Page 91 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

The root remained frozen.

The fire leaned toward them.

Seren had the absurd impression that the entire cabin was waiting to see which of them would pull away first. Elira released her and the loss of contact came too quickly, leaving the skin beneath Seren’s sleeve cold and strangely exposed. Elira drew her hand back against her body as though she had touched something dangerous, and for the first time since Seren had met her, the composure across her face failed entirely.

“What was that?” Seren asked. Her voice sounded rougher than it should have.

Elira’s gaze dropped briefly to Seren’s wrist before returning to the root. “Do not touch it.”

The answer explained nothing. It also did not explain why her hand was trembling.

“I was not planning to embrace it.”

“Seren.” Her name should not have sounded that way in Elira’s mouth. Not General, not Veyr, not the sword or symbol people invoked whenever they wanted something from her. Elira spoke it stripped of title and public weight, leaving only the private shape of the name itself.

For half a heartbeat, Seren forgot about the root. Elira appeared to realize the mistake at the same moment. Her expression closed, but too late. Seren collected the piece and stored it beside every other thing the woman had revealed unintentionally. Her name was not sacred. Men had shouted it across battlefields, politicians had dressed it in speeches, and strangers had carved it into songs until it scarcely sounded like something belonging to her. From Elira’s mouth, it had sounded dangerously alive.

Seren wanted to hear it again, which was inconvenient enough that anger seemed the most practical response. The root unfurled slowly. At its tip, cradled in a thin coil, rested a sliver of pale stone no longer than Seren’s thumb.

The vibration stopped.

The fire returned to gold.

Outside, the horses’ panic eased into restless snorting.

“General?” Mara called through the wall.

“Stay there.”

“Gladly," her voice called back.

Elira crouched first. Her hand trembled once before she steadied it, reaching toward the stone and then stopping short. Instead, she withdrew a cloth from her coat and used it to lift the fragment free. The root retreated at once, sliding beneath the floorboards with obscene softness.

Seren sheathed her sword. “The roots have developed a habit of delivering things to you.”

Elira stared at the object. “This is not a message.”

“What is it?”

“A key.”

The word rearranged the room. The storm continued around them, but it felt farther away now than the small piece of stone wrapped in Elira’s hand. “A key to what?”

Elira turned it over. The listening symbol had been carved into one face. On the other lay an older mark Seren did not recognize: a vertical line crossed by three thornlike branches, each angled downward as though digging into the earth.

Elira looked toward the covered window and the invisible hill beyond it. “To the place beneath Listener’s Rise.”

Seren stepped closer. “There is something beneath the hill?”

A bitter laugh escaped Elira. “Old stories are generally lies people tell because the truth is worse.”

The side door opened, admitting Mara and Coren along with a gust of snow and the smell of frightened horses. Mara took one look at the split floorboards and the stone in Elira’s hand. “I assume we all saw the cabin grow a root.”

“Yes,” Seren said.

Coren swallowed. “Should cabins do that?”

“No.”