A Shadow in Summer (Long Price Quartet, #1)

by Daniel Abraham

He walked back to the compound slowly. Not because of the dread, though the gods knew he wasn’t looking forward, but instead because his failure seemed to have washed his eyes. The sounds and scents of the city were fresh, unfamiliar. When he had been traveling as a young man, it had been like this coming home. The streets his family lived among had carried the same weight of familiarity and strangeness that Saraykeht now bore. At the time, he’d thought it was only that he had been away, but now he thought it was more that the travels he’d made back then had changed him, as the letter from Epani had changed him again just now. The city was the same, but he was a new man seeing it: The ancient stonework; the vines that rose on the walls and were pulled back every year only to crawl up again; the mixture of languages from all across the world that came to the seafront; the songs of the beggars and cry of birdcall.