Page 116 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

The old sanctuary had not gone silent. Her grandmother had been wrong. Or, worse, her grandmother had lied. Aelira descended the ridge first. She felt Seren’s gaze on her back the entire way.

It had become a familiar irritation, that attention. Precise. Disciplined. Relentless. Seren watched the world as if every detail might become a weapon in the next breath, and Aelira had begun to understand how dangerous that made her because she noticed the moments when people wanted most not to be noticed.

Aelira disliked being seen.

She disliked even more that Seren did not seem to look at her with the greedy triumph of someone uncovering a secret. There was suspicion, yes. There should have been. Only fools abandoned suspicion in old ruins. But beneath it lived something more troublesome.

Concern, sharpened by grief. Curiosity, which was worse, and, worst of all, restraint.

Seren had asked what Aelira was running from.

Aelira had answered with a blade because she had no answer safe enough to offer. “Some of us are the thing other people learned to run from.”

The words had been cruel. They had been meant to wound. They had also been truer than she wanted them to be. Seren had not asked again. That silence followed Aelira down the ridge more closely than any question would have.

Behind them, Mara and Coren guided the horses along a narrow break in the trees. The animals disliked the valley immediately. Their ears pinned back. Their breath steamed hard in the cold. One of them balked at the first broken archway, refusing to cross beneath it until Mara dismounted and led it by hand with a patience that seemed more stubbornness than kindness.

Aelira could not blame the horse.

Animals had the good sense to fear places people sanctified.

Tel’Mara had once been beautiful.

Even ruined, that much remained.

The sanctuary had been built in a low hollow between ridges where three old streams met underground. Its stones were dark, nearly black beneath the frost, veined with green mineral lines that caught what small light the winter sky offered. The circular outer wall had collapsed in three places, but the bones of its design remained visible: seven arches, seven paths, seven listening stones arranged around a central descent.

Seven.

Not Ashwood construction, then.

The Earthspeakers had favored uneven numbers, not out of superstition but because symmetry, they believed, invited arrogance. Perfect circles belonged to stars and tyrants. Living things grew imperfectly. The old builders had understood that. They had carved their sanctuaries to breathe rather than dominate.

Then Ashwood had inherited them. Guarded them. Named them. Failed them. Aelira stepped over a fallen stone and entered the outer ring. The roots brightened. Only slightly.

Enough for Seren to stop beside her.

Aelira did not look at her. “If you ask another question, I may push you into a historical feature.”

“Is that what we are calling holes now?”

“Only the dignified ones.” Aelira shot back, annoyance budding once again.

“There are undignified holes?”

“Most.”

Seren’s mouth almost moved. The moment was small, absurdly so, and Aelira hated how the shape of it warmed the cold between them. Humor had no place here. Not in a sanctuary built over old warning. Not with Briar Hollow vulnerable behind them and vanished villages somewhere beneath the world. Not with roots glowing at her feet as though greeting an old mistress they had no right to remember.

Seren looked away first, studying the nearest arch instead of pressing the point. “These marks are older than the ones at Listener’s Rise.”

Aelira paused because the observation was correct.

“Some,” she said.

Seren crouched, brushing snow from the base of the arch. Beneath the frost, a line of carvings emerged: roots descending, a crown split in two, a rose turned upside down above a hollow circle. Aelira’s chest tightened. Seren’s hand stilled over the rose. The general had learned quickly not to touch every old thing that presented itself. Sensible. Irritatingly so.

“What is this?” Seren asked.