Part Six — A Small Town, A Small Problem

　Two days of walking with Doran turned out to be the easiest two days I'd had since the mountain, mostly because he didn't ask me to talk about anything I didn't want to talk about, and I returned the favor by not asking why a man traveling alone through the middle of nowhere happened to know exactly where every safe clearing and clean stream was.

Everybody's got a past. Mine's just got more claws in it than most.

By the time the town came into view — walls more patched than whole, smoke rising lazy from a dozen chimneys — I'd more or less decided something about myself.

Grief wasn't going anywhere.

Fine.

It could sit in the back seat.

I wasn't going to spend however many decades I had left in this world walking around like every conversation was a eulogy.

My parents hadn't raised a kid who moped.

They'd raised one who trained until he couldn't stand, then got up and trained more.

So.

New rule.

I'm going to enjoy this.

All of it, where I can.

And if something out there decides it wants to test that — well, that's what the rest of me is for.

"You're smiling," Doran said, giving me a sideways look as we passed through the gate.

"Didn't take you for the type."

"I contain multitudes," I said, which meant nothing to him and made me feel better anyway.

The inn was small, the innkeeper unbothered by two dust-covered strangers, and dinner was the first meal in over a week I hadn't half-ruined myself.

I was midway through convincing myself a second bowl of stew was a reasonable life choice when the door banged open hard enough to rattle the shutters.

Three men.

Local, by the look of them — not soldiers, not anything organized, just the particular breed of loud that shows up in every town that's ever existed.

The lead one had a hand already resting on a club at his hip and eyes that went straight to Doran's coin pouch before they bothered with his face.

"Evening, traveler," he said, in the tone of a man who'd said that exact sentence to a hundred other travelers right before robbing them.

"Road tax. Pay up, or we walk you out and you pay a different way."

Doran's hand moved toward his blade, slow and unhurried, the way a man moves when he's done this exact dance before and isn't especially worried about the outcome.

I put a hand on his arm before he could stand.

"It's fine," I said.

"Let me."

He looked at me like I'd suggested something genuinely strange, which, fair — I was eight, physically, and the man doing the talking had at least a foot and a half on me.

"Kid," the lead thug said, not unkindly, more amused than anything, "this doesn't concern you."

"Actually," I said, still smiling, still perfectly relaxed, "it does.

See, this is the part where you made a mistake.

You walked in here, looked at my friend, and decided he was worth threatening for a few coins."

Doran carried me two extra days when he had no reason to.

Fed me before he knew if I'd survive the night.

That earns a person a certain amount of protection, as far as I'm concerned.

"And that's fine," I went on.

"People make mistakes.

But I'd feel a lot better about the rest of my evening if you three turned around, walked back out that door, and forgot this inn exists."

The lead thug laughed — a real laugh, genuinely entertained — and took a step toward me, club coming off his hip.

I didn't move from my seat.

I let a thread of aura out, just enough, just barely, the same careful precision my mother had spent three years drilling into me one leaf at a time — except this time it wasn't a leaf I was lighting.

It was the air directly between his club and my head, close enough that he felt the heat of it against his knuckles a full half-second before the wood itself started smoking.

He stopped walking.

"That," I said, still smiling, tone exactly as pleasant as it had been a sentence ago, "was a warning.

I don't tend to repeat myself past that point.

So I'd think very carefully about whatever you're about to do next."

Nobody moved.

The room had gone very quiet, in the specific way rooms go quiet when everyone in them has just recalculated who's actually dangerous.

The lead thug's eyes flicked to his club, still faintly smoking, then back to me — really looking at me this time, the way people look at something once they've stopped seeing a kid and started seeing whatever's underneath.

"...Right," he said, voice noticeably less steady.

"Right, no — we're good.

We're good here."

They left considerably faster than they'd arrived.

Nobody in the inn said a word for a solid ten seconds after the door swung shut.

Doran let out a breath I don't think he'd realized he was holding.

"You could've just let me handle that."

"I could have."

I picked my spoon back up, entirely unbothered, and went back to my stew like nothing had happened, because as far as I was concerned, nothing much had.

"But you fed me when you didn't have to, and I don't really do anything by half-measures when it comes to people who've done right by me."

He studied me for a long moment — recalculating again, same as the first night, except this time I could tell he'd landed somewhere new.

"Gods," he said finally, mostly to himself.

"What exactly did I pick up off that forest floor."

I just smiled and asked the innkeeper for that second bowl.

Get strong enough that nobody I care about ever has to be afraid again.

That's the whole plan.

Everything else is just details.