Page 132 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Seren noticed the bandage around Aelira’s palm. “You need that cleaned properly before we go down.”

Aelira did not look up from securing the lantern shutter. “I need many things.”

“Start with the one currently bleeding.” Seren stepped closer at once.

Aelira felt the movement before she saw it, the general’s presence entering the space beside her with all the subtlety of weather changing pressure before a storm. She looked up at last and found Seren’s gaze fixed not on her face, but on her hand.

That should not have unsettled her.

It was only her hand, wounded one, but nothing more. If anything, it was a practical concern before a dangerous descent. Yet Seren reached for it with such careful restraint that Aelira almost preferred roughness.

Roughness could be resisted.

Care was more difficult.

Care asked nothing and somehow took up more room.

Aelira let Seren take her wrist. Barely, and only because she allowed it. The contact was brief, gloved fingers against skin warmed by pain, but the world had become increasingly fond of making brief things significant.

Seren unwound the edge of the bandage enough to inspect the cut. Her mouth tightened. “You should have said it reopened.”

“You should have noticed it sooner.” Her reply was swift, cutting, and much too soft for her own liking.

Seren looked up from the bandage and for one dangerous heartbeat, they were too close for the lie of indifference to pass easily between them. Aelira saw the exhaustion beneath Seren’s command, the anger held in check, the suspicion sharpened by every answer Aelira had refused to give her.

Beneath all of it, worse than all of it, was concern.

Seren cleaned the cut with efficient, battlefield care.

There was no flourish to dismiss, no softness offered for its own sake, no sudden intimacy Aelira could name as manipulation. Seren unwrapped the old linen, rinsed the wound with water cold enough to sting, and bound fresh cloth around Aelira’s palm with the practiced hands of someone who had done this in tents, barns, battlefields, and worse places where gentleness had been a luxury no one could afford.

Aelira watched the bend of Seren’s head. Snow had melted into her dark hair. A bruise shadowed her jawline. A small cut marked her temple. Beneath all of it sat the restraint of a woman holding grief away from her hands so they could remain useful.

Aelira should have said something sharp. Something about sentimental generals, battlefield nurses, or the humiliating persistence of human concern. Instead, she said nothing. As Seren tied the bandage firmly, her thumb settled once against the inside of Aelira’s wrist before she released her. Accident, perhaps, if accidents existed. Aelira did not believe in accidents.

“There,” Seren said. “Now you may continue pretending you are made of stone.”

Aelira flexed her hand and ignored the place where Seren’s thumb had been. “Stone is at least sensible enough not to ask questions.”

“Stone does not lie to me.”

Aelira’s smile was faint and sharp. “How fortunate for the stones.”

Seren held her gaze a moment longer. Concern lived there, and irritation, and grief sharpened so recently that it made every softer thing more dangerous. Aelira felt the old impulse to step back from it. Concern from Seren Veyr should have been impossible. It should have been insulting. Instead, it warmed some exhausted, treacherous place inside her, which was reason enough to become cruel.

She did not become cruel. “If infection sets in—” Seren began.

Aelira bit back a groan. “If I die of an infected hand while traveling beneath the world through ancient rootways toward an entity that steals villages, please feel free to remark upon the irony at my funeral.”

Mara, passing behind them, made a face. “I object to how specific that was.”

Coren whispered, “I object to all of it.”

Seren’s mouth curved faintly. “You are welcome.”

“I did not thank you,” Aelira interjected.

“You were thinking it very quietly.”