Page 78 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“I was hoping for breakfast first,” Roran muttered.

Seren unfolded the drawing. At first glance, it resembled most of Wren’s work: uneven lines, too much charcoal, and proportions governed more by feeling than geography. A steep hill dominated the page, crowned by a ring of stones that looked like broken teeth. Thick roots twisted beneath them, pressed into the parchment so deeply that several lines had nearly torn through. At the center stood one taller stone bearing a symbol Seren had not seen before. A circle broken near the base. Three branching marks beneath it. One vertical line descending through the center like a root driven into darkness.

Seren looked at Elira. The woman’s expression was composed, but her attention had fixed too carefully upon the mark. “You recognize it.”

“You have a charming habit of turning assumptions into statements.”

“And you have a charming habit of not answering them," Seren shot back.

“I had not realized we were exchanging compliments.”

“Elira.” Seren spoke the name more quietly than intended, and something shifted behind the scholar’s eyes before she lowered her gaze to the parchment.

The woman closed her eyes as if deeply inconvenienced before she spoke. “It is an Earthspeaker mark.”

Elowen drew a breath. "What does it mean?”

Elira considered the question long enough for Seren to see the lies gathering. There were people who lied clumsily because invention required more skill than honesty, and there were people who lied with such fluent precision that the pause before speaking became the only visible sign that truth had been weighed and rejected. Elira belonged to the latter group. Then her eyes moved to Wren. The child had gone still, her charcoal-stained fingers resting along the edge of the table as though she were listening for something beneath the conversation. “

It means listening place,” Elira said.

The room seemed to narrow around the words. Seren looked back at the mark. “Listening to what?”

Elira’s gaze dropped briefly toward the floorboards. Beneath them lay cellar stone, old foundations, wet earth, and the pale roots that had begun appearing wherever fear gathered thickest. “To whatever is beneath.”

The tavern felt colder after that. Elowen leaned over the drawing. “Is this place near the village?”

“Yep,” Wren replied before anyone else could answer. She pushed herself higher in the chair, blanket slipping from one shoulder as she stretched across the table and planted one charcoal-smudged finger on the map north of Briar Hollow. Her certainty had none of the hesitation adults usually brought to maps; she did not search for landmarks or ask whether the scale made sense. She simply knew.

Seren followed the line of Wren’s finger past the fenced pastures, beyond the hunter tracks Tommen had shown them, to where the old northern road narrowed beneath the inked edge of the forest. Near the faded ridge line, written in common script so lightly that someone had nearly allowed the name to disappear, was Listener’s Rise.

Seren stared at it.

Beside her, Elira made a quiet sound that might have been a laugh if there had been any amusement in it. Seren looked over in time to catch the slight tightening at the corner of her mouth, not surprise exactly, but recognition sharpened by annoyance.

“You can bury anything beneath enough ignorance,” Elira murmured.

The comment was aimed at the map, but Seren heard the history beneath it.

She turned fully toward her. “You know this place.”

Elira’s gaze remained on Listener’s Rise for half a heartbeat too long. There—another pause. Seren had begun noticing them more often, those tiny spaces in which Elira seemed to choose between several truths before offering the least dangerous one.

“I know the purpose of places like it,” Elira said.

Seren watched her fingers fold together at the edge of the table. Calm posture. Careful voice. Nothing overtly defensive, which made it more defensive. “That was not what I asked.”

Elira finally looked at her. The expression she wore was composed enough to be irritating, but Seren saw the faint challenge underneath it, as though the woman knew perfectly well what Seren was trying to drag into the open and had decided, with equal deliberation, not to help.

“No,” Elira said. “But it was the answer I gave.”

Seren held her gaze a moment longer. Most people looked away when they withheld something important. Elira did the opposite. She met scrutiny directly, almost inviting it, as though boldness could make evasion look like confidence. It was clever. Seren disliked that she respected it.

Across the table, Roran rubbed one hand slowly across his beard, his eyes moving between Elira and the map with the patient resignation of a man who had already realized the morning would involve more secrets than breakfast.

“The hill lies beyond the tracks Tommen showed us,” he said.

Seren looked back down at Listener’s Rise, but she remained aware of Elira beside her. That, too, was becoming inconvenient.