Page 113 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“Your village is afraid of the north,” Elira said.

Seren looked at her. “My village?”

“The way you speak of it.”

“I speak of it as a place full of people I am responsible for protecting.”

“How noble.”

“How observant.”

Elira’s mouth curved, but her eyes remained on the trees. “Responsibility is a beautiful word. People use it when they wish to make obligation sound voluntary.”

Seren absorbed that in silence.

There was a wound behind the sentence. She could hear it now. Elira hid pain behind philosophy the way soldiers hid injuries beneath armor until blood found a seam, and Seren had noticed where the seams were.

“And what would you call it?” she asked, sounding less curious than professionally offended.

Elira glanced at her. “A debt.”

Seren considered that a moment. “To whom?”

Elira’s face changed, not enough for most to see. “The living.”

The answer settled between them, strangely bare.

Seren did not push.

The storm found them just after the first old marker. It came down from the ridge without warning, not as gentle snow but as a white wall of wind and ice that erased the road between one breath and the next. The pines thrashed overhead, black branches clawing at a sky gone suddenly blind. Mara swore from somewhere ahead. Coren’s horse screamed.

Seren turned in the saddle just in time to see the young scout vanish behind a curtain of snow so thick it looked less like weather than a door closing. “Stay close,” Seren shouted.

The wind tore the command apart.

Elira’s horse shied hard beside her.

Seren caught the bridle before the animal could bolt sideways into the trees. The movement brought her knee hard against Elira’s saddle, their horses jostling on the narrow road. Elira seized the pommel with one hand, her other gripping Seren’s forearm for balance. For an instant, the storm vanished behind the immediate fact of touch.

Elira’s fingers were cold through Seren’s sleeve. Then the road gave way ahead. Not enough to kill them, which Seren considered a rare courtesy from the mountain. A section of the old stone edge cracked beneath the weight of ice and water, sliding loose into the ravine below with a sound like a building exhaling its last breath. Coren shouted. Mara’s horse stumbled back. Seren pulled hard on Elira’s reins and forced both mounts toward the inside wall of the pass.

The road had narrowed to less than the width of a cart, rock rising sheer on one side, the ravine dropping into white emptiness on the other. Snow erased distance. The horses danced, panicked by the shifting ground. One wrong step would take all of them down.

“Off,” Seren ordered.

Elira did not argue.

That alone told Seren the situation was worse than she wished to admit.

They dismounted into knee-deep snow. Seren passed both sets of reins to Mara when she finally fought her way back through the storm, then pointed toward a dark break in the rock wall barely visible beneath hanging roots.

“There,” Seren said. “Get Coren and the horses under cover. Now.”

Mara looked at the opening, then at the road, then at Seren. “That is not a cave.”

“It is more cave than standing here.”

“High praise.”