Page 3 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“Mostly councilmen” she muttered. “Wolves are more direct.”

That earned the smallest sound from him, almost a laugh, though it died before it became useful. His gaze shifted past her toward the open shop, toward the red silk lying abandoned on the floor and the coins still scattered on the counter. “You’ve seen enough yet?”

“No.” Seren looked back through the rain-specked glass. “I’ve barely scratched the surface.”

Her gaze moved from the abandoned silk on the shop floor to the coins left scattered across the counter, then beyond the glass to the square where lanterns burned in every window as if the whole village had been carefully prepared for people who were no longer there. Roran’s report had called it a disturbance. That was too small a word. “I have, however, seen enough to dislike your report.”

Roran’s brow lifted. “My report was accurate.”

“Your report was vague.”

“Possible magical involvement was the best phrase available for a village that emptied itself without the courtesy of leaving evidence.”

Seren looked at him fully then. He was exhausted, not embarrassed, and not defensive in the usual way. Exhausted, and angry, and frightened enough to hide behind sarcasm.

“My report,” Roran spoke, quieter, “was written before I had time to invent better words for impossible.”

Seren let that pass because it was fair.

The square lay vulnerable around them, rain falling steadily onto cobblestones and through the empty market stalls. Baskets of root vegetables sat artfully arranged beneath canvas covers. A merchant’s scale hung from a stall beam, one side still weighted with three small stones. A wooden horse lay on its side near the well. Someone’s shawl had snagged on a nail beside the bakery door and now shifted faintly in the wind. Nothing had been smashed. Nothing had been stolen.

Everything sat where it had been left. It waited, and that was the word her mind kept circling back to.

Seren had walked across battlefields so soaked in blood that mud turned black beneath her boots. She had stepped over bodies piled three-deep against shattered city walls. She had breathed the stench of burned flesh and listened to men and women scream for mothers who would never come. She had watched rivers carry the dead downstream by the hundreds.

War was rarely quiet.

Even after the killing stopped, battlefields remained alive; flies gathered. Carrion birds circled the wounded as they cried out from beneath corpses. Grief had sound and death always left something behind.

This village had nothing left.

“What do you think?” Roran asked.

Seren looked toward the glowing windows, her expression flat. “I think the Council should stop paying you to write reports.”

Roran glanced at her. “Helpful.”

“You asked.”

“I was hoping for insight.”

“You should know better by now.”

The exchange should have carried more humor than it did. Once, it might have. Roran would have made a number of wounded complaints about her cruelty, and Seren might have rewarded him with the smallest possible smile. Now his gaze remained fixed on the empty street ahead, and his hands were not steady.

He had tucked them beneath his cloak, perhaps hoping she would miss it.

Seren had seen men hide shaking hands before. Recruits did it before battle. Officers did it after sending too many bodies into a field they knew they could not hold. Survivors did it when the mind had not yet found a place to put what the eyes had already witnessed.

Fear on battlefields was familiar – useful. It sharpened soldiers if it did not consume them. Roran’s fear was of a different kind. The fear of a man who had encountered something his training could not arrange into tactics. There were no enemy lines, nothing to pursue, and nothing to strike.

“Maybe they evacuated.” His voice came out softer than intended. Seren understood why. The village swallowed sound too quickly. Their words did not echo properly against the houses; they seemed to fall into the spaces where people should have been.

She said nothing, but the silence that settled over her was not empty; it was armed. She crossed to the nearest cottage and stepped through a door left ajar wide enough that rain had dampened the threshold. Inside, a fire still burned in the hearth – Warm and alive.

The sight should have brought comfort on a cold northern evening. Instead, its heat only sharpened the emptiness. Someone had tended that fire recently. Someone had knelt there, added wood, adjusted coals, perhaps warmed their hands before returning to the table. Someone had believed they would come back to it.

A loaf of bread sat half-cut beside a knife. The slice had not been finished. A cup of tea rested beside it, full and untouched, though the steam had long since vanished.