Chapter 13: The Cost of Protection
The house stood at the edge of Mossgrove, where the path gave up and roots took over. Toren knocked once and waited. Dorian caught smoke, broth, damp bark, wet earth.
The door opened at once.
His father looked like Toren thirty years older. The same curls, gone grey. The same green eyes, only sharper. Dorian looked once, then again, and privately decided the Forest bred unfairly well.
“Liana,” the man said, warm as ever. Then his attention shifted. “And you must be Dorian.”
“Toren has spoken of me, has he?” Dorian asked.
“A little,” Eryn said, his eyes resting on Dorian a moment longer than necessary. Then he stepped aside. “Come in before the food gets cold.”
Toren had changed already. Not much, but enough. His voice was quieter. His movements more careful. He stepped in after his father and went straight for the bowls without being asked.
They ate first. The broth was hot. Mushrooms, herbs, dark bread. Liana answered the familiar questions easily. Eryn asked after her health, her work, the road. Most of his attention settled on Dorian after that. Where he had travelled from. How the Loteri Lands had treated him. There was something about Eryn’s soft voice that made Dorian feel far too comfortable for his taste. He mistrusted that at once.
Dorian answered with perfect manners and very little substance, while Toren served, cleared, wiped the table, and put everything back where it belonged. Dorian noticed that too. Toren belonged here.
After the meal, Eryn said it was time to begin the ritual that would protect them in Ashen Valley. Then he took them behind the house.
The yard thinned into moss, roots, and wet earth until it stopped being a yard at all. The forest had come close here. House and trees stood together. A little farther in, the ritual place waited.
It was ready.
The seats had been shaped into the roots themselves, set in a circle. Not cut rough and forced into place. Guided. Grown that way. Dry herbs lay around them in a careful ring. Dorian saw old black marks in the soil where other circles had burned before. Symbols had been cut into the nearest trunks long ago. Bark had grown over part of them since.
Inside the circle stood a shallow basin made of stone and root. Dark liquid rested in it.
Eryn changed as soon as he stepped into the clearing. The warmth stayed, but his focus sharpened. He moved through the circle with the ease of a man who knew every mark in the ground and what it was for. Toren had gone quiet too. Not uneasy. Familiar.
Liana looked around once and said nothing. Dorian looked longer.
Eryn showed them the seats. Liana sat. Dorian followed her, the root hard beneath him, the herbs close at his feet, the basin waiting in the middle.
The house already felt far away.
Eryn stood outside the circle. Without a word, Toren crouched and touched flame to the herbs. The dry stems caught at once. Smoke rose in thin pale lines, then thickened, climbing around them instead of drifting into the trees.
Dorian watched the ring close and recognised the effect at once. The clearing held. Everything beyond it fell back. An intimate memory flickered through his mind, Toren shutting the rest of the world out around them with that same quiet forest magic. Dorian pushed it away at once.
Eryn looked at them both. “Listen to my voice. Do not force anything. Do not hold anything back either.”
His tone remained even. Practical. As if he were giving instructions for some ordinary task instead of sealing them into a smoke-filled circle in the woods.
“I will speak in Old Forest,” he said. “Liana understands. Dorian does not. Toren will give you what matters.”
Toren moved behind Dorian without a word. Close enough that Dorian could hear his breathing.
Eryn dipped the ladle into the basin and offered the dark liquid first to Liana, then to Dorian. One measured swallow each. “Drink.”
The decoction was bitter enough to feel insulting. Earth, shrooms, and something sharper underneath. Liana drank without complaint, and Dorian did the same.
Eryn began again, slower now, the old dialect low and steady. Toren translated in short fragments near Dorian’s shoulder.
“Memory is the protection. Let it pass. Do not resist.”
Then Eryn’s voice shifted, only slightly.
“The circle will keep what rises,” Toren murmured.
Dorian fixed on the words, not Toren’s voice, not his breathing close behind him. The memory of Toren’s mouth and hands was distraction enough without being invited back into a ritual. It took effort to keep his mind where it belonged.
The smoke thickened. The air turned warm and close.
Dorian kept his eyes on the basin and waited for nothing good.
Liana slipped first.
Not all at once. Eryn’s voice still moved through the smoke. The root pressed against her back. Bitter taste clung to her tongue.
Then the clearing dropped away.
Her father was dying.
The yurt was close and stale. Blankets. Thin breath. His face already half gone. Liana tried to move towards him, but memory pinned her where she was and made her watch.
Then fire.
The burial ground. Heat against her face. Smoke rising hard into the sky. Mirrors catching dull light in unsteady hands. The farewell song low and slow, then silence. That was the worst part. Not his last breath. The silence after.
The ritual pulled her back.
Steppe wind. Sun. Dust in her teeth. She had sworn she knew the route. Her father let her lead until she did not. Shame came hot and fast. He said nothing cruel. Only stepped beside her and pointed down. Bent grass. Broken crust of earth. A track half-lost to wind.
Look there, Liana. Not where the eye wanders. Where the truth is.
Another memory.
The bow was too big for her then-small hands. They already had enough food, and still she loosed at the second hare. The arrow struck badly. Her father made her kneel beside it and finish the kill properly. Then he taught her the apology. Gratitude for the life taken. Respect for prey. Respect for the Steppe. Never kill carelessly. Never take more than need.
Firelight. A blanket around her shoulders. His voice teaching her wind, stars, distance, direction.
Further back still, his shadow covered her from the harsh sun. Tall grass brushed her arms. His hand closed around hers. He showed her where to step. She had never had her mother. There had only ever been him.
Death stayed where it was. So did grief. Underneath both sat the rest of him. The lessons. The habits. What he had left in her.
Not around her now.
Inside.
Eryn’s voice kept moving through the smoke. The circle held.
So did Liana.
Dorian held longer than Liana.
For a while he managed it. Smoke in his lungs. Root digging into his thighs. Toren’s voice just behind him, low enough not to disturb the rhythm of Eryn’s words.
Then Toren translated softly. “Do not follow fear.”
The workshop at Steamhollow.
Cold air. Metal filings. Oil soaked into wood. Dorian knew the room by smell before he saw it clearly. He turned towards the bench, towards the door, towards the empty corner where Marek, his father, should have been.
Nothing. No movement. No tools in hand. No curse from the next room.
Only a box left on the workbench. Inside it, Marek’s bloodbound ring. A rare mirrorwalking artefact. Valuable enough to matter. Personal enough to wound.
The absence hit Dorian all at once.
Another line from Toren, close to his ear. “Let memory do its work.”
The workshop thinned. The old Corvell mansion took its place.
He was smaller there. Case in one hand. Gloves too stiff. Collar crooked. Marek crouched in front of him, fixing it with rough fingers, saying something about schooling, chances, the sort of future that could not be built in hired rooms and workshops. Dorian remembered the words. What he had heard then was simpler.
You are staying. I am leaving.
The floor beneath that memory shifted.
Haven Tavern.
Warm bread. Lamp oil. Paper. The Keeper’s voice somewhere beyond a half-shut door. Mireal’s hands sorting something on a table. Dorian sat on the floor with a book, his back against R’Yussa’s great warm side while soft purring rolled through him. Safer than the mansion. Kinder too, though Dorian had not trusted kindness much even then. Marek was leaving him there. Only for a while, he said. Work first. Back soon.
Dorian had believed him because he had wanted to.
Then the oldest part opened.
A sting in his arm. Sharp enough to shock, not enough to understand. He looked down and saw blood welling bright against skin. His sisters leaned over him. Curious. Wide-eyed. Interested. Not frightened. Not sorry. Watching the drop slide towards the mirror’s edge.
Then shouting. His mother and aunt. His father arguing with both. Servants. Feet on polished floor.
Rain on his father’s coat. Iron on his hands. The hard grip of his arms lifted Dorian before anyone else could. Dorian remembered pressing his face into damp wool and leather while the mansion lurched away behind them. At the time he had understood only that he was being taken.
Now the rest came with it. Taken out. Taken away before the house could decide what to do with a child who bled into mirrors.
Toren translated again, quieter now. “Memory is the protection.”
That was when the pieces turned.
Marek had taken Dorian from the mansion. Kept him. Worked where he could. Taught him what he knew. Left him in places he judged safer when he had no better choice. Brought him back when Dorian needed more than he could provide. Then vanished only when Dorian was grown enough to stand without him.
For years, Dorian had remembered only the insult of it. Being left. Sent away. Put aside.
The ritual gave him the rest.
Not comfort. Not gentleness. Something rougher than that. A protection built badly, unevenly, and still lodged deep enough to last.
Not around him now.
Inside.
Eryn’s voice kept moving through the smoke. Toren’s followed it, close and careful, giving him only what mattered.
Dorian sat very still inside the circle and hated the truth for arriving so late.
Dorian came back slowly. Like surfacing.
The root seat was still under him, but for a moment he did not trust it. The clearing looked almost ordinary. The herbs had burned down to ash. The smoke was gone. The forest stood quiet around them, as if it had never closed at all.
It could not have been long. It felt like hours.
A blanket lay over his shoulders. Another was around Liana. Toren crouched beside them with a cup of pure water in each hand, practical as ever. He offered Liana hers first, then Dorian.
“Drink,” he said softly.
Eryn waited until they were both properly back. Then he stepped to Liana, touched her forehead with two fingers, and said, “Va theryn lo, saelen vey.”
When Eryn lowered his hand, a small blue mark glowed at the centre of her brow.
Then he came to Dorian and did the same. “Va theryn lo, saelen vey.”
Toren’s voice followed quietly. “What was opened is now closed.”
The touch was cool. Final.
“You stay here tonight,” Eryn said. “Sleep first. Leave in the morning.”
Neither of them said no. They were too worn out, and not yet ready to put themselves back together. The protection had taken hold.