Page 73 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“At least you admit it.”

“I find denial dull.”

Seren scoffed. “Then you must find yourself fascinating.”

Aelira looked up before discipline could prevent it. Seren stood several paces away with damp hair curling slightly at her temples and mud darkening the lower edge of her cloak. Evening had sharpened the planes of her face, turning the gray of her eyes almost blue beneath the failing light, yet amusement had softened something near her mouth.

The answer had surprised Aelira. Worse, it had pleased her. She felt the beginning of a smile before she could stop it, only the slightest betrayal at the corner of her mouth, but Seren caught it immediately. Of course she did. The general’s own lips threatened to answer before flattening with suspicious haste.

Aelira wondered if Seren understood how transparent that effort was.

Probably not.

People rarely recognized the moment they betrayed themselves. They noticed afterward, when shame or caution had already arrived to rewrite the evidence. Seren Veyr, however, appeared determined to become exceptional in every inconvenient category available to her. Aelira lowered her gaze to the roots before the exchange could become warmer than hostility.

“These tracks led here,” Seren said as she crouched across from her.

“So they did,” Aelira murmured.

“You found them too?”

“Yes.”

Seren waited. “When?”

Aelira let the pause stretch just long enough to become rude. “Before you.”

The weight of Seren’s stare settled over her immediately. Aelira could feel it even without looking, an awareness moving over her skin with a warmth that had no place in the damp cold of the clearing. Behind Seren, Roran made a strangled sound that might have been laughter struggling heroically not to become insubordination.

“Cooperation,” Seren said, “would make this considerably easier.”

Aelira’s gaze dropped to the general’s hands.

One rested loosely against Seren’s knee while the other hovered above the disturbed soil without touching it, close enough to examine the pale roots but restrained from making contact. The hesitation was slight, hardly worth noticing, and yet Aelira noticed because it had not been there before.

When Seren first arrived in Briar Hollow, she had approached old magic the way Aelira imagined she had once approached kingdoms: directly, suspiciously, with the quiet conviction that anything resistant enough could eventually be made to yield beneath sufficient pressure. A dangerous instinct, though hardly an unfamiliar one. Men had built empires from the same arrogance and then written histories describing conquest as order.

Seren had fought to destroy one of those empires.

That did not make the instinct less recognizable.

Aelira remembered stories told after Ashwood fell, all of them polished smooth by victory. Seren Veyr breaking gates. Seren Veyr cutting through royal defenses. Seren Veyr standing beneath burning banners while frightened people called destruction liberation because history had already begun choosing which dead deserved grief. Even now, years later, Aelira could summon the old anger with humiliating ease, hot and precise beneath her ribs. She had carried it so long that hatred no longer felt like something she possessed. It felt structural, built into her the way roots were built beneath soil.

It was safer when Seren behaved accordingly. But now she waited. She watched the roots without reaching for them. She studied the disturbed earth as though it might deserve the dignity of being understood before being handled. Aelira hated the small flare of approval that moved through her. It felt almost like betrayal of the dead and of every person whose absence Aelira had spent ten years arranging into something survivable. Of a mother whose blood still lived more vividly in memory than most living faces. Of a kingdom reduced to cautionary tales and songs sung by people who had never smelled its libraries burning.

Seren Veyr was not supposed to improve. She was not supposed to learn. Most of all, she was not supposed to become more difficult to hate. Aelira curled one finger against the edge of her notebook until the pressure grounded her.

“I have rarely found easier to be synonymous with wiser,” she said.

Seren’s eyes narrowed. “That sounds like something someone says immediately before withholding useful information.”

The irritation in her voice should have restored the balance between them. It nearly did.

Aelira allowed herself the faintest smile. “It is a terrible habit of mine.”

“Among many, I’m sure.”

There it was again, that dry edge Seren wielded without effort, sharp enough to answer Aelira without ever quite becoming cruel. Aelira resented how easily the general met her there. She had expected righteousness from Seren, perhaps arrogance, perhaps the humorless certainty of a woman accustomed to hearing her own name sung back to her.