Page 61 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

By morning, she would need to decide how much to tell Seren Veyr. By morning, she would need to decide whether the general was more dangerous ignorant or informed. By morning, perhaps, the roots would have moved again. For now, Aelira climbed the tavern stairs with mud on her hem, Wren’s words beneath her skin, and the torn Coalition note hidden against her chest.

Chapter Eleven: Seren Veyr

Seren woke before dawn to the sound of footsteps outside her door. For one disorienting moment, she thought she was back in a military encampment. Her body recognized the rhythm before her mind did. Boots crossing damp earth before sunrise. Low voices traded between changing watches. The muffled scrape of weapons being adjusted in the dark. The peculiar stillness that existed in the final hour before a camp fully woke, when exhaustion and vigilance sat side by side and neither had yet won. Her hand moved toward the sword within reach.

The memory returned.

A northern village where children dreamed of forests they had never seen, where roots pushed through stone as though the earth had forgotten how to remain buried, and where a silver-haired scholar had stood in the midnight mist with Wren wrapped in her cloak and secrets gathered around her like shadows.

Seren sat up with an ache in her back. The room remained dark. A faint gray light pressed against the curtains, hinting at dawn. She had not slept well, though that hardly made her unique in Briar Hollow. The entire village seemed to exist now in the thin, fraying space between waking and dreaming. Her thoughts had spent most of the night circling the same collection of problems: the vanished villages, the roots, the dreams, the Council’s silence, Wren’s sleepwalking, and Elira.

That last one irritated her more than it should have. Most mysteries had the decency to remain inanimate. They did not answer questions with better questions. They did not look at ancient roots as though hearing something no one else could hear. They did not stand barefoot in moonlit squares guiding children back from the northern road with a tenderness they seemed determined to hide.

A knock sounded at her door. “Come in.”

Roran entered without ceremony, which was how he entered most rooms belonging to people who had once bled on him. His hair was damp from mist, his cloak fastened crookedly, and his face carried the exhaustion of a man who had slept badly and intended to make that everyone else’s problem. “We’ve got another one,” he said.

Seren’s stomach tightened before she could stop it. “Another disappearance?”

“No.” His mouth pressed into a line. “Sleepwalker.”

The relief that came was brief and insufficient. A child wandering toward the forest in a trance was not significantly better than a child vanishing. It merely offered more time to fail.

“Who?” Seren asked, though she already suspected the answer.

Roran exhaled. “Wren.”

Seren swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Again?”

“That depends on whether we are counting last night officially.”

Her mouth pressed thin. “We are.”

“Then yes. Again.” He leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Her mother says she was in bed when checked after midnight. Elowen sat with her until nearly second watch. Sometime after that, Wren left the house. No one heard the door.”

Seren reached for her boots. “Where did they find her?”

Roran hesitated. “She was nearly at the northern road.”

The room went still around that answer. Images from the night returned with unwanted clarity. Wren in white nightclothes, dark curls damp with mist. Elira kneeling before her in the road. The child’s small hand near the earth. Elira’s face when she looked toward the forest. She was not frightened exactly but struck by something old enough that fear seemed too simple a word. Seren had seen only the end of it from the inn doorway. Enough to know she had missed the beginning. Enough to know the beginning mattered.

“Was she awake?” Seren asked.

“Not when Elira found her.”

There it was again—Elira.

Seren pulled on her coat. “And what, precisely, was Elira doing outside in the middle of the night?”

Roran lifted one brow. “I assumed you would enjoy asking her that yourself.”

Outside, Briar Hollow looked as if dawn had forgotten how to enter it.

Mist lay low across the square, pale and cold, turning cottages into softened shapes and lanterns into blurred stars behind glass. The village was beginning to stir, but not naturally. Doors opened by inches. Faces appeared and vanished. A woman carried water from a barrel already filled because no one wanted to approach the covered well unless necessary. Two men stood near the northern road with spears they did not know how to hold properly.

The well remained sealed under planks after the boy’s near-drowning the night before. Seren’s gaze lingered on it. The boy had survived. That should have counted as victory. Instead, every saved life in Briar Hollow felt like a reprieve granted by something patient enough not to hurry. People moved through the village as if listening for instructions they hoped not to hear. A farmer crossed the square carrying a bundle of kindling, then stopped halfway and turned his head toward the northern forest. His wife called his name sharply. He blinked, studied the wood in his arms as though surprised to find it there, and hurried inside without meeting anyone’s eyes.

Elira, Seren reminded herself, had said the village was experiencing symptoms. At the time, Seren found the phrasing evasive. Now she was beginning to think it had been exact.