Page 49 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

The child looked toward the village well. Seren followed her gaze. For a moment, the square looked ordinary. Snow, mud, lanterns, frightened people pretending fear had schedules. Then a faint green light pulsed beneath the well stones, soft enough that no one not watching for it would notice.

Wren’s voice dropped. “They like Elira.”

Seren’s attention honed in. “The roots?”

Wren nodded. “They look at her different.”

Seren did not ask how roots looked. She had survived enough impossible things not to argue with a child about vocabulary.

“How do they look at her?”

Wren frowned down at the charcoal staining her fingers. “Like they know her. Like they were waiting.”

The words settled too close to Seren’s earlier unease.

“And me?” Seren asked before she could decide whether the question was wise.

Wren looked up. There was something in the child’s face then that made Seren very still. “The roots get quiet when you look back.”

A cold line moved down Seren’s spine. “Do they?”

Wren nodded solemnly. “They don’t like your sword.”

Seren almost glanced at the blade at her hip, but stopped herself. “Most people don’t.”

“No.” Wren touched the drawing, leaving a black fingerprint beside the well. “Not that sword.”

Seren’s mouth went dry.

Before she could ask what that meant, Wren folded the parchment and held it out to her. Seren accepted it carefully. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Keep it," the child said.

“Why?”

Wren’s eyes moved past Seren, toward the road that led north, toward the old places no one in Briar Hollow wanted to name after dark. “So when grown-ups say they don’t see it, you can show them they do.”

Seren looked at the drawing in her hand. Then at the child beside her. Something in her chest tightened, not loudly, not dramatically, only with the familiar ache of another responsibility finding its way into her hands. “All right,” Seren said. “I’ll keep it.”

Wren nodded once, as though that settled something. She picked up another scrap of parchment and began to draw again. Before Seren could ask what that meant, Elowen called from across the square. Wren slid off the wall, gathering her drawings. “I have to go. Elowen made green soup.”

“You dislike green?”

“I like green.” The girl made a face. “Not when it’s wet.”

She made it halfway across the square before the village remembered it was afraid. At first, it was only a change in sound. Conversation thinned. A shutter closed too quickly. Someone near the well stopped speaking mid-sentence. A woman carrying folded linen drew her daughter closer with a hand that looked gentle only until Seren saw the force in the fingers. Fear moved through Briar Hollow quietly. Not panic yet. Preparation. A village could become a mob long before the first stone was thrown. It began in glances. In held breath. In the sudden agreement of ordinary people that someone else’s body might be the door through which their terror could leave. Wren did not notice at first. Or perhaps she noticed and was too young to understand which kind of noticing mattered. She clutched her drawings against her chest, one bootlace loose and dragging through the mud. The blue thread at her wrist flashed whenever her sleeve slipped back.

“She was near the northern road again,” someone muttered.

“And the roots came after,” another voice said.

Seren turned fully now, one hand lowering with casual precision toward her sword. Roran, speaking with two scouts near the inn, glanced up. He saw her face and stopped mid-sentence.

"Where is the little devil going now?"

Wren looked around, confusion gathering at the edges of her mouth. “I was going to Elowen.”

No one answered. A man stepped into her path. Broad-shouldered. Miller, perhaps, from the flour ghosting his coat. Late forties. Tired eyes. A jaw clenched around grief or anger or both. “Show us,” he said.