Shadows of Self (Mistborn #5)(28)

Someday, he hoped he might be able to look into the girl’s eyes and see emotion. Hatred, maybe. Something other than that emptiness.

“Get out.”

Wayne ducked his head and left.

*

There should not have been a thatched log hut in the middle of Elendel, and yet here it was. Wax stooped to enter, seeming to step backward in time hundreds of years. The air inside smelled of old leather and furs.

The enormous firepit in the middle would never be needed in Elendel’s mild weather. Today, a smaller fire had been constructed at its very center, and over it simmered a small kettle of hot water for tea. However, charred stones indicated that the entire firepit was sometimes used. It, the furs, the ancient-style paintings on the wall—of winds, and frozen rain, and tiny figures painted with simple strokes on slopes—were all fragments of a myth.

Old Terris. A legendary land of snow and ice, with white-furred beasts and spirits that haunted frozen storms. During the early days following the Catacendre, refugees from Terris had written down memories of their homeland, as no Keepers had remained.

Wax settled down beside his grandmother’s firepit. Some said that Old Terris waited for this people, hidden somewhere in this new world of Harmony’s design. To the faithful, it might as well have been paradise; a frozen, hostile paradise. Living in a land naturally lush with bounteous fruit, where little cultivation was required, could warp one’s vision.

Grandmother V settled down opposite him, but did not start the fire. “Did you remove your guns before entering the Village this time?”

“I did not.”

She snorted. “So insolent. During your long absence, I often wondered if the Roughs might temper you.”

“They made me more stubborn, is all.”

“A land of heat and death,” Grandmother V said. She crinkled a handful of herbs, flakes dropping into a tea strainer above her cup. She poured steaming water over them, then placed the lid with a gnarled hand. “Everything about you stinks of death, Asinthew.”

“That isn’t what my father named me.”

“Your father didn’t have the right. I would demand you remove the weapons, but it would be meaningless. You could kill with a coin, or with a button, or with this pot.”

“Allomancy is not so evil as you make it out to be, Grandmother.”

“Neither power is evil,” she said. “It is mixing those powers that is dangerous. Your nature is not your fault, but I cannot help but see it as a sign. Another tyrant in our future, too powerful. It leads to death.”

Sitting in this hut … the scent of Grandmother’s tea … Memories grabbed Wax by his collar and shoved him face-first up against his past. A young man who had never been able to decide what he was. Allomancer or Feruchemist, city lord or humble Terrisman? His father and uncle pushing him one way, his grandmother another.

“A Feruchemist slaughtered people in the Fourth Octant last night, Grandmother,” Wax said. “He was a Steelrunner. I know you track everyone in the city with Feruchemical blood. I need a list of names.”

Grandmother V swished around her tea. “You’ve visited the Village on … what, a mere three occasions since your return to the city? Nearly two years, and you’ve made time for your grandmother only twice before today.”

“Can you blame me, considering how these meetings usually go? To be blunt, Grandmother, I know how you feel about me. So why torture either of us?”

“You cling to your images of me from two decades ago, child. People change. Even one such as I.” She sipped her tea, then added more herbs to the strainer and lowered it back into the water. She would not drink until it was right. “Not one such as you, it appears.”

“Trying to bait me, Grandmother?”

“No. I am better at insults than that. You haven’t changed. You still don’t know who you are.”

An old argument. She’d said it to him both times they’d met during the last two years. “I am not going to start wearing Terris robes, speaking softly, quoting proverbs at people.”

“You will shoot them instead.”

Wax took a deep breath. A mixture of scents lingered in the air. From the tea? Scents like that of freshly cut grass. His father’s estates, sitting on the lawn, listening to his father and grandmother argue.

Wax had lived here in the Village for only a single year. It had been all his father had agreed to give. Even that had been surprising; Uncle Edwarn had wanted Wax and his sister to both stay away from the place. Before his official heir, the late Hinston Ladrian, had been born when Wax was eighteen, Edwarn had basically appropriated his brother’s children and tried to raise them. Even still, it was hard to separate Wax’s parents’ will in his head from that of Edwarn.

One year among these trees. Wax had been forbidden Allomancy during his days in the Village, but had learned something far greater. That criminals existed, even among the idyllic Terris.

“The only times I’ve truly known who I am,” Wax said, looking up at his grandmother, meeting her eyes, “are when I’ve put on the mistcoat, strapped guns to my waist, and hunted down men gone rabid.”

“You should not be defined by what you do, but by what you are.”

“A man is what he does.”

“You came looking for a Feruchemist killer? You need only look in the mirror, child. If a man is what he does … think of what you’ve done.”