Kilvin casually picked up the bar of iron used to stir the forge and swung it hard at my head. His gesture was so casual that it caught me completely off my guard, and I didn’t even have time to cower or flinch away.
The bar stopped two feet away from me, as if striking some unseen obstruction. There was no sound as if it had struck something, neither did it rebound in Kilvin’s grip.
I reached out my hand cautiously and it butted up against . . . nothing. It was as if the intangible air in front of me was suddenly made solid.
Kilvin grinned at me. “The warding stones are of particular use when performing dangerous experiments or testing certain equipment,” he said. “They somehow produce a thaumic and kinetic barrier.”
I continued to run my hand along the unseen barrier. It wasn’t hard, or even solid. It gave way slightly when I pushed at it and felt slippery as buttered glass.
Kilvin watched me, his expression faintly amused. “Truthfully, Re’lar Kvothe, until Elodin made his suggestion, I was thinking of calling your arrow-arresting device the Minor Ward.” He frowned slightly. “Not entirely accurate, of course, but more so than Elodin’s dramatic nonsense.”
I leaned hard against the unseen barrier. It was solid as a stone wall. Now that I was looking more closely, I could see a subtle distortion in the air, as if I were looking through a slightly imperfect sheet of glass. “This is far superior to my arrowcatch, Master Kilvin.”
“True.” Kilvin gave a conciliatory nod and bent to pick up the stones, muttering again under his breath. I staggered a little when the barrier disappeared. “But your cleverness we can repeat endlessly. This mystery we cannot.”
Kilvin held up the two cubes of metal on the palm of his huge hand. “These are useful, but never forget: cleverness and caution profit the artificer. We do our work in the realm of the real.” He closed his fingers over the warding stones. “Leave mystery to poets, priests, and fools.”
Despite my other failures, my study with Master Elodin was progressing rather well. He claimed all I needed to improve myself as a namer was time and dedication. I gave him both, and he put them to use in odd ways.
We spent hours riddling. He made me drink a pint of applejack, then read Teccam’s Theophany from cover to cover. He made me wear a blindfold for three days straight, which didn’t improve my performance in my other classes, but amused Wil and Sim to no end.
He encouraged me to see how long I could stay awake. And since I could afford all the coffee I liked, I managed nearly five days. Though by the end I was rather manic and starting to hear voices.
And there was the incident on the roof of the Archives. Everyone has heard about that in one version or another, it seems.
There was a great beast of a thunderstorm rolling in, and Elodin decided it would do me good to spend some time in the middle of it. The closer the better, he said. He knew Lorren would never allow us access to the roof of the Archives, so Elodin simply stole the key.
Unfortunately, that meant when the key went tumbling off the roof, no one knew we were trapped up there. As a result the two of us were forced to spend the entire night on the bare stone rooftop, caught in the teeth of the furious storm.
It wasn’t until midmorning that the weather calmed enough for us to call down to the courtyard for help. Then, as there didn’t seem to be a second key, Lorren took the straightest course and had several burly scrivs simply batter down the door leading to the roof.
None of this would have been a particular problem if, just as it had started to rain, Elodin hadn’t insisted that we strip ourselves naked, wrap our clothes in an oilskin, and weigh them down with a brick. According to Elodin, it would help me experience the storm to the fullest degree possible.
The winds were stronger than he’d expected, and they had snatched both the brick and our bundled clothes, hurling them into the sky like a handful of leaves. That was how we lost the key, you see. It had been in the pocket of Elodin’s pants.
Because of this, Master Lorren, Lorren’s giller Distrel, and three brawny scrivs found Elodin and me stark naked and wet as drowned rats on the roof of the Archives. Within fifteen minutes, everyone in the University had heard the story. Elodin laughed his head off at the whole thing, and though I can see the humor of it now, at the time I was far from amused.
I won’t burden you with the entire list of our activities. Suffice to say that Elodin went to great lengths to wake my sleeping mind. Ridiculous lengths, really.
And much to my surprise, our work paid dividends. I called the name of the wind three times that term.
The first time I stilled the wind for the space of a long breath while standing on Stonebridge in the middle of the night. Elodin was there, coaching me. By which I mean he was prodding me with a riding crop. I was also barefoot and more than slightly drunk.
The second time came on me unexpectedly while I was studying in Tomes. I was reading a book of Yllish history when suddenly the air in the cavernous room whispered to me. I listened as Elodin had taught me, then spoke it gently. Just as gently the hidden wind stirred into a breeze, startling the students and sending the scrivs into a panic.
The name faded from my mind some minutes later, but while it lasted I held the certain knowledge that should I wish it, I could stir a storm or start a thunderclap with equal ease. The knowledge itself had to be enough for me. If I had called the wind’s name strongly in the Archives, Lorren would have hung me by my thumbs above the outer doors.
You may not think these terribly impressive feats of naming, and I suppose you are right. But I called the wind a third time that spring, and third time pays for all.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SEVEN
Debts
Since I had a great deal of free time on my hands, midway through the term I hired the use of a two horse fetter-cart and headed to Tarbean on a bit of a lark.
It took me all of Reaving to get there, and I spent most of Cendling visiting old haunts and paying old debts: a cobbler who had been kind to a shoeless boy, an innkeeper who had let me sleep on his hearth some nights, a tailor I had terrorized.
Parts of Waterside were strikingly familiar, while other pieces I didn’t recognize at all. That didn’t particularly surprise me. A city as busy as Tarbean is constantly changing. What did surprise me was the strange nostalgia I felt for this place that had been so cruel to me.
I had been gone for two years. For all practical purposes it was a lifetime ago.
It had been a span of days since the last rain, and the city was dry as a bone. The shuffling feet of a hundred thousand people kicked up a cloud of fine dust that filled the city streets. It covered my clothes and got in my hair and eyes, making them itch. I tried not to dwell on the fact that it was mostly pulverized horseshit, with an assortment of dead fish, coal smoke, and urine thrown in for flavor.
If I breathed through my nose, I was assaulted with the smell. But if I breathed through my mouth, I could taste it, and the dust filled my lungs making me cough. I didn’t remember it being as bad as this. Had it always been so dirty here? Had it always smelled this bad?
After half an hour of searching, I finally found the burned-out building with a basement underneath. I made my way down the stairs and through the long hallway to a damp room. Trapis was still there, barefoot and wearing the same tattered robe, tending to his hopeless children in the cool dark below the city streets.
He recognized me. Not as other people would, not as a budding hero out of stories. Trapis had no time for such things. He remembered me as the smudgy, starveling boy who fell down his stairs fever-sick and crying one winter night. You could say I loved him even more for that.
I gave him as much money as he would take: five talents. I tried to give him more, but he refused. If he spent too much money, he said, it would attract the wrong sort of attention. He and his children were safest if nobody noticed them.