. The leader of the bandits. The graceful man in chain mail. Cinder. He was the one who had spoken to me when I was a child. The man with the terrible smile and the sword like winter ice.

I hesitated, then spoke softly. “She was Felurian, most beautiful of all.” I reached out to brush the side of her neck where her red hair began its curling tumble downward, then leaned forward and whispered seven words into her ear. “For all that, she lacked your fire.” And she loved me for those seven words, and her pride was safe.

It is easier to understand if you think of it in terms of music. Sometimes a man enjoys a symphony. Elsetimes he finds a jig more suited to his taste. The same holds true for lovemaking. One type is suited to the deep cushions of a twilight forest glade. Another comes quite naturally tangled in the sheets of narrow beds upstairs in inns. Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made. Some might take offense at this way of seeing things, not understanding how a trouper views his music. They might think I degrade women. They might consider me callous, or boorish, or crude.

It seemed like a distant cousin to Heart of Stone, the mental exercise I’d learned so long ago. That said, there was little similarity between the two. Heart of Stone was practical: it stripped away emotion and focused my mind. It made it easier to break my mind into separate pieces or maintain the all-important Alar.

Only barbarians and madmen take pleasure in combat. Whoever loves the fight itself has left the Lethani behind.”

I have been alone for most of my life. But rarely have I felt it so much as at that moment. I knew one person within four hundred miles, and he’d been ordered to keep away from me. I was unfamiliar with the culture, barely competent with the language, and the burning all across my back and face was a constant reminder of how much I was unwelcome.