The Boar’s Bane

If the coronation had been law made visible, the celebration was memory made loud.

By the time the crown settled and the Hall released its hold on breath and bone, the city had already begun to sing. Fires bloomed in the squares and along the river walks. Tables were dragged out and weighted with bread and roast and the first cautious casks opened with ceremony rather than greed. Lanterns swung from lintels and spears alike, their light turning stone warm and unfamiliar. The bells rang until their voices went hoarse, and when they finally fell silent the bards took their place.

They came in twos and threes at first, then in a bright tide—harpers from the western hills, drum-men of the plains, salt-voiced singers from the docks. They tuned and argued and laughed, then found a common rhythm as if the city itself had leaned in to listen.

They sang of the mist and its breaking.

They sang of the boar and the plain scrubbed raw.

They sang of the Hall and the kneeling stone.

And they sang of Yohan.

Not as he would have told it.

In their verses he stood taller, struck harder, laughed louder. His cough after the mist became a defiant roar; his quiet steadiness was remade into bold defiance. One song placed him shoulder to shoulder with kings of old; another crowned him with antlers borrowed from Damh Dearg itself. Children were hoisted up to see him. Cups were raised in his name. Someone—gods knew who—wove a laurel and pressed it into his hands before he could refuse.

“Hero of the realm,” a bard called, bow sweeping low. “Stand and be seen.”

Yohan stood. He smiled when required. He drank when pressed. He endured.

He was better at endurance than at praise.

Across the firelight he caught Mira’s eye once. She smiled at him—soft, knowing, a little apologetic—and turned back to Lyra, who was listening intently to a singer from the plains. Yohan took that for permission.

He slipped away between verses, between refilled cups, between hands reaching to pull him back into the light. No one noticed at first. The songs were too loud for absence.

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Mira saw him first. She nudged Lyra, tilting her head toward the shadowed alley. “He’s gone,” she whispered, eyes sharp with calculation. “He needs the grove.”

Lyra’s brow furrowed. “The travel ring… the old roots?”

Mira nodded. “We follow. Not to intrude—just to see. To know he is safe.”

Yohan moved through alleys washed in lantern glow and spilled laughter, past doorways where dancing shadows leaped and fell. The city thinned as he walked, noise dissolving into the honest sounds of night: foot on stone, breath in chest, the distant rush of water over weirs.

Beyond the outer ring, where old roots had cracked the paving and never been mended, stood the travel grove.

It was small and easily missed, a ring of trees older than the city’s oldest wall, their bark scarred with sigils worn nearly smooth. The air there was different—cooler, steadier. Paths met and parted beneath the canopy, leading not just outward but elsewhere, if you knew how to ask and when to wait.

Yohan stepped into the grove and let the noise fall away.

He leaned his forehead briefly against the rough bark of the nearest tree and breathed. The laurel slipped from his fingers and lay at the roots, green and quiet. He did not feel ungrateful. He felt tired in the way men of action do when words have been stacked upon them until they obscure the ground.

Here, no one asked him to stand taller.

He sat on a low stone and listened to the leaves move overhead. The grove did not sing his name. It did not care who he had been to anyone else. It held him as land holds a traveler—without judgment, without demand.

After a while, his shoulders loosened. His breath found an easier rhythm. The weight of the day—of weeks, of blood and duty and near-loss—settled into something he could carry again.

Mira and Lyra had followed quietly. They crouched beyond the grove’s entrance, unseen but present. Mira watched him, assessing, protective, calculating how best to tend Toren in his absence. Lyra’s gaze lingered on Yohan, her mind threading possibilities—how to speak, when to step closer, how the bond they held with each other could extend toward the brothers they intended to protect, even marry one day.

Neither made a sound. They would not startle him; he must find his peace. Yet their presence was deliberate, a shadow of care and intent. They waited, witnessing, considering.

Yohan rose finally, brushing leaves from his cloak. He did not speak to the empty grove, but his eyes flicked toward where the sisters hid. He knew—always—that someone watched. And he would allow them to witness, for now. A shared understanding, quiet and necessary.

He stepped into the outer paths, still alone in the grove’s embrace, but aware of the threads extending from him: Mira toward Toren, Lyra toward himself. One careful step at a time, the connections solidified, unspoken yet purposeful.

He would return when called—because kin and oath mattered—but tonight, he let roots and shadow, and the quiet vigilance of two sisters, hold him.

And as the city roared and danced behind him, Yohan’s figure became a quiet marker of endurance, of thought, and of careful foresight. He was no hero in song tonight. He was simply a man walking among the trees, preparing for the steps that the future demanded, steps that would bind the sisters’ hearts to the brothers in ways the realm would soon notice.