The Slow Regard of Silent Things: A Kingkiller Chronicle Novella (The Kingkiller Chronicle) (15 page)

Honey and laurel might have been enough if this were a simple poet’s candle. But he was no mere poet. She needed something more.

A pinch of camphor would have been ideal. Just a pinch, a spark, a hint of something volatile. But she had no camphor, and there was no sense in wishing. So she fetched a daub of perfect pitch instead from Port. For binding, and to keep his heart hearty against the coming winter.

Auri stirred the beeswax with a slender glass rod. She smiled. It was a rare joy working with the proper tools. What luxury. Waiting for the resin to dissolve, Auri whistled as she stirred, and grinned. That would be her secret. There would be her whistle in the candle too.

She stepped into Mantle then, and eyed her perfect lavender in the grey glass jar. She lifted out a sprig of it. Then two. Then Auri felt the hot shame rise in her chest. This was no time for thrift.
He
was never stingy with his help. Didn’t he deserve sweet dreams?

Auri set her jaw and pulled fully half the lavender from out the jar. She could be a greedy, greedy thing at times.

Back into Boundary. Auri poured the laurel fruit into the grinder. In three breaths’ time it was minced tidily and fine. Then she stopped, staring at the mass of half-pulped fruit.

She knew the proper way for laurel. She knew the patient way of things. Grind and boil the waxy fruit. Sieve off the dottle. Boil again and clarify and cool to separate the wax. Even with the proper tools it would be hours of work. Hours and hours.

But he was coming
soon.
She knew. She knew she had no time for it.

And even if she had all day. There would be principles inside the wax that were not right for him. He was plum full of anger and despair. And pride . . . well, he had that in a sure and certain surfeit.

There were ways to factor those things out. She knew them all. She knew the turning circles of the calcinate. She could sublime and draw. She could isolate a non-exclusionary principle as well as any who had ever turned their hand to work the craft.

But this was not a time for begging favors from the moon. Not now. She could not rush and neither could she be delayed. Some things were simply too important.

It was just as Mandrag said: Nine tenths of alchemy was chemistry. And nine tenths of chemistry was waiting.

The other piece? That slender tenth part of a tenth? The heart of alchemy was something Auri had learned long ago. She’d studied it before she came to understand the true shape of the world. Before she knew the key to being small.

Oh yes. She’d learned her craft. She knew its hidden roads and secrets. All the subtle, sweet, and coaxing ways that made one skilled within the art. So many different ways. Some folk inscribed, described. There were symbols. Signifiers. Byne and binding. Formulae. Machineries of maths . . .

But now she knew much more than that. So much of what she’d thought was truth before was merely tricks. No more than clever ways of speaking to the world. They were a bargaining. A plea. A call. A cry.

But underneath, there was a secret deep within the hidden heart of things. Mandrag never told her that. She did not think he knew. Auri found that secret for herself.

She knew the true shape of the world. All else was shadow and the sound of distant drums.

Auri nodded to herself. Her tiny face was grave. She scooped the waxy fine-ground fruit into a sieve and set the sieve atop a gather jar.

She closed her eyes. She drew her shoulders back. She took a slow and steady breath.

There was a tension in the air. A weight. A wait. There was no wind. She did not speak. The world grew stretched and tight.

Auri drew a breath and opened up her eyes.

Auri was urchin small. Her tiny feet upon the stone were bare.

Auri stood, and in the circle of her golden hair she grinned and brought the weight of her desire down full upon the world.

And all things shook. And all things knew her will. And all things bent to please her.

It was not long before Auri returned to Mantle with a sorrel colored candle pressed with lavender. It smelled of bay and bees. It was a perfect thing.

Auri washed her face. She washed her hands and feet.

Soon. She knew. Soon he would come visiting. Incarnadine and sweet and sad and broken. Just like her. He would come, and like the proper gentleman he was, he would bring three things.

Grinning, Auri fairly danced. She would have three things for him as well.

First his clever candle, all Taborlin. All warm and stuffed with poetry and dreams.

Second was a proper place. A shelf where he could put his heart. A bed to sleep. Nothing could harm him here.

And the third thing? Well . . . She ducked her face and felt a slow flush climb her cheeks. . . .

Stalling, Auri reached out for the small stone soldier sitting on his bedshelf. Strange she’d never noticed the design upon its shield. It was so faint. But yes. There was the tower wrapped up in a tongue of flame. No mere soldier, it was a small stone Amyr.

Peering closer, Auri spied slight lines upon his arms as well. She did not know how she had missed these things before. It was a tiny Ciridae. Of course. Of course it was. It would hardly be a proper present for him otherwise. She kissed the tiny figurine and set it back upon the shelf.

Still, there was the third thing. This time Auri did not blush. She smiled. She washed her face and hands and feet. Then she skipped quickly into Port and opened up the hollybottle. With two fingers Auri lifted out a single seed. The tiny berry bright as blood despite green Foxen’s light.

Auri scampered off to Van and peered into the mirror. She licked her lips and pressed the berry up against them, daubing it from left to right. Then she smoothed the berry back and forth across them.

She eyed her reflection. She looked no different than before. Her lips were palest pink. She smiled.

Auri returned to Mantle. She washed her face and hands and feet.

Excitement bubbling up inside of her, Auri looked at his bed. His blanket. His bedshelf with the tiny Amyr waiting there to guard him.

It was perfect. It was right. It was a start. He would need a place someday, and it was here all ready for him. Someday he would come, and she would tend to him. Someday he would be the one all eggshell hollow empty in the dark.

And then . . . Auri smiled. Not for herself. No. Not ever for herself. She must stay small and tucked away, well-hidden from the world.

But for him it was a different thing entire. For him she would bring forth all her desire. She would call up all her cunning and her craft. Then she would make a name for him.

Auri spun about three times. She smelled the air. She grinned. All around her everything was proper true. She knew exactly where she was. She was exactly where she ought to be.

CODA

DEEP IN THE
UNDERT
HING,
stones warm beneath her feet, Auri heard a faint, sweet strain of music.

AUTHOR’S ENDNOTE:

LET
ME
TELL
you a story about a story. Because that’s what I do.

Back in January of 2013, I was in a San Francisco bar with Vi Hart: mathemusician, videotrix, and all-around lovely person. We’d both been fans of each other’s work for years without knowing it, and had recently been introduced by a mutual friend.

This was our first time meeting in person. I had just finished the first draft the story you now hold, and Vi had agreed to take a look at it and give me her opinion.

We spent a couple hours talking about the story, our conversation frequently tangenting off in odd directions, the way good conversations do.

Her feedback was really good. Not just clever, but startlingly insightful. When I mentioned this to her, she looked slightly amused and explained that writing was most of what she did. She scripted her videos, then recorded them. The scripting was the lion’s share of the work.

She pointed out some things that needed work in the story, some rough spots, some logical incongruities. She pointed out the parts she liked, too, and talked about the story as a whole.

I should mention that by this point in the evening, I was slightly drunk. A bit of a rarity for me. But since we were hanging out in a bar, it seemed polite to buy a drink. Then I had a drink because Vi was having another, and I wanted to be social. Then I had another because I was a little nervous about meeting Vi for the first time. Then I had another because I was a little nervous about my story.

Well, let’s be honest, I was more than a little nervous about the story. I knew, deep in my heart of hearts, that my new-wrought story was a train wreck. A colossal, smoldering mess of a train wreck.

“It doesn’t do the things a story is supposed to do,” I said to her. “A story should have dialogue, action, conflict. A story should have
more than one character.
I’ve written a thirty-thousand-word vignette!”

Vi said she liked it.

“Well, yes,” I said. “I like it too. But that doesn’t matter. You see, people expect certain things from a story,” I explained. “You can leave out one or two if you step carefully, but you can’t ditch
all
of them. The closest thing I have to an action scene is someone making soap. I spend eight pages describing someone making soap. Eight pages of a sixty-page story making soap. That’s something a crazy person does.”

As I’ve said, I was really worried about the story. And perhaps more than slightly drunk. And I was finally getting something off my chest that I hadn’t really shared with anyone before.

“People are going to read this and be pissed,” I said.

Vi looked at me with serious eyes. “I felt more of an emotional connection to the inanimate objects in this story than I usually feel toward entire characters in other books,” she explained. “It’s a good story.”

But I wasn’t having any of it. I shook my head, not even looking up at her. “Readers expect certain things. People are going to read this and be disappointed. It doesn’t do what a normal story is supposed to do.”

Then Vi said something I will always remember. “Fuck those people,” she said. “Those people have stories written for them all the time. What about me? Where’s the story for people like me?”

Her voice was passionate and hard and slightly angry. She might have slammed her hand down on the table at this point. I like to think she slammed her hand down on the table. Let’s say she did.

“Let those other people have their normal stories,” Vi said. “This story isn’t
for
them. This is my story. This story is for people like me.”

It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

I did not mean to write this story. Or rather, I did not mean to have this story about Auri turn out the way it did.

I started writing it midway through 2012. I meant for it to be a short story for the
Rogues
anthology edited by George Martin and Gardner Dozois. I’d anticipated it being a trickster story and figured Auri would make a nice complement to the more traditional scoundrel-type rogues who would no doubt show up in that book.

But the story didn’t turn out the way I’d expected. It was stranger than a simple trickster tale, and Auri herself was more full of secrets and mysteries than I had guessed.

Eventually the Auri story hit 14,000 words, and I abandoned it. It was too long. Too odd. And beside all that, it had become clear it wasn’t right for the anthology. Auri was no mere trickster. Most importantly, this wasn’t a rogue story at all.

Despite the fact that I was already over deadline, Martin and Gardner were very kind and gave me some extra time. So I wrote “The Lightning Tree” instead, a story featuring Bast. A much better fit for the anthology.

But Auri’s story was still crawling around in my head, and I realized the only way to get it out was to finish the thing. Besides, I owed Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press a novella from
way
back. He’d published my two not-for-children picture books,
The
Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed
, and the sequel,
The Dark of Deep Below.
So I knew he wasn’t afraid of a story that was a little strange.

So I kept writing the story, and it kept getting longer, and stranger. I could tell by this point that it wasn’t any sort of normal. It wasn’t doing the things a proper sort of story should do. It was, by all traditional metrics, a mess.

But here’s the thing. I liked it. It was weird and wrong and tangled and missing so many things that a story is supposed to need. But it kinda worked. Not only was I learning a lot about Auri and the Underthing, but the story itself had a sort of sweetness to it.

Whatever reason, I let the story develop according to its own desire. I didn’t force it into a different shape or put anything into it just because it was supposed to be there. I decided to let it be itself. At least for now. At least until I made it to the end. Then I knew I’d probably have to wield the editorial hatchet, performing cruel surgery in order to turn it into something normal. But not yet.

You see, I’d actually been down this road before.
The Name of the Wind
does a lot of things it’s not supposed to. The prologue is a laundry list of things you should never do as a writer. But despite all that, it works. Sometimes a story works
because
it’s different. Maybe this was that kind of story. . . .

But when I wrote the eight-page scene with Auri making soap I realized that was not the case. I was writing a trunk story. For those of you who don’t know the term, a trunk story is something you write, then when it’s finished you put the manuscript in the bottom of a trunk and forget about it. It’s not the sort of story you can sell to a publisher. Not the sort of story people want to read. It’s the sort of story that you write, then on your deathbed you remember it and ask a close friend to burn all your unpublished papers. Right after they clear your browser history, of course.

I knew Bill at Sub Press was delightfully open to strange projects, but this? No. No, this was a story I had to write to get out of my head. I had to write it to learn about Auri and the world. (Which is named Temerant, by the way, did you catch that?)

Simply said, I knew this story was for me. It wasn’t for other people. Sometimes that happens.

But still, I liked it. It was strange and sweet. I’d finally found Auri’s voice. I’m rather fond of her. And I’d learned a lot about writing in the third person, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.

When it was finished, I sent it to my agent, Matt, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re a writer. I told him I was going to offer it to Bill, but that I didn’t expect Bill would actually want it, as it was, narratively speaking, a train-wreck.

But Matt read it and liked it.

He gave me a call and said we should send it to Betsy, my editor at DAW.

“She isn’t going to want this,” I said. “It’s a mess. It’s the story a crazy person writes.”

Matt reminded me that, according to my contracts, Betsy had right of first refusal on any future books I wrote. “Besides,” he said. “It’s just polite to loop her in. She’s your primary publisher.”

I shrugged and told him to go ahead and send it. Slightly embarrassed to think of Betsy reading it.

But then Betsy read it and liked it. She really liked it. She wanted to publish it.

That’s when I started to sweat.

In the many months since my conversation with Vi Hart, I’ve revised this story roughly eighty times. (This isn’t unusual for me. In fact, it’s a little on the light side.)

As part of this process, I’ve given this story to about three dozen beta readers, gathering feedback to help me in my endless, obsessive revisions. And one comment people have made over and over again and again, phrased many different ways, is this:

“I don’t know what other people will think. They probably won’t like it. But I really enjoyed it.”

It’s strange to me how many people have said some version of that. Hell, I just now realize I said something similar myself a page or two ago in this author’s note.

The truth is, I’m fond of Auri. I have a special place in my heart for this strange, sweet, shattered girl. I love her more than just a little.

I think it’s because we’re both somewhat broken, in our own odd ways. More importantly, we’re both aware of it. Auri knows she isn’t all quite proper true inside, and this makes her feel very much alone.

I know how she feels.

But that itself is not unusual. I am the author, after all. I’m
supposed
to know how the character feels. It wasn’t until I started gathering feedback that I realized how common this feeling is. I’ve had person after person tell me that they empathize with Auri. That they know where she’s coming from.

I didn’t expect that. I cannot help but wonder how many of us walk through our lives, day after day, feeling slightly broken and alone, surrounded all the time by others who feel exactly the same way.

So. If you read this book and you didn’t enjoy it, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. This is a strange story. You
might
enjoy it more on a second reading. (Most of my stories are better the second time around.) But then again, maybe not.

If you’re one of the people who found this story disconcerting, off-putting, or confusing, I apologize. The truth is, it probably just wasn’t for you. The good news is that there are many other stories out there that are written just for you. Stories you will enjoy much more.