Page 57 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Wren leaned backward until she was staring upside down at the gray sky, her braid nearly brushing the mud. “They know you.”

The cold moved through Aelira before the meaning fully settled. She kept her voice level. “Who does?”

“The roots.”

The answer came with such casual certainty that it might have concerned neighbors, livestock, or someone seen crossing the road. Aelira’s gaze returned to the pale tendrils beneath the fence. They remained harmless in appearance, half submerged in mud and shining faintly where they should not have shone at all.

“What makes you say that?” she asked.

Still upside down, Wren shrugged. “They talk different when you’re around.”

Aelira’s fingers curled slowly into her palm.

This was no longer merely strange. Jacob had heard singing. Wren heard distinctions within it—patterns, shifts, perhaps even intention. Not language as adults understood it, but something beneath language, old enough that words might only be the shape it took when forced through a human mind. “What do they say?”

Wren righted herself and regarded Aelira with extreme pity. “They don’t say things.”

“Then how do you know?”

The child became quiet, searching for language large enough to hold what she meant. At last, she pressed one muddy hand against the earth beside the wall and left it there. “It feels like when someone recognizes you.”

Aelira did not move. Once, the land had known her before she touched it. Roots had shifted from her path, doors grown from living wood had opened beneath her hand, and rivers had slowed at her crossing—not because she commanded them, but because the old bonds beneath Ashwood understood the shape of her blood.

For ten years, the earth had answered her with silence. Recognition should have felt like mercy—this did not.

Mercy did not usually arrive through pale roots spreading beneath a frightened village while children dreamed of something sleeping under an ancient tree. Mercy did not hide beneath soil and whisper through those too young to understand what listened back.

Wren abruptly reached into the pocket of her coat. “Oh. I found a paper.”

The change in subject came so quickly that Aelira nearly missed the object pinched between her muddy fingers. A broken wax seal clung to one folded edge. Coalition blue. The unease inside Aelira settled into something colder and much more precise.

“Wren,” she asked, watching rain gather along the torn paper, “where did you find that?”

Wren pointed toward the northern road. Beneath the fence, one of the pale roots shifted.

Aelira held out one hand. “May I see it?”

Wren gave it over without hesitation.

“You should hesitate more when surrendering stolen government correspondence.”

“I didn’t steal it," she demanded. "A soldier dropped it.”

“That is the traditional beginning of theft.”

“He dropped it where I could find it.”

“An argument favored by criminals and children.”

“I’m not a criminal.”

“Yet.”

Wren seemed pleased by the possibility. Aelira unfolded the paper carefully. Much of it had been torn away, likely damaged by rain and careless handling. The remaining section was wrinkled, mud-stained, and nearly illegible in places. Only fragments remained—fragments were often enough.

She read it slowly.

Maintain observation of Subject Rose.