Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going—
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
Kozan Ikkyo
Ezre'd slept in transit as if he'd not slept during the last month of classes at Brunnhold. He'd slept as if he knew what was ahead of him once he reached the comforts of his cold, snowed-in home. When he woke to familiar bells at expected hours to shuffle barefoot on wood and stone in the dark, he didn't wake his guests—slipping reluctantly from Lilanee's warm company and denying himself the curiosity of peering in to make sure Tom was comfortable somewhere so different in atmosphere, temperature, and, well, everything else.
Instead, he met the polished onyx gaze of his umah in the ruddy glow of a candle she cradled in her hands with a shared, ever so secret, ever so fleeting smile in the dark. She, on her way to the kitchen, and her child on their way outside to shovel snow and bring in water from their communal well.
He put away his independent sense of self and layered on the thick felted wool of communal responsibility as he stood in the foyer, fumbling for his second coat in the thick, inky shadow that clung to the house in these early bells before almost everyone else woke. He'd already stoked the fires his otsur had stirred to life earlier, even if Tuhir was nowhere to be found by now. The young Guide's father, he knew, had left half a house ago, generously giving Ezre one more day of sleeping in while the older Hand lit shrine lanterns along the set route for his Achtus meditations—a duty the returned student would be expected to take over for his stay at home.
The child of raen wasn't alone outside with a shovel in his hands, bundled against the biting chill. A cousin joined him. Then a neighbor. Two more children formed a team. Clouds of breath and the sound of metal scraping stone became a rhythmic song, a mantra all its own.
Smaller children—two nieces and a nephew who'd grown so much it seemed since Ezre'd last visited in Roalis—watched from beneath the covered archway that ran around the courtyard, an open hall of sorts. Pink cheeked beneath all the layers, they giggled and followed behind their elders, gathering snow to toss at each other and pestering the better-traveled Guide about their guests, chattering away in endless streams of Deftung, asking about skin like unglazed pottery and hair like fire.
Once they tired of Ezre's huffed assurances that his pair of foreign friends were most definitely sleeping, the troublesome children grew bored of sliding on ice and hanging off other peoples' coats, scurrying off through the black stone communal housing, slipping past the gilded wooden doors to their homes, climbing everywhere where they shouldn't, and pressing faces against wood-framed, thick-glassed, curtain windows in hopes of catching a glimpse of the strangers from kingdoms far, far away.