Page 74 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Instead, Seren had the deeply inconvenient habit of being funny.

Aelira lifted her gaze.

She let it travel slowly over Seren’s face, allowing the scrutiny to linger because retreat would reveal far more than boldness ever could. The general looked tired beneath the failing light, mud along her cloak and damp hair beginning to curl near her temples, yet there was something infuriatingly steady in the way she met Aelira’s attention.

Aelira could have hated beauty easily. Beauty was superficial. Beauty had never burned a palace. What unsettled her was everything gathering underneath it. The restraint. The intelligence. The willingness to reconsider. Small human details had begun attaching themselves to the symbol she had carried in her head for ten years, and Aelira despised every one of them for making Seren Veyr harder to keep safely monstrous.

So she reached for the weapon that remained easiest.

“Careful, General.” Aelira let the smile sharpen just enough to conceal everything beneath it. “If you continue cataloguing my habits, people may begin to think you are interested.”

The words were lighter than the resentment beneath them. That was the point. If Seren heard flirtation, she would not hear accusation. If Seren answered with irritation, Aelira would not have to ask herself why some disloyal part of her hoped she would answer at all. The words altered the space between them. Seren held her gaze, and for one suspended moment neither woman yielded. The general’s expression did not redden or soften; Seren was not so easily embarrassed—she looked caught. That distinction sent a small and entirely unhelpful satisfaction through Aelira.

Behind her, Roran found sudden fascination in a low-hanging branch. The hunter turned his face toward the trees. Even the scouts began examining the perimeter with an exaggerated professionalism that suggested they valued continued employment. The forest quieted with them. The root beneath Aelira’s hand stopped humming. For one heartbeat, the network listened. The subtle vibration running beneath the clearing simply ceased, leaving an absence Aelira felt inside her teeth.

Seren shifted her weight, and whatever had gathered beneath the soil loosened again. “What did you find?”

Aelira brushed wet leaves from the exposed root cluster. “They have changed direction.”

Seren leaned closer. “Toward the village?”

“No.” Aelira lowered her voice instinctively, though anything buried beneath them would hear whether she whispered or shouted. “Away from it.”

Seren shifted nearer to see. The distance between their shoulders narrowed enough that Aelira caught the scent of rain and leather clinging to her coat, woodsmoke beneath it, and something warmer belonging only to skin.

She concentrated fiercely on the roots. “These are not separate growths,” Aelira said. “What you have seen beneath Briar Hollow belongs to the same buried network.”

Roran crouched beside Seren, broad forearm resting across one knee. “One plant?”

“Not a plant in the way you mean.”

His brow tightened and Aelira considered the amount of truth she could safely offer. Too little and Seren would press harder. Too much and the questions would begin leading backward through history, toward Ashwood, toward bloodlines, toward names that had survived only because everyone believed them buried.

“Forests do not begin and end with what grows above the soil,” Aelira explained. “Beneath us, roots divide, graft, decay, and grow through one another until the distinction between one living thing and the next becomes less certain. Old magic deepens those connections. What wounds one part of the network may leave an impression elsewhere. What touches it in one place can be remembered in another.”

Seren’s attention shifted from the roots to Aelira. “Remembered by what?”

There it was—the question humanity had asked for centuries and then ruined entire civilizations trying to answer with certainty.

Aelira’s mouth curved faintly. “That is the question wiser people spent lifetimes learning not to answer too confidently.”

Seren did not appear satisfied.

Aelira moved one finger above the parallel tendrils without allowing skin to meet them.

“Surface Earthspeakers work with what might be called nearby memory. A burned tree retains something of fire. Stone from a collapsed wall may hold the pressure of its breaking. Rivers remember their first courses long after people force them elsewhere. Skilled speakers can sometimes draw those impressions forward or persuade living things to repeat an old pattern.”

Roran glanced at her. “Persuade. Not command?”

“Command is possible.”

Memory rose before Aelira could stop it.

Her mother beneath the Ashwood boughs, blood bright across her palm. Roots lifting around her in dark, impossible arches. Not servants answering a queen, whatever the histories later claimed, but something ancient recognizing the terms of an agreement older than either of them.

Aelira forced the image down. “It is also crude,” she continued, “costly, and rarely forgotten. The earth obeys force much as people do.”

Roran’s expression hardened slightly. “Resentfully.”