Page 6 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“No,” she repeated. “Do not begin that sentence as if the Council is weather and we are simply discussing an unfortunate storm.”

Roran’s expression hardened with her. “The Council deemed intervention necessary after the third confirmed disappearance.” He spoke cleanly, but the message underneath was understood.

“How efficient of them.”

“Politics,” he muttered.

The word landed foul in the rain. Three villages gone, and someone had spent eight days deciding whether vanished families, abandoned dinners, and children’s toys left in empty rooms met the proper threshold for alarm. These were her villages. These were her people. They were not numbers on parchment; they were families. They were old women with bad knees and children with ugly dolls. They were men who left bread half-cut because they believed they had time.

Roran reached into his coat and withdrew a folded packet, rain-dark at the corners despite the oilskin wrapped around it.

Seren looked at it. “That was not in your letter.”

“No.” Roran’s mouth tightened. “It was not meant to be.”

That was enough to make the cold in her chest sharpen into something dangerous. Seren took the packet from him and unfolded the first page. The report inside was written in a different hand than Roran’s, neater, narrower, the sort favored by men who believed legibility could make cowardice look like order. Half the lower margin had been cut away with a blade.

Seren ran her thumb along the severed edge. “Who removed this?”

Roran looked toward the empty village rather than at her. “It came to me that way.”

“From the Council?”

“From the Preservation Office.” The name settled between them with all the warmth of a drawn knife.

Seren looked down again, and near the top of the page, almost hidden beneath a smear of travel-stained ink, was a stamped notation she had seen only twice before, both times on records that later vanished from public archives.

Restricted magical disturbance.

Do not circulate beyond approved authority.

Seren let out a humorless breath. “Approved authority apparently did not include the general whose roads are swallowing villages.”

Roran’s jaw flexed. “Apparently not.”

She read the remaining lines quickly: references to unusual lantern behavior, reports of villagers dreaming of roots, and one mention of a child in the second village drawing underground rooms she had never seen. Then another clean cut where the next paragraph should have been. Someone had not merely failed to tell her things. Someone had decided which pieces of the truth she was permitted to carry into danger. Seren folded the report with slow precision. That was for Roran’s benefit. Inside, something much less controlled had begun sharpening its teeth.

“Find out who cut the pages,” she ordered.

Roran’s expression darkened. “Gladly.”

“And Roran?”

The man waited beneath the weight of it.

“If another report reaches you with missing pieces, bring it to me before anyone in a clean office decides what I am allowed to know.”

A faint, grim smile touched his mouth. “That sounds dangerously close to treason.”

“No,” Seren said, looking toward the lantern-bright village. “That sounds like competence.”

Roran followed her gaze and for a while, neither spoke. Rain moved over the empty street, silvering the stones, gathering in the grooves between them. Every window still burned. Every doorway still waited. The whole village had the unbearable neatness of a room arranged after a death no one was ready to name.

Roran glanced toward the darkening tree line. “It’s like they all just stopped."

The thought moved through Seren with a slow, cold weight. The village had not been emptied by fear. Fear made messes. Fear knocked over chairs, tore clothes from hooks, dragged valuables into sacks, trampled mud across thresholds. This was controlled, precise, and beautifully executed. She hated that word, beautiful, and hated that it came to her mind when describing what they now witnessed.

“Who else is here?” she asked.