Page 4 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Seren touched the rim with two fingers.

The cup was cold. Not recently poured, then. This place was not abandoned in panic while steam still rose. Enough time had passed for heat to leave, but not long enough for dust to settle. Her gaze moved from the cup to the bread, from the bread to the knife, from the knife to the chair pushed half an inch back from the table.

Interrupted, but not startled. That distinction mattered.

Roran came in behind her and lifted the cup, sniffing it cautiously.

Seren turned her head.

He caught her watching and lowered it with the faint defensiveness of a man who had just realized he looked ridiculous. “What?”

“If you discover the missing village by smelling tea, I’ll recommend you for promotion.”

“I was checking for poison.”

“In a cup no one finished?” Despite herself, Seren almost smiled. “Ambitious theory.”

“I was being thorough.”

“Or dramatic.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive.”

For a moment, the exchange almost resembled something ordinary. Then Seren looked back at the half-cut bread, the cold tea, the chair pushed slightly from the table, and whatever humor had managed to survive between them thinned beneath the weight of the room.

“Whoever lived here planned to finish supper,” she stated.

There should have been an answer. A raid left marks. An evacuation left panic, footprints, dropped bundles, empty cupboards, overturned beds, crying children, and locked doors forced free when someone refused to leave. This left a loaf of bread, a cold cup of tea, and the horrible impression that life had simply been called away from itself.

Seren’s gaze shifted to the floor near the door.

A child’s doll lay face down against the wall.

It was a small cloth thing with glass eyes, a faded dress, and yarn hair partly torn loose from the scalp. Ugly, in the devoted way beloved toys often were. The kind of toy repaired too many times because a child refused every replacement. The kind of toy dragged through mud, slept with, dropped, recovered, named, and loved beyond reason.

Seren crouched and picked it up.

The doll’s painted eyes stared past her shoulder, blank and accusing. She turned it over once, searching for hidden marks, blood, anything useful. There was nothing, which meant the absence itself was evidence.

She set the doll carefully on the table beside the bread. Roran watched her but said nothing. That was one of his better qualities. He knew when silence was not absence, but mercy.

“Evacuation is unlikely,” Seren uttered.

“Yes,” Roran replied. “I had begun to gather that.”

They stepped back into the street. The lanterns continued burning. Each flame caged, bright, and steady behind glass. They did not flicker or gutter in the wind when doors stood open. They burned with an almost deliberate constancy, as if tended by invisible hands.

“How long have they been burning?”

Roran followed her gaze. “Since we arrived. Perhaps longer. We do not know when they were lit.”

“Were there any tracks found leaving?”

“None that make sense.”

Something in that answer hooked beneath Seren’s ribs. “Show me.”

He led her down a side road slick with mud and rainwater. They passed an apothecary with herbs still hanging from ceiling beams, a bakery with loaves cooling on racks, a blacksmith shop where tongs rested beside a horseshoe half-formed and abandoned in the coals. Every place told the same story.