Page 106 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Honesty landed between them harder than denial would have. Seren tested the pull in her shoulder and the bruised ache beneath her ribs. Pain flared, familiar enough to be irritating rather than alarming. She should have looked at the sealed fissure. She should have checked the perimeter, woken Mara, marked the place, counted how far she had fallen and whether the rootway beneath them connected to the same system under Briar Hollow.

Instead, she watched the woman in front of her. “Why didn’t you?”

Elira’s gaze shifted toward the fire, where Mara had begun to stir beneath her cloak. Coren slept on, blessedly useless, one arm thrown over his face as though he had personally defeated consciousness and wished to be left in peace.

“Do not mistake an absence of murder for affection,” Elira said.

Seren almost smiled. “I rarely do.”

“Good.”

“But it does raise questions.”

Elira looked back at her, and the falling snow moved. “Everything about you raises questions, General.”

“That may be the nicest thing you have said to me.”

“It was not meant kindly.”

“No,” Seren said, glancing toward the place where the fissure had vanished beneath smooth white snow. “But then, neither was saving me.”

Elira’s expression flickered, barely visible, gone almost before it existed, but Seren saw it anyway. A wound touched by careless fingers. A door closing too late. Something beneath all that frost and poise that had moved before calculation could stop it. Seren should have pressed. She should have asked what language Elira had spoken into the dark, why the root had obeyed, why the fissure had closed only after Elira commanded it, and why the woman had looked down into that blackness as if something inside it had recognized her. Seren should have drawn the knife of questioning and placed it exactly where Elira’s silence had begun to thin.

Instead, she found herself watching Elira’s hands. Red marks crossed her palms where Seren’s sleeve had twisted against her skin. The woman had gripped hard enough to tear herself open before she let the earth take Seren, hard enough that the faintest line of blood had begun to rise beneath the cold. Elira noticed her looking and closed her hands into fists. The movement was too quick—too revealing. Seren lifted her gaze back to Elira’s face, and for one suspended breath, neither of them had the mercy of pretending this was simple.

“Wake your archer.” She gave the silence one last moment to understand its defeat before she answered. “The ground is no longer trustworthy.”

Seren remained at the edge of the standing circle, cold sinking through her coat, shoulder throbbing, wrist marked by the root’s pale pressure. Behind her, Elira spoke quietly to Mara, voice already composed again, as if she had not just dragged Seren from the mouth of the earth with both hands and a language she did not want anyone to know she possessed.

Chapter Seventeen: Aelira Ashwood

Above ground, Listener’s Rise looked almost peaceful.

The General had insisted they remain at Listener’s Ridge for another full day and night, claiming she needed more time to gather whatever scraps of information the place might yield, though the stiffness in her movements after the fall—and the way she favored one leg when she thought Elira was not watching—made the true reason painfully obvious. The storm that rolled through the hills was only an unexpected addition.

The standing stones circled them like patient guardians, their ancient carvings veiled by frost and the last blue remnants of day. Beyond the ridge, the forest thickened into black shapes, branches webbing across the dim sky like veins beneath translucent skin. Briar Hollow lay somewhere south and east, too far for its hearth smoke to be seen, close enough that Aelira felt the direction in her body like a pulled thread.

Wren would be asleep by now, perhaps. Or pretending well enough. Children rarely slept deeply once the world began whispering beneath their dreams.

The thought unsettled her more than she wanted to admit. Wren with her solemn eyes and strange drawings. Wren with blue thread around her wrist. Wren who had drawn Listener’s Rise before the roots delivered the symbol like a summons. Aelira had known many kinds of fear in her life, but there was a particular cruelty in watching children become interesting to old powers. Adults could at least pretend their choices had led them to the blade. Children were simply found.

Aelira turned from the horizon and found Seren watching her.

The general was speaking to Coren, her posture angled toward the boy, her expression arranged into something practical and attentive, but Aelira had survived too many years in court to mistake divided focus for indifference. Seren’s gaze moved once from the standing stone to Aelira’s hand, then away again, swift enough that most people might have missed it.

Seren had seen the roots move. She had felt the false name weaken between them. Questions were gathering behind those gray eyes, sharpening themselves with all the patience of knives being laid out before a careful interrogation.

They made camp inside the stone circle because the old site, for all its unsettling habits, offered better shelter than the exposed ridge. Mara built the fire low and narrow, feeding it with careful hands so the flames would not carry too far across the hill. Coren rubbed down the horses and muttered apologies to them as if they had personally endured political betrayal. Seren laid a rough map across a flat stone and marked the stair entrance in charcoal, frowning at the land as though imperfect terrain were an insult directed at her command.

Aelira watched them work with an irritation she did not immediately name. It had been a long time since she had traveled with people who became useful without needing every breath ordered into place.

Ashwood had moved differently. Beautifully, yes, but beauty could suffocate as easily as it pleased. In the palace, servants anticipated desire before it became language, guards obeyed before thought complicated loyalty, and ministers smiled with knives hidden in the grammar of every sentence. Every footstep knew its proper echo. Every meal, every bow, every silence belonged to expectation.

Here, Mara swore when the fire smoked. Coren dropped a saddlebag on his own foot and looked personally betrayed by leather. Seren corrected the map with the burned end of a stick and muttered something that sounded very much like an insult to geography itself. No one bowed. No one announced. No one watched Aelira as if her existence were a political weather pattern.

Except Seren, but Seren watched everyone. That was, at least, what Aelira told herself.

Dinner was not worthy of the name, though everyone was too tired to insult it properly. There was hard bread, dried meat, and a handful of winter apples bruised from the saddlebag, their skins dented and dark from the road. Mara produced a flask from somewhere within her coat with the smug efficiency of a woman who believed preparedness should include bad decisions, took a swallow, and offered it to Seren.