Page 122 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“Take the eastern houses. Coren goes with you. No one separates, and no one touches anything until you call it out first. If you find anyone, living or dead, you tell me before you move them.”

Coren looked toward the darkened street running south from the square. His face had gone pale enough that his freckles stood sharply against his skin. “General—”

“Move.” She did not raise her voice. She could not afford to.

Mara caught Coren briefly by the shoulder and turned him toward the eastern row of houses. They obeyed because Seren had given them something to do, and because orders were sometimes the last recognizable structure left when the world had stripped everything else away.

Seren’s body understood orders. It understood command. It knew how to keep her back straight and her breathing measured while something inside her began splitting along old fault lines.

She crossed the square toward the village hall. Every step took effort now. Not because she was tired, though exhaustion had hollowed her for days. Because with every doorway she passed, every abandoned task, every absence left sitting in plain view, one name grew louder inside her.

Roran.

She searched automatically as she moved: thresholds, windows, rooflines, snow softened by fresh fall. Blood. Drag marks. Boot prints. Broken locks. Anything that would turn the emptiness into something physical, something with an edge she could meet.

There was nothing. The village hall stood open. Seren stopped outside. She already knew. That did not make stepping inside easier.

Cold smoke and damp wool greeted her first, followed by ink and stale tea. The long table still held their maps. Her reports lay stacked near one corner beneath a mug turned onto its side. Elowen’s notes sat beside them, neat columns describing sleepwalking episodes, fever, root growth, and which children had required sedatives to keep them from wandering after dark.

Roran’s handwriting cut across the map in thick, impatient strokes. One of his knives pinned the eastern edge of the parchment to the table, driven down with more force than necessary because Roran had always treated paper as though it might try to escape if not properly threatened.

Seren stared at it. For one impossible heartbeat, she expected him to appear behind her, some remark about how long she had taken. Something insulting about snow. A complaint that she had once again disappeared into something ancient and dangerous without sufficient supervision.

The room smelled like absence.

Seren moved farther inside. There was no blood. The back room held folded blankets, an open crate of bandages, and the extra spears Roran had ordered positioned near the door so frightened villagers could reach them quickly. Everything had been prepared—that was what hurt.

He had done exactly what she asked. He had held the village. He had prepared defenses. He had kept watch. And whatever had come had rendered all of it meaningless.

“Roran.” Her voice struck the walls and returned to her thinner.

She stepped into the storage room. “Roran!”

The silence afterward was worse because for one fractured moment Seren had truly expected him to answer. She returned to the main room and stopped beside the table, focusing on the map because she could not look at the open doorway again. His final notes ran along the lower edge of the parchment.

Northern watch doubled. Children sleeping in central houses. Chapel floor unstable. Roots active near well. Elowen requests more sedatives. Wren says singing changed.

The last line trailed toward the edge of the page. Seren stared at the place where his writing stopped. She reached for the parchment. Her hand never made it.

Something brown lay beneath the fallen chair beside the table. Seren stopped breathing. One of Roran’s gloves rested half hidden beneath the wooden leg, worn smooth across the palm and split along a side seam he had been claiming he would mend for three years.

She knew that glove. She had thrown it at him once during a winter campaign because he had used the torn seam as an excuse for losing a card game. He had worn it through rain, snow, mud, and half a dozen assignments because, according to him, replacing something merely because it was falling apart encouraged weakness.

Seren crouched. The movement felt far away. Her fingers closed around the leather.

Of course it was cold. Yet the instant she touched it, the hall vanished.

She was twenty-three again, kneeling in a ditch outside Ashwood with arrows cutting through the smoke overhead while Roran bled through both hands.

She remembered pressing hard against his side and screaming at him to keep pressure on the wound because she did not have time for him to die. He had laughed—actually laughed. Blood on his teeth, face gray with pain, and the bastard had told her that if she let him die he would haunt her incompetently out of spite.

She remembered swearing at him until her voice broke. He had survived. He had survived Ashwood. He had survived the palace siege and the famine road. He survived fever outside Halewick while Seren sat beside him for two nights pretending not to count his breaths. He survived the eastern mutiny, two attempts on Seren’s life, and one assassination attempt directed at him because he had insulted the wrong duke’s nephew with such precision that the man apparently decided murder was the only reasonable response.

Roran survived because that was what Roran did. He remained. Through every battle, every failure, every version of Seren that came home meaner or more tired than the one who left, he remained. And Seren had left him here.

The glove trembled in her hand.

“No.” The word escaped before she could stop it.