Page 112 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

The key hidden in her coat had changed the shape of the road ahead. Before the storm, Listener’s Rise had been a place to investigate, a site connected to Wren’s drawings, the roots, the sleepwalking, and the old road beneath the forest. Now it was a door with a key, and one of them knew more about doors than she intended to say.

Seren gathered the map and folded it carefully. “You think we are close.”

She did not answer.

“Elira.”

The woman’s mouth curved faintly. “You have discovered that repeating my name does not make me more cooperative, yes?”

“I remain optimistic.”

“How tragic.”

“Are we close?”

Elira looked toward the shuttered window. “Closer than we were.”

Seren stared at her.

Mara muttered, “That was almost impressive.”

Elira inclined her head. “Thank you.”

“It was not a compliment.”

“I accept it regardless.”

Seren almost grinned despite herself. That had become the danger with Elira. Irritation had begun making room for something else, something sharper and less useful. The woman’s evasions infuriated her, but they also pulled Seren’s attention as surely as a half-hidden trail in fresh snow. Every answer Elira refused to give became another mark on the map. Every flicker of grief beneath her composure became another reason Seren kept looking.

And looking, she had learned long ago, was often where trouble began.

They left the cabin shortly after.

The old shelter disappeared behind them by degrees, swallowed by snow-heavy pines until only the chimney remained visible through the trees, black against white. The horses picked carefully through drifts and half-buried stones. Beneath them, the road was more suggestion than path, an old imperial track nearly consumed by forest, frost, and neglect. Here and there, the original stonework emerged from beneath the snow, dark and smooth, laid with a precision that had survived revolution, weather, and time.

Seren studied it more closely than she would have ten years ago. The empire had built things to last. That was inconveniently true.

A cruel system could still produce strong roads. A tyrant’s architects could still understand water, stone, pressure, and time. The old world had been oppressive, arrogant, and violent. It had also known things the Coalition now stumbled toward like children in a room full of knives.

Both truths existed at once.

Seren was growing tired of truths that refused to choose a side.

Mara rode ahead, scanning the path. Coren trailed behind, still pale from poor sleep but alert enough to be useful. Elira rode beside Seren, not because anyone had suggested it, but because the road had narrowed and somehow arranged them into proximity.

Seren suspected the road of malice.

For a long while, they rode without speaking.

The forest around them was beautiful in the cold, severe in the way winter made living things. Snow softened the branches. Ice clung to exposed roots. The stream beside the path moved under a thin skin of frost, its water dark and quick beneath the surface. Above them, the sky remained the color of old pewter, low and heavy with weather that had not yet decided whether it was finished with them.

The quiet should have been welcome.

Quiet had changed in Seren’s mind since Eastmere. Silence no longer meant peace. It meant absence. It meant rooms left warm, lanterns burning, bread on tables, a child’s doll abandoned beside a cold cup of tea. It meant something had happened too cleanly to be honest.

Briar Hollow was not silent yet.

That was what drove her forward.