When Fii woke up, he was in his father’s arms, and how he got there was no mystery. The night had bled away into earning morn’, and they were no longer outside of the city walls. They were back at the farmhouse, in the same room he had slept the prior night. The large arms cradling him felt like safety and home and peace, but safety and home and peace did little to quiet the niggling worm in Fii’s mind.
“What happened?” Fii managed, when his tongue was finally in working order. His father pushed a skin of water to his lips. Fii drank. “How’d--how’d you find me?”
“You weren’t home by nightfall, boy.” His father’s voice was coarse and tired, and his eyes were bloodshot, as though the man hadn’t slept for a day and a night. The man probably hadn’t. “So we went looking. That information dealer you like so much told us where you went a-hunting for your mother’s trail. Introduced us to some people."
His father shifted. Fii sipped his water.
"Broke a few fingers. Made a couple o’ threats. Wasn’t too hard to get ourselves hired as their new bodyguards after. That group’s been doing it for a while, but won’t be slaving anymore, after last night. They’ve barely got a breath left between them.” The smile on his father’s face was far from reassuring. “Don’t do that again, boy.”
Sheepishness colored Fii’s ears red. “Sorry,” he mumbled, face down.
Then, “Did you know? That this is what mother does?”
“No.” Then father laughed, and it was a croaking, dry sound. “But we’re mercenaries. I’m not surprised. Your old woman’s always been a mysterious one.” Then, hesitation. “But she’s a good woman.”
Fii pushed himself to sit, and his father let him, large arms pulling away as Fii propelled himself to lean against his father’s side.
He could not reconcile it. The same woman who sang him lullabies to sleep was a woman who would… who would what? Slit the throats of children under the cloak of the night?
“Why didn’t you look for her?” Fii whispered, instead.
“Where would we start?” A sigh. An old, faraway look. “Never told you, but we always knew she’d be leaving. She came tellin’ us she’d be going someday. Your mother’s a special one. Some sort of destiny. Never knew if she was running to it, or running from it.”
Hesitation, again. “She left a locket. You should have it.”
A beat of silence. Then another.
“I have to know,” Fii whispered, fingers clenching the his father’s sleeves so tightly he must have left stains upon them. “I have to.”
He wasn’t sure what it was that he had to know. He wasn’t sure what he meant. There was a niggle in his mind that itched unbearably at the thought of not knowing, and there was a whisper in his soul that rankled with desperation at the thought of staying still. He liked himself much less today than he liked himself yesterday, and he needed to know who Fii was and if he would like Fii tomorrow. He liked his mother much less today than he liked her yesterday, and perhaps he had to reconcile the woman he thought he knew with the woman she was, and he did not know who she was.
Stop judging. Stop thinking.
The older man gazed down at Fii for a long time without speaking. Fii wondered when his father’s hair had turned grey. Was it recent? His father was a man nearing his fifth decade, and it had been years since Fii had looked at him carefully.
For a moment, Fii cursed that spoiled, selfish child he had been, that he might still be, demanding attention, demanding answers, demanding the world to fall to its knees in front of his foolish egotism.
Then, his father nodded. Once. Twice. “Yes, you do.”
“Goodbye, father,” Fii said, standing once again in front of the abandoned farmhouse. He was dressed and geared for a longer journey this time. There were coins in his pouch and clothes in his pack, knifes in his boots, and a locket that pulsed with heat against his chest, beneath his shirt. There was a touch more humility and less arrogance in his demeanor.
“Stay safe, son.” The man’s face was stern, and visibly tired.
There was a touch of awkwardness in the farewell. Awkwardness from both of them, for both of them. How long had it been since the pair of them spoke so genially? How long would it be before they spoke again, if ever?
“I’ll find my way back,” Fii promised, half to himself. “Once I have my answers.” He wasn’t sure what, or how, or when, or even what his questions were, but he believed it nonetheless.
A pause. “Yes.”