EVENTUALLY A CLOUD hid the moon. Smug thing. And Auri took the chance to scamper back into the Underthing.

Auri’s not afraid of the moon. She’s shown at various times in The Kingkiller Chronicle to be out when the moon’s phasing and when it’s absent from the sky. She waits for clouds to cross before the moon because the environment darkens. There’s nothing supernatural about her aversion to moonlight. However, she doesn’t want to be seen.

She’s disappointed that Kvothe wasn’t there. That he wasn’t playing for her. JohnPoint suggested after the last post that this second day corresponded to chapter six, “Love,” of The Wise Man’s Fear. So perhaps Kvothe was playing. Perhaps Auri somehow sensed it.

But she found a large tangle of dry wood in Umbrel, washed down the grates in some forgotten storm. Ash and elm and hawthorn. So much wood it took six trips to carry all of it to Mantle.

This is as good a spot as any to note the telltales of ring composition between A QUITE UNCOMMON PLEASANT PLACE and its paired chapter, ASH AND EMBER. Heck, it might be the best place. Elm and hawthorn appear only in those two chapters along with acorns and suet. But the craft extends in a different direction that some of the other pairs.

Almost everything Auri picks up in this chapter makes an appearance in the one across the ring. Much of it goes into or is at least involved in the soap making process. The rest is eaten or stored. She actually returns to Umbrel with two of the items she finds together later to perform some alchemical factoring. She laughs, for different reasons, at the end of each.

The particular woods are noteworthy as well. Ash and elm feature prominently in The Name of the Wind in two distinct contexts. The first is the nursery ryhme about disposing demons. It appears in the frame…

“Let me tell you what to do.

Dig a pit that’s ten by two.

Ash and elm and rowan too—”NW 39

… and the narrative:

The mayor nodded eagerly and singsonged, “Dig a pit that’s ten by two. Ash and elm and rowan too.” He cleared his throat.NW 646

There are all kinds of hints littered throughout The Slow Regard of Silent Things that Auri is only a former student despite Kvothe’s “moon fae” diminutive. Auri interacts unremarkably with iron. Her abilities are eschewed rather than limited. And she has no trouble with ash and elm, even though both are mentioned right along with iron and fire by Felurian.

They’re also involved in a minor naming controversy.

“Fine,” I said, as I fished the leaf out of my mouth. It was yellow, shaped like a spearhead. “The wind has decided for us. Master Ash.”

“Are you sure it isn’t Master Elm?” she asked, eyeing the leaf. “It’s a common mistake.”

“Tastes like an ash,” I said. “Besides, elm is feminine.”

She nodded seriously, though her eyes were dancing. “Ash it is then.”NW 558

I don’t think I’d noticed until now that ash and elm simultaneously recall something and point directly away from it. At any rate, both are hardwoods ideal for making lye, or “caustic lies,” which dovetails in the paired chapter and might suggest something about Denna’s patron. The ash/elm mistake comes up gain when Kvothe reconnects with her in chapter sixty-four of The Wise Man’s Fear.

After gathering the wood, Auri washes. She changes back into the dress with more pockets and shoulders her gather sack. She heads out of the Underthing.

She took the final piece of Mandril more by memory than sight, stepping carefully until she stood behind the upright runoff grate that looked out onto nothing much except the bottom of a gully. Auri moved to stand next to the heavy bars . From there she saw the bulk of Haven up upon the hill, a shadow looming large against the starry sky.

The accompanying image here didn’t make it into the final version of the book. It’s Nate’s initial drawing of the exit from Mandril which was deemed too busy and maybe too revealing. It’s not exactly canon, but it gives a decent sense of what Haven might look like.

Auri waits again for the clouds to obscure the moon and dim its light so she can move without being seen. If Kvothe’s right about her, and Elodin seems to agree, avoiding Haven is probably a top priority.

The image that appears in the book is more spare, leaving much more to the imagination but retaining the mood of the rejected drawing. Auri disappears into the woods. She finds a small forgotten graveyard while gathering pinecones. And we get a textual clarification about why she avoids the moon.

The moon was out again, but she was lower now, and bashful. Auri smiled at her, glad for the company now that she was no longer On Top of Things and Haven was far gone behind.

It’s only a threat because it reveals her to prying eyes. Once she’s alone and isolated, when nobody can see her on top of a University roof or skulking about the Rookery starved and half naked, it’s no big deal. The light’s actually kind of handy.

Here on the edge of the clearing the moon showed acorns scattered on the ground. Auri spent a few minutes picking up the ones with perfect hats and tucking them into her gathersack.

In the paired chapter, she makes a meal of these. Perfect hats rang a bell and I tracked it down in Rogues. In another faen parallel, Bast demands similar acorns from Pem and Wilk.

“I also need twenty-one perfect acorns,” he said. “No holes, with all their little hats intact…”“The Lightning Tree”

She finds an lonely laurus nobilis, odd in this forgotten place. Inhaling the aroma of bay leaves, she sees a gap between the roots, perfect for disposing of human remains.

Nodding, Auri reached into her gathersack and brought out the bone that she had found the day before . She bent down and tucked it deep inside the dark and hollow space beneath the tree.

Satisfied, she gathers a couple handfuls of laurel berries. They’ll themselves be the source of some consternation in the later chapter. And we’ll finish this one on Friday.