Page 109 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Mara’s head turned very slightly from the edge of the circle. Then, with admirable self-preservation, she looked away. Aelira should have been angry. She was angry, certainly, and beneath the anger came something more unsettling—recognition. Recognition did not absolve. It simply existed in the room and refused to leave.

Aelira reached for the flask Mara had left near the fire. “You do not know me.”

“No,” Seren agreed.

“Remember that.”

“I do.”

Aelira drank deeply this time, and the liquor burned too hard. Seren’s mouth curved faintly. Aelira tilted her head. “What?”

“I am relieved,” Seren said. “I was beginning to think you were entirely ornamental.” Seren looked watched her with an expression so solemn it became, after a moment, suspicious.

Aelira realized with mild horror that the general was joking. Badly, but still trying. Joking all the same. “I have never been accused of ornamentation without someone regretting it,” Aelira said.

“I have survived worse.” Seren’s smile appeared then, small, and tired and unmistakably real.

Aelira looked away first. Victory, she told herself—a small one.

Still victory, nonetheless.

The sky darkened from iron blue to black. Stars emerged in the breaks between clouds, cold and indifferent above the stone circle. The open stair waited several paces away, marked by stones and shadow. From the outside, it looked only like a dark mouth in the hill. Nothing moved within it. Nothing called. That did not comfort Aelira. Old things did not need to make noise to remain awake.

Mara’s watch ended without incident. She returned to the fire and nudged Seren’s boot with her own. “Your turn.”

Seren folded the map carefully. “Anything to report?”

“Wind. Trees. Coren snoring like a dying goat,” she yawned.

“I do not,” Coren muttered from inside his bedroll.

Mara looked pleased. “Good. He’s alive.”

Seren rose, stretching carefully. Aelira noticed the stiffness in one shoulder, the tightness around her ribs, the way she refused to let discomfort become sound. Soldiers were tiresome creatures, forever mistaking silence for strength. Then again, princesses did the same thing and called it composure, so perhaps hypocrisy was another inheritance.

Mara settled near Coren and was asleep within moments, or pretending well enough that the difference lost relevance. Seren took the northern watch, standing near the stone Mara had occupied, her silhouette outlined against the deep black sky—sword at her hip, lantern low, with eyes on the ridge.

Aelira should have slept. Instead, she remained by the fire, watching flames sink into coals while the open stair pulled at her attention with patient, wordless insistence. Beneath the hill, the chamber waited with its seven sealed recesses and its black basin. The root-woven stone had bent toward her. The false name had failed. The listening dark had heard grief first, though she had not given that truth to Seren.

Grief was the oldest language Aelira knew. Older than court speech, older than root-script, older than Ashwood’s songs and bloodline records sealed beneath silver glass. It had taught her the taste of smoke, the silence after screaming, and the humiliating persistence of living after everyone whose name formed the architecture of her heart had been reduced to ash, rumor, or warning. She had once believed revenge would make grief obedient.

It had only given grief something to hold.

After a while, Seren spoke without turning. “You should sleep.”

Aelira closed her eyes briefly. “Has anyone ever responded well to that sentence?”

“No.”

“And yet you persist.”

“I’m stubborn.”

“How fortunate you warned me.”

Seren turned then, one shoulder resting against the standing stone. The firelight barely reached her, leaving half her face in shadow. “You looked frightened down there.”

The coals shifted as the wind moved over the hill. “Careful,” Aelira said.