Solid ground always felt odd for a time, after any great length spent at sea, and so Asha was glad that Pyke never felt wholly steady when she stepped onto the dock.
"Well met, nuncle," she hailed Aeron, who was already beetling forward to bless the Black Wind's prow in thanks of a successful journey. He seemed even less sane than he had when last she had seen him, his always-wild hair and eyes absolutely mad now, gleaming with a fervour she knew best from her father's face, when he spoke of conquest, of reaving.
Like as not he would disapprove of Asha's methods on her latest journey, but Asha was a woman grown and then some, and had travelled widely enough to know that her father's methods - the old methods - would not survive long in the world as it stood now. It amused her a little, to think of how the Summer Islanders or the Tyroshi or even just the Oldtowners would react to Ironborn longships spilling bands of reavers onto their shores, and that smile carried her from dock to saddle to the great doors of her father's castle.
Pyke was not a place for smiling, however - Asha had smiled her share and more on this island, and on all the islands, but she had grown to womanhood in the shadow of war and bitterness. It had not stunted her growth, never that, but it had made her wary, had helped her understand the power of a smile.
She wondered, sometimes, if her little brother had ever learned that lesson. Winterfell was said to be the hardest place in Westeros, but only by greenlanders, who knew nothing of the Islands. Life as a hostage could not have been pleasant for Theon, especially not under the watch of a man of such grim reputation as Eddard Stark. Theon would be a man grown by now, three-and-twenty and doubtless as roguish and handsome as Rodrick had ever been, but hopefully without the vicious streak their father had fostered in both him and Maron.
"My mother is yet at Harlaw?" she asked by way of greeting, sweeping a bow like a man's before stepping closer to the Seastone Chair so that she could press a kiss to her father's weathered, withered cheek - a rare show of softness, from such a hardened man. "And you are yet here."
He snapped a glare at her for that, which surprised her - he tended to be made uncomfortable by mentions of her mother, but his anger was a rare thing when Alannys Harlaw haunted the air.
"Your mother is best where she is," he growled, launching himself to his feet and setting to striding the length of the hall, up and down like a failing pendulum. His step was uneven, a weakness showing that Asha had never noticed before, and she wondered how so much had changed in her time abroad. True enough, she had been gone for close to a year, and had not been in any great hurry to return home, but she had not expected her father to become an old man while she was away. "You were best where you were, like as not!"
Asha said nothing in response - this seemed more Aeron's sort of bluster than her father's, or even Victarion's, but it did not surprise her as much as it might have done a year ago. Distance had allowed her to see that mayhaps her father was not the man she had allowed herself to believe of him, that perhaps he was not so secure and eternal as she had convinced herself.
What was odd was his sudden decision that she was best gone from the Isles - he had protested her departure more severely than anyone else, and had refused her the funds to refurbish the Black Wind for such a journey. She had turned to the Reader for help, because while Asha was a wealthy woman in her own right, she had had a crew to pay, tolls and taxes to meet if she wished to avoid undue notice, and a ship to maintain, never mind refurbish.
The Reader had asked only for a handful of books in return, and she had all he had requested locked safely in her personal chests, as well as half a hundred trinkets she knew he would find interesting and amusing, and gifts for her mother and Gwynesse both. That would please him as much and more as her repaying his kind loan with a hold full of Ghiscari silver, traded and tricked from a team of would-be slavers in the Basilisk Isles.
"And here I thought you would be glad to see at least one of your children returned to you," she said, light as a zephyr, and was pleased by the sudden straightness of his spine. At least there was a little sense left in him, if he could be distracted by the insult he felt at Theon's continuing absence.
"Aye," was all he said, though, as he returned to the Seastone Chair, and to his sudden old age. "At least you've not lost your way home."
"There's something queer in the air," Qarl said as soon as she stepped back aboard the ship. He had never been one to mince words, but his obvious discomfort took her aback - Asha had felt something changed at Pyke, true, but she had put it down to the time she had spent away, nothing more. That Qarl was noticing it made her uneasy, and she wished to be once more at sea, away from Pyke and her father and her disapproving uncles. Aboard the Black Wind the only authority she had to mind was her own, and that of the Drowned God - and he seemed to favour her, more often than not, so his will was no great imposition.
"There's something queer with my father," Asha agreed, beckoning for him to follow her to her quarters. "And the Damphair, too, did you notice him to be changed?"
"A little madder, if anything," Qarl said uneasily, "and frightened, now that you say it, as if he was being chased. I hadn't thought anything of it, truth be told, because the Damphair is always mad."
That was true enough that Asha wondered if it was just that she was becoming paranoid, already tiring of the restraints of Pyke after so long at sea, but she doubted it. She was not her mother, jumping at ghosts, or her aunt, lost in dreams of grandeur, or even the Damphair, drowning in piety. There was no reason for the sinking feeling in her belly, but it was there, and its twin was in Qarl, she could see it on his smooth face.
"We will stay until the morning," she decided, wondering if her dreams would be as cold as the wind blowing in from the Sunset Sea.
All her crew were uneasy the following morning, but Asha left them to prepare the ship for sailing all the same, determined to take her leave of her father and, in doing so, to find what it was that had rendered him such a wreck.
"You are early," the Damphair said in his sonorous voice, like the bells of Volantis against the high ceiling above the Seastone Chair. "Lord Balon will be with us presently."
"I am sure," Asha said easily, settling on the end of the long bench nearest the throne. "He is not a man to be late."
Her father had never given a single shit as to whether or not he kept others waiting, but Aeron seemed to take Asha's words as seriously meant, and began nodding emphatically. Asha was too tired for one of his lectures on the superiority of the Ironborn and of her father, as their lord and rightful king, having slept poorly the night before. Her whole crew had slept badly, despite never having had a bad night aboard the Wind before - but that queerness that rotted the air over Pyke had infested the very boards of the ship, or so it had felt. Her dreams had been filled with shadows of things, things that had frightened her but which she couldn't remember fully.
"There are shadows on your father's shoulders which you cannot understand," Aeron said, which surprised her - such a declaration was unusually forthright for the Damphair, who so delighted in speaking in riddles and false prophecies. "The weight of the Isles is not an easy weight to bear, child. You should think more kindly of him."
"The weight of the Isles seems to have increased in my absence," Asha said lightly, not looking him in the eye. "Is there some trouble I should know of, nuncle? Might be that I can be of help to my father if there is."
"There is no weight I cannot carry," her father said, emerging from behind the Chair with a face like thunder. "Be gone, Aeron, and take your portents and dreads with you - there is no place for them here. Be gone! Back to Great Wyk with you, and may your shadows follow you there!"
The flash of genuine fear on Aeron's face surprised Asha all the more, since she had thought that the Damphair feared nothing at all, but she did not object to his departure.
"And you!" her father boomed, throwing himself against the hard lines of the Seastone Chair and glowering from beneath his tangled hair. "I suppose you are for Ten Towers, to have tea with the old bitch and to talk fairy-stories with the Reader?"
"And to visit my lady mother," Asha agreed, glad that the mention of her mother seemed to shame him, at least a little. "I have not seen her in too long, and suspect the same could be said of you."
"I will not be spoken to in such a manner," he said, short and sharp, "or you will find no welcome here on your return."
"If I return at all," Asha said, smiling at the freeze of his face. "The foul stench over Pyke is enough to keep any ship away, I think."
"There is no stench!" he roared, bolting from the Chair with such vigour that Asha scrambled back along the bench, fearing him for the first time since she was a child. "Be gone, foolish girl, and do not come back until you have emptied your head of your uncle's stories!"
As the doors of the hall closed behind her, Asha wondered which uncle's stories were the problem - the Reader, or the Damphair? Which would scare her father more, that she consider a more peaceful path such as the Reader pushed her toward, or that she would follow the Damphair into madness and fear?
She could not say, but she knew one thing for a certainty. If the unshakeable Damphair was afraid, the whole of the Isles ought to be the same.