The Name of the Wind

PROLOGUE
A Silence of Three Parts

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music...but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint.

The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.

The man had true-red hair, red as flame. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with the subtle certainty that comes from knowing many things.

The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to

Patrick Rothfuss is the bestselling author of The Kingkiller Chronicle. His first novel, The Name of the Wind, won the Quill Award and was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear, debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller chart and won the David Gemmell Legend Award. His novels have appeared on NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction/Fantasy Books list and Locus’ Best 21st Century Fantasy Novels list. Pat lives in Wisconsin, where he brews mead, builds box forts with his children, and runs Worldbuilders, a book-centered charity that has raised more than six million dollars for Heifer International. He can be found at patrickrothfuss.com and on Twitter at @patrickrothfuss.

Praise for The Kingkiller Chronicle

The best epic fantasy I read last year.... He s bloody good, this Rothfuss guy. George R. R. Martin, New York Times-bestselling author of A Song of Ice and Fire
 
Rothfuss Kingkiller books are among the most read and re-read in our home. It s a world you want to spend lifetimes in, as his many fans will attest.   Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Hamilton

Rothfuss has real talent, and his tale of Kvothe is deep and intricate and wondrous. Terry Brooks, New York Times-bestselling author of Shannara
 
"It is a rare and great pleasure to find a fantasist writing...with true music in the words." Ursula K. LeGuin, award-winning author of Earthsea
 
"The characters are real and the magic is true. Robin Hobb, New York Times-bestselling author of Assassin s Apprentice
 
"Masterful.... There is a beauty to Pat's writing that defies description." Brandon Sanderson, New York Times-bestselling author of Mistborn
 
[Makes] you think he's inventing the genre, instead of reinventing it. Lev Grossman, New York Times-bestselling author of The Magicians
 
This is a magnificent book. Anne McCaffrey, award-winning author of the Dragonriders of Pern
 
The great new fantasy writer we've been waiting for, and this is an astonishing book." Orson Scott Card, New York Times-bestselling author of Ender s Game

It's not the fantasy trappings (as wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss. Tad Williams, New York Times-bestselling author of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn
 
An extremely immersive story set in a flawlessly constructed world and told extremely well. Jo Walton, award-winning author of Among Others
 
Hail Patrick Rothfuss!