I'm late to the KKC party—I don't know how I've missed these books all of these years. Anyway, this is a happy little story, because we need more of those.

Also, I know nothing about sculpting, so my apologies to the real artists out there for anything I've butchered.

Chapter 1

Elodin knew the names of things, and everyone knew that. Some said he had magic powers, like Taborlin the Great—that he could crumble a building into dust or call down lightning from the sky.

Fela wasn't sure she believed it. Her mother had read her the story of Taborlin the Great many nights when she was a little girl, along with tales about princesses carried off by dragons and faeries that put old kings to sleep for a hundred years. But now that Fela was older, she didn't know if she believed in that sort of magic anymore. On the other hand, she didn't not believe in it, but no one had ever broken through the walls of her room with only a word.

Others said Elodin was simply mad—cracked, crazy, completely out of his mind. Fela wasn't convinced of that, either. He was odd sometimes, there was no doubt about that, the way he walked around with no shoes and a loose grin that showed all of his teeth. Insane, though, seemed something more.

But she had heard none of these things about Elodin when she first came to the University, barely eighteen and newly arrived from Modeg with her uncle. They had rented a set of adjoining rooms at the Golden Pony two days before admissions. Her uncle, who had gotten his guilder years before, spent those two days pointing out the various University buildings to Fela and reminiscing about his classes, but Fela was too nervous to pay much attention.

Her legs trembled as she climbed the stage of an empty theater for admissions, and she laced her fingers together so the masters wouldn't see them shake. She looked over them in quick succession, nine of them sitting in a half-circle at an immense table. None of them looked friendly, although some seemed unfriendly.

"Name?" asked the man sitting in the middle.

"Fela, Moran's daughter," Fela said, her soft words cracking in her dry mouth. "I'm here to apply for the University."

"Sponsor?"

"Beran—my uncle," she said. "I have his letter of introduction."

She walked to the edge of the stage and passed the letter down to the man she assumed was the Chancellor. He broke the seal, skimmed it, then set it aside.

"Very well," he said. "We have some questions for you. Master Alchemist?"

The man at the far end of the table was mostly unremarkable, apart from skeletal fingers that looked permanently stained.

"Name a substance that is denser in liquid form than solid form."

Fela's throat was so tight it hurt when she swallowed.

"Water, sir."

Master Alchemist nodded absently.

"And what is the practical effect?"

"Ice floats on water."

He nodded again, then looked to the man at his left. "Master Arithmetician?"

"List the primary trigonometric functions and their reciprocals."

"Sine, cosine, and tangent," Fela answered, feeling more confident. She'd always been good at math, and it was one of her favorite subjects. "Their reciprocal functions are cosecant, secant, and cotangent, in that order."

She shuffled through the masters one at a time. She tried to remember their names and their faces—Master Kilvin, Master Physicker—but they all blurred together in a nervous whirl. The Chancellor gave her what might have been the hint of a kind smile when he asked her a question in Siaru and she responded in kind, but Master Rhetorician smugly looked her up and down when it was his turn.

She had seen the look often. Her uncle had always encouraged her studies, her mother proud and her father supportive in his distant way. But others had scorned her for being a woman, for attempting to learn the knowledge passed on to men without a second thought. Master Hemme's look saw through her shirt to her breasts—not salaciously, but in a way that made it clear she had no place at the University because of them. Fela crossed her arms over her chest as hot prickles spread across her face and down the back of her neck.

"Give an example of an antanaclasis," he said.

Fela paused. Figures of speech all seemed to have similar names. Antanaclasis—was that the one that crossed in the middle and repeated in reverse?

"'Fair is foul, and foul is fair,'" she said, quoting the example her uncle had used when they went over rhetorical devices. "Or is that a chiasmus?"

"A chiasmus," Master Hemme said, with a snide look that said she'd proved his point.

The flush on her face flared hotter, but Master Sympathist proved kindly, despite his intimidating appearance. She answered the remaining questions as best she could; she knew most of them, and the ones she didn't know at all she left alone.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt, her uncle had always told her.

Her heart had slowed somewhat and her legs had stopped trembling and were merely weak by the time the questions ceased.

"Thank you," the Chancellor said. "Allow us a few minutes to work out the details of your tuition."

Fela relaxed—she had passed, she had been admitted to the University—and then someone cleared their throat. Eight heads swiveled toward the man at the end of the table.

"Master Namer," said the Chancellor, his voice delicately neutral. "Do you have a question?"

Fela had hardly looked at the last man until then. She had seen him when she first scanned the row of masters, but then all her focus had been on answering their questions, and she hadn't paid any attention to the young man with dark hair.

He was younger than the other masters, and where they wore their robes with a solemn dignity, his were rumpled. He wasn't short, but he wasn't particularly tall. He was handsome, but not in an ostentatious way like the men back home, with their silk shirts and jeweled rings and puffed up chests. Master Namer didn't draw her eye—it was when she spent a couple of seconds looking at him that she saw the beauty in him.

But she didn't stare at him for more than a few seconds before his dark eyes looked up from the table to catch hers, and suddenly, she couldn't breathe. He saw through her. Not the way Master Hemme saw through her shirt to her breasts—Master Namer saw straight to the heart of her.

"Five spades have been played," he said, and his voice rang out in the hall. For the first time, it felt like a theater, alive with a performance. Fela's heart started pounding again, sure this was some riddle out of a storybook, like when the locksmith's apprentice tricked the Keeper of the Door to Beyond. "You have three spades in your hand. How many spades is that?"

The other masters looked exasperated. Master Hemme's face tightened with disdain as he exchanged a look with Master Arithmetician, and bearded Master Artificer sighed audibly.

Fela paused. She hadn't known how to answer some of the other masters' questions, but that was simply not knowing the material. None of the other questions had thrown her off balance like this, and her mind raced through her options. But she couldn't think of any other answer.

"Eight," she said, her voice softer than even when she first started. Sure that she was missing something, that the question couldn't be that simple, she added, "I think."

Master Hemme chuckled and whispered something to Master Arithmetician, and her cheeks flamed again. She had confirmed their suspicion, that women were too stupid to answer a basic question, too stupid to attend the University.

"You think?" Master Namer said, tilting his head.

Fela realized she was picking at the end of her sleeve and forced herself to stop.

"I'm not sure I understand the question, sir," she said, feeling small and exposed on the stage.

She thought something like sympathy might have flitted across the Chancellor's face. But something else flashed on Master Namer's, serious and thoughtful.

"Do you know," he said, his voice again ringing in the quiet, "the nine words that will make a man weep?"

Fela thought for another long moment. Her younger brother had cried inconsolably when she was twelve and her mother had left the house on an errand. But he had fallen out of a tree, and if there were nine words involved, Fela hadn't heard them. Her father had never cried, that she knew of.

"No," she said, feeling like she had disappointed him.

But his intense presence dissipated as he gave her a toothy grin, and he was goofy as a child. That was Fela's first brush with what they called madness, but her attention turned quickly to the Chancellor as the masters talked and set her tuition at three talents and six jots. Warmth flowed back into her legs as she rushed to tell her uncle, and she forgot about Master Namer as they went back to the Golden Pony to celebrate.

She learned about him that same night, as she sat on her new bunk in the women's section of the Mews with three other female students.

"Hemme is a horse's ass," said Devi, whose fierceness seemed to make up for her smallness. "He hates women—he'll do anything to make a fool out of you in front of his class. And Brandeur's his lapdog. He'll go along with Hemme every time if it comes down to a vote."

"Master Arwyl is strict, but fair," said Mola, sensible and efficient with her short blond hair and neat clothes. "He won't try to trick you, but he'll make sure you don't mess up with his patients."

"You're only saying that because he likes you and asked you to keep working in the Medica," Devi said. "He's an old stuffed shirt."

Mola shook her head, but her smile was half-amused.

"Elxa Dal looks a bit evil, but he's kind," said Rhinnon, a third girl with curling brown hair and warm eyes. "And Kilvin is alright, if you don't let the bearishness scare you away."

"Lorren will be fine so long as you're careful with his books. That's all he cares about," Mola advised Fela. "The Chancellor doesn't teach much, because he's the Chancellor, but he's nice, and then Mandrag just wants an army of students to work in the alchemy labs for him."

The three of them nodded. Fela ran through the masters in her head, cataloguing what the other girls had said with her own impressions of them. Then she remembered the young master with the deep eyes and odd questions.

"And Master Namer?" she asked.

All three girls snorted—Rhinnon laughed outright, and Devi rolled her eyes.

"Elodin?" Devi said. "He's cracked as a china teacup. Completely nuts. They locked him up in the asylum a couple of years ago when he lost it, but he managed to escape. No idea why they let him stay—he doesn't teach anything."

"Do you know what he asked me in my admissions yesterday?" Rhinnon said. "He wanted me to explain the difference between dirt and rock dust."

The other girls laughed.

"He didn't say a word in mine," said Mola, "just stared at his pen the whole time, like it would start talking back to him."

"Completely mad," Devi said.

More stories trickled down from the older students and were whispered among the new students as Fela started her classes. Elodin had been the youngest Chancellor ever before he went mad. He'd been caught at midnight in the morgue of the Medica. He'd been thrown out of the Horse and Four for getting into a fistfight with a traveling baron.

But for all of the rumors, Fela hardly saw the man himself. He didn't speak at all in her admissions for her next three terms; he stared at the ceiling for two of them, and then played with a sheet of paper when she started her second year. She wondered if she had disappointed him that first time, but she did well enough with everyone else's questions, and Lorren sponsored her to E'lir after her second term and Re'lar after her seventh.

Over the next two years, while several of her fellow students tried to cajole and coerce Elodin into teaching them naming, Fela caught only glimpses of Master Namer. She stepped around him one morning when he went on to spend the entire afternoon sitting crosslegged in the middle of the busy walkway between Mains and Hollows. She looked up as she walked to the Mess with Rhinnon and saw him perched in a tree.

Other students chased magic and the fame of old heroes, like Taborlin the Great. But Fela had learned that the magic in storybooks was just sympathy and sygaldry: rules and runes and strategically kept secrets, not wizardry. And so Fela didn't waste time with aspirations of grandeur. While Devi claimed that she was a better sympathist than any man at the University, and that one day, she would prove it, Fela spent quiet afternoons working in the Archives. While Mola spent all of her spare time in the Medica and planned to take Arwyl's place as Master Physicker one day, Fela was satisfied with early mornings in the Fishery. And if Master Namer seemed, at least in passing, as odd as everyone said, it was no matter to Fela—she hadn't come to the University to learn faerie magic.

So it was to her surprise when Elodin stepped into her tranquil world at the Fishery one morning.

"Good God, boy, open the fume hood before you suffocate yourself."

Fela looked across the workroom and saw Elodin pointing his fingers at Basil. Basil looked irked as he fiddled with the ventilator; Elodin, on the other hand, looked entirely out of place in the Fishery. Instead of his master's robes, he wore a white shirt and pants cut off at the shins. From the way loose threads frayed and straggled down, Fela guessed he had sheared them off himself rather than going to a seamstress.

Basil mumbled something, and Fela turned back to her workstation. She carefully laid out the metal plates and pieces of glass to make two identical sympathy lamps. She decanted a small vial of bone tar to dope her emitters, then nearly dropped the vial and burned her hand when Elodin cleared his throat from behind her. He had crossed to her workstation almost silently, despite wearing a pair of shoes that looked a few steps away from falling apart.

"Sympathy lamp?" he said, and Fela turned around, taking care that the vial of bone tar wouldn't spill over onto her hand. She nodded. "To light two young lovers' carriage on a moonless night?"

"I don't know about that," she said, "but it'll light well enough."

He looked at the sets of twin parts with an intensity that belied his strange words. He stared at the metal plates like he was reading the sygaldry Fela hadn't scratched in yet. Then he gave her that loose grin she'd seen in her admissions interview.

"Did you spill shit on Kilvin's floor?"

"What?" Her hands clutched tighter around the vial of bone tar.

"You're a Re'lar, right? Lorren sponsored you three terms ago? How come you're not doing something more interesting than sympathy lamps?"

She set the bone tar back on her workstation, then turned back to him. She did other, more complicated projects, and while sympathy lamps were simple, she enjoyed them. Her hands knew how the pieces fit together and fell into a rhythm that was relaxing—soothing, even.

"I—" Fela faltered. Feeling silly, she said, "I like them."

"Like doing the same thing over and over, like a tinker's donkey?"

Elodin lowered his head and slapped his hands alternately against his knees, like a donkey plodding along with a heavy cart.

Fela stiffened, but hesitated before responding sharply. If he was as unpredictable as they said—and it certainly seemed that way—there was no point in arguing with him. She wasn't trying to impress him; she didn't need him to teach her faerie magic, if that sort of magic was even real. Besides, Kilvin liked her sympathy lamps just fine.

She held up the schema.

"It's the same design, yes, but every lamp is different. Not in the way it's designed, but the way it fits together." She held up the two metal plates, one for each lamp. "These are both hemispheres, but this one doesn't curve as sharply. I had to shape the glass a little differently so it would fit tight enough."

Elodin had stopped fidgeting. Instead of looking at her like she was a tinker's donkey, he looked at her like she was a talking, flying donkey. Feeling self-conscious, Fela went on.

She picked up the two pieces of blue glass.

"These pieces of glass are cut from the same sheet, maybe even right next to each other, but they're not the same color."

"They're both blue," he said. "Blue, blue, blue."

She nodded, then held them up to the light.

"Yes. But this one is thinner," she said, gesturing to the one in her right hand. "It was thicker on one end to begin with, so I had to grind off more to make it even. It will be a lighter blue than the other. And the other one has little bubbles in it—see?" She offered it to him, and he held it like it was a ruby or a gold necklace. "The bubbles will distort the light a little. So it's the same design, but they're not the same lamps at all."

It was one of the things she liked best about working in the Fishery: the cool metal under her fingers, the smoothness of glass, the intricacies of multiple wires. There was something calming about learning the uniqueness of each piece, something satisfying about finding the way to make each individual part fit perfectly. It wasn't as dramatic as the alchemy labs, where concoctions fizzed and reacted in mysterious ways, or as high-pressure as the Medica when someone was brought in with a gaping wound. These mornings in the Fishery were simple and methodical, and they were enough for Fela.

Elodin stared at the glass in his hands for so long, she wondered if this was another display of madness. But when he finally looked up at her, his gaze was quite sane, if intense.

"Do you do anything else?" he asked her. "Do you draw or paint or carve?"

"I sculpt," Fela said, confused by the sudden turn of the conversation. "Not very well, most of the time."

He looked at her, his eyes so focused she could hardly meet them. Then something in him changed, and the loose grin was back.

"Sculpting is for the sexually repressed. Sculptors spend all of their time diddling with private parts."

He gestured obscenely at his chest, mimicking shaping breasts. Then he spun the glass in his fingers, and Fela tensed, ready to reach for it if it fell. But Elodin didn't drop it; he placed it back on her workstation next to the metal plates, then headed out of the Fishery, the stray threads of his sheared off pants blowing around his bare calves.

Fela turned back to the pieces of her sympathy lamps. She brushed a piece of hair back behind her ear before she picked up the emitter. Based on her first real conversation with Master Elodin, he was quite as cracked as everyone said.

He came back to the Fishery a couple of spans later, although it took Fela a few moments to recognize him behind the large block he was carrying. A white sheet hung over it and down past his knees, so that the dilapidated shoes underneath gave him away.

Elodin set the covered block on her workstation with a loud thud, then turned to her and gave a stately bow.

"For Fela, shaper of men's marble balls," he said.

She frowned at the crude title, then frowned deeper as she processed the rest of what he'd said. She hadn't realized he knew her name.

He pulled off the sheet with a flourish.

Underneath was a block of marble. Fela saw that it was very fine: a rich grey with a uniform pattern, much finer than than the marble Kilvin allowed Re'lars to use. She wondered whether Elodin had bought it, or if he had stolen it from Kilvin's private storage and she would get in trouble for having it at her workstation.

She reached out and ran her fingers over it. It was smooth, with no cracks or hitches.

"I am here to commission a sculpture," Elodin said, leaning toward her. "I want you to make me—" his voice rang impressively, like he was an oracle in a faerie story, setting her on a quest "—a whistle in the wind," he finished dramatically.

Fela stared at him.

She opened her mouth to tell him that wasn't how sculpting worked, that it would be a waste of very good marble—but then she stopped. If he was as mad as she was coming to believe, disagreeing with him would get her nowhere. He was a master, and it wasn't her marble, after all.

"Okay," she said instead with a shrug.

The intense look flashed back across his face and was gone just as quickly. He slapped the marble with the flat of his hand and said, "And I want it tickling the hair on a farmer's balls," and then left the Fishery.

x x x

Fela didn't touch the marble for nearly a span. She spent five days trying to decide how to sculpt a whistle in the wind. She tried to envision it in her head, tried to sketch it, tried to model it out of clay. When that didn't work, she set the block aside for another four days and worked on sympathy lamps instead, hoping that inspiration would come.

It didn't.

So on the tenth day, worried that Elodin would come back and find his marble untouched, Fela sighed and picked up a mallet and chisel. She would just have to figure it out as she went along.

"This is absurd," she said to herself. "He's clearly been touched in the head."

She didn't know what a whistle in the wind looked like, but she was sure it wasn't a square block, so she started chipping at one corner to break off large chunks. She felt stupid, working at the block with no plan whatsoever. She was going to waste the nicest bit of marble she'd touched since she'd left her parents' fountain garden.

But after a few minutes, her hands relaxed around the tools and fell into a rhythm. Her eyes softened until she saw the basic shape of the marble only vaguely; she didn't look at it critically, and her hands found the places to strike without conscious thought. It was peaceful, in a way.

"—keep the lid on the canister, Basil," Kilvin's deep voice rumbled, and Fela startled and dropped the mallet. She heard Basil's mumbled response, and she looked around to see the two of them walking across the workroom.

Then she looked down at her marble and almost gasped in surprise.

There was a whistle in the wind. Not the way she had tried to sketch it or mold it with clay, or even how she would imagine it—but when she looked, it was the wind, and it was whistling. She scanned over the lines of it, clever and sleek in a way she hadn't consciously pictured, then noticed she had chipped off a piece on one side when Kilvin startled her. The pang of disappointment wasn't enough to dampen her surprise that she had actually shaped it.

As she sanded it smooth, she thought about trying to find Elodin, then remembered the ridiculous lengths other students had gone to track him down. So she left it on her workstation, a marble whistle in the wind.

x x x

Elodin was at her workstation a few days later, trailing a finger over the sculpture, when Fela came in to the Fishery at dawn.

"This is very good, Fela," he said with his back to her.

"I messed up one side," she said, as Elodin touched the chip. "I got distracted, and my chisel must have slipped."

He ran his hands over it for a few more seconds, as though his fingertips were a second set of eyes.

"Where's your plan?" he asked. "Your sketches, your models?"

"I didn't have any," she said, embarrassed at her unconventional methods. How could she explain that it wasn't like artificing, with careful instructions and schemas and precise measurements? Feeling foolish, she added, "I . . . I felt it."

He turned around and looked at her as intently as he'd examined the sculpture.

"Hmm," he said.

Then he picked up the marble and left.

He brought her three more slabs of marble, each as fine as the last. He told her to make a cube with eight sides, the sound of a dry riverbed, and water vapor condensing into a raindrop.

The next ones were easier than the first, if only because Fela knew it could be done. Like the whistle in the wind, she didn't try to analyze it, didn't try to sketch it. She just let her hands find the shape in the marble.

It was relaxing, in some way. It was freer than the sympathy lamps, more creative than the other designs she made for Kilvin. She came to enjoy mornings in this state, even, and when Elodin came back the fourth time, she proudly showed him the raindrop. It was her best sculpture yet, the reflection so multifaceted she didn't know how she had done it.

When he finished running his fingers over it, he turned to her with an unsettling light in his eyes.

"Fela," he said. "Fela with the magic hands, lady of the tools."

He sounded like he was summoning her out of a storybook, although the grass stains all over his white shirt ruined the effect somewhat.

"Would you like to learn," he said, leaning toward her like he was telling her a secret, "the storied art of naming?"

It rang impressively in the air, and even if the faerie stories weren't true, Fela almost expected something to happen—for the wind to howl through the Fishery or the glass jars to rattle around them.

Nothing did, of course. It wasn't a storybook, after all—although she wasn't sure why he was asking her, of all people. She wasn't smart: not like Uresh, who could solve differential equations in a couple of lines, or Kvothe, who had been promoted to E'lir in three days. She was smart enough—she'd gotten into the University, after all, and gotten good marks in her classes—but she worked for it. It was all from long hours in the Archives, going to the masters' offices after class, comparing her work with the other students'.

"I'm not sure," she said. "I've heard naming's dangerous. People . . . go mad."

Like you, she didn't say, looking at his clothes, already freshly stained in the early morning.

Elodin scoffed and waved his hand dismissively.

"People go mad in the Fishery," he said. "Or in the alchemy labs."

"That's different," Fela said. "You can plan for that. Accidents happen and people make mistakes, but there are formulas and rules. You can avoid things going wrong if you're careful."

"Pssh. Don't you want to learn how to call a star down from the sky?" he asked, with a sweeping gesture that would have been more impressive if there wasn't a slit in his sleeve from his wrist to his elbow. "How to turn rocks into dust? The name of the wind?"

"But those are faerie stories," she said.

"Are they?" He raised an eyebrow. "Where do you think the faerie stories come from?"

"I do geometry and make sympathy lamps," Fela said. "I came to the University to learn higher maths, not be a princess in a storybook."

"And Fela with her heart of stone found herself locked in a high tower,"Elodin said, his voice filling the Fishery. The few students who were there this early turned to look curiously. "They had taken her sword and stripped her of her tools: key, coin, and candle. But Fela knew the names of all things, and so all things were hers to command."

Fela tried a different tack, eager to cut him off before the other students started paying more attention.

"Naming seems . . . impractical," she said, struggling for a polite way to say it. "Unpredictable. Sygaldry, alchemy, mathematics—they make sense. They do things: they make light, they cure illnesses. Why do I need the name of the wind?"

"Why do we need the moon in the sky?" Elodin asked.

His laugh made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. That disconcertingly loose smile was back; then he grabbed the raindrop sculpture and carried it toward the door, pushing past a student who stared at him in sleepy surprise.

Fela wasn't sure if she had agreed to learn naming or not—but she was becoming more and more convinced that, rumors of magic powers aside, Master Namer was quite mad.