Now that I have some more time, i'll toss something out there that doesn't just end the conversation. Doc, do you remember the song Arliden wrote about his wife? When Kvothe recites it, he claims that his mother didn't like it because of the rhythm of the verse. Makes sense really, because if you read it in rhythm, the last line sounds out as "Netalia Lackless".
Another case is that child's rhyme that Kvothe sings that ends with "On the road that's not for traveling, Lackless likes her riddle raveling" and that clearly irks his mother. She explains that the rhyme is actually pretty racy and that "Lady Lackless is a real person, with feelings that can be hurt." "Ravel" is a derogatory term for the Ruh.
Lately i've been trying to figure out if Auri is Princess Ariel or not. As well as who Skarpi actually is. He knows stories that he shouldn't know. Is he one of the Amyr? Who is Bredon? Is he an Amyr? Is he Denna's Master Ash? Is Master Ash a Chandrian?
In reverse order, I would bet that Master Ash is Cinder of the Chandrian. Kvothe's naming skills have a remarkable quality of hitting the mark well, and getting Ash from Cinder would be another example.
I suspect that both Bredon and Skarpi are members of the Amyr. The Cthaeth tells Kvothe that the Maer is closer to the Amyr than even the Maer realizes, and having Bredon be one would explain this. The Chandrian fled something before killing Kvothe, and the Amyr are a good bet (the Sithe are guarding the tree and the singers were all dead), which provides a means for the Amyr being aware of Kvothe if they arrived right afterwards. That also would explain how Skarpi knew who Kvothe was: remember, Skarpi just up and calls him Kvothe without Kvothe ever introducing himself. It is tenuous, but we have a mechanism and reason for the Amyr to know about Kvothe, and we have two people who take quite the interest in him. So, it's a sort of Occam's Razor thing.
Auri could well be Princess Ariel. If so, then Kvothe again gets the name almost right. It works as a general literary allusion, too: Ariel is a moon of Uranus and that was named for the sky spirit from the Tempest. (Obviously, these things probably do not exist in Kvothe's world, but this is literature!) The other possibility (and this is much more far fetched) is that she "is" the Moon, or the faeling associated with it that Jax stole.
I think that the 3rd book, The Door of Stones, comes out next year. I certainly hope so: but I'll miss the speculating!
Denna herself is quite the mystery. I have this very bad feeling that I'm going to slap my forehead hard when we learn her backstory.
Gods don't play dice with the universe, they are the dice of the universe: our job is to figure out how many sides and dice!
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