Stone. I kept my eyes closed and wrapped the calm rationality of Heart of Stone around me like a mantle before I dared even think of her again.
What did I know? I brought to mind a hundred stories of Felurian and plucked out the recurring themes. Felurian was beautiful. She charmed mortal men. They followed her into the Fae and died in her embrace.
How did they die? It was fairly simple to guess: extreme physical stress. Things had been rather rigorous, and the sedentary or frail might not have fared so well as I. Now that I stopped to notice, my entire body felt like a well-wrung rag. My shoulders ached, my knees burned, and my neck bore the sweet bruising of love bites from my right ear, down my chest, and....
My body flushed and I struggled deeper into the Heart of Stone until my pulse slowed and I could force the thought of her from the front of my mind.
I could remember four stories where men had come back from the Fae alive, all of them cracked as the potter’s cobbles. What manner of madness did they exhibit? Obsessive behavior, accidental death due to separation from reality, and wasting away from extreme melancholy. Three died within a span of days. The fourth story told of the man lasting nearly half a year.
But something didn’t make sense. Admittedly, Felurian was lovely. Skilled? Without a doubt. But to the extent that every man died or went insane? No. It simply wasn’t likely.
I don’t mean to belittle the experience. I don’t doubt for a second that it had, quite naturally, deprived men of their faculties in the past. I, however, knew myself to be quite sane.
I briefly entertained the notion that I was insane and didn’t know it. Then I considered the possibility that I had always been insane, acknowledged it as more likely than the former, then pushed both thoughts from my mind.
Eyes still closed, I lay there, enjoying a quiet languor of a sort I’d never felt before. I savored the moment, then opened my eyes and prepared to make my escape.
I looked around the pavilion at silken draperies and scattered cushions. These were only ornaments for Felurian. She lay in the middle of it all, all rounded hip and slender leg and lithe muscle shifting underneath her skin.
She was watching me.
If she was beautiful at rest she was doubly so awake. Asleep she was a painting of a fire. Awake she was the fire itself.
It may seem strange to you that at this point I felt fear. It may seem strange that only an arm’s length from the most attractive woman in the world, I was suddenly reminded of my own mortality.
She smiled like a knife in velvet and stretched like a cat in the sun.
Her body was built to stretch, the arch of her back, the smooth expanse of her belly going taut. The round fullness of her breasts was lifted by the motion of her arms, and suddenly I felt like a stag in rut. My body reacted to her, and I felt as if someone were hammering at the cool impassivity of Heart of Stone with a hot poker. My control slipped for a moment, and a less disciplined piece of my mind started composing a song to her.
I couldn’t spare the attention to rein that piece of myself back in. So I focused on staying safe in the Heart of Stone, ignoring both her body and that nattering part of my mind forming rhyming couplets somewhere in the back of my head.
It wasn’t the easiest thing to do. As a matter of fact, it made the ordinary rigors of sympathy seem simple as skipping. If not for the training I’d received at the University, I would have been a broken, pitiful thing, only able to concentrate on my own captivation.
Felurian slowly relaxed out of her stretch and looked at me with ancient eyes. Eyes unlike anything I had ever seen. They were a striking color ...
The summer dusk was in her eyes
... a sort of twilight blue. They were fascinating. In fact ...
With lids of winged butterflies
... there wasn’t any white to them at all....
Her lips the shade of sunset skies
I clenched my jaw, split that chattering piece of myself away, and walled it off in a distant corner of my mind, letting it sing to itself.
Felurian tilted her head to one side. Her eyes were as intent and expressionless as a bird’s. “why are you so quiet, flame lover? have I quenched you?”
Her voice was odd to my ear. It had no rough edges to it at all. It was all quiet smoothness, like a piece of perfectly polished glass. Despite its odd softness, Felurian’s voice ran down my spine, making me feel like a cat that’s just been stroked down to the tip of its tail.
I retreated further into the Heart of Stone, felt it cool and reassuring around me. However, while the majority of my attention was focused on self-control, the small, mad, lyric part of my mind leapt to the fore and said: “Never quenched. Though I am doused in you, I burn. The motion of your turning head is like a song. Is like a spark. Is like a breath that billows me and fans to flame a fire that cannot help but spread and roar your name.”
Felurian’s face lit up. “a poet! I should have known you for a poet by how your body moved.”
The gentle hush of her voice caught me unprepared again. It wasn’t that her words were breathy, or husky, or sultry. It was nothing so tawdry or affected as that. But when she spoke, I couldn’t help but be aware of the fact that her breath was pressed from her breast, past the soft sweetness of her throat, then shaped by the careful play of lips and teeth and tongue.
She came closer, moving on her hands and knees through the pillows. “you looked like a poet, fiery and fair.” Her voice was no louder than a breath as she cupped my face with her hands. “poets are gentler. they say nice things.”
There was only one person I’d ever heard whose voice was similar to this. Elodin. On rare occasions his voice would fill the air as if the world itself were listening.
Felurian’s voice was not resonant. It did not fill the forest glade. Hers was the hush before a sudden summer storm. It was soft as a brushing feather. It made my heart step sideways in my chest.
Speaking thus, when she called me a poet, it did not raise my hackles or make me grit my teeth. From her, it sounded like the sweetest thing a man was ever called. Such was the power of her voice.
Felurian brushed her fingertips across my lips. “poet kisses are best. you kiss me like a candle flame.” She brought one of her hands back to touch her mouth, her eyes bright at the memory.
I took her hand and pressed it tenderly. My hands have always seemed graceful, but next to hers, they looked brutish and crude. I breathed against her palm as I spoke. “Your kisses are like sunlight on my lips.”
She lowered her eyes, butterfly wings dancing. I felt my mindless need for her slacken and began to understand. This was magic, but nothing like what I knew. Not sympathy or sygaldry. Felurian made men mad with desire the same way I gave off body heat. It was natural for her, but she could control it.
Her gaze wandered over my tangle of clothes and belongings strewn messily at one corner of the glade. They looked oddly out of place amid the silks and soft colors. I saw her eyes settle on my lute case. She froze.
“is my flame a sweet poet? does he sing?” Her voice trembled and I could feel a tenseness in her body as she waited for an answer. She looked back at me. I smiled.
Felurian scampered off and brought back my lute case like a child with a new toy. As I took it, I saw her eyes were wide and ... wet?
I looked into her eyes, and in a flash of understanding I realized what her life must be like. A thousand years old, and lonely from time to time. If she wanted companionship she had to seduce and lure. And for what? An evening of company? An hour? How long could an average man last before his will broke and he became as mindless as a fawning dog? Not long.
And who would she meet in the forest? Farmers and hunters? What entertainment could they provide, slaved to her passions? I felt a moment of pity for her. I know what loneliness is like.
I took the lute from its case and began to tune it. I struck an experimental chord and carefully tuned it again. What to play for the most beautiful woman in the world?
>
It wasn’t hard to decide, actually. My father had taught me to judge an audience. I struck up “Sisters Flin.” If you’ve never heard of it, I’m not surprised. It’s a bright and lively song about two sisters gossiping while they argue over the price of butter.
Most people want to hear stories of legendary adventure and romance. But what do you play for someone out of legend? What do you sing for a woman who has been the object of romance for a mortal age? You play her songs of ordinary people. So I hoped.
She clapped delightedly at the end of it. “more! more?” She smiled hopefully, cocking her head to make it a request. Her eyes were wide and eager and adoring.
I played her “Larm and His Alepot.” I played her “Blacksmith’s Daughters.” I played her a ridiculous song about a priest chasing a cow that I’d written when I was ten and never even named.
Felurian laughed and applauded. She covered her mouth in shock and her eyes in embarrassment. The more I played, the more she reminded me of a young country wife attending her first fair, full of pure joy, face shining with innocent delight, eyes wide in amazement at everything she sees.
And lovely, of course. I concentrated on my fingering so as not to think about it.
After each song she rewarded me with a kiss that made it difficult to decide what to play next. Not that I minded horribly. I’d come to realize rather quickly that I preferred kisses to coins.
I played her “Tinker Tanner.” Let me tell you, the image of Felurian, her quiet, fluting voice singing the chorus of my favorite drinking song is something that will never, never leave me. Not until I die.
All the while I felt the charm she had on me slacken, bit by bit. It gave me room to breathe. I relaxed and let myself slide a little farther out of the Heart of Stone. Dispassionate calm can be a useful frame of mind, but it does not make for a compelling performance.
I played for hours, and by the end of it I felt like myself again. By which I mean I could look at Felurian with no more reaction than you might normally feel, looking at the most beautiful woman in the world.
I can still remember her, sitting naked among the cushions, twilight-colored butterflies dancing in the air between us. I wouldn’t have been alive had I not been aroused. But my mind seemed to be my own again, and I was grateful for that.
She made a disappointed noise of protest as I set the lute back into its case. “are you weary?” she asked with a hint of a smile. “I would not have tired you, sweet poet, had I known.”
I gave my best apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, but it seems to be getting late.” Actually, the sky still showed the same purple hint of twilight it had since I first woke, but I pushed on. “I’ll need to be moving quickly if I’m to meet ...”
My mind went numb as quickly as if I’d been struck a blow to the back of my head. I felt the passion, fierce and insatiable. I felt the need to have her, to crush her body to mine, to taste the savage sweetness of her mouth.
Only because of my arcane training did I hold onto any concept of my own identity at all. Even so, I only held it with my barest fingertips.
Felurian sat cross-legged on the cushions across from me, her face angry and terrible, her eyes cold and hard as distant stars. With a deliberate calm she brushed a slowly fanning butterfly from her shoulder. There was such a weight of fury in her simple gesture that my stomach clenched and I realized this fact:
No one ever left Felurian. Ever. She kept men until their bodies and minds broke beneath the strain of loving her. She kept them until she tired of them, and when she sent them away it was the leaving that drove men mad.
I was powerless. I was a novelty. I was a toy, favorite because it was newest. It might be a long while before she tired of me, but the time would come. And when she finally set me free my mind would tear itself apart with wanting her.
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
Blood and Bitter Rue
ASISAT AMONG the silks with my control slipping away, I felt a wave of cold sweat sweep over my body. I clenched my jaw and felt a small anger flare up. Over the course of my life my mind has been the only thing I’ve always been able to rely on, the only thing that has always been entirely mine.
I could feel my resolve melting as my natural desires were replaced by some animal thing unable to think beyond its own lust.
The part of me that was still Kvothe raged, but I felt my body respond to her presence. With a horrible fascination I felt myself crawl through the cushions toward her. One arm found her slender waist, and I bent to kiss her with a terrible hunger.
I howled inside my own mind. I have been beaten and whipped, starved and stabbed. But my mind is my own, no matter what becomes of this body or the world around. I threw myself against the bars of an intangible cage made of moonlight and desire.
And, somehow, I held myself away from her. My breath tore out of my throat as if racing to escape.
Felurian reclined on the cushions, her head tilted up toward me. Her lips were pale and perfect. Her eyes half-lidded and hungry.
I forced myself to look away from her face, but there was nowhere safe to look. Her throat was smooth and delicate, trembling with her rapid pulse. One breast stood round and full, while the other angled slightly to one side, following the downward slope of her body. They rose and fell with her breath, moving gently, making candle-cast shadows on her skin. I glimpsed the perfect whiteness of her teeth behind the pale pink of her parted lips....
I closed my eyes, but somehow that only made it worse. The heat of her body was like standing near a fire. The skin of her waist was soft beneath my hand. She moved beneath me, and her breast brushed softly against my chest. I felt her breath against my neck. I shivered and began to sweat.
I opened my eyes again and saw her staring at me. Her expression was innocent, almost hurt, as if she couldn’t understand being refused. I nursed my small flame of anger. No one did this to me. No one. I held myself away from her. A slight line of a frown touched her forehead, as if she were annoyed, or angry, or concentrating.
Felurian reached up to touch my face, her eyes intent as if trying to read something written deep inside me. I tried to pull back, remembering her touch, but my body simply shook. Beads of sweat fell from my skin to patter gently on the silk cushions and the flat plane of her stomach below.
She touched my cheek softly. Softly, I bent to kiss her, and something broke in my mind.
I felt the snap as four years of my life slid away. Suddenly I was back on the streets of Tarbean. Three boys, bigger than me with greasy hair and piggish eyes had dragged me from the broken crate where I’d been sleeping. Two of them held me down, pinning my arms. I lay in a stagnant puddle that was bitterly cold. It was early in the morning and the stars were out.
One of them had his hand over my mouth. It didn’t matter. I had been in the city for months. I knew better than to yell for help. At best no one would come. At worst someone would, and then there would be more of them.
Two of them held me down. The third cut my clothes off my body. He cut me. They told me what they were going to do. Their breath was horribly warm against my face. They laughed.
There in Tarbean, half-naked and helpless, I felt something well up inside me. I bit two fingers off the hand over my mouth. I heard a scream and swearing as one of them staggered away. I strained and strained against the one who was still on top of me. I heard my own arm break, and his grip loosened. I started to howl.
I threw him off. Still screaming I stood, my clothes hanging in rags around me. I knocked one of them to the ground. My scrabbling hand found a loose cobblestone and I used it to break one of his legs. I remember the noise it made. I flailed until his arms were broken, then I broke his head.
When I looked up, I saw the one who had cut me was gone. The third huddled against a wall. He clutched his bloody hand to his chest. His eyes were white and wild. Then I heard footsteps approaching, and I dropped the stone and ran and ran and ran....
Suddenly, years later, I was that f
eral boy again. I jerked my head back and snarled inside my mind. I felt something deep inside myself. I reached for it.
A tense stillness settled inside of me, the sort of silence that comes before a thunderclap. I felt the air begin to crystallize around me.
I felt cold. Detachedly, I gathered up the pieces of my mind and fit them all together. I was Kvothe the trouper, Edema Ruh born. I was Kvothe the student, Re’lar under Elodin. I was Kvothe the musician. I was Kvothe.
I stood above Felurian.
I felt as if this was the only time in my life I had been fully awake. Everything looked clear and sharp, as if I was seeing with a new set of eyes. As if I wasn’t bothering with my eyes at all, and was looking at the world directly with my mind.
The sleeping mind, some piece of me realized faintly. No longer sleeping, I thought and smiled.
I looked at Felurian, and in that moment I understood her down to the bottoms of her feet. She was of the Fae. She did not worry over right or wrong. She was a creature of pure desire, much like a child. A child does not concern itself with consequence, neither does a sudden storm. Felurian resembled both, and neither. She was ancient and innocent and powerful and proud.
Was this the way Elodin saw the world? Was this the magic he spoke of? Not secrets or tricks, but Taborlin the Great magic. Always there, but beyond my seeing until now?
It was beautiful.
I met Felurian’s eyes and the world grew slow and sluggish. I felt as if I had been thrust underwater, as if my breath had been pressed from my body. For that tiny moment I was stunned and numb as if I had been struck by lightning.
The moment passed and things began to move again. But now, looking into Felurian’s twilight eyes, I understood her far beyond the bottoms of her feet. Now I knew her to the marrow of her bones. Her eyes were like four lines of music, clearly penned. My mind was filled with the sudden song of her. I drew a breath and sang it out in four hard notes.
The Wise Man's Fear Page 79