Page 63 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“She could never remember the tune properly. She would begin one song and finish another, and if I corrected her, she threw flour at me until I apologized.” His gaze never left the darkness below. “Terrible voice. Gods, she had a terrible voice.”

Seren felt the shape of the trap then. It had not called him with beauty. It had chosen imperfection. The wrong notes, the flour, the private irritation polished tender by years—small things no stranger should have known and no grieving man could dismiss. Whatever waited in that well understood that love lived most securely in details too ordinary for anyone else to remember.

The stones pulsed. Green light seeped through their seams and moved over the snow, staining Tovan’s bare feet the color of new leaves. For an instant, the air changed. Beneath the cold came the faint warmth of yeast and flour, the remembered scent of bread rising beside a hearth.

Tovan inhaled sharply. Hope transformed his face so completely that Seren almost looked away. She had seen men spared execution with less gratitude. She had watched soldiers wake beneath surgeons’ hands and discover that death had passed them by, yet nothing had ever looked as fragile or dangerous as the belief now opening inside him.

Seren stepped closer. “Maira is gone.”

The words sounded cruel the moment they left her, but cruelty and truth were often forced to share a mouth when kindness would only lead someone farther toward the edge.

“I know,” Tovan whispered. He pressed one hand against his lips as another sob moved through him. “I know she is.”

Seren waited, though some part of her already understood what he would say and wanted desperately to be wrong.

“That is why I came,” he said.

The cold entered her somewhere deeper than skin. He had not been deceived into believing Maira lived. The well had offered something worse: the certainty that death had not placed her beyond reach. Seren had spent years watching people survive by refusing that thought. The dead remained dead because the alternative would hollow every grave and turn mourning into a doorway. She knew this as firmly as she knew how to hold a blade, yet beneath that certainty moved an unwanted understanding.

Had the well called with a voice she had buried, would knowledge alone have kept her away?

She did not allow herself to answer.

At the edge of the square, Elira appeared without sound, her dark cloak nearly disappearing into the night until the green light caught in her silver hair. Seren sensed her before she turned, feeling the subtle pressure that seemed to gather whenever old magic woke in the woman’s presence.

Elira looked first at Tovan and then into the well. Whatever she saw stripped every trace of weariness from her expression.

“Do not listen,” she said.

Tovan turned toward her slowly, and the hope in his face was so defenseless that Seren felt the absurd urge to shield it, though preserving it would mean allowing the thing below to keep its hold on him. “You hear her too.”

“No.” Elira’s voice was cold, but her hand had tightened at her side. “I know better than to call it a song.”

Tovan stared at her, confusion flickering through his grief. “It is her.”

“It knows her voice.”

The distinction landed with visible force. Tovan’s face tightened, and Seren saw anger enter where sorrow had been, the brittle anger of a man being told that the miracle before him was only another cruelty. “You do not know her voice.”

“No,” Elira said, and something almost gentle moved beneath the severity of her expression. “But neither does that thing.”

The well pulsed again. This time, the sound came with it. It was not clear enough to become melody, only the faint shape of a woman humming somewhere beneath the earth, worn thin by stone and distance. The tune faltered halfway through, shifted clumsily into another, and began again.

Tovan made a small, broken sound. “Maira.”

Seren watched the last of his doubt disappear. The thing had made the mistake perfectly. He stepped forward. Seren moved before his weight fully shifted, catching him around the waist and dragging him back as a pale root slipped over the rim toward his reaching hand.

Tovan screamed.

The sound tore through the square with such complete despair that doors opened all around them and villagers appeared in the windows, no longer pretending not to watch.

“No,” he sobbed, twisting against Seren with strength grief had stored in him for years. “No, let me go. Please.”

Seren tightened her grip and planted her boots against the icy stones. “Tovan, listen to me.”

“She was there.”

“It was using her voice.”