Page 130 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Aelira should have felt satisfaction.

Roran Vale had fought beneath the banners that destroyed Ashwood. Seren had been the revolution’s beloved blade. Every person taken from this village had lived under a new world built partly on her family’s bones. Some old, bitter part of her should have looked at Seren’s grief and whispered that history had finally placed a debt back into the correct hands.

Instead, she felt tired. That offended her more than pity would have. Pity, at least, could be dismissed as weakness. Tiredness was harder. Tiredness meant the old hatred had begun requiring effort where once it had carried itself. Tiredness meant watching Seren search empty houses did not feel like justice. It felt like watching another person step barefoot through glass and refusing to name the blood because the wound belonged to an enemy.

Seren emerged from the last cottage with nothing in her hands. Snow clung to her shoulders. Her dark hair had come loose from its tie, damp strands plastered near her temple. One sleeve was torn where she had forced open a swollen door. Her mouth was set in a line so hard it made her whole face look carved around refusal.

Mara approached first. “Eastern lane is empty.”

Coren swallowed. “Southern road too. No tracks past the outer fields. Nothing.”

Seren looked toward the well. No one followed her gaze gladly. The planks covering it had warped since they left. Warped, as if something beneath had breathed against them with enough patience to bend wood without cracking it. Pale roots curled around the base of the stone, slipping between old mortar joints, threading through snow, retreating when Aelira looked too directly at them. The well had been covered when they rode north. Now thin green light leaked through the gaps.

The rootway had opened beneath the village.

“They went below,” Seren said.

Mara’s face tightened. “Or were taken below.”

“That distinction will matter later.” Seren’s voice did not shake. “Right now it does not change where we go.”

Coren looked at the well as if it might open its throat and swallow him for listening. “General, the whole village?”

Seren’s hand pressed once against the glove inside her coat. Then dropped. “Yes.”

The answer moved through the square with terrible simplicity.

Aelira stepped toward the well before anyone could mistake silence for planning. The roots closest to her hand stirred beneath the snow. She did not touch them yet. Touching old rootways without knowing their hunger was how people became lessons. Instead she crouched near the warped planks and listened with the part of herself exile had not managed to kill.

At first, there was only cold stone. Then, it pulsed. It was not the frantic movement she had felt racing south from Tel’Mara. That had been swift, decisive, and purposeful. Whatever had moved beneath the road had arrived. It had taken what it came for—now it waited. Aelira’s signet warmed beneath her glove. She did not allow herself to flinch.

“Elira,” Seren’s voice came flat.

The false name felt thinner every time Seren spoke it.

Questions had gathered in the general all night, sharpening behind her eyes with every old mark, every root that bent too eagerly, every answer Aelira gave with the shape of a locked door. Aelira could feel them now. Through the crueler intimacy of attention. Seren watched her as if she were a battlefield finally revealing where the bodies had been buried.

Who the hell are you?

The question stood between them as plainly as if Seren had spoken it. Her restraint had edges. Aelira could see them in the set of her mouth, in the stillness of her shoulders, in the way one hand hovered near the glove tucked inside her coat before dropping again. Seren wanted answers. She wanted to take the false name apart and see what bled beneath it. She wanted, perhaps, to know whether anything Elira Thorn had shown her had been true.

The thought landed somewhere Aelira had not meant to leave unguarded. The arguments. The warnings. The hand gripping hers over a widening fissure. The dry, unwilling almost-smiles. The way Seren had begun to look at her not only as a danger, but as a person she was trying hard not to care about.

Aelira hated that Seren did not demand the truth then. She hated, more, that she understood why. The people were below, lost or taken or waiting in some green-lit dark that had already swallowed too much. Seren Veyr was angry, suspicious, and wounded by a lie she did not yet fully understand. And still, she chose the living first.

Aelira lowered her gaze to the well. There were many kinds of mercy. This one felt like a blade held away from her throat by will alone.

Aelira stood slowly. “The rootway is below the well.”

“We can open it?”

That word unsettled her, not because it was inaccurate, but because Seren said it without ceremony, as if some line had already been crossed in the snow and she had accepted Aelira as part of the descent before Aelira herself had decided what she meant to be.

Enemy. Guide. Prisoner. Key. Liar. Necessary thing.

Her voice remained calm, though nothing in her expression promised mercy. “Perhaps.”

Seren’s eyes sharpened. “That is not enough.”