Page 69 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t nice.”

“I noticed.”

Wren studied her with the blunt concern children reserved for adults who had failed to perform basic maintenance. “You should sleep.”

“So should you.”

The kicking stopped. Wren’s mouth tightened, and the momentary quiet in her face erased some of the mischief that usually made her seem older than seven. “Sleeping is where the singing is.”

Seren’s attention sharpened at once, although she kept her posture loose and her voice mild. Children often offered the truth sideways, tucked between observations about birds and weather, and pushing too quickly could turn honesty into whatever answer they believed an adult wanted.

“Do you hear it while you’re awake?”

“Sometimes," the girl replied.

“When?”

Wren lifted one shoulder beneath the shawl. “When it wants me to.”

The answer settled slowly, resisting every harmless interpretation Seren attempted to give it.

“When it wants you to,” she repeated.

Wren nodded, apparently unaware that she had just transformed the singing from a symptom into something capable of choice.

“Does it speak to you?”

“No.” The child sounded faintly insulted by the question. “It doesn’t have a mouth.”

“A shocking limitation.”

Wren rolled her eyes. “It remembers at people.”

Seren turned toward her. Wren looked back with complete confidence, as though the meaning should have been obvious to anyone possessing a functional mind. Seren resisted the urge to interrogate the grammar before the horror of the idea had fully settled. “What does it remember at you?”

The child’s gaze drifted past the square and toward the northern hills, where the forest rose dark beneath a low sky. Something in her expression loosened and went distant, as if she were no longer seeing the rooftops between them.

“A tree under the world,” she said. “There are roads made of roots, and people walk down them.”

Seren watched the girl’s profile, the faint charcoal stains still lodged along her fingernails despite Elowen’s likely efforts to scrub them clean. “Do they come back?”

“Some of them.” The answer was too immediate.

“And the others?”

Wren frowned. “Maybe they go somewhere else.”

Seren disliked the softness of that possibility far more than she would have disliked certainty. “What happens to the ones who return?”

“They come back different.”

“Different how?”

The child thought for a moment, her brow drawing together as she searched for the nearest word. “Older.”

Cold moved over Seren’s skin beneath her coat. She could have asked what older meant, whether Wren had seen gray hair or bent bodies or simply something ancient looking outward through familiar faces, but the girl’s legs had stopped swinging, and for the first time since Seren sat down she looked entirely her age—small beneath Elowen’s enormous shawl, tired around the eyes, and frightened by something she did not possess the language to explain.