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When Kvothe began to speak of the Cthaeh, Bast could barely keep himself from breaking down into fits of half-choked tears. There were a million things he wanted to say, reassurances and promises soft like summer grasses, but they all fell dead on his lips before he could speak them. The Chronicler stared at him as if he were a child overreacting, as if meeting the Cthaeh, letting its words seep into your ears, were no more damaging than a skinned knee one could bandage and forget about.
Kvothe, for his part at, looked at the agony painted plain across Bast’s face and favored him with a sad smile. “You’re so very young,” he said. As if Bast couldn’t know what speaking with the Cthaeh meant. As if Bast couldn’t understand what it was like.
It was one of the few times that Bast knew in his heart that Kvothe was unambiguously, unequivocally wrong, and not only in regard to Bast’s age. Bast was older than he seemed, older than his reshi knew. Kvothe was, at the hidden truth of the matter, a sapling in Bast’s shade. But beyond that Kvothe was wrong because Bast knew with a sharp and dreadful certainty what it was like to talk with the Cthaeh, because he had once talked with the Cthaeh too.
***
Weeks earlier, Kvothe had chosen to spend the night getting completely and utterly drunk.
They had run out of sugar and Bast had trekked across the village to barter some from the Aelmin homestead. When he stepped back into the inn in the dying twilight he was slammed with the heady reek of spilled wine. He could tell from a brief sniff that it was their cheapest vintage; Bast knew Kvothe would never waste a good bottle on himself, much less spill it in haphazard puddles across the top of the bar. Kvothe himself was slumped across the counter, staring forlornly down into his mostly empty cup as if it held tea leaves that could tell him his fate.
Bast slung his rucksack off of his shoulders and set it next to the door, taking care to lock the latch behind him before treading over to Kvothe. “Good evening.”
Kvothe turned to face him with a smile that Bast couldn’t help but return, regardless of the circumstances. “Why’re you not still talking to the Aelmin girl?”
Bast snorted and leaned on the counter next to Kvothe so he could wrap and arm around the other man’s shoulders, steadying him. “Her father chased me off. And so I’m stuck with you for the evening.”
Kvothe drained the rest of his glass and banged it down on the counter too quickly. “An unworthy substitute, I know.”
Even though the comment had been said in jest Bast still wanted to disagree, to tell him he would rather have Kvothe’s friendship than that of any girl from the four corners or beyond, mortal or fae. He cleared his throat instead. “You should take better care of yourself.”
Kvothe raised an eyebrow. “My choices are my choices. I would have thought you would like that, that I’m taking my destruction on my own terms.”
Kvothe couldn’t know what he was saying. Bast felt madness rise up inside him and thought about all the things he wanted to do at that moment, the violence he would love to commit against a real enemy that he could carve up in front of him, the blood a cleansing absolution. Instead he was up against the steady press of fate, against which swords and knives and spells were nothing but mocking parodies of rebellion. The future was a net and he would choke himself twisting against it before all was said and done.
Swallowing his anger, he dragged the wine goblet from his reshi’s grasp with steady fingers. Alcohol in large quantities made Kvothe morbid; Bast had always tried to keep him from reaching this stage, even if it meant he had to pass his hand over the wineglass and turn the clouded purple bitterness of the alcohol into sweet clear water when Kvothe wasn’t looking. He told himself it wasn’t lying, not truly, even though he knew deep down it was. It was not something he let trouble him overmuch; he would gladly go to far greater lengths to protect Kvothe, after all.
The wine had made Kvothe’s limbs clumsy; Bast let Kvothe lean against him and carded his hair gently as Kvothe’s breath curled warm against his neck. “I’d rather you had no destruction on anyone’s terms,” he said at last, pressing the words like promises into the fiery curls of Kvothe’s hair.
Kvothe snorted. “My destruction is not your burden to bear.”
Bast was silent for a spell before a small sigh escaped his lips. That was the crux of it, wasn’t it? “I would bear it if you let me,” he finally said.
Kvothe was silent but Bast caught the way his eyes shied away in the dying light of the hearth and knew he had heard him, knew he understood. Bast supposed he could have reached over and gripped Kvothe’s chin so that their eyes were forced to meet and Kvothe couldn’t pretend any longer. Instead, Bast wrapped his arms around his mentor and helped him stumble off to bed.
***
Kvothe was an ungrateful bastard when hung-over. Normal people were irritable and moaned a lot, to be sure. But Kvothe managed to funnel his discomfort into a prickly kind of superiority that would have bothered Bast to now end if he hadn’t recognized it for what it was.
“Eat your oatmeal,” he repeated, setting the bowl down on the bedside table after Kvothe finished making snippy comments about the consistency and color of the oatmeal while swaddled in his blankets.
“You don’t have to assuage your guilt for my by force-feeding me undercooked porridge, Bast. I’m the one that got into the wine.”
Bast rolled his eyes. “A normal person might think I’m just being nice.”
Kvothe favored him with one of his broad smiles; his teeth glinted bright in the morning sunshine streaming in from the window. “But I’m hardly normal, am I?”
There were a million jibes about ego and bragging that Bast had at the ready that he could employ to steer the conversation back into safe territory, where the patterns of their dialogue had already been worn into paths that avoided hard-edged truths. But he couldn’t bring himself to do so. It was so rare he saw the old Kvothe nowadays; he wanted to linger on the moment, hold it in his mouth like fine brandy.
Pushing his blankets out of the way Kvothe stood up and stretched, apparently bored. “In any case, there’s no need to be guilty. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
Bast watched his reshi saunter out of the room; he said nothing, though the word ‘yet’ hovered on the tip of his tongue like a sore. Meanwhile the untouched oatmeal grew cold on the table next to him.
***
And so when the chronicler asked about the Cthaeh and Kvothe responded with his flippant condescension that Bast had always loved before, it was all he could do to grit his teeth and keep from screaming.
He’d always expected the Cthaeh would tell its listener everything. He’d expected words upon words, tripping after each other and weighing everything down in a brutal press of fate. It would take the weight of millions of words, he’d thought, millions of foretold failures and unavoidable fates to drive the listener to his knees, to crush him and break him.
Instead, the Cthaeh did it with four.
Bast could still remember how the air seemed to break apart when the Cthaeh spoke, how the future, rather than becoming pressing and heavy as he’d imagined it would, had transformed into the weightless and sickening vertigo that sometimes strikes right before sleep takes you.
Bast would always remember the hissing of the Cthaeh’s voice, the cleanness of the enunciated syllables in the air, each and every one a perfect dagger aimed at Bast’s heart.
Only four words, but four were enough.
“You will fail him.”