Page 126 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

My people, Seren thought.

Roran. Elowen. Wren. Jacob. The baker’s wife. The blacksmith. The old farmer who complained about his knee and lied badly about checking fences. The children with blue thread around their wrists. The terrified mothers who had trusted Seren because she had stood in their square and spoken like a woman who could keep catastrophe outside the walls.

My people, even now.

She had left them. She had ridden toward answers and returned with nothing but a key, a warning, and an empty village. Elira’s expression changed. Softness did not belong easily on that face. But something behind her eyes altered. The anger slipped. Beneath it was a grief that did not feel like surprise.

“I know,” Elira said quietly.

Seren almost hated her for the gentleness. Then the well pulsed and deep, distant sound rose from below. Singing. Not melody in any human sense. It was a layered vibration moving up through root and stone, through the well shaft, through the soles of Seren’s boots. It carried no words, but her body understood direction.

The sound touched the air and every lantern in the square dimmed. Mara swore. Seren held still, because beneath the first sound, almost too faint to be heard, came another.

Seren turned back to the well so fast her knees struck the stone rim. “Roran!”

The name fell into the shaft. For one breath, nothing answered, until far below, something moved. A flicker, a shape, and the sound came again. A groan, perhaps. Or wood shifting. Or the rootway imitating what she needed to hear. Seren did not care. She leaned farther over the well.

Mara grabbed the back of her coat. “General.”

Seren tried to pull free. “Let go.”

“No.”

“Mara—”

“It could be drawing you.”

“It could be him.” Seren growled.

Mara’s face twisted. “I know.”

The honesty stopped Seren harder than the grip. Elira stepped to the well and placed one gloved hand against the stone rim. The singing changed at once.

The roots below brightened.

“What is it?” Seren’s voice dipped when she asked, soft enough to make the question feel like touch.

Her eyes were fixed on the depths. The green light from below climbed the roots, illuminating the well shaft in pulses. With each pulse, Seren glimpsed fragments. Stone. Root. Darkness. A scrap of cloth caught on a thorn. A boot surfaced, perhaps?

A sleeve followed, maybe?

The light surged higher. Near the inner rim of the well, carved into stone that had not been visible beneath moss before, words appeared.

The rose above.

Seren’s pulse slowed in a way she did not like, not from calm, but from the cold, instinctive recognition that whatever stood beside her was no longer merely a woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue. Elira had been suspicious from the beginning, certainly, and secrecy was hardly a crime by itself; Seren had spent enough years around commanders, spies, frightened villagers, and ambitious councilmen to know that everyone hid something when survival asked it of them. But this was different.

This was not a hidden scar or a false name or a past one did not wish to discuss by firelight. This was a well in a village where people had vanished. This was old stone answering to her hand. This was the earth itself dragging words out of the dark, and Elira looking not confused, not horrified in the honest way an innocent person might be, but stricken with recognition.

The next line brightened.

The root below.

Elira’s hand tightened on the stone, and Seren saw the movement with a clarity that made anger rise through the fear. She saw the pale tension of Elira’s knuckles, the stillness of her shoulders, the way her face closed around whatever truth had just surfaced between them. Again. Always again. Children had wandered toward the trees. Roots had moved where roots should not move. Wren had drawn maps she should not have been able to know. Jacob had heard something growing slowly beneath the world, and through all of it, Elira had watched, measured, withheld, and spoken only in fragments, as if the truth were a privilege Seren had not yet earned while innocent people paid the cost of Elira’s caution.

The final line emerged.

The blood between.