Page 124 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

The room moved around Seren. For one dangerous moment, she wanted to turn on Elira. Not because it would be fair. Because grief required somewhere to go, and Elira was standing there with secrets in her blood and old roads answering her name. Elira had known things. Not all things, perhaps. Not enough. But more than she had said. More than Seren had been able to force from her. More than might have mattered had she spoken sooner.

The thought rose cruel and hot. Seren closed her fist around it until it broke. No. Blame could wait. The villagers could not. She folded the drawing with care that felt obscene and tucked it inside her coat. Elira had not moved. Her face had gone very pale. Seren had seen Elira wear composure like armor enough times now to recognize when something struck beneath it. The message had wounded her.

It said Elira came too late.

Good, some ugly part of Seren thought. Then she hated herself for it immediately. “Elowen?” Seren called.

No answer came back.

“Wren?”

The house held its breath.

Seren checked the small bedroom, though she knew. The bed was unmade. A shawl lay on the floor. A cup of water rested on the windowsill with a thin crust of ice beginning at the rim. No bodies. No blood. No broken glass. No sign that anyone had fought hard enough. If they had fought, perhaps Seren could have forgiven herself a fraction. If there had been blood, overturned furniture, splintered doors, anything that said Roran and Elowen and the villagers had stood against it until overcome, there would at least be proof of resistance. But this looked like surrender without consent. As if the whole village had simply listened—and gone.

Seren returned to the main room. Mara stood near the door, eyes downcast. Coren’s face had lost every trace of youthful eagerness. He looked noticeably young and sick. Elira stood beside the table, one hand gripping the chair hard enough that her knuckles had gone white beneath her glove.

Seren looked at her. “What happened?” The question came quietly.

It cut through the abandoned cottage with more force than shouting would have. Around them, the room remained arranged for lives that had been interrupted mid-breath: lavender drying above the hearth, broth cooling in a pot gone thick at the edges, a child’s cup overturned beside the table. Every ordinary detail sharpened the wrongness until Seren could feel it pressing beneath her skin, looking for somewhere to become violence.

Elira looked up. For once, no clever answer came. “The rootway opened,” she said.

Seren waited. Elira’s throat moved as she swallowed. “It took them below.”

“Alive?” The word broke slightly despite Seren’s attempt to hold it steady, and she hated that. She hated the small human fracture of it, hated that it gave anything away, hated that she could see Wren’s drawings in her mind and Roran’s glove in her hand and Elowen’s bitter tea sitting untouched on a table no one had returned to.

Elira looked away. “Some may be.”

Seren breathed in through her nose, slow and controlled, because control was the last useful thing she owned. The air smelled of lavender, cooling broth, damp wool, and abandoned children. Grief moved through her, hot and shapeless, but she caught it before it could break open and turned it into something colder. Something with edges.

“Where?” she asked.

Elira closed her eyes once, then opened them again, and Seren watched the mask rebuild itself. The stillness. The distance. The old, infuriating elegance of a woman who knew how to hide behind composure even while an entire village had vanished beneath her feet. “I do not know.”

Seren stepped closer. Mara’s attention shifted from the doorway. Coren went very still near the hearth. Neither of them spoke.

“Guess,” Seren said.

Elira’s gaze flicked to her face. “Seren—”

“No.” Seren’s voice stayed low, but the word landed hard enough to make the room feel smaller.

“Do not soften my name like you are trying to lead me away from the edge of something. You know more than you are saying. You have known more since the first night I met you, and I have allowed that because secrets are useful until they start costing lives.”

Elira’s expression did not change, but something behind her eyes tightened. Seren moved another step nearer, close enough now that Elira had to look up at her or make a deliberate choice not to. Seren did not touch her. She did not reach for her sword. She did not need to. There were older kinds of threat than steel, and Seren had learned most of them in rooms where maps decided which people lived long enough to become statistics.

“Elira,” she said, and the false name filled the room like a challenge, like an accusation, like a plea she was too angry to admit. “Guess.”

For one suspended moment, Elira looked as though she might refuse. Seren hoped she did not. That was the part of herself she disliked most. The part that had survived war by becoming particularly good at deciding how much pressure a person could take before they broke. The part that knew where to stand, how quietly to speak, how to make silence feel like a blade laid flat against the throat.

She would not hurt Elira—not here. Not like this. But there were frightened children somewhere beneath the earth, Roran was gone, and whatever tenderness had begun growing between them did not have the right to stand in front of the truth. Elira seemed to understand that.

Her eyes opened slowly, as though she had to choose the world again before allowing herself to see it. “They will have been carried along the nearest active rootway,” she said. “The one beneath the northern road. It likely connects back through Listener’s Rise and Tel’Mara, then deeper into the old system.”

Seren’s jaw tightened. “Toward what?”

Elira’s face turned to stone—there it was. She kept shutting the door. Seren felt grief harden further inside her, turning useful, turning dangerous. She thought of Wren’s small hand against the roots in the drawing. She thought of Roran’s unfinished notes. She thought of every empty chair in Briar Hollow and every person who had trusted her to come back with answers before the dark found them.