Page 46 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

The miller cleared his throat. “Everyone gets distracted.”

Seren turned to him. He looked as though he regretted speaking.

“Of course,” she said evenly. “Do they often return from distraction with soil under their fingernails?”

He looked down. “No.”

That counted as progress. “What else?” Seren asked.

Elowen’s mouth tightened. “The roots.”

The village showed them after the meeting. They grew first near the well. Pale tendrils emerged from the mud in clusters, winding between stones and disappearing beneath the circular wall. They did not look ordinary. Their surfaces were too smooth, too colorless, almost translucent beneath the skin. When rainwater slid over them, they caught the light as if some dim brightness lived beneath the outer layer. Seren crouched and the villagers gathered at a careful distance behind her.

“Careful,” Elowen said.

Seren paused with one hand still half extended toward the roots, not because anything beneath the soil had moved, but because she had become aware of the woman kneeling on the opposite side of them.

At first, she saw only silver hair braided loosely over one shoulder, several strands freed by the wind and drifting across a face still angled toward the earth. Travel dust dulled the hem of her cloak, ink marked the fingers of one hand, and an open notebook rested beside her beneath the weight of a smooth stone. Everything about the arrangement suggested a scholar absorbed in her work.

Everything except the woman herself.

She had not startled when the soldiers entered the square. She had not shifted when Seren approached, nor glanced toward the villagers gathering behind them. Her attention remained fixed on the exposed roots with a concentration so complete that everyone else seemed reduced to noise she had already decided to ignore.

An academic, then.

Seren had known enough scholars to recognize the breed. Most possessed soft hands, impractical boots, and an almost religious willingness to walk directly into danger if the danger had been carved in an interesting language.

This woman did not fit neatly among them. She knelt with one leg positioned beneath her and the other ready to bear her weight. Her shoulders appeared relaxed, though not carelessly so, and her cloak fell in a way that left both hands unobstructed. Even at rest, there was calculation in the arrangement of her body, the kind learned through repetition until caution no longer looked like caution at all. Seren’s gaze dropped briefly to the ground around her.

The woman had chosen a place with a clear view of the square and the northern road. No one could approach from behind without crossing broken stone. A narrow blade rested against her waist, close enough to reach without thought.

The warning came quietly. Not fear, exactly, but the sharpening awareness that this woman had noticed every entrance before Seren had noticed her. As though sensing the direction of Seren’s attention, she finally raised her head. Her gaze moved first to Seren’s cloak, then to the sword at her hip and the hand still hovering near the roots. Only after cataloguing each of those things did she look Seren fully in the face.

There was no surprise in her expression. No uncertainty, no deference, and none of the startled recognition Seren had grown accustomed to seeing when strangers realized who stood before them. The woman regarded her with cool, deliberate attention, as if Seren were not a general whose name had survived a revolution, but another detail in the square that might prove relevant if examined closely enough.

Her eyes flicked once toward Seren’s boot. “You are standing on evidence.”

Seren held her gaze for a beat before looking down. The edge of one boot rested over a patch of disturbed soil near the roots, flattening a faint impression she had not seen.

She stepped aside automatically.

The woman lowered her attention to the ground once more. “Thank you.”

The sincerity of it made the correction considerably worse.

Behind Seren, someone coughed into a hand. The sound carried the suspicious strain of laughter being forced into another shape.

Roran, almost certainly.

Seren did not turn. Murder remained frowned upon in villages she had not yet finished investigating, and explaining his death would only delay matters.

“You’re the scholar,” she said.

The woman’s fingers stilled above the page. Only for an instant. She turned one leaf of the notebook and answered without looking up. “That depends entirely on who is asking.”

The woman appeared to notice her noticing, because a faint smile touched one corner of her mouth before vanishing.

“You’ve been studying these?”