Page 70 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“Do you remember walking last night?” Seren asked.

Wren lowered her gaze to her hands. “A little.”

Seren waited, allowing the silence to remain gentle rather than demanding. “Tell me what you remember.”

“I was dreaming, but the village was gone.” Wren rubbed one charcoal-marked thumb over the other. “The forest was open, like it had been waiting for me, and there was a path that shone even though there weren’t any lanterns.”

“What made it shine?”

“The roots.”

Seren imagined pale tendrils threading through black earth, illuminating a road no waking traveler had found. “And you followed them?”

“I wanted to see the sleeping tree.” The phrase landed with the weight of something she had heard before, though never spoken so plainly.

Seren kept her voice even. “Did you reach it?”

Wren shook her head. “Elira was there.”

That caught Seren more sharply than the rest. “What was she doing?”

“Standing in the path.”

“Did she wake you?”

“Not at first.” Wren’s mouth twisted as she searched for the memory. Seren could almost see the dream moving behind her eyes, indistinct but stubbornly real.

“What did she do?” Seren asked.

“She sounded quiet.”

Seren waited, expecting the child to continue. When she did not, patience briefly failed her. “She sounded quiet?”

Wren nodded as though Seren had finally repeated the important part correctly. “Other people are noisy when they’re scared, even when they don’t talk. Their fear goes everywhere.”

Seren thought of soldiers breathing too quickly before battle, hands tightening around weapons, boots shifting toward exits while mouths insisted they were calm. “And Elira?”

“She gets quieter.”

The answer struck with more force than it should have. Seren had witnessed Elira’s stillness often enough to mistake it for contempt, secrecy, or the ordinary arrogance of a woman convinced she understood more than everyone else. She had not considered that the silence might be fear drawn inward and compressed until nothing escaped. “What frightened her?”

Wren looked toward the forest again. “The thing hearing her.”

Seren went still. Around them, Briar Hollow continued its fragile imitation of an ordinary afternoon. A cart groaned over the road, someone split wood behind the inn, and the baker argued through an open window about the price of salt. None of it reached Seren clearly.

“The thing hearing her,” she repeated.

Wren nodded.

Seren lowered her voice without meaning to. “What thing?”

“The one under the tree.” A faint pulse moved through the stones beneath them.

Seren’s hand closed against the edge of the wall as she told herself it had been the cart, frozen ground settling beneath its wheels, or any one of the reasonable explanations Briar Hollow had steadily taught her to distrust.

Wren leaned closer until the shawl slid halfway off one shoulder. “The roots don’t talk to you the same way.”

“So you’ve mentioned.”