Page 13 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

The northern village at the third seal has emptied. The old marks have surfaced. The temple reads: The heir must return.

Reluctantly, she continued. Each line seemed heavier than the last. A sensation she had spent a decade trying to forget began stirring somewhere deep inside her. For a moment, the tower around her was no longer stone and rain and exile. It was the chamber beneath the Worldroot Tree. It was her father’s voice swallowed by roots. It was a child standing too straight because she had not yet learned that inheritance could be another word for sentence.

Her grip tightened slightly around the parchment. The movement was small and barely noticeable, yet it was the first outward sign of emotion she had displayed in years. She hated the vulnerability of it, and hated the memory it awakened. She hated it because she had felt this before. It had been earlier, much earlier, when she had been standing beneath the Worldroot Tree while her father spoke of responsibilities she had not yet been old enough to understand. She remembered the expression on his face: the exhaustion, the certainty.

And for the first time in many years—she understood it completely.

Chapter Three: Seren Veyr

“You’re doing it again.” Roran appeared beside her with a strip of dried meat in one hand and the expression of a man preparing to become irritating on purpose. He had shed his cloak and rolled his shoulders as if the cold could be bullied into leaving him alone.

Seren did not look away from the pit. “Doing what?”

“Staring into the abyss," he replied, "dramatically.”

“I am investigating."

“You have been investigating for fifteen minutes.”

“Thoroughly.” Seren spoke mostly to herself, which was usually how her least diplomatic thoughts survived.

“The abyss remains unimpressed.”

Despite herself, Seren almost smiled, though the expression did not last.

Roran leaned against a broken pillar that had once supported one corner of the temple roof. “What do you think?”

Seren considered the question—it was the same one everyone kept asking her, though most were wise enough not to do it aloud. Soldiers wanted her to have an answer. Villagers from the surrounding farms wanted her to have an answer. The Council, no doubt, wanted her to produce one clean enough to place in a report and distant enough to keep blame from reaching their chamber doors. She wanted an answer too. That did not simply make one appear.

“I think,” she spoke at last, “someone is going to write a report about this.”

The silence stretched and the man at her side let out a heavy breath. “That’s your professional assessment?”

“No.” She folded her arms, still watching the darkness below. “My professional assessment is that I would very much like to find whoever invented reports and throw them into that hole.”

That earned a soft snort from him, and it was a welcome sound—normal, and human. The village contained precious little of either. Roran chewed thoughtfully, then nodded toward the excavation. He looked down into the pit. “Maybe they went down there.”

At that, Seren abandoned the hole and turned her head towards the soldier behind her.

Roran sighed. “Right. All of them in that hole is a stretch. Terrible suggestion.”

“I did not say terrible.” Clearly, she did not have to say it out loud for him to hear her. A few of the nearby soldiers glanced at them, then quickly looked away when Seren’s gaze passed over them. She noticed the way they moved: quieter than necessary, shoulders tight beneath damp leather, hands lingering near weapons that would be of little use against whatever had emptied a village without spilling blood. They were trained, but training gave structure to fear. It did not remove it.

Seren understood that better than most. Fear was not failure. Fear was information. It told the body something had changed before the mind had decided what to call it. A foolish commander dismissed fear because it made soldiers uncomfortable. A better one taught them where to put it.

“Rotate the lower team in half an hour,” she instructed to Roran. “No one stays down there long enough to start imagining shapes in the dark.”

He gave her a sideways look. “You are saying that like they are the only ones imagining shapes in the dark.”

“I am their commander. I’m allowed to do it first.”

“That is not how command works.” Roran made a heavy sound.

“It often is.”

Roran’s mouth twitched, but his attention drifted again toward the excavation. “The men are uneasy.”

“They should be.”