Blood Sings If You Let It

The pub was wrong for both of them. Too clean for Abercrombie, too loud for Rothfuss. Someone had put a football match on the television above the bar, and the commentary leaked through the ceiling beams in tinny bursts that made Rothfuss wince every thirty seconds like clockwork. Abercrombie didn’t seem to notice. He’d ordered a pint of something dark and already half-finished it before I’d gotten my coat off.

“So we’re doing Macbeth,” Abercrombie said. Not a question.

“We’re doing ambition that destroys the ambitious,” I said, sitting down. “And multiple perspectives on the same event. Rashomon.”

“Right. Macbeth through Rashomon.” He took a drink. “Which means everybody lies.”

“Everybody lies beautifully,” Rothfuss said. He’d arrived with a notebook — actual paper, cream-colored, the kind that costs more than it should — and was already writing something in it. I couldn’t tell if he was taking notes or working on something else entirely. “That’s what interests me. The lies people tell when the stakes are their own lives. Those aren’t sloppy lies. Those are crafted. Architecture. The liar becomes an artist because the alternative is a noose.”

“The liar becomes a coward,” Abercrombie said. “That’s the whole point. Macbeth doesn’t lie beautifully. He lies badly, sweating through his shirt, and everybody at the table knows it, and nobody says anything because they’re all doing the same thing. The beauty is in the silence between the lies. The collective agreement not to look at the blood on the floor.”

I’d expected them to circle each other for longer before the first real disagreement. This was ninety seconds in.

“Both of those things are true,” I offered.

“One of them is more true,” Abercrombie said.

Rothfuss stopped writing. He looked up with an expression I recognized from interviews — a kind of patient irritation, the face of a man who has spent years being told his prose is too pretty for its own good and has long since stopped being wounded by it but hasn’t stopped noticing. “Joe. When Kvothe tells a story about himself, is it beautiful?”

“Kvothe’s a special case.”

“When anyone tells a story about themselves — when the stakes are everything — does the language flatten? Does it become crude? In my experience, the opposite happens. People who are fighting for their reputation reach for poetry. They reach for the language they wish they deserved.”

“That’s because your people are performers,” Abercrombie said. “Bards and students and clever bastards who’ve read too many books. My people are soldiers. When a soldier lies, he doesn’t reach for poetry. He reaches for the simplest version of events that keeps him alive. ‘I wasn’t there. The other one did it. I was following orders.’ Flat. Functional. And the horror is that it works.”

“So we have two modes of lying,” I said, leaning forward, trying to stitch something together. “The ornate testimony and the blunt denial. What if both exist in the same story? What if the central event — the killing, the betrayal, whatever it is — gets told by someone who lies the way Pat describes and someone who lies the way Joe describes?”

Neither of them responded immediately, which I’d learned was a good sign. Rothfuss wrote something in his notebook. Abercrombie finished his pint and waved for another.

“The event,” Rothfuss said eventually. “What is the event?”

“A king dies,” I said. “Or a warlord. Someone with power. And the question of who killed him — and why — gets told from multiple angles, each one self-serving, each one hiding something different.”

“A king dies in mud,” Abercrombie said. “Not in a throne room. Not on a battlefield with banners. In mud, in a camp, in the middle of the night. An ugly, graceless death. Somebody cut his throat while he was pissing. Or while he was sleeping. Or while he was praying — pick the version that makes your narrator look best.”

“The prayer version interests me,” Rothfuss said. “Someone would tell it that way. A narrator with religious conviction, or at least religious pretension. ‘He was at prayer when the blade found him.’ That transforms a murder into a martyrdom. The same event — a man bleeding out — becomes sacred or profane depending on who’s talking.”

“Who’s talking, though?” Abercrombie said. “Give me the people. I don’t care about structure until I know who’s sweating.”

I had been thinking about this. Three narrators. Maybe four. Each with a claim to the dead man’s power, or a reason to distance themselves from the killing. I described what I had in mind: a general who had served the warlord for twenty years and wants the succession to look orderly. A younger commander who actually held the knife but needs it to look like self-defense. A woman — adviser, lover, something — who orchestrated the whole thing but whose version paints her as a reluctant witness.

“The woman is the most dangerous one,” Abercrombie said. “She’s the Lady Macbeth figure, obviously. But don’t make her a puppet-master. Don’t make her the one who was really pulling the strings all along, because that’s just a different kind of tidiness. Make her someone who pushed things in a direction and then lost control of them, and now she’s trying to construct a version where she had less agency than she did. Not more. Less.”

“Why less?” I asked.

“Because agency is liability. If she pushed for the killing, she’s complicit. If she was a witness, she’s a victim. Every one of these narrators is trying to be a smaller player than they actually were. That’s how lying works in politics. You don’t inflate yourself. You diminish yourself. ‘I was just an adviser. I was just a soldier. I was just in the room.’”

Rothfuss was nodding slowly, which looked like it cost him something. “That’s — yes. That’s true. And it’s ugly. The beauty I want to find is in the telling, not the content of the lies. The general who has served twenty years and needs the succession to look orderly — when he tells his version, there’s a formal quality to it. Almost liturgical. He’s rehearsed this. He’s been rehearsing it for days, or weeks, and the prose itself has been burnished by repetition until it shines. He says ‘the lord fell in the night’ the way a priest says a prayer. The words have stopped meaning what they mean and started meaning what he needs them to mean.”

“And the young commander?” I asked.

“Raw,” Abercrombie said instantly. “Broken sentences. Repetitions. He keeps circling back to the same moment — the feel of the knife going in, or the sound, or the way the body dropped — because he can’t get past it. He’s not polishing his story. He’s trapped inside it.”

“There’s your contrast,” Rothfuss said, and his voice had changed — lower, less careful, the way people sound when they’ve forgotten they’re performing. “The polished lie and the ragged one. The general’s version is a cathedral. The young man’s version is a wound.”

“And the woman?” I said.

They looked at each other. It was Abercrombie who spoke first.

“The woman’s version is the one that’s closest to the truth, and therefore the one nobody believes. Because truth in this kind of story doesn’t look like truth. It looks messy and contradictory and it doesn’t explain why she was standing where she was standing. The general’s version is elegant. The young man’s version is visceral. Hers is just — confusing. Full of details that don’t add up. Things she noticed that have nothing to do with the murder: a dog barking, the way the mud smelled, a broken buckle on someone’s boot.”

“Sensory debris,” Rothfuss said. “That’s what traumatic memory actually looks like. Not a narrative. A pile of fragments. And nobody trusts fragments because we’ve been trained to trust stories.”

I sat back. The football match above us erupted into cheering, someone had scored, and the noise washed over the table and receded. Rothfuss grimaced. Abercrombie didn’t blink.

“I keep wanting to make the prose beautiful,” I admitted. “Across all three narrators. Even the young commander — I want his broken sentences to have rhythm. I want the fragmentation to feel composed.”

“Of course you do,” Abercrombie said. “And that’s the problem. Because if every narrator sounds beautiful, even in different registers, you’re doing Pat’s thing across the board. And the whole point of this pairing is that some of it should be ugly. Not artfully ugly. Actually ugly. Prose that makes you uncomfortable to read because the sentence doesn’t land right, because the image is graceless, because the character is saying something that falls flat. Real people say things that fall flat.”

“But we’re not writing real people,” Rothfuss said. “We’re writing characters in a story that readers pay money to read. And there’s a contract —”

“There’s no contract.”

“There is a contract. The contract says: this will be worth your time. It doesn’t say the experience will be pleasant, but it says the prose will be worth sitting with. And prose that is genuinely graceless, genuinely ugly, breaks that contract. A reader will put the book down.”

“A reader will put the book down if they’re bored,” Abercrombie said. “Not if they’re disturbed. Nobody puts down a car crash. The ugliness has to serve the tension. The young man’s voice is raw and ungainly not because I’m being lazy but because his composure has failed him and the reader can feel it. That’s not gracelessness. That’s a different kind of craft.”

“A craft that disguises itself as the absence of craft,” Rothfuss said.

“Yes.”

“And my craft announces itself.”

“Yes.”

Rothfuss wrote something in his notebook. He wrote for a long time. When he looked up, he said: “All right. Give me the general. I want the burnished, liturgical version. The twenty-year soldier who has polished his lies until they glow. That’s where my instincts are useful — the lyricism isn’t decoration, it’s a tell. The more beautiful his testimony becomes, the more the reader should distrust it.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“And I’ll take the young commander,” Abercrombie said. “The ragged one. The one who can’t stop telling you what the knife felt like.”

“And the woman?” I asked.

Another silence. The football commentary droned. Someone dropped a glass behind the bar and there was a scatter of applause from the people who weren’t watching the match.

“The woman is yours,” Rothfuss said to me.

I felt something cold in my stomach. “Mine?”

“You’re the one who has to synthesize us. The woman’s testimony has to sit between Joe’s voice and mine, pulling from both without belonging to either. She has the fragments — the dog, the mud, the buckle — but she also has moments of clarity that cut through. She’s the one who says the thing nobody else will say, not beautifully, not brutally, just — plainly. And the plainness is what makes it unbearable.”

Abercrombie was watching me with what might have been sympathy, or might have been amusement. With him it was hard to tell. “You wanted to be the synthesizer. Here’s your chance. The woman’s voice has to earn the reader’s trust by being the least artful, the least dramatic, the least satisfying version. She didn’t see the whole thing. She was there and she missed half of it. What she did see, she doesn’t fully understand. But the details she gives — the ones that don’t fit into anyone else’s story — those are the shrapnel. Those are what lodge.”

“And none of them know the whole truth,” I said.

“Nobody ever knows the whole truth,” Abercrombie said. “That’s not cynicism. That’s the operating condition. You know what you saw, and what you saw was partial, and what you remember of what you saw is even more partial, and what you tell someone about what you remember is a negotiation between what happened and what you need to have happened.”

“Rashomon,” Rothfuss said.

“Rashomon.”

“But with mud,” I said.

“With mud and prophecy,” Rothfuss said, and now he was leaning forward, his notebook forgotten. “We haven’t talked about prophecy. The Macbeth element. The crown that poisons. What if the reason this warlord was killed isn’t political ambition — or not only political ambition — but because someone received a prophecy that he would fall, and the prophecy itself became the mechanism? Someone heard he was fated to die, and that knowledge made the killing feel inevitable, feel permitted —”

“Prophecy as permission,” Abercrombie said. “I’ve done that. It works. The worst things people do are the things they believe they were always going to do. Takes the guilt right out of it. ‘The stars said he’d fall. I just happened to be the one holding the knife.’”

“But each narrator has a different relationship to the prophecy,” I said, catching up. “The general might deny it exists. The young commander might believe it absolutely — it’s what convinced him the killing was righteous. The woman might have been the one who spoke it.”

“Spoke it or fabricated it,” Rothfuss said.

“Is there a difference?” Abercrombie asked. “In a world where prophecy is real — or might be real — the distinction between speaking a true prophecy and creating a self-fulfilling one is meaningless. The warlord is dead either way. The knife went in either way.”

“The difference matters to her,” Rothfuss said quietly. “If she spoke a true prophecy, she’s an instrument. If she fabricated one, she’s a murderer. The entire weight of her testimony hangs on a question she can’t answer honestly because she doesn’t know. She might have seen the future. She might have invented it. And the story refuses to tell us which.”

The pub had gotten louder. A second match was starting or the first one had gone to extra time. Abercrombie ordered a third pint. Rothfuss closed his notebook and placed his pen on top of it with a precision that suggested he was done writing for the evening and wanted the pen to know it.

“There’s something we haven’t settled,” I said. “The prose question. Joe, you said some of it should be actually ugly. Pat, you said there’s a contract with the reader. Where do we land?”

“We don’t land,” Abercrombie said. “That’s the tension that drives the thing. The general’s sections are Pat’s. Lyrical, burnished, suspicious. The commander’s sections are mine. Blunt, repetitive, visceral. The woman’s sections are somewhere else entirely. If you try to resolve the tension between those registers, if you try to smooth it into a single unified voice, you’ll kill the thing that makes it alive.”

“The dissonance is the point,” Rothfuss said. “I hate that. I want the prose to cohere. I want a piece of writing that feels like a single instrument playing a single song. But he’s right. The dissonance is the point. Three liars telling three versions and the reader hearing the friction between them. If it all sounds the same, you’ve just got one liar in three costumes.”

“So we leave it unresolved,” I said.

“We leave it honest,” Abercrombie said. He lifted his glass, not in a toast, just to drink. “The honest thing is three voices that don’t harmonize. The honest thing is a dead warlord in the mud and nobody who saw it clearly and a prophecy that may or may not have been real. You don’t owe the reader resolution. You owe them the feeling that something true happened and that truth is the shape of the hole between the testimonies.”

Rothfuss opened his notebook again. Wrote one line. Closed it.

“The mud smelled like iron,” he said, to no one in particular. “That’s where it starts. Before the testimonies. Before the lies. The mud smelled like iron, and there was a dog