Coming home was strange.
Not the strangeness of unfamiliarity — the opposite. The Northern Reach was familiar in a way that hurt now, because Ryn had spent six months learning how to see, and seeing the place you grew up with trained eyes was like reading a childhood book as an adult. The words were the same. The meaning was different.
The village — Mill Creek, population three hundred, the place where he'd been born and raised and from which he'd departed on the Iron Road with sawdust on his boots — sat in a valley between two forested ridges in the kingdom's north-eastern region. Fenrath's Winter domain influence faded this far east, but the climate was still northern: cool summers, cold winters, a growing season that required planning and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that some crops simply did not want to grow this far from the equator.
