Home.
The word was a cold blast of air. It dried the salt of memories to his skin.
Home.
That feeling—the one he’d been nursing ever since Dourin first suggested this change of course—ballooned. It pushed up between his ribs, shallowed his breath.
Home.
He thought of his mother. He thought of his father.
He slowed Eywen to a stop.
“Well, human?” Dourin rode to his side. The elf’s long white hair danced in the breeze. It matched his white horse, who was slender and fierce and named—Dourin had told him this with a grin—Grey. “What say you?”
Venick was quiet. Then he said, “I think I’ve explained that my people won’t—rejoiceat my return?”
Dourin’s tone was arch. “You may have mentioned it.”
“As in, it’s possible that I’ll be attacked as soon as I set foot inside the city.”
“Lucky you.”
“I need to find my mother first. And I need to do it before anyone recognizes me.”
Dourin made an impatient gesture. “So pull up your hood and walk fast.”
“It’s not that simple. I’m not even sure where she lives anymore.” Venick doubted Lira would have chosen to stay in the house where she’d watched her son murder her husband. It wasn’t easy, scrubbing bloodstains out of wood. It couldn’t be easy scrubbing that kind of memory out, either. Even with a good scrubbing, there had been a lot of blood. Venick had a hard time imagining his mother walking over that spot every day. Washing linens, cooking, hosting company on her husband’s remains.
“So what are you saying?” Dourin asked.
“I’m saying that we don’t just walk in.”
The elf made a show of looking him over. “You haven’t exactly sprouted wings.”
“No,” Venick replied. “But I do have an idea.”
THIRTEEN
There was a saying in Irek.She stands strong on weathered legs.It was meant to be inspirational, an ode to their people. Irek was a secluded city, built at the ocean on the edge of the world. Her people were grizzled, older, mostly women. That wasn’t surprising, not when you considered that all the young men born in Irek went to battle, and most young men died there.
But the saying was true in the literal sense as well. With an ocean to the south and marshlands to the north, Irek’s buildings were at the mercy of tides and shifting sands and summer storms. Flooding wasn’t uncommon. Neither was erosion. To combat these elements, many of Irek’s homes had been built on wooden stilts. They dotted the land like tall, spindly-legged water bugs.
She stands strong.Of course, the saying had its ironies. The buildings didn’t always stand strong. Once or twice a year, a home would collapse into the marsh, sometimes with its inhabitants still inside. Wood rot would do that. So would the wind storms. To help prevent this kind of downfall, an intricate network of ropes had been rigged between buildings, tethering them together, neighbors holding neighbors strong.
Not the best system, if you thought about it—which Venick had often as a boy. The most obvious issue was that if a house did collapse, it might drag several others down with it. A childhood friend of Venick’s had died that way, crushed under his own home after it was pulled down by another. When Venick tried voicing this concern to his father, however, he was quickly silenced.
We do it this way because we’ve always done it this way,his father had replied in a tone that brooked no argument.It is custom.
Call it yet another hallmark of their people, this stubbornness for tradition, the unwillingness to change. You rigged your house to your neighbor’s even if you knew it was stupid, even if theirs looked ready to fall, because that’s how things had always been done. Because they’d do it for you. Solidarity won out over common sense, every time.
Venick found himself smiling vaguely at the memory. He realized how he must look and wiped the smile from his face. Not that there was anyone to see him, hidden here in the river reeds at the city’s edge, but still…what did he have to smile about? The tragic passing of a friend? His father’s inflexibility? It was inflexibility that led to his father’s death, in the end.
To his murder, you mean.
Venick put the thought away. He refocused on what he was doing, which was examining a network of such ropes and riggings, and the two watchtowers they tethered together.
He readjusted the axe in his hand.
