I am ten years old, sitting on a short stool watching my dinner cook in the pot over the fire while Mother reads from her old book with the tree on the cover. It is near midsummer, and the swell of crickets outside fills the room. There are thousands of them humming perfectly in tune together. I have tried and failed to count them all. Someone knocks on the door.

Mother and I both look up; I look to her, and she looks to the door. The knock comes again, a loud percussive interlude. There is no mistaking the sound; the confusion lies with its origin. Mother sets down her book and comes to look into the pot, reaching above her head to the little pot of lyrium on the mantle. She nicks her finger with a small knife and drops of blood fall into my dinner, followed by a pinch of dust. I lean forward, curious, and in the ripples on the surface of what used to be my stew I make out the darkness of the small clearing in front of our house, and the small gathering of figures before our door. There is another knock.

"Not a word," Mother whispers to me, but she does not tell me to hide. I turn on the stool and watch her stand before the closed door and call, "Who goes there?"

"We seek words with the daughter of Asha'bellanar," says the voice, the wood of the door making it hard to hear. I recognize all the words, but the sounds are strange, as if the speaker does not know how to speak properly.

Mother says, "How many are you?"

"Four." I glance at the pot, but without Mother's concentration the pictures has disappeared. "We seek shelter for the night. We've meat to cover the debt."

My dinner is lost to magic, and when Mother looks back to me I give her a hopeful look. She sighs, and I know she is trying to decide what to do with me. In the end she chooses nothing, and instead says, "Enter, then."

She opens the door and the four come into our house. They are not like Mother and I. They are all shorter than she is, though still taller than me, and their faces are thin, their noses oddly rounded, their eyes enormous. Their ears are their most startling feature, as though someone has pinched them and pulled them back and then flattened them, as Mother does when she makes cookies. One of them is a woman, or at least her shape matches Mother's; she carries a staff on her back, as Mother sometimes does, while the other three have curved staffs secured with string. They wear long cloaks, and their clothes have far more fur and decoration than mine do, though I cannot guess why. I can do little more than stare, and hope they will speak again.

The woman does. "Thank you for your courtesy," she says, her words still strange, almost whistling, looking around our house. It is rounded, the fireplace on one side and a few chairs and a table in the middle and Mother's shelf and the door on the other side, the wall curving into the ceiling low above our heads. There is a wall in the middle that stops halfway, blocking the beds from view while still letting in the heat from the fireplace. Everything is made of wood and various shades of brown, aside from the black cookpot.

"There's little space, but 'tis enough," Mother says, her words short. "If you have sought me for a purpose, name it."

The woman nods to one of the men, who pushes aside his cloak to reveal several small pouches. He opens one and withdraws something—I catch a glimpse of something fist-sized, firelight glinting gold off it—and shows it to Mother. "Do you know this?" the woman asks.

Mother's face does not change, but she does not answer. She does not look at me, either, but she says, "Morrin, fetch the blankets from the chest at the foot of my bed, and bring them to our guests."

At once all eight enormous eyes are looking at me, and I am glad to hop off my stool and have work. The peaceful hum of the crickets has turned shrill in the presence of the new people, and part of me is afraid that Mother will work some sort of magic to do...something. I am not sure what I fear. I do not know what Mother's magic can do, aside from call animals and make the air sleepy and still and thick. I do not think it can stop death, but part of me knows that it can cause it.

I go to the chest and pull out the blankets—and these at least have colors other than brown, like green and blue and yellow—and although I know they are speaking with Mother I do not listen. When I come back, my arms full of rough, warm cloth, the woman is sitting on the table, the men on the floor, and Mother in her chair. She is holding something in her two hands, but I cannot see what it is, and her face is frowning. I give the men their blankets, staring at their faces and their ears; the woman takes the blue one, and says, "A boy?"

"My son," Mother says. This is what I am; it explains the entirety of me. I am Mother's son and she is my mother and together we are happy. I smile at her.

"Where is his father?" asks one of the men. His words are wrong, too, and one of them is a word I do not know.

"Ferelden," Mother answers, another word I do not know, "if he still lives."

"We're a far cry from Denerim," the woman says.

"As the crow flies," Mother says, her voice...flat. She answers them as if she does not wish to but feels she must, and must do so honestly. "It is safer here."

"Farther from the Chantry," one of the men says. My caution fights with my curiosity as I return to my stool, looking to Mother for instructions she is not giving. "It has been an odd time for mages."

"Indeed," Mother says.

"What's his name?" the woman asks, and I answer without waiting for Mother's permission.

"Morrin," I say, and as if the word were the final strike, questions fall out of my mouth. "What are you? Why are you here? Can you do magic?"

Mother says my name in a warning tone, but the woman laughs and says, "I was wondering if you could talk! We are Dalish, traveling on a mission from our clan. I am our Keeper's first, so yes, I can look through the Veil." She smiles at me and says, "With such a powerful mother, your own abilities must be strong."

"Morrin is no mage," Mother says, still warning.

"Still, no doubt his dreams are interesting." The Dalish woman still regards me. She is poking me with her questions and her eyes—large and oval and blue—and her smile—it is a pretty smile. But I have watched a worm tunnel through dirt and seen snakes sunning themselves on rocks and created rainbows from puddles and I do not know why her smile should be so pleasant to view. It is a small thing, compared to the vastness of the world around my house.

"Too much lyrium in the air," one of the men says. I am still looking at the woman's smile.

"As I said, Morrin is no mage," Mother says. "He is, however, a boy who needs his sleep."

She stands and looks at me and I am off the stool and behind the wall in three steps. I am not scared of Mother, but I respect her silent commands. I pull off my shirt and lay atop my blanket; it is too warm to sleep under it. Mother comes and bends over me, as she has not done in quite a while, and deep in her yellow eyes I think I see...worry. I do not know what worry is, exactly, but the word marks her expression and the fact that I can see her worry bothers me.

Mother would not like it if she knew I knew she worried. It is not something I am meant to know.

She merely says, "Sleep well, boy," and places a hand on my forehead; before I can protest, I am asleep.

o.O.o

I do not know how long I sleep. My sleep is deep and restful, as always, and when I wake I open my eyes and see Mother placing the folded blankets back in the chest. "They're gone?" I ask, sitting up and rubbing my eyes.

"Yes," she says, not looking at me. "They still have many miles to cover before they return to their clan."

"Did you recognize what they showed you?"

She smooths down the blanket in the chest, running her hands over it, and closes the trunk with a thud. "Yes," she says, clicking the lock over her answer as if to hide it.

"What was it?"

Mother looks at me. She is worried, even if she will not voice it aloud. "It belonged to my mother," she says, and it is my turn to hide my feelings. Flemeth's name fills the space of the silence between us. I realize that there is a space between my mother and I, that Mother is also Morrigan and that Morrigan has her own Mother, and therefore her own childhood, and perhaps a life apart from me, a life with Dalish and fathers and Ferelden. I do not know why she has not told me this before, and I do not know if she will answer me truthfully, should I ask.

Either way, I have to try. "Mother," I say, "what's a father?"

She stands a moment longer, looking at me with her arms crossed. I think she is trying to decide whether or not she should answer my questions—whether or not she can. I look at her and try to tell her without speaking that I am her son. There is no one else to ask; there is no one else I want to ask.

She sits on her bed, across from me, and says, "Children do not simply appear from nothing, boy. They require a mother and a father to come together and make them. A father is a man who causes a woman to have a child and become a mother." She pauses, her eyes searching the ceiling. I wait for her to decide if this definition suits her. "One might argue that a father is a man who also helps raise the child, but that was never an option."

I long to ask why, but Mother only offers explanations when she thinks they are needed. "What's Ferelden?" I ask instead.

"A country," she says, "far away from here."

"What's a country?"

She raises her eyes to the ceiling again, this time in exasperation. "We shall be at this all morning, Morrin."

"I want to know," I say, putting up another hopeful expression, "please."

She sighs and says, "At least put yourself to some use, and help me tend the garden."

I exchange my usual morning ritual of inspecting all the trees around our house for stooping on my hands and knees and removing the unhelpful flowers from the bed of dirt where Mother has planted the flowers she uses in her magic. I keep asking questions, about countries (pieces of land full of people who are the same) and Denerim (a city) and cities (overcrowded, cramped stone prisons into which people voluntarily group themselves to encourage mutual insanity); Mother's voice grows hoarse with answering, and she tells me which books on her shelf will give better explanations. My mind cannot be still. It races from idea to idea (there are other people in the world, and many of them) (people use stone for building?), creating pictures of the world I have never thought about. Occasionally my mind adds words Mother has not used, unfamiliar labels for my imaginings which yet ring true. I do not pause to consider this; it is part of me, and there are too many other wonders to think about.

The day passes as a blur of knowledge and digging; Mother scrubs me in the washtub before allowing me to bed. I lay on my back, tired but still thinking, though my thoughts are unfocused and blurry. "Mother," I say, my voice sleepy, and I hear her sigh as she lies on her bed, "what're dreams?"

"Dreams," she says, her voice equally tired, "are memories of visiting the Fade while you slept."

"Oh," I say. I now know what the Fade is (a confusing realm where mages get their magic, and people go when they sleep), but I have no memories of visiting such a strange place. "Do I have dreams?"

"Everyone has dreams, Morrin." She has turned her face into her pillow. "If you sleep now, you will have one."

I have learned so much today, it seems impossible that the night should pass without at least one incident; but sleep is, as always, a dark, empty, restful place, and by morning I have forgotten that I have nothing to remember.