Page 56 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“I was listening.”

Aelira glanced toward her. “Espionage, then.”

Wren brightened immediately. “Yes.”

“How disappointing. I had hoped you possessed better judgment.”

The girl’s brow furrowed. “What’s judgment?”

“Precisely.”

Wren accepted this as an answer and leaned farther over the wall, her damp hair falling toward the roots. They lay motionless beneath the fence, pale against the black soil and faintly luminous wherever rainwater passed over them, as though some thin light had become trapped beneath their skin.

Aelira had spent the better part of an hour studying them without permitting herself to touch. They appeared young, but old magic had never respected appearances. They had broken through the soil too quickly, followed patterns too deliberate to be dismissed as ordinary growth, and when Aelira listened—not with her ears, nor entirely with the weakened magic she still possessed, but with the frayed and hidden part of herself that remembered how the earth had once felt when it knew her—the roots seemed aware of her presence. That alone was dangerous.

Then Wren said, “They don’t like the rain.”

Aelira’s hand stilled above the mud. She turned her head slowly. “The roots?”

Wren nodded, her expression solemn.

“What makes you say that?”

“They get quieter when the ground is too loud.”

Aelira studied the child’s face for some sign of invention, but Wren returned the scrutiny with the serene confidence shared by children, prophets, and fools—those rare creatures who spoke impossible things without yet understanding they should be afraid of them.

“The ground is loud when it rains?” Aelira asked. Her voice remained smooth, though her attention had sharpened around the question.

“Of course.” Wren sounded faintly disappointed by the limits of adult intelligence. “Everything is drinking.”

Aelira looked back toward the roots. Everything is drinking. It might have been no more than a child’s description, yet Wren did not speak as though she were inventing stories. She spoke the way someone might describe a storm gathering beyond the hills, certain of what she had witnessed and confused only by everyone else’s failure to notice.

Unease shifted carefully beneath Aelira’s ribs. For several moments, rain whispered through the healer’s garden, bending rosemary and feverfew beneath its weight. Somewhere inside the cottage, Elowen moved between shelves and hummed beneath her breath with the distracted persistence of someone pretending that worry could not hear her if she disguised it as a song.

Wren dragged one charcoal-stained finger through the water pooled along the wall. “Why are you pretending?”

Aelira went still. The reaction lasted no longer than a heartbeat, but within it the careful architecture of Elira Thorn became thin as glass. Wren watched her without triumph or fear, only curiosity. She drew a measured breath. “What am I pretending about?”

The child frowned as if the question itself were unnecessary. “You keep acting like you don’t know what’s happening.”

Relief arrived first, sharp and humiliating. Irritation followed quickly after, because being relieved that a child had failed to uncover treason was not a dignified experience. “I do not know what is happening.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, Wren.”

Wren narrowed her eyes. “You say no like grown-ups do when they already know the answer is yes.”

Aelira held her gaze, though the girl appeared entirely unimpressed by the effort. “You are impossible,” Aelira said.

Wren gave a pleased little huff. “Thank you.”

“That was not praise.”