Free The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss Page A

we can
begin.”
    Chronicler looked doubtful. “It’s a very complex—”
Seeing Kvothe frown, he sighed. “I’ll try.”
    Chronicler drew a deep breath and began to write a
line of symbols as he spoke. “There are around fifty different sounds we use to
speak. I’ve given each of them a symbol consisting of one or two pen strokes.
It’s all sound. I could conceivably transcribe a language I don’t even
understand.” He pointed. “These are different vowel sounds.”
    “All vertical lines,” Kvothe said, looking intently
at the page.
    Chronicler paused, thrown off his stride.
“Well…yes.”
    “The consonants would be horizontal then? And they
would combine like this?” Taking the pen, Kvothe made a few marks of his own on
the page. “Clever. You’d never need more than two or three for a word.”
    Chronicler watched Kvothe quietly.
    Kvothe didn’t notice, his attention on the paper.
“If this is ‘am’ then these must be the ah sounds,”
he motioned to a group of characters Chronicler had penned. “ Ah, ay, aeh, auh. That would make these the oh s.” Kvothe nodded to himself and pressed the pen back
into Chronicler’s hand. “Show me the consonants.”
    Chronicler penned them down numbly, reciting the
sounds as he wrote. After a moment, Kvothe took the pen and completed the list
himself, asking the dumbfounded Chronicler to correct him if he made a mistake.
    Chronicler watched and listened as Kvothe completed
the list. From beginning to end the whole process took about fifteen minutes.
He made no mistakes.
    “Wonderfully efficient system,” Kvothe said
appreciatively. “Very logical. Did you design it yourself?”
    Chronicler took a long moment before he spoke,
staring at the rows of characters on the page in front of Kvothe. Finally,
disregarding Kvothe’s question, Chronicler asked, “Did you really learn Tema in
a day?”
    Kvothe gave a faint smile and looked down at the
table. “That’s an old story. I’d almost forgotten. It took a day and a half,
actually. A day and a half with no sleep. Why do you ask?”
    “I heard about it at the University. I never really
believed it.” He looked down at the page of his cipher in Kvothe’s neat
handwriting. “All of it?”
    Kvothe looked puzzled. “What?”
    “Did you learn the whole language?”
    “No. Of course not,” Kvothe said rather testily.
“Only a portion of it. A large portion to be sure, but I don’t believe you can
ever learn all of anything, let alone a language.”
    Kvothe rubbed his hands together. “Now, are you
ready?”
    Chronicler shook his head as if to clear it, set
out a new sheet of paper, and nodded.
    Kvothe held up a hand to keep Chronicler from
writing, and spoke, “I’ve never told this story before, and I doubt I’ll ever
tell it again.” Kvothe leaned forward in his chair. “Before we begin, you must
remember that I am of the Edema Ruh. We were telling stories before Caluptena
burned. Before there were books to write in. Before there was music to play.
When the first fire kindled, we Ruh were there spinning stories in the circle
of its flickering light.”
    Kvothe nodded to the scribe. “I know your
reputation as a great collector of stories and recorder of events.” Kvothe’s
eyes became hard as flint, sharp as broken glass. “That said, do not presume to
change a word of what I say. If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember
that true stories seldom take the straightest way.”
    Chronicler nodded solemnly, trying to imagine the
mind that could break apart his cipher in a piece of an hour. A mind that could
learn a language in a day.
    Kvothe gave a gentle smile and looked around the
room as if fixing it in his memory. Chronicler dipped his pen and Kvothe looked
down at his folded hands for as long as it takes to draw three deep breaths.
    Then he began to speak.
     
    “In some ways, it began when I heard her singing.
Her voice twinning, mixing with my own. Her voice was like a portrait of