Chapter Text
Caleb keeps a particular morning routine. It’s essential that he leave for work early in order to be on the subway before the general crush of commuters with its many indignities, so he wakes to a quiet apartment and showers, dresses, and feeds Frumpkin before slipping out the door. With his seat on the train secured and headphones on, he dozes to the backdrop of an audiobook enthusiastically informing him about the evolutionary history of cephalopods or the mysterious interconnectedness of fungi. He automatically surfaces just before they pull in to his stop.
It’s a short walk from the station to Dwendalian publishing house’s office—glints of weak autumn sunlight between buildings, boots and heels splashing through puddles of last night’s rain, a flock of pigeons drawing a curtain across his path—and then it’s quiet in the lobby, just him and the receptionist whose name he doesn’t know. They always exchange nods, though. Nine floors up and down the hallway to the kitchen, where he brews a cup of tea to bring to his desk.
Typically, he’d have an hour before anyone else showed up in the cubicles around his, an hour to get his best thinking done. But this morning, Elodin is leaning against his desk, rearranging his shelf of mismatched ceramic cat knickknacks according to a painstaking yet indecipherable system. (The decorations have gotten a bit out of hand—he started with just one, but once someone sees the collection, they inevitably gift him yet another.) Caleb couldn’t say he’s surprised to see Elodin, considering how the publisher of the Waystone Press imprint appears and disappears for reasons that mere editors have never been able to discern.
“Hello,” Elodin says once he has the last cat in place. The shelf does somehow look subtly more right, although Caleb wouldn’t be able to explain why. “I have a book for you. Three books, really, which is an excellent number.”
“Good morning,” Caleb replies. He takes a sip of his tea, even though it’s still slightly too hot, to give himself a moment to calibrate how enthusiastic his response should be. He’s been at Waystone for less than a year, and it’s his first full-time editorial role, so he’s in no position to turn a project down. But he’s found that the titles Elodin sends his way are . . . complicated. Chaotic. Verging on catastrophic sometimes, if he doesn’t put in sufficient overtime.
“Tell me more,” he settles on, and he follows Elodin to his desk.
By the time he first walked through this door, Caleb had seen enough college professors’ offices to be completely unfazed by any level of clutter and eccentricity he might encounter. Elodin’s space still holds a particular fascination for him, though. He’s sure that if you surveyed the geological strata of tomes piled on every flat surface, including the floor, you’d be able to reconstruct Waystone’s whole history from layers of literary bestsellers, pulpy paperbacks, and hardcover fantasy bricks. The only books that ever seem to shift position are the rotating cast of titles in the genre that his coworker Beau calls “woo-woo nonsense,” piled around Elodin’s computer. He’s been known to open one up and quiz visiting agents to discover the color of their auras, but Caleb hasn’t yet witnessed the phenomenon himself.
They settle into the two book-free chairs, and Elodin turns to pull up an email on his screen. “This is an interesting one,” he says. “We have a vagabond author—broke his contract with his agent, left his comfortable home with RSC, and now his new agent is scratching at our door, wondering if we’ll let him in.”
Yes, of course, chaotic. “Was there any explanation of what occurred with the contract?” Caleb asks.
Elodin waves a hand. “Typical agent fluffery—‘creative differences,’ it says here. I’m sure he’ll be a pain in our ass. But if we can get beyond that, we could come away with the next big epic fantasy series before anyone else knows what they’re missing out on.”
Caleb nods. Complicated, too—he thinks of all the files saved on his computer, stuffed full of conlang glossaries and maps of places that thankfully look increasingly less like identical copies of England nowadays. It’s the sort of complexity that draws him in despite himself.
He’s about to ask about the premise when Elodin continues, “I’ve never heard of the fellow who sent this to me before. The agency seems quite new—it’s Kvothe at Eolian Associates. Have you gotten anything from him yet?”
Caleb rarely has reason to regret his excellent power of recall, but he does now, as images of the past unfold in his mind in four-color glossy print. A few years ago, Kvothe had been an assistant at a different agency. They’d been moving in the same orbit, two up-and-coming publishing professionals who were dedicated (or desperate) enough to attend all the networking events. The last time they’d seen each other had involved a Christmas party, and champagne, and Kvothe’s lips on his in a coat closet.
As if the list of cliches wasn’t long enough, they’d become involved just after Caleb broke up with Astrid and Eadwulf. At the time, it had felt imperative to reaffirm that the ledger of attractive people in the world didn’t begin and end with his best friends slash roommates. His memories of Kvothe are nothing but fond, but remembering the person he’d been makes him glad that Elodin is still half turned away to look at the monitor, not seeming to notice his expression.
“I have not received any submissions from him, no. But we’ve met. He is very intelligent and very persuasive.”
“Hmm,” Elodin says. He stares at Caleb intently enough that he very well could be figuring out what color Caleb’s aura is. Before Caleb can execute a hasty subject change, he continues, “Have a look at the sample chapters, all right? If you like them, you can be the one to take the meeting—if the two of you already get along, then I won’t interfere.”
“Yes,” Caleb replies. The relief at having made it away from the topic of Kvothe mostly unscathed makes him bold enough to continue, “But if it comes time to offer, do you think Molly might be interested in this one? With the Tombtakers series finishing up, they’ve been complaining that they’re bored. And I was wondering if you’ve had time to think, yet, about my question.”
Elodin spins his chair in an arc away from Caleb and lets it slowly drift back to face him. When it stops, he says, “Caleb. These books are your destiny.” He pauses, then chuckles. “Well, maybe not, depending on how the bidding goes. Nevertheless, I’ve thought about whether we can get you working on nonfiction, and for now, the answer is no. Focus on getting good at one thing. Slow down—you have more time than you think. And you can ask me again later, but your best bet is not on a Tuesday, unless it’s the third week of the month.”
Disappointment scratches in Caleb’s throat. He still manages to say, “Not on a Tuesday, noted,” with an affected gravity that matches Elodin’s before he walks back to his cubicle.
People are starting to arrive in the office, now, but his hunched shoulders probably dissuade anyone from accosting him before he sits down at his computer. The submission is waiting in his inbox, and he scrolls down to the signature, which he stares at for a bit.
He hasn’t thought about Kvothe in a long while. After the party, they’d stopped running into each other at events. Some late-night rifling through Kvothe’s Instagram revealed that he seemed to be off traveling: mountains draped in fog and forests of trees like none Caleb’s ever seen before, all artistically filtered.
Caleb logs into Publishers Marketplace and types in Kvothe’s name. Book deals populate the search results, some of which he remembers hearing about back then, but when he looks up the titles, none seem to have published yet. The Lightning Tree theoretically comes out next month, but it has only the bare bones of its metadata filled in. Draccus is supposedly releasing in three years. All of these books are listed under The Arcanum Agency, a name that’s also familiar from joint complaining sessions about internships—except one, The Doors of Stone, which is connected to Eolian.
A bit more judicious Google stalking confirms that yes, Kvothe is back in New York and appears to have started his own agency. Well, good for him. Despite his inexperience—he’d been the youngest of the loose circle of interns, with Caleb as the oldest, restarting his life once again—Kvothe had never seemed to Caleb like the type who enjoyed working under someone else. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t skilled at finding the most important person in the room and ending up next to them, laughing at their jokes like he’d been there the whole time.
Next up is their potential nightmare author. Rand al’Thor’s first book, he discovers, was scooped up off the internet, which wouldn’t be surprising except that its first home was a website with what he’d generously describe as early-2000s charm. The chapters have all been taken down, but he can still sift through sporadic blog posts informing readers about the progress of the next update. The comments sections are mostly full of the usual fan enthusing and complaining, but further back in the site’s history, Rand has actually replied to some (including a few that read like they could come from trolls, but the responses are good-natured—people he knows, it seems).
lord_of_chaos
Please update soon! I can’t deal with waiting to find out if anyone ever recognizes Isam after the bodyswap. You’ve got me obsessed with these characters!
dragonman
Glad to hear you like it :-) I won’t keep you waiting long, hopefully. My last final is this week, and then it’s writing time.
wisdomheals95
Posting this but not texting me back? For shame.
dragonman
Sorry! I was going to respond once I got off work. If blog comments are the cool new way to communicate: Yes, I’d love to come for dinner tomorrow.
Caleb ends up on Rand’s Facebook next, getting caught up in curiosity about the author as much as about the books. Disappointingly, it hasn’t been updated in almost five years. The posts seem to be from high school—photos full of smiling teenagers, with a tall redhead usually towering above the rest of the faces.
There are shots of bonfires, kids sitting around in a truck bed with some curly-haired jokester making absurd faces right next to the camera, reposts of articles from a local newspaper reporting the scores of Two Rivers Royals football games. Caleb quickly becomes bored. It’s a silly thing to dwell on over a decade later, but he’d observed lives like these as an outsider, never completely sure whether he truly had no interest in them or was merely avoiding wondering about something that couldn’t be his. Rand’s online presence is ordinary enough, and that’s perfectly fine.
Regardless of what Caleb thinks of the person who wrote them, the sample chapters are waiting in his inbox. He opens the document and begins to read.
Three days later, Caleb walks into the coffee shop where he, Kvothe, and Rand have arranged to meet. He’s slightly early so he can try to snag one of his preferred tables by the window. The proprietors of The Invulnerable Vagrant—it seems to be a family-run business, but he hasn’t been able to discern exactly how the various near-identical fellows behind the counter are related—know he tips well, so they don’t try to hurry him along when he lingers for a while with a potential author. He secures a cinnamon roll and a cup of tea, slides into a seat with a view of the door before it can be taken by a man juggling two laptops and a phone, and arranges his notebook and pen along with a printed copy of The Breaking of the World in front of him.
He’d spent far too much of the time he’d allocated to prepare for this meeting on writing and rewriting and re-rewriting his email to Kvothe expressing interest in the project. The first draft was too long and too formal, full of business-speak congratulating Kvothe on starting his own agency and expressing hopes that he’d keep Caleb in mind for “any titles that might fit my list.” Dreck.
Then that night, sprawled on the couch with Frumpkin snugged around his neck while Astrid watched one of her reality shows about celebrities being horrible to each other, he’d gotten halfway through just typing out a text to Kvothe. All of their old conversations were still there, specimens preserved behind his phone screen. But after scrolling through one too many messages combining discussions about Joyce or Melville with thinly veiled flirting—god, they’d been pretentious, and Kvothe had certainly used a lot of meaningful emojis—he went back to reading the sample chapters.
The next morning, he produced a few plainspoken lines and hit send fast enough to outrun his second thoughts. Good to hear from you again, this project looks like something special, can we set up a time to talk? Kvothe’s reply had been equally unilluminating.
The first person Caleb sees, though, is not Kvothe but rather the man from the Facebook photos he’d been snooping through. Rand looks even taller in real life, his long legs easily crossing the distance between the door and Caleb’s table. It’s clear that he’s older, but Caleb couldn’t point to a particular feature that’s been marked by time—it’s a sort of overall filling in of detail, who he is now shaded on top of the high schooler on the screen. The main difference is that Caleb’s nearly sure he had two hands in the pictures, but his left wrist ends just before where the cuff of his henley falls.
He pulls out a chair halfway but hesitates before sitting down, asking, “You’re Caleb, right?”
Caleb stands as well to shake his hand. “Yes. You must be Rand al’Thor. Pleased to meet you.” He has a strong grip, a callused palm.
As they both sit, Rand says, “Kvothe told me his train’s running a little slow, but he should be here soon.” And that’s interesting—Caleb counts himself on the warier side when it comes to giving his personal number out to authors, but he supposes he shouldn’t be surprised if Kvothe is freer with his. Caleb still responds to emails at all hours of the day and night, anyway.
“Ah, that is fine,” he replies. “I won’t attempt to steal you away to Waystone before he joins us. How was your own trip in—you’re coming from Brooklyn, I believe?”
One of the first things Caleb learned as an editor was how to collect useful small-talk scripts. In the misty far-off past of his days in academia, no one minded very much whether he was pleasant to chat with. Authors and agents require gentle coaxing in the form of questions about their pets and children, though. And one of the first things he learned upon moving to the city a decade ago was that everyone here always has something to say about transit. So instead of questioning Rand about the book, Caleb learns that he lives in Williamsburg. He has a roommate who also works in publishing, and he still hasn’t gotten tired of looking out the window of the subway car at Manhattan drawing closer along the bridge.
“No, I’ve never stopped finding it beautiful myself,” Caleb tells him. “I think it comes from growing up somewhere very different.”
“Where’d you move here from?” Even as he’s asking mundane questions, Rand’s full attention is almost a weight on Caleb’s shoulders. He looks closely at Caleb the whole time he talks, sitting straight and still. Curiosity—Caleb likes it in an author.
“One of the less interesting parts of Pennsylvania,” Caleb says. He sketches in a few words on his way to move onto something else: “Cows, fields, et cetera.”
At that moment, Kvothe appears to the side of the table, emerging from a muddle of people waiting for their drinks. Caleb would be more disconcerted that he didn’t notice when Kvothe came through the door, but his memories of the fellow involve his popping up in unexpected places fairly often.
“This is exactly what I hoped for,” Kvothe says with a grin. “My two farm boys, talking about whatever happens on farms.”
Caleb chooses not to be irritated by this in favor of looking Kvothe over. Uncharacteristically for him, his Instagram adventuring chronicles had involved not a single selfie, or even a picture with him in it. He’s grown out his hair until it’s nearly as long as Caleb’s, but his hangs loose around his shoulders. He seems thinner, which is an impressive feat for someone who Caleb used to imagine could disappear into a shadow by turning sideways, and the hollows under his eyes are deeper but his gaze is brighter. When he steps closer to the table to avoid some students passing by, Caleb catches the scent of the same cologne Kvothe used to wear. He is most certainly doomed.
By the time everyone has greeted each other properly and Kvothe and Rand have gotten their drinks, Caleb is back to focusing on the book instead of his unknown but almost certainly ignoble fate. It isn’t difficult, really—it’s been a while since he’s found himself losing track of time while reading a submission rather than counting how many pages he has left to slog through.
Rand’s debut, Lord of the Morning, was about the discovery of a new system of magic in a world full of competing sources of power. Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but most reviews had raved about the realism of the characters and the attention to detail in the setting, all of which Caleb agrees with. The new series is part of the same universe, but it covers the impending death, not birth, of a culture of magic and the efforts of its practitioners to work together with a society very unlike their own to potentially avert the crisis. The meeting of different ways of life, and the lone protagonist chosen as a go-between, almost remind Caleb more of the sci-fi paperbacks he reread as a child until the covers fell off than the fantasy he’s used to reading lately. And it’s clear that Rand has grown as a writer after devoting himself to the task full time.
Caleb starts there: “What you have is a very, very good book.” Rand’s gaze slides sideways—Caleb hasn’t met many authors in his area who are good at taking a compliment.
“Tell me a bit about where your ideas for this came from,” he continues. “What got you interested in writing fantasy?” He’s following a path he’s observed Elodin treading in many other meetings like this one. The point is less to learn about the book itself—which is a shame, because Caleb dearly wants to know what happens next—and more to discern what sort of person he’d be tying himself to if he took on the project.
“Well, originally, probably getting really bored as a kid,” Rand says, still half looking down at the table but smiling a bit, now. “We lived a ways from town, so there was bad internet and not a lot to do. Besides reading every Jain Farstrider book the library had and wandering around in the woods coming up with stories. My dad had a lot of his own stories from when he was deployed, and there was a point when I was pretty invested in trying to figure out exactly which parts were true—he liked to exaggerate. Then I got into speculative fiction and figured out that exaggerating can sometimes be the only way to say what you mean and do it right.”
Caleb nods. The mention of a military background makes sense—his writing is full of combat, but thankfully there’s a deliberateness to the scenes that goes beyond a fixation on explosions and swordplay. He asks, “And how long have you been working on this particular universe?”
“The very start was a terrible draft I mostly did to entertain some friends in high school. Nothing serious. Then I got hurt and ended up getting my diploma by taking online classes at the local community college. And with all that, I had a lot of free time.” Rand gestures at his left wrist as he says this, and it’s almost self-conscious, but no, there’s a deliberateness here, too. A story of its own, or one in the process of being built. “So I wrote. Egwene—that’s my roommate—started bothering me about posting Lord of the Morning online, and she’s still never let me forget how much I hated the idea at first.”
A dozen possible questions spark in Caleb’s head as he listens, but for now, he respects the mask of narrative. “Well, I am glad you came around,” he says. “When I say that the ending made me want to throw the book at the wall, please take that as a compliment.”
Rand furrows his eyebrows. “When did you say you emailed him, Kvothe?”
Kvothe, who’s been listening to them talk with one arm slung lazily over the back of his chair, straightens up. “Monday. But he really did read everything in two days. I used to think he was lying about how many pages he got through in a week, but then I realized he’s a wizard.”
“Discipline, obsession, magic, call it whatever you will.” Caleb shrugs and turns to Rand. “I do want to be clear that if I became your editor, your book would receive my close attention. Dwendalian is big, yes, but we handle things in our own fashion at Waystone. We take each individual title quite seriously.”
Before Rand can reply, Kvothe jumps in. “Well, we are looking for a more personal touch, here. From what Rand’s told me, at RSC, they were treating their authors like little typewriter monkeys with nothing else going on in their lives. But the schedule would need to be flexible.”
Caleb internally thanks Kvothe for not making him be the one to ask, “So, why exactly did you burn all of your bridges after what seemed like a perfectly successful debut?” And it makes sense that over at Ruby Sea Chateau, they’d be rushing Rand’s work through an assembly-line process, considering how quickly they’re growing nowadays.
“That would not be an issue,” he replies. “I want a book that is good. Whether it is finished quickly is immaterial to me. Of course, it is not my decision alone—but I would be prepared to make a fuss to get you the time you needed.”
“I appreciate it,” Rand says.
Caleb isn’t finished with the subject, though. “Was the break with your previous agent related to timing as well?”
“A bit.” Rand fiddles with a napkin, crumpling it in his hand. “If I say I’m going to meet a deadline, I keep my word. Getting constantly asked for updates every day didn’t help anything—it made my work worse.”
“Cadsuane Melaidhrin over at Tower writes some crazy emails,” Kvothe puts in. His voice changes to become comically haughty: “‘This is the most important task of your life thus far. You would be a fool not to take it seriously.’ I can’t say I’m not dramatic, but at the end of the day, it’s just a book.”
Caleb shakes his head slightly, thinking of how many times friends have said the same thing to him: It’s just a book. Even if he isn’t always sure he agrees, that’s between him and his own long hours in the office. “Understood. And it’s good that you’ve found Kvothe—I can say with confidence that he treats his authors well.”
They talk for a bit longer, going over how much of the manuscript Rand already has and when he could reasonably deliver the whole thing, but Caleb has already made his decision. Elodin had told him once that he typically knew within the first five minutes of conversation whether he wanted to offer on a title. Caleb hasn’t always been able to catch hold of the same sureness, but he feels it here, now. Some portion of his future will bend around this point.
He’d like to keep speaking with Rand and Kvothe all the same, but the thought of the emails no doubt piling up in his inbox draws him away. As they all collect their things, Caleb says, “Kvothe, thank you for making this happen. And Rand, I am very glad to have met you. I hope I will have good news for you soon.”
Rand nods, reaching out to clasp his hand again. “Thanks for your time. It’s good to find another farm boy in the big city.” He looks over at Kvothe, whose laugh is both charming and annoying.
Outside the coffee shop, Rand splits off to walk to his subway stop. Caleb goes along with Kvothe, who’s heading in a different direction. When they’re a block away, Caleb frowns at him and says, “You did not have to make that into a thing. I do not want it to be a thing.” He means to sound teasing, but it comes out more grumpy.
Kvothe spreads his palms in front of him in a placating gesture. “I’m just making connections, here. If you want something to be a secret, I may not be the person to tell.” He’d seemed much older, at the coffee shop, but now the playfulness that Caleb recalls is coming through again.
“Just what I want to hear from my agent,” Caleb sighs, also beginning to remember why the two of them had used to argue nearly as much as they had flirted.
Ahead of them on the sidewalk, there’s a busker playing the violin, and as they get closer, Kvothe touches Caleb’s shoulder and stops to listen. This is familiar, too—Kvothe digging around in his wallet for cash to toss into the violinist’s open case, then standing for a moment with his fingers lightly tapping out the beat against his thigh, the notes moving through him. Caleb had asked about the habit, when he first noticed Kvothe’s pattern of stopping for every performer he ran into on the street. Kvothe had answered that this had been him once, that he didn’t want to forget. Caleb watches him as he watches the song end with a flourish of the violinist’s bow.
“Are you still making music?” Caleb asks once they’re on their way again. “Veth and Yasha and the rest are always talking about going back to the open mic night at Denna’s. Half for the cheap drinks, I think.”
Kvothe shakes his head, turning his face away to brush back his hair. “No. I haven’t written a new song since . . . It’s been at least a year. All my time is taken up with agenting nowadays, anyway.” His tone is light, but he’s looking somewhere down the street as he speaks, like he’s still caught up in the song from before.
“Why did you leave? Why come back?” For all that Caleb enjoyed sketching out the edges of Rand’s story, it’s nice to simply be able to ask what’s at the forefront of his mind. Because truly, it feels like Kvothe never left and they’re picking up the same thread that had run through their lives before.
Nevertheless, they’ve reached Kvothe’s subway stop. As they pause in front of the stairs, Kvothe rocks back and forth on his heels like he’s considering running from the questions. “I forgot that talking to you is always like getting interviewed, even outside meeting with authors,” he laughs. “Because I’m young and stupid? I called it figuring things out, and Bast called it chasing the wind—he’s got too much poet in him for his own good. If you want to know the whole thing, we should get dinner sometime.”
Well, that answers the other question that Caleb didn’t ask. Maybe. “I would like that,” he replies, each word carefully measured out. “I hope we’ll have much more to discuss soon, besides: Once I speak with my boss, just as a formality, you can expect an offer.”
“Great! I knew you’d like this one.” Kvothe doesn’t sound particularly surprised, but with the reminder of the project, it’s suddenly as if neither of them knows how to end the interaction. Kvothe leans forward a bit like he might shake Caleb’s hand, then turns and waves instead, calling back “Talk soon” as he joins the stream of people headed down the subway steps.
The week after that, Caleb is getting ready to go out to brunch to celebrate closing the deal. It’s a victory, but a strange one—there was no auction for The Breaking of the World, never mind that Rand’s first book made it to the science fiction and fantasy bestseller list. Elodin authorized Caleb to make a generous offer, Kvothe barely fiddled with the terms, and the contract was signed.
Caleb had never been able to figure out Kvothe’s relationship with money. He didn’t seem to have much of it, considering the carefully stitched mending on some of his shirts and jackets. But he was also almost obsessive about paying his own way for drinks and dinners, no matter how the rest of the editorial assistants and other lower publishing lifeforms jumped at the chance for a free meal. And whatever his game is here, Rand is seemingly happy to play along, even though he’s also both foolish and brave enough to be making a living off his writing alone.
Still, it is the biggest deal of Caleb’s career so far. He hasn’t explained the whole thing to Astrid and Eadwulf yet—they’ve both been having long days on shoots and collapsing into bed as soon as they get home. When he’d mentioned the figure on their group chat, though, Eadwulf had immediately insisted that they’d be taking him out for a congratulatory meal.
Half-dressed, Caleb gropes around under his bed for the box with his coats stored inside. He’s been putting off taking them out for the season, considering there’s no space to hang them anywhere in his little room, but the heating’s come on and autumn has started its decline toward winter. Frumpkin pokes his head into the container as Caleb takes out a peacoat and a down jacket. He replaces them with a random selection of books from the stacks piled up near his dresser.
When they’d moved into this place, they’d been broke creatives confident that if they hadn’t driven each other crazy staying over in Astrid’s single dorm all the time during undergrad, they could make do with one bedroom and a study. Now, the study is Caleb’s room because he certainly isn’t getting rent this cheap anywhere else—at least, that’s his joking justification if he’s asked why he’s nearly thirty and still living crammed into a tiny apartment with his exes.
Through his open door, he can hear Astrid knocking on the other doorframe, saying, “Wulf, they’re going to be here in fifteen minutes. At least be vertical.”
“No, they are not,” Caleb says, standing and wandering out into the living room in his boxers and undershirt. Veth and Yeza are coming to brunch, but they’re bringing Luc, and nothing ever happens quickly with a toddler involved. “Fifteen minutes late counts as early in the Brenatto household. Help me with my shot before we go?”
Even though she’s hassling Eadwulf, Astrid’s hair looks like she got halfway through styling it before getting distracted. Still, she nods. “Yeah, get your stuff. I’ll be there in a second.”
In the bathroom, Caleb gathers up the supplies for his testosterone injection and lays it all out on the side of the too-shallow bathtub but doesn’t unpackage anything. He’s felt all kinds of ways about this process over the past decade, but nowadays, he’s mostly settled into the idea that if people who love him are willing and available, it’s best that someone else handles the sharp objects.
Hair looking a bit tamer, Astrid carries in a stool from the kitchen and settles herself in front of where Caleb is sitting on the closed toilet seat. As she gets everything ready, he stares at a cracked floor tile, wondering when was the last time any of them swept. Sorts through his brain for a conversational topic—talking helps.
“Do you remember Kvothe?” he asks.
“Fuckboy,” she says near instantly, making him laugh so hard so abruptly that he starts coughing.
“I think that slang is far out of date,” he replies when he recovers. “And no, he is the agent for this new book.”
“He can be both.”
“Fair. But he does seem different nowadays—more focused, I think, and perhaps more mature.”
Astrid hands him an alcohol wipe to rub across his thigh. “All business, then? But no, I don’t think you’d have brought it up if that was true.”
Caleb doesn’t have to think about it, not with how much thinking he’s been doing over the past few days. Still, he hesitates. “No . . . Well, I don’t know. It does not matter, anyway, because we will be working on this project for years, if all goes well.”
Astrid chuckles, then asks, “Ready?”
“Yes. Why are you laughing at me?”
As the needle pinches his skin, Astrid says, “Let’s review some history. Freshman year of college, you thought you were in love with Fjord because the two of you were on the debate club board together. The year after that, we had that semester-long group assignment and you jumped my bones a month in. And there was the guy from grad school—what’s Essek up to nowadays?”
“Hmm, some sort of postdoc thing. I am not sure. Your conclusion is?”
“All set.” Astrid pats his knee slightly harder than necessary and sweeps some wrappers into the trash can, but she doesn’t move from her seat. “And you’re smarter than that. If you’re working on a project with him, you’re going to fall for him.”
Something in him has surely been aware of this pattern in his life, but he’s never had it articulated quite so clearly. He taps his fingers against his opposite wrist as he thinks. “Well,” he says finally. “That may be true, but I am serious about this job and serious about this book. I will do this properly.”
Astrid leans back, crossing her arms, and nods. “Damn right you will. What has you worked up about this one—are they finally letting you into nonfiction?”
“No,” Caleb sighs. She and Wulf have listened to him vent about this topic for far too long already, but he can’t stop himself from continuing, “I finally asked Elodin explicitly if I could try a new area, but he refused me. So many editors would give anything to work in speculative fiction! And yet I am the one stuck circling back to the books of my childhood instead of learning something different.”
Standing up, Astrid offers him a hand and pulls him out into the living room, where Eadwulf is sitting on the couch, head propped up by his fist but eyes half shut. “We need to change the agenda,” she tells him. “We aren’t day drinking because Caleb closed a six-figure deal in his first year of a totally new job. We’re day drinking because he isn’t measuring up to the exact checklist for success he came up with in his head.”
“Hypocrite,” Caleb mutters affectionately, taking his hand back. As he walks back to his room to finish getting dressed, he adds, “We’re not day drinking at all. We are old, and now all we are useful for is setting a good example for Luc.”
Wulf flashes him a thumbs down as he passes, but Astrid pursues him to the threshold. “You’re excited about this book. I can tell. And I bet you can do something different here, even if it isn’t exactly what you want.”
Caleb checks his reflection in the mirror mounted on the wall, smoothing down his collar. Among the photos taped up next to it, there’s one that looks like its own reflection of the image—a younger Caleb with Astrid at his shoulder. He lets his gaze go unfocused for a second, blending the two.
“Perhaps we can.” He turns and tells her, “Thank you.” Then there’s a loud knock on their front door, heralding all the chaos of the present.
Caleb’s life slides into a different kind of chaos as the season’s launch meeting approaches. He wishes he could say he forgets how terrible launch is until it’s happening—but no, he remembers in perfect detail throughout the entire cycle of a season. It’s as if the meeting invite on his office calendar is Frumpkin and he’s a doomed apartment spider being leisurely stalked from room to room.
Beau, another editorial refugee from academia, likes to tease him about it. “You don’t wanna stand up for fifteen minutes and talk while a bunch of sales reps pretend they aren’t texting the whole time? That’s, like, the exact same thing you used to do. Except even easier.”
Caleb pauses and stares off at his cubicle wall—for all her starts-the-day-with-a-can-of-Monster exuberance, Beau never tries to interrupt him when he’s thinking. Then, he says, “No, it is not. Here, I am selling something. In the lecture hall, if some of them were not particularly excited about the Brothers Grimm, well, that was their loss. But if I do not make these books sound marketable”—he scowls—“then these authors’ words will not find the appreciation they deserve.”
When he says it, he finds himself imagining one author in particular: Rand. Chapter by chapter, the back half of his manuscript has been coming in. Caleb has been chewing on bits of it during any quiet moment he can steal—on his commute, while eating breakfast, in bed at night—even though he knows more than enough about the project for sales and publicity’s needs at this point. It’s somewhat alarming, the volume of words showing up in his inbox, but he’ll find time to worry about that later, when he isn’t fighting four different slide decks and losing.
Beau shrugs. “I just don’t think it’s that high pressure. College students, those are the real trouble.”
“Hmm, yes, I think it could be quite troublesome if you threatened to hit one with a stick during a seminar.” Caleb swivels his chair back around and reopens his Word doc because he can follow this well-worn line of teasing with just five percent of his brain engaged.
“Bo staff, not stick,” Beau replies, right on cue. He’d worked on Beau’s girlfriend when the editors went out for drinks one evening, and eventually, Jester had confirmed that despite the rumors, this incident was not in fact why Beau had dropped out of her philosophy PhD. Beau walks around to her own cubicle, muttering, “Bet they’d let me hit an author with a stick one time.”
So Caleb prepares his presentations. He does not practice any of them, because he has long since learned that whether or not he does, it doesn’t matter. He always comes to at the end of the Q&A with people clapping politely and nodding, and later, name tags he recognizes from emails compliment him on how well-spoken he was as he chokes down small concoctions of meats and cheeses.
As he works on the slides for Breaking, he thinks again about that meeting with Rand. Typically, when Kvothe is in a room, your attention is drawn toward him as if he’s a magician and you’re the audience, watching rapt in case you might see behind the next bit of sleight-of-hand. (Caleb is reasonably confident that this assessment is not purely lust driven, since several others at the imprint have remarked on his presence, including Beau.) But with Rand at the table, too, there was a more subtle pull—the warmth of a bonfire on a chilly evening, making you lean in to warm your hands. The point is, anyone who can capture your focus like that in the presence of Kvothe would be a good person to have in front of the reps, especially considering they wouldn’t need to pay any travel expenses.
Caleb calls Kvothe up. It’s nearly lunchtime, but because he keeps the hours of the nocturnal students he’s always hanging around with, Kvothe’s voice still sounds sleepy when he says, “Just the man I was hoping to hear from. I’m guessing you love the sample chapters and Elodin said you can offer immediately?”
Rubbing his temple with his knuckles, Caleb grins despite himself. “You must stop sending me that nonsense. If not for my sake, then for the interns’. They could very possibly perish from purple prose exposure.”
In the early-season madness, getting dinner with Kvothe has fallen off Caleb’s list of priorities, along with other key items such as sleeping more than six hours at a time. Still, ever since they reconnected a few weeks ago, Kvothe has been emailing him submissions that are not scraped from the bottom of the barrel but rather excavated from the depths of romance novelists’ most uninspired fantasies. Caleb’s protestations that the presence of fairies or vampires was necessary but not at all sufficient for something to fit his wish list did not prevent The Hushed Hart from landing in his inbox yesterday. It’s hard for him to imagine why Eolian would be representing this sort of absurdity. But apparently, it sells, and Kvothe likely needs all the deals he can get as he’s starting things up.
“It’s good for them. How else will they develop the sense of humor they’ll need to survive?”
“No. More. Please,” Caleb says, clicking his pen to punctuate each word even though it won’t be audible over the phone line. He knows Kvothe won’t stop, and he knows that he’ll continue getting a small, pleasant kick out of seeing his name on the screen.
“Agree to disagree,” Kvothe replies breezily. “If you aren’t going to give me quite a lot of money today, then what can I do for you?”
Caleb explains that he’d like Rand to give a short speech at the launch meeting, talking about his publication history and the fan engagement his previous book has gotten. Rand is still figuring out social media, so it’s important to emphasize the attention paid to his website when he was still posting there. (Apparently, Rand’s tweets that don’t sound like they’re written by an old man sitting on a mountain somewhere are edited by Egwene the roommate. Caleb dearly wishes she worked for them by day rather than for Heronmark.)
When he finishes, Kvothe is quiet, which immediately prepares Caleb to toss the idea away—Kvothe is never quiet. The first thing he says, though, is, “I think that’s brilliant. He won you over”—Caleb is disappointed at his own transparency—“so I’m sure he’ll impress everyone at Dwendalian.”
“But?”
“Well, he’s not the type who gets out a lot.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with authors.”
Kvothe laughs, a wonderfully musical sound. “I’m trying to be tactful and subtle, here. Getting coffee with us was a big thing for him—he’s still trying to find his balance in the city, it seems like. So I’ll ask, but just don’t count on it.”
“Thank you,” Caleb replies. “Please tell him that it would be excellent to have him there, but if he prefers not to attend, it is no trouble.”
A few days later, though, there’s another email from Kvothe in his inbox, and the subject does not contain “Circling the Moon” or “Waves Upon Lilies.” The body of the message informs him that Rand is prepared to present, and it includes his cell number so they can connect before the event.
On launch day, Caleb goes down to meet Rand in the lobby. He lurks by the front desk, watching all the people who aren’t doomed to give a presentation in thirty minutes going about their carefree afternoons. When his author comes through the revolving door, he gives the most cheerful wave he can muster under the circumstances.
Rand nods as he walks over, expression equally serious. The emails he’s written Caleb have all been rather formal sounding, different from the man who’d joked with him at their first meeting. It’s with that same tone that he says, “Good to see you again.” A long wool coat over a deep red button-down and black slacks complete the overall business-professional impression—he looks like he’s headed to one of the more old-fashioned, prestigious imprints rather than coming to represent Waystone.
“Likewise,” Caleb says, leading him to the elevators. “Thank you again for agreeing to do this—it’s a great help.”
“No problem,” Rand replies as Caleb pushes the button for the top floor. He stands with his shoulders back and legs wide apart, filling the space in a way Caleb’s never been capable of. Apprehension starts to crackle in Caleb’s chest—will he be this intense for the presentation? Why did Kvothe think this would work out?
He tries to leave his worries behind him as they walk into the big conference room, because it’s too late to do anything now except hope that the plan works out. Truly, that may be the refrain of his editorial career thus far. Rand follows at his shoulder as he weaves through clusters of sales reps and imprint staff, looking for someone in particular.
He’s easy to locate—maybe the only other person at this event whose height sticks out as much as Rand’s, not to mention the pink hair. “Caduceus is handling your marketing and publicity,” Caleb says to Rand as they join up with the edge of a circle of publicists. “I need to get ready to present in a few minutes, but he will take care of you in the meantime.”
Cad is also the most relaxed, and most relaxing, person Caleb has ever worked with. Even his slow nod and calm “Hello, there” make Caleb’s heart rate slow a bit. If there’s anyone who can make Rand less tightly wound before he stands up to speak, it’ll be him.
“Best of luck,” Rand says to Caleb as he turns to leave, which makes Caleb feel worse—is his lack of confidence apparent enough for even the newcomer in the space to notice it?
When he sits down next to Beau at the front of the room, she fistbumps him under the table, their silly ritual before meetings providing comforting familiarity. As the audience members start wandering to their seats, she leans over to ask, “Are you sure you’ve got a fantasy author over there?”
Caleb raises an eyebrow. “Why?”
“They’re just usually major nerds.” Beau shrugs. “That one looks like he can kick some ass. I could probably take him, though.”
Caleb is distracted from the prospect of Beau visiting violence upon his authors by watching Rand cross the room behind Caduceus. There is a sort of controlled strength to his movements that was harder to notice from close up at the coffee shop.
Beau pokes him in the side. “Hello? Caleb? You’ve got a weird look on your face.”
He scratches at his arm half-consciously, trying to find his focus again. “I am fine,” he says in answer to the question behind Beau’s pestering.
Then Elodin is standing to introduce the fall list with his usual smattering of non sequiturs, and Caleb is absorbed in waiting for his turn while he watches the other lead titles get pitched. By the time he’s up, he’s ready to go through his slides without any missteps, the words flowing through him easily.
Rand, though—Rand is amazing. What felt like overwhelming intensity when it was just him and Caleb in an elevator transmutes into a subtle energy that makes the enormous room feel smaller as he walks up beside the projected slide with his author photo and the cover of his debut.
When he thanks the reps for the opportunity to say a bit about his books, it’s like he’s speaking to each person alone as a friend. The warmth in his voice spreads as he talks about running into fans on a road trip and learning that he’d reached the bestseller list while on break at his minimum-wage job. Caleb eventually remembers to look at the audience, and there are still a few people in the back failing to be discreet about answering emails, but it’s still the most awake Caleb’s seen a launch meeting crowd.
“I didn’t know I was doing anything ambitious with the first book. It just kept working out, one thing after another,” Rand says. “But this time, I know how lucky I am, and I’ll do everything I can to make this a series you’re proud to sell. With Caleb keeping me on track—I’ll hand you back to him.”
Caleb borrows some of Rand’s conviction as he runs through their proposed specs for the book. It carries him through the next half hour of listening to his coworkers talking through titles he’s already heard everything about and presenting the other three projects that Elodin’s assigned to him. By the time they reach the end, though, the closing applause from the reps scratches at his eardrums, builds a pressure behind his eyes. He tries to stay present, but when his senses turn on him like this, there’s never anything to do except bend beneath the feeling.
Across the hall from the conference room, there’s an open space scattered with spindly decorative tables and ottomans where drinks and snacks have been set out for after the meeting. Caleb wanders there mostly on autopilot. Picks up a bottled water for something to do with his hands before finding a seat in the corner. People flowing between conversations form colored blurs across his vision as he looks out at nothing, trying to appear aloof yet attentive.
The presentations were perfect, better than he could have hoped. Everything is fine. That’s typically when he loses his grip—once he’s already succeeded and the magic deserts him.
One of the blurs is moving closer. He blinks a few times. He doesn’t know the woman’s face, so it must be a sales rep he hasn’t spoken with yet.
Before he can try to shrug Associate Editor Caleb Widogast back on like an ill-fitting coat, someone else takes the seat beside him and the rep diverts course to a table of snacks. Rand. Caleb nods and fishes around in his head until he comes up with the words “Excellent job.”
“Thanks. You too. These things are kind of overwhelming, huh?”
Caleb nods again, but that seems to be all Rand had to say. He knows he should be making conversation and taking Rand around to meet everyone, but he’s stuck in the pocket of calm created by the man sitting between him and the rest of the room. So he stays there like that for a while, gaze fixed on a place where Rand’s slacks have started to wear out at the cuff. Not perfect, then.
When he comes out of his rut, it’s always all at once. Veth’s compared him to her ancient laptop, struggling until it finally boots up, which is supremely unflattering given his knowledge of how she treats her tech. He cracks the cap on his water bottle and takes a sip to clear his throat before he says, “Apologies. I’ve had a difficult week, preparing for this. I am more tired than I had expected.”
Rand shrugs, leaning back until it’s a bit less like he’s trying to shield Caleb from the rest of the room with his unreasonably broad shoulders alone. “You don’t have to be sorry. I wanted a break from the crowd, too—I know what it can be like.”
Does he? Caleb thinks back to the phone call with Kvothe that led to all of this. A fellow in his early twenties, newly moved to New York from the middle of nowhere, keeping to himself most of the time. Writers can be reclusive, of course, but that’s not the sort of person Caleb saw in the digital record of his life back home. Something in him changed, or is changing.
“They take us solitary bookish types and regularly make us all stand in a room and shake hands. It’s utterly inhumane,” Caleb says with a crooked smile.
Rand chuckles quietly, and a thought occurs to Caleb, something braver than he’d ordinarily venture—but he’s been turned all sideways, now. And when he’d first found himself in the city, trying to get beyond the past and simply be here, he’d owed a great debt to the people who had reached out. “If you are up for a much more pleasant form of this madness, though, Waystone editorial always goes out for drinks to celebrate getting through launch. We’d be happy to have you if you would like to come along.”
As soon as Rand turns to look at him, Caleb is sure he’s going to politely decline, but what actually comes out of Rand’s mouth is “That sounds fun.” Then his eyes narrow a bit like he’s surprised he said it, too. “I wouldn’t be barging in where I don’t belong, though? I know you all probably want a break from talking to authors.”
“No, authors are welcome.” Caleb doesn’t add that typically, the ones who get invited have been with Waystone for many years—there’s no reason to intimidate him.
Now that he feels more equal to it, Caleb does have to talk to everyone he’s been ignoring in favor of hiding in the corner. He promises to come get Rand when the editors are ready to leave and begins walking around the room. The time passes quickly, at least—soon, people are heading for the elevators, and Molly appears at his elbow, saying, “Come along, it’s drinks o’clock.”
“I will be there in a moment,” Caleb replies.
Molly follows his gaze to where Rand is talking with Caduceus again, looking at something on the publicist’s phone—probably a picture of a weird mushroom he found in Inwood Hill Park. “You’re bringing that one? He’d better be interesting. At least his book’s gay, but whose isn’t, these days?”
The summary promised a romance, but so far, the protagonist is just occasionally pining after another man from back home while the main plot occurs hundreds of miles away. Caleb had included the typical bit about the importance of queer fantasy in his presentation, though.
By the time he returns with Rand, Molly has found Beau and Lan, a senior editor who mostly handles poetry and doesn’t talk terribly much. They’re soon joined by Devi, who does thrillers, Verin, who’s edited pretty much everything in the decades she’s been with Waystone, and Olver, an intern who’s supposedly in his last year of college, although Caleb struggles to believe it given his youthful looks. All of them set off for their usual bar a few blocks away, which boasts the selling point of being nondescript and mediocre enough that it usually isn’t crawling with tourists like most other places in the area.
They squeeze into a booth, and Caleb ends up sandwiched between Rand and Devi. The other editor is chatting with Molly about something gruesome sounding enough that Caleb tunes out after a while—he hasn’t quite been able to fathom the fixation on true crime podcasts that’s spread across the department. When he turns to see how Rand is holding up, he finds him listening to Lan.
“Everyone will recommend the Catskills and Adirondacks, of course,” the editor is saying. “But there are good trails you can reach without a car. The Metro-North can get you within walking distance of some places.”
When Lan takes vacation, he’s always unreachable by email or phone—a rarity for their office—because he disappears into the woods. Caleb, who’d had enough of the beauty of nature long before he escaped to college and traded the rural for the urban, doesn’t understand the appeal himself. But it makes sense that Rand is the outdoorsy hiking type as well.
“I haven’t even left the city since moving here,” Rand says, “but I should, before it gets too cold.”
Lan sits quietly for a moment, sipping his drink. “There are still a few good weeks left,” he replies. “But sometimes I think I like winter camping best. Fewer people around.”
Rand nods. “I used to go backpacking through all kinds of crazy weather with my friends from back home. Snow, thunderstorms, whatever. I can’t believe our parents didn’t stop us—I think at one point my dad said they were letting us learn our own lessons. Then I learned that frostbite is no joke.” He shakes his head as he taps a finger against his left wrist.
It’s clear when Rand notices Caleb listening to the conversation beside him—he goes from leaning back casually to sitting up straighter, crossing his arms. Caleb’s known among the editorial staff for spending whole meetings observing without saying a word, so it’s not as if he was intending to be surreptitious, but uneasiness still prickles across his shoulders. The question of why Rand’s comfortable with someone he only met this afternoon knowing this about him, but apparently not with Caleb sharing that knowledge, only makes the feeling settle in stronger.
“Maybe a harder lesson than they had intended,” Lan says evenly, either not catching or not caring about the change in Rand’s demeanor.
Rand shrugs, a stiff movement. “Well, it got me here in the end. I might’ve just ended up wandering around in the forest forever, otherwise.” Then he looks Caleb in the eye until Caleb shifts his gaze to the ice melting at the bottom of his glass. “What about you, Caleb—how’d you get out of the middle of nowhere?”
“I wanted to be a professor of literature, before I realized that I was more interested in the creation of books than the study of them,” Caleb says. And, because he doesn’t think Rand will let the matter of his past drop unless he makes things a bit uncomfortable, he looks up again and adds, “And I wanted close-minded people to gawk at me less on the street. Neither desire was likely to be fulfilled in my hometown, so I left and have not gone back.” He hasn’t bothered to come out to anyone at this job, but he also hasn’t yet met a cishet man in his generation of publishing professionals, so he’s not exactly giving anything away.
“People can be assholes,” Rand says. It’s a meaningless statement of the type that Caleb hasn’t come to expect from him, but they’re both still stuck staring at each other with no obvious next move. And with Lan half watching them, half pretending to watch sports coverage on a TV across the room.
“It is nice to get a chance to start over, here,” Rand finally continues. “Everyone at home knew exactly who I was, or thought they did. But now I can choose how I want to come across to someone I’m getting to know. Most of the time.”
So, what—he doesn’t want Caleb to see him as someone who made a mistake as a teenager and paid for it? He’s trying to partition that part of him off from a history and a place that he still wants to wear his connection to proudly? Caleb understands sorting pieces of yourself into careful boxes, if nothing else. Although he doesn’t know if he’s in a good position to understand any more while sitting surrounded by his coworkers with pop music playing slightly too loudly in the background, feeling somewhat fuzzy from just one drink because he hadn’t managed to make himself eat anything before the presentation.
“I am interested to learn more about whatever version of Rand al’Thor you decide to show me,” he settles on. As soon as he says it he imagines he can hear Yeza’s typical reaction when he recounts something like this later: “That’s kind of intense, buddy.” Well, he is an intense person, and there will be no hiding it as they work together.
Rand doesn’t appear put off, at least—in fact, he shifts toward Caleb a bit, which brings them close together given they’re already shoulder to shoulder. Under the table, their knees are barely brushing against each other, but the detail is suddenly significant. Before, he’d thought they were on the edge of fighting, but now he’s not sure.
“Caleb. Hey, Caleb.” A sharp fingernail pokes him on the shoulder, not gently—one of Molly’s manicured talons, because they’ve leaned all the way over Devi to get at him. “We’re trying to get more drinks. You’re in the way. Move, please and thank you.”
Caleb mumbles something that could pass for an apology, and they all shuffle out of his side of the table. Molly might not be as discreet as Devi, but they’re not an idiot, so they could probably see that he was trying to have a serious conversation. Did they think they were breaking up an argument? Or . . . His face heats as Rand slides back into the seat beside him. Rand had reacted as if Caleb were flirting with him, before the interruption.
Rand and Lan are talking again, this time about the football game that’s on—Caleb doesn’t think he’s ever heard Lan say so many words in one night—leaving him free to sit silently and fret. Rand is handsome, yes. Caleb knows his own preferences, and he’d admit this to anyone who asked, Waystone employees excepted. But his desire to listen to Rand, to take apart and analyze the pieces of him, especially the ones that don’t seem to match up, could lead to a different sort of trouble.
Fine, then, he thinks somewhat helplessly. While he’s nursing his crush on Kvothe, he might as well make things much more professionally complicated and lust after his author as well. It’s not as if he’s going to do anything about either.
“You all right?” Rand asks. Caleb’s rubbing his temple to fend off the beginning of a headache, probably looking like he’s about to drift away like he did after the presentation.
“Yes,” Caleb replies. “It’s been a long day—for you as well, I know. But I am glad you came with us this evening.”
Which isn’t a lie, despite the impending headache and all the rest. With Rand’s gaze on him, everything collapses into a single feeling: curiosity. Even if it’s foolish, he does want to know what will happen, after the bar and the goodbyes and the train ride home, after the text message that slips into a pocket of signal in the tunnels: “Thanks again for inviting me out. I’m interested to learn more about Caleb Widogast, too.”
Caleb keeps texting Rand, in the days and weeks that follow. First, it’s reactions to the chapters that are coming in—it’s more efficient to send a quick message about a line that made him laugh or a turn of phrase that came out just right rather than saving everything up for an email later. Then, it moves into discussing the other things they’re reading. Caleb isn’t very good about keeping up with new SFF releases nowadays—one small act of rebellion against his editorial fate—but he likes hearing what Rand has to say about them, and he likes that Rand takes seriously the stranger fringes of his own reading habits. Not that Rand completely resists teasing him when a photo of the pile of books on Caleb’s desk includes some particularly pulpy historical romances, but he’ll at least agree that getting a better understanding of different genre conventions is a worthwhile exercise.
As the end of the year approaches, other details slip in, shading in the edges of the day to day. Rand visits home for the first time since he moved to the city, and Caleb expects the conversation to go quiet in the week leading up to Christmas. Instead, while Caleb’s accompanying Veth on shopping trips and preventing Luc from ferreting out and prematurely unwrapping his gifts, he hears about Rand catching up with his childhood friends and helping his dad fix things around the house. He’s not sure why Rand would find the minutiae of his life entertaining, but it’s easy to keep talking, even when January arrives and they’re both back to spending most of their time sitting at their respective desks.
At one point, Rand texts, “Why is your job so dramatic? Every time Egwene tells me about her day, it’s like I’m hearing about two world wars and a coup.”
“That is publicity,” Caleb responds. “Editorial sticks to just one armed conflict daily.” Another message: “But I did just get yelled at over the phone by one of your sort. He was angry that the jacket photo he sent me himself made him look ugly.”
Which isn’t in any way professional, but Rand is easy to talk to, and Caleb has already reassured him that he’s one of the good authors. Anyway, Kvothe isn’t keeping things work-related, either. Caleb had created a group chat to congratulate Rand on his presentation so that the agent knew their plan had gone well, and now, Kvothe occasionally uses it to send memes or completely random thoughts. Kvothe’s office is apparently just his living room at home, so it’s not terribly surprising that he’s socially understimulated enough to text them about why the subjunctive mood is unnecessary and would be removed from the English language if he were in charge.
Caleb doesn’t make many of his own additions, but Rand sometimes tosses in a joke, and one afternoon, he sends, “What spots would you recommend for someone who hasn’t done any of the obvious NYC things yet? Empire State Building? Statue of Liberty?”
Before Caleb can sort out whether he wants to try to save Rand or leave him to pursue his own destiny, Kvothe replies, “Oh, no. I won’t let this happen to my author. Waste of money—there are tall buildings everywhere, and you can just go to Battery Park and look across the water for free if you truly must.”
After Rand responds with a laughing emoji, Kvothe adds, “Museums are actually worth it. Been to any?”
Rand says he hasn’t, and now Caleb is indignant, too. He’s long been bored of most of the places where his friends take their families when they’re in the city, but his fondness for spending an afternoon daydreaming among displays of cataloged treasures has never faded. The Museum of Natural History is his particular favorite, life’s rainbow cascading across the wall as all that taxidermied taxonomy, but he’s not sure that’s what will capture Rand’s interest.
“We should go to the Met,” he types, hitting send before his common sense can interfere. Not professional at all.
Almost immediately, both of them reply in the affirmative. Caleb slides down in his desk chair until his head tips against the backrest, fighting a spike of nausea, but it’s too late—a day and time are already being set. He rarely makes impulsive moves, especially when he’s mentally indexed each reason why inaction is a far better plan, but certain people are bad influences on him. He was already well aware of Kvothe’s presence on the list, and now it seems that it’s time to add a new entry.
They settle on Saturday, and as the weekend approaches, Caleb recovers some equanimity. There is nothing untoward about visiting a museum, and he’s hardly the first editor to befriend his author.
And this can only be helpful, truly. They’re nearing the deadline for Rand’s entire manuscript to be turned in, and based on the outline, Caleb expected to get just a few more chapters. Instead, the words keep pouring into his inbox—all of them good, but so, so many. He’d been planning on setting up a phone call to figure out how they can avoid breaking 800 pages and creating a behemoth that will frighten people at the bookstore, but talking in person could be even better.
They meet on the steps in front of the Met, their breath forming clouds in the weak winter sunlight. Kvothe leads the way to the entrance, telling Rand about how admission is pay-what-you-want for state residents and students and he used to come here almost every week. Caleb is content to trail a bit behind, getting used to being around the two again as real, solid people rather than words on a screen. He thinks he also hears Kvothe saying something about almost getting banned from the place, once, but half of it gets lost in the commotion of tourists shuffling themselves into lines inside the doors.
“So, what’s the best way to see everything?” Rand asks once they’ve sorted out their tickets. Caleb is both charmed and bemused by his naive ambition. He looks down at the map he picked up, trying to decide on a handful of things that would be best for a first visit.
Before he can come to any conclusion, Kvothe says, “Get yourself lost and see what happens.” He tugs on Caleb’s arm, nearly making him drop the map, and pulls him down a hallway, Rand following.
Caleb’s sense of direction is impeccable, even within the mazes of identical rooms full of paintings, so he has no expectation of actually getting lost, but he’s willing to humor Kvothe. They go to the medieval wing first, passing by the parade of caparisoned horses with their mannequin knights—an obvious choice, considering the roots of the sword-and-sorcery stories that’ve brought them together. It’s not exactly the flavor of Rand’s book, though, and he lingers most over the matched pairs of katana and wakizashi blades with their delicate hilt ornaments.
“This is the sort of thing Dannil would fight with, no?” Caleb asks, looking down at a silk-wrapped grip with a tiny copper heron woven into the binding. The protagonist isn’t much of a warrior, but as his connection with magic wanes, he takes up a weapon later on.
“Kind of,” Rand replies. “I mean, I never really take anything from just one source. There’s a bit of those sabers across the hall in there, too.”
“I was just reading the latest battle scene you’ve sent me,” Caleb continues, feeling out how he wants to phrase this. He’s only sent Rand surface-level enthusiastic responses so far, nothing critical or particularly in-depth. “Would you be open to condensing that a bit? In isolation, it’s engaging, but I worry that we’re getting off-track so close to the ending.”
“Maybe,” Rand says slowly, still looking at the weapons behind the glass. “I’ll have to think about it. The project’s been fighting me, lately, and I’m hoping if I ignore it for a few days, it’ll come around.”
“Like a cat,” Caleb responds absentmindedly as they wander into a new room. If this isn’t how he gets Rand to agree to cut things down, then he will need to come up with another way.
Kvothe catches up to them beside a display of chain mail. He interrupts Caleb’s thoughts by asking Rand, “So, what’s with the new interest in tourism?”
Rand shrugs. “I’m about to have a lot more free time, after I finish these last few chapters.” Chapters, plural? Not good. “When I first moved, I was dealing with everything with my old agent and writing all the time to get away from that . . . I kind of accidentally locked myself away in my apartment for a while, I guess.”
“At least tell me your roommate’s showing you around your neighborhood.” When Rand shrugs again, Kvothe persists, “Restaurants? Bars? Clubs? We need to do something about this tragedy.”
Caleb doesn’t know how he’s become implicated in “we,” but he’s mostly amused by the difference between how carefully Kvothe’s talked about Rand with him and this incorrigible persona Kvothe sometimes puts on to achieve a desired outcome. He keeps pace with the two of them as they continue down the hall, observing them as they look at the antique firearms.
Rand snorts, then says, “Sorry, I’m trying to imagine Egwene taking me to the club. She’s a little overprotective. Which I get—the last time we were hanging out regularly, it was before she moved here for work, and my mental health wasn’t great. That was years ago, though.”
“The hazards of having people who care for you very much,” Caleb says, drawn back into the conversation despite himself as he’s reminded of the fuss Astrid and Eadwulf make when he pulls a single all-nighter to meet a deadline nowadays. His rebuttal is that it’s impossible to get ahead in this line of work without a touch of the urge toward self-harm—carefully balanced, of course. Then they call him overdramatic.
He expects Kvothe to continue trying to needle Rand into expanding his social life. Instead, they come up the stairs to the music exhibit, which diverts Kvothe into finding strange instruments to introduce them to—the seven-foot-tall contrabass saxophone and the guitar crossed with a harp are old friends of his, it seems.
“So, are you an actual New Yorker, then?” Rand asks Kvothe once they’ve met several ornately carved lutes. “Since you know everything about this museum and everywhere else,” he adds. Kvothe is facing away from him, but Caleb can see Rand’s mouth turning up at the corners as he says this.
“Strictly speaking, no,” Kvothe responds, keeping his gaze on another set of string instruments that Caleb doesn’t have names for. “I grew up all over—my parents were performing musicians, and I went on the road with them. But this is the only place where I’ve ever settled down, so I guess it’s mine.”
Caleb isn’t surprised this hasn’t come up between the other two yet, considering how evasive Kvothe is about the topic. Himself, he’s never learned the specifics of the past tense Kvothe always uses to refer to his family—it’s not somewhere Caleb wants to go, either, so he lets it lie. Maybe this is the sort of thing they talk about, though, now that they’re . . . friends? It’s a good enough descriptor, he supposes.
“It suits you,” Rand says, like the city is a piece of clothing he’s put on. They’ve come out onto a balcony overlooking the first floor, now, with the glass-pane roof letting in the gray winter sky, and Caleb supposes Kvothe does belong here, although maybe as a statue of a trickster spirit among all the marble forms below. For Caleb, living in this place is a means to an end, except in these rare moments when the wonder rushes back all at once, brief but just as strong as it was a decade ago. For Rand . . . Caleb is intrigued to see what it will all come to signify.
They chat about nothing that means very much as they wind through the displays of American furniture and into the European paintings, places Kvothe’s been on the road and trips Rand wants to take with his friends. Caleb, who is fond of staying in one location and reading about the rest of the world, enjoys hearing them talk nevertheless. He’s still anxious to sort things out with Breaking, though. He tries again while they’re resting on a bench, side by side in front of a hunting scene slashed with light and shadow.
Straightforward, now, because wandering around for a few hours tuning out the conversations around them and being brushed past by museumgoers degrades his ability to be subtle or clever. “So. What we have is a very long book that is only continuing to grow. I like this long book. I am more concerned that the market may not feel the same. And I am wondering how both of you might feel about significant cuts in the edits.”
“I thought we were hanging out, not working, today,” Rand says after a pause.
Caleb chews at his lip, irritated. He doesn’t see why there has to be a dividing line. He also doesn’t know how to say that if Rand’s looking to get to know him, beneath the surface layer of books, there are mostly just more books.
Kvothe answers for him, saying, “We are—Caleb’s just being Caleb.” But then he immediately betrays him by continuing, “I think we can probably get this sorted out pretty quickly and go back to enjoying ourselves, though. For my part, the MS you’re getting is the MS you get. I offered you all a gamble at the start of this—now we follow through.”
“The nature of the gamble was on the author, not the word count,” Caleb replies. “And it has paid off, and I am pleased. But I think it would be more prudent to trust my judgment in this case.”
“And I’m saying we’re not being prudent with this one. We’re taking a chance and seeing what happens.”
Caleb drums his fingers against the side of the bench, wishing he could figure out how to better punctuate his point. “Waystone can absorb this risk, even if I’d prefer not to draw Elodin’s ire. But can you? Can Rand? It is our responsibility to be certain about that.”
Rand’s been sitting quietly in the middle of all this, not moving even as their voices get sharper, but now he speaks up. “You’re both looking out for me,” he says once both Caleb and Kvothe’s eyes are on him, “and I appreciate that. No one wants me to be able to pay rent more than I do, trust me—but I know what this book is supposed to be, in the broad shape of it. We can work together on the details, but I’m not giving that up.”
Caleb takes a deep breath, then another. This is not nearly the most angry he’s been at an author or an agent. He will not physically burst into flames while surrounded by oil paintings of pastoral landscapes.
The words are graceless but honest when he says, “If this is what the two of you have decided, then I will do my best to make it possible.”
“Everything will turn out all right,” Rand replies, just as easily as he’d been commenting on the paintings before. Caleb has seen him rattled, yes, but not yet about his book—it’s as if the writing is its own separate space of calm in his mind.
“What he said,” Kvothe echoes, reaching behind Rand to pat Caleb on the shoulder. “And if it doesn’t, at least you’ll enjoy reminding us that you predicted our doom.”
Caleb should only be more annoyed by Kvothe’s pawing at him and making fun of him, but some things are getting tangled in his brain. He’ll need to think more about risk assessment, later.
“I will not,” he grumbles, “because I will be busy coming up with reasons why this was an excellent plan that failed due to factors outside of our control. Because by then we will be on to book two.”
By the time they start walking again, he’s mostly able to put his annoyance to the side for the rest of the afternoon. He enjoys spending time with these people. He mostly thinks their judgment is sound. They’re properly amused when he shows them the item in the ancient Roman wing that was originally a bathtub but was later repurposed as a sarcophagus, which must count for something.
So, when they’re leaving and Rand says they should do something like this again sometime, he doesn’t hesitate before he agrees.
When Caleb gets back to the apartment the day the full manuscript is finally turned in, Eadwulf is sitting crammed over their tiny kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal. “How was work?” he asks around a mouthful of granola clusters.
“Hold on,” Caleb says absently as he fumbles with the knot on his scarf. He hangs it up alongside his coat and messenger bag and then walks down the hallway to their living room, where he sprawls out on his back on the floor.
For a glorious five minutes, no one is pestering him about when sample material will be in for foreign rights or making break room conversation about the weather when he’s trying to think about syntax. At one point, Frumpkin wanders over to sit on his chest and purr, but this is acceptable. He thinks absolutely nothing and does absolutely nothing but stare at the patchily painted ceiling.
Then he gets back up and wanders into the kitchen and says, “It was fine. Except for the part where I am enabling the creation of a book that is far too long because Rand and Kvothe are convincing and I am an idiot.”
Eadwulf makes a noise of slightly confused agreement, which was all he needed, really.
Caleb goes to pour a glass of water but then adds, “I thought Kvothe and I had an understanding—I still do not know what has happened. They’re going to have to cart this hardcover around in wheelbarrows.”
“Have you tried sticking your tongue down his throat at another Christmas party?” When Caleb turns around in order to glare at Eadwulf more effectively, he just shrugs and loudly crunches another bite.
“That was years ago! Why do you still remember that?” Caleb leans back against the counter, sighing. “Anyway, the plot has advanced much further now. He and Rand seem like they’re the ones getting along well.” He hadn’t realized that the seed of the idea was there until the words left his mouth, but he can imagine it, the two of them. He takes a drink before he can say anything else.
Eadwulf can communicate multiple sentences with a single raised eyebrow, and he does so now.
Caleb huffs. “Yes, I’m aware that this does not preclude anything, obviously. But I am very cross with them. There will be no tongues anywhere unless this scheme of theirs somehow works out.”
It could be much worse, truly. Ignoring the overall bulk of the text, there’s plenty he can trim down on the sentence and paragraph levels, considering Rand’s tendency to be overly descriptive at times. The ending is solid while setting up the next part of the trilogy, and for all Rand’s worries, it was turned in on time, which is more than he can say for half of his authors. But he’s been off-balance, since the day at the Met, and getting the finished draft has shifted him even further from his ordinary equilibrium.
When his friend looks like he’s in danger of making another comment, Caleb says, “I will tell you if anything ever happens. Which it will not. How was your day on set?”
“Good.” Eadwulf nods. “Beat up a couple more guys.”
Caleb nods, too—casting directors have been leaning hard into his tough-guy look, lately. He listens to Eadwulf recounting an argument the makeup team got into with one of the other actors while he rolls a thought around in the back of his head, like shaping a ball of clay.
Him and Kvothe. Him and Rand. Rand and Kvothe. All equally foolish combinations, and the three of them . . . the most unlikely and foolish of all.
When Eadwulf finishes his cereal and heads back to his room, Caleb stays standing in the kitchen. He stares through the tiny window at something that’s hardly a view, a jumble of walls and other buildings’ windows, with the smallest patch of yellowed night sky. Lets his thoughts wander through the city maze, their path uncertain. Tomorrow, the true work begins—he knows that, at least.