Page 65 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“And it would have taken him?”

Her gaze flicked briefly to Seren’s, then away. Seren rose slowly beside him. The night seemed colder afterwards. The village seemed smaller. Every lit window felt like an eye trying not to blink. “We are out of time,” she said.

Aelira looked toward the northern road where the old stones waited beneath snow. “Yes,” she said. “We are.”

Patterns usually meant intent. Intent usually meant a person, or at least a will. People could be followed. Wills could be resisted. Armies could be broken. Orders could be intercepted. Seren understood those kinds of problems. She had no wish to consider the alternative.

The village hall had become her temporary command post, though calling it that felt ambitious. It was a long room with a leaking corner, a smoking hearth, and enough anxious villagers passing through that any attempt at order required stubbornness bordering on delusion. Seren had both.

Reports lay spread across the table before her. Dreams. Sleepwalking. Root growth. Missing time. Animal behavior. Unfamiliar tracks. That last category held her attention longest. Several hunters reported finding human prints beyond the northern boundary over the past two weeks. Repeated passage through the same stretch of forest. Not villagers. Not soldiers. Someone else. The tracks appeared near exposed roots and vanished near the older game trails leading toward the hills.

Finally, something tangible. She leaned over the table and traced the rough map one hunter had drawn with charcoal.

“You look pleased,” Elowen said.

Seren glanced up sharply. The healer stood in the doorway with a tray of tea balanced against one hip and the expression of a woman delivering medicine to someone unlikely to appreciate it. Her sleeves were rolled. Her hair had been pinned badly and with increasing resentment. Shadows darkened the skin beneath her eyes.

“I would not go that far,” Seren muttered.

“You found something," the healer observed.

“I found a possibility.”

Elowen crossed to the table and set the tray down without asking permission. Her gaze dropped to the charcoal map, then to the marks Seren had circled near the northern boundary. “Those tracks?”

Seren nodded. “Repeated. Human. Moving through the same northern route.”

The healer’s face tightened. “You think someone is causing this.”

“I think someone would simplify several things.”

“That is not the same as believing it.”

“No.” Seren accepted the cup because refusing appeared pointless and because Elowen seemed like the sort of woman who would simply continue holding it until obedience became less exhausting than resistance.

The tea tasted bitter enough to count as a threat.

Elowen sat across from her. “You do that often?”

“Drink tea under duress?”

“Choose the explanation that gives you something to fight against.”

Seren paused with the cup halfway to her mouth. Healers noticed people differently than soldiers did. Soldiers watched hands, exits, weight distribution, the angle of a shoulder before a strike. Healers watched fatigue, pain, the lies bodies told when mouths tried to sound convincing. Elowen was watching her now. Carefully, she reminded herself.

“I prefer problems that can be solved,” Seren said.

Elowen gazed toward the covered well visible through the hall window. “And if this cannot be solved that way?”

The planks across the well were dark with moisture, weighted down by stones as though the village feared the opening might push them aside.

“Then I solve it another way,” she said.

“You make that sound simple.”

“It rarely is,” Seren agreed.

“Yet you say it anyway.”