Capítulo 182: Asha 7 293 AC
Damn her father. Damn the lot of them to the deepest damned trenches in the salty fucking sea.
She shoved a Thrall out of her way as she stalked through the halls of Pyke.
She had arrived early in the morning, with the rising sun behind her. She had returned to her Father's halls with news of her Kinslaying Uncle's death.
And what did he do?
Did he disbelieve her tale and name her a kinslayer, after he had been too much of a damp coward to follow her south?
No, he didn't. That was the foolishness she had expected of him, and she knew it was what the drowned priests whispered, and the drinking-halls told. She knew that it was obvious from the moment she had set foot on the island.
No, that wasn't what had her so furious. That was normal, sensible even, her tale of suicide sounded like just the excuse to avoid the taboo.
No, she had returned from her hunt, helm in hand, and what was the first thing her father did?
He all but named her a whore. Right there in front of the court, and all the court did was laugh.
"A nice ship you arrived on," He had said, the moment she walked into the hall. "Did you pay the iron price for it?" Her father had laughed bitterly as was his way. "No, crows fly from the south even here, and we all know you didn't, you paid on your back in a bed for your ship, and to think I had such hopes for you."
She had been stunned, stunned and stung by her father's words, and she found no allies in the court, that bunch of drowned old men, they laughed and jeered, and she had not been able to raise a word against them for her father had silenced her at every try.
Finally, when she reached for her throwing ax, half prepared to earn her kinslaying Taboo, he banished her. "Get from my hall." He had shouted over the din. "Shame me no more."
She had stood there a long moment, half prepared to plant it into her father's skull, to throw the islands into a civil war just so she could kill every single one of those damp men who had lived out the rebellion by virtue of their cowardice.
She wasn't even sure now why she hadn't done it. It would be better than this.
In the castle, they called her a whore, and in the streets of the port, they called her a kinslayer.
'This isn't how it was supposed to be.'
She was supposed to have returned a conquering hero, her Uncle's head in her hands to place before the Reader's door.
Now she was being all but heckled in the streets of Pyke, and those damned drowned priests were speaking sermons against kinslaying in her earshot.
The Ironborn at the docks asked her why she had shown up on a Greenlander ship. Asked if she had sold out the Reader's men to get it. Maybe sold them into slavery in Tyrosh.
She could remember Pyke not being like this, not when she was a little girl and would play with the others in the street, not when the women all gathered for sacrifices to the drowned god during the rebellion, not when she was the princess of the Iron Islands after Theon was taken in the rebellion.
It was as if, in her eight months of absence, the people of the city had been possessed, taken over by skin-changing demons who had forgotten all the time she had spent here, everything she had shared with them.
And what was worse, they did so on the back of lies. Not for anything she'd done, nor anything they'd seen her do, but only on the basis of things they assumed she'd done.
It'd made her want to strangle the life out of them all. To bleed each and every one of them dry on a rack like fish to satisfy the white-hot fury that flowed through her veins.
She stalked to the port, fury gripping her form, struggling with the unworthy shame that tried to bubble up out of her gut for something she had never done.
When one of the Reaver's near the docks, probably drunk, called her a kinslaying whore in those words it was the last straw.
The first thing she did was chuck an ax into his boot, eliciting a scream of pain and probably taking off a couple of toes before it was silenced by the sword she pressed against his unarmored neck.
She tried to think of something to say, something that would silence the rest of them who were there, their eyes watching her like hawks. Maybe there was something that would silence the rumors.
Something, anything.
There was nothing, she shoved him over with her free hand and ripped her ax out of its boot.
It was bent a little, she would have to fix that.
Once she was back on her ship she would fix that.
He tried to get back up, she punched him in the face, something crackled, and his noseguard caved in.
Her father was worth less than the reaver she had left on the ground, but then he had always been. He was too much of a coward to chase down Euron, this fuck at least had the balls to stand and fight, dumb as he was, in as much pain as he was.
Not that he got up again after the last one, but the point still stood. Her uncle was no better, and neither were most of his toadies amongst the Lords.
She had planned to stay in the Iron Islands a while. To stay with her father, to see about the wives and families of the Reader's men.
Now one of those reasons was gone entirely, and from the reaction in Pyke, she doubted it would be much better in Harlaw land.
No, she needed to leave. This place stank. Stank of fish and of cowardice. Of even the captains who had sailed the farthest, not a one had been as far as she, and not a one had pursued her Uncle as she had, with a smaller crew in a weaker longship. Yet did that matter? No. She was a whore and a kinslayer as far as they were concerned.
Well then, let them keep their fish and their cowardice, she at least had somewhere else to go. She had a brother, well, two actually, but it had been long since she had seen Theon, and he was surely half-Greenlander by now.
But then wasn't she? She had drunk one's blood, had sworn to one in the most intimate of ways. Become his sister and taken him on as brother and lord.
It was hard to think about, as angry as she was.
Still, the thought that Theon might be like her at least struck a cord. He might understand what she felt inside. The rejection she suffered there. They all hated him too after all.
Well, it was better than nothing. She stalked onto the deck of her ship, the cold Island's wind sending its sails snapping at their leashes like hunting-dogs in a storm. Her Greenlander crew had all stayed aboard, a caution she had given them lest some fool try to take them as Thralls.
They weren't loyal to her. Not yet, not the way that the men on the Black Wind had been for their common cause.
But they might be in time, and they would sail where she ordered still.
And that was enough, enough for now.
"We sail for the North. I will visit my brother there before I return to fulfill my duties to Arthur." She ordered tightly, "We can restock on the coast. I am not as welcome here as I had thought."
The bitter wind carried that little cutter like a dagger through the waves away from Pyke, away from those salt-blasted hunks of rock they called islands. The Greenlanders were happy to see it go, half terrified of being chained as slaves there.
To Asha, her home was dead, left in the past with the memories of her Harlaw Uncle, and of playing in the waves as naked as the day she was born.
Whatever it was now it was just a corpse to her desiccated by the flies that hung about her rotting father and his driftwood court.
She didn't even want to look back.
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