Of The Line

"Whenever someone starts talking to you about purity, the old 'Oh you mustn't', they're just trying to scare you," the oarsman told the lad sitting next to him. "All those fucks have done bad and thought worse, trust me."

The kid was barely tall enough to see over the bar, but that didn't stop the man from buying him a round. Over the next 45 minutes his life changed rather drastically.

They'd thought that for some reason or another he was old enough to have earned the striped shirt he was wearing, the shirt he'd found in a gutter the day prior and washed off as best he could. The shirt of an oarsman guild two towns over.

They'd thought he was just out of practice when the oar slipped from his hands, when he had to dive into the icy waters to retrieve it as it bobbed gleefully away from him.

Two hours later they'd propped him up beside the fire, and once he started to move, the tall oarsman now sat next to him had hauled him over to fill a bar stool.

The rest of the tavern was full of striped shirts of different colors, different towns, bantering, drinking, smiling.

It's the most he'd felt at home since his brother drowned last year.