Kilvin nodded, absentmindedly smoothing down his beard with one hand. “Yes. I see.”
He shrugged and picked up his piece of chalk. “Well then. I consider this matter resolved for the moment.” He turned back to the slate and glanced over his shoulder at me. “I trust I will not be troubled by a horde of pregnant women waving iron pendants and cursing your name?”
“I’ll take steps to avoid that, Master Kilvin.”
I filled a few hours doing piecework in the Fishery, then made my way to the lecture hall in Mains where Elodin’s class was being held. It was scheduled to begin at noon, but I was there a half hour early, the first to arrive.
The other students trickled in slowly. Seven of us in all. First came Fenton, my friendly rival from Advanced Sympathy. Then Fela arrived with Brean, a pretty girl of about twenty with sandy hair cut in the fashion of a boy’s.
We chatted and introduced ourselves. Jarret was a shy Modegan I’d seen in the Medica. I recognized the young woman with bright blue eyes and honey-colored hair as Inyssa, but it took me a while to remember where I’d met her. She was one of Simmon’s countless short-lived relationships. Last was Uresh, nearly thirty and a full El’the. His complexion and accent marked him as coming all the way from the Lanett.
The noon bell struck, but Elodin was nowhere to be seen.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. It wasn’t until half past noon that Elodin breezed into the hall, carrying a loose armful of papers. He dropped them onto a table and began to pace back and forth directly in front of us.
“Several things should be made perfectly clear before we start,” he said without any introduction or apology for his lateness. “First, you must do as I say. You must do it to the best of your ability, even when you don’t see the reasons for it. Questions are fine, but in the end: I say, you do.” He looked around. “Yes?”
We nodded or murmured affirmative noises.
“Second, you must believe me when I tell you certain things. Some of the things I tell you may not be true. But you must believe them anyway, until I tell you to stop.” He looked at each of us, “Yes?”
I wondered vaguely if he began every lecture this way. Elodin noticed the lack of an affirmative from my direction. He glared at me, irritated. “We aren’t to the hard part yet,” he said.
“I’ll do my best to try,” I said.
“With answers like that we’ll make you a barrister in no time,” he said sarcastically. “Why not just do it, instead of
I nodded. It seemed to appease him and he turned back to the class as a whole. “There are two things you must remember. First, our names shape us, and we shape our names in turn.” He stopped his pacing and looked out at us. “Second, even the simplest name is so complex that your mind could never begin to feel the boundaries of it, let alone understand it well enough for you to speak it.”
There was a long stretch of quiet. Elodin waited, staring at us.
Finally Fenton took the bait. “If that’s the case, how can anyone be a namer?”
“Good question,” Elodin said. “The obvious answer is that it can’t be done. That even the simplest of names is well beyond our reach.” He held up a hand. “Remember, I am not speaking of the small names we use every day. The calling names like ‘tree’ and ‘fire’ and ‘stone.’ I am talking about something else entirely.”
He reached into a pocket and pulled out a river stone, smooth and dark. “Describe the precise shape of this. Tell me of the weight and pressure that forged it from sand and sediment. Tell me how the light reflects from it. Tell me how the world pulls at the mass of it, how the wind cups it as it moves through the air. Tell me how the traces of its iron will feel the calling of a loden-stone. All of these things and a hundred thousand more make up the name of this stone.” He held it out to us at arm’s length. “This single, simple stone.”
Elodin lowered his hand and looked at us. “Can you see how complex even this simple thing is? If you studied it for a long month, perhaps you would come to know it well enough to glimpse the outward edges of its name. Perhaps.
“This is the problem namers face. We must understand things that are beyond our understanding. How can it be done?”
He didn’t wait for an answer and instead picked up some of the paper he’d brought in with him, handing each of us several sheets. “In fifteen minutes I will toss this stone. I will stand here,” he set his feet. “Facing thus.” He squared his shoulders. “I will throw it underhand with about three grip of force behind it. I want you to calculate in what manner it will move through the air so you can have your hand in the proper place to catch it when the time comes.”
Elodin set the stone on a desk. “Proceed.”
I set to the problem with a will. I drew triangles and arcs, I calculated, guessing at formulas I couldn’t quite remember. It wasn’t long before I grew frustrated at the impossibility of the task. Too much was unknown, too much was simply impossible to calculate.
After five minutes on our own, Elodin encouraged us to work as a group. That was when I first saw Uresh’s talent with numbers. His calculations had outstripped mine to such a degree that I couldn’t understand much of what he was doing. Fela was much the same, though she had also sketched a detailed series of parabolic arcs.
The seven of us discussed, argued, tried, failed, tried again. At the end of fifteen minutes we were frustrated. Myself especially. I hate problems I cannot solve.
Elodin looked to us as a group. “So what can you tell me?”
Some of us started to give our half-answers or best guesses, but he waved us into silence. “What can you tell me with certainty?”
After a moment Fela spoke up, “We don’t know how the stone will fall.”
Elodin clapped his hands approvingly. “Good! That is the right answer. Now watch.”
He went to the door and stuck his head out. “Henri!” he shouted. “Yes you. Come here for a second.” He stepped back from the door and ushered in one of Jamison’s runners, a boy no more than eight years old.
Elodin took a half-dozen steps away and turned to face the boy. He squared his shoulders and grinned a mad grin. “Catch!” he said, lofting the stone at the boy.
Startled, the boy snatched it out of the air.
Elodin applauded wildly, then congratulated the bewildered boy before reclaiming the stone and hurrying him back out the door.
Our teacher turned to face us. “So,” Elodin asked. “How did he do it? How could he calculate in a second what seven brilliant members of the Arcanum could not figure in a quarter hour? Does he know more geometry than Fela? Are his numbers quicker than Uresh’s? Should we bring him back and make him a Re’lar?”
We laughed a bit, relaxing.
“My point is this. In each of us there is a mind we use for all our waking deeds. But there is another mind as well, a sleeping mind. It is so powerful that the sleeping mind of an eight-year-old can accomplish in one second what the waking minds of seven members of the Arcanum could not in fifteen minutes.”
He made a sweeping gesture. “Your sleeping mind is wide and wild enough to hold the names of things. This I know because sometimes this knowledge bubbles to the surface. Inyssa has spoken the name of iron. Her waking mind does not know it, but her sleeping mind is wiser. Something deep inside Fela understands the name of the stone.”
Elodin pointed at me. “Kvothe has called the wind. If we are to believe the writings of those long dead, his is the traditional path. The wind was the name aspiring namers sought and caught when things were studied here so long ago.”
He went quiet for a moment, looking at us seriously, his arms folded. “I want each of you to think on what name you would like to find. It should be a small name. Something simple: iron or fire, wind or water, wood or stone. It should be something you feel an affinity toward.”
Elodin strode toward the large slate mounted on the wall and began to write a list of titles. His handwriting was surprisingly tidy. “These are important books,” he said. “Read one of them.”
After a moment, Brean raised her hand. Then she realized it was pointless as Elodin still had his back to us. “Master Elodin?” she asked hesitantly. “Which one should we read?”
He looked over his shoulder, not pausing in his writing at all. “I don’t care,” he said, plainly irritated. “Pick one. The others you should skim in a desultory fashion. Look at the pictures. Smell them if nothing else.” He turned
