Page 105 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

One body swallowed by the hill, one troublesome general removed, one key perhaps taken from the camp while Mara and Coren scrambled in panic.

Elira Thorn had secrets enough to need Seren gone, and for one moment, Seren knew Elira was thinking it too. Not because cruelty entered her face—it did not. That would have been simpler. What crossed Elira’s expression was worse: calculation so fast and intimate it looked almost like pain. Her gaze dropped to Seren’s sword, to the fissure, to the old stones, to the sleeping camp beyond the fire. A woman weighing revenge would have looked like that—so would a woman weighing survival.

Seren’s grip began to fail. The root around her wrist pulsed once, and with it came a whisper. More like memory trying to force itself into language. A child crying. A door closing. Rain on palace stone. Someone screaming through smoke.

Seren’s vision tilted.

Elira moved.

She dropped flat into the snow and caught Seren’s forearm with both hands. The force of it wrenched a curse from Seren’s throat. Elira’s fingers locked around her like iron beneath silk, one hand braced above the root, the other gripping hard enough to bruise. The old tendril reacted at once, tightening as though offended.

“Elira,” Seren warned.

“Be quiet.”

“Wonderful. I am being rescued by charm.” Seren sucked in a breath.

“You are being rescued despite your personality, which is a greater miracle than you deserve.”

The root around Seren’s wrist crawled higher. Elira’s face changed, opened for an instant, something beneath her composure looked directly into the dark below them. Seren could not name it. Recognition, hatred, or fear. The hill answered with another green pulse, and the air filled with the smell of wet leaves after burial.

Elira cursed something under her breath. It was not Common, she noticed. The words were soft, old, and vicious. The root stopped moving. Her eyes were fixed on the tendril around Seren’s wrist. “When I pull, you will use your knees against the side. Do not fight the root.”

“You are giving me instructions that involve not fighting a thing currently trying to make a bracelet of my arm.” Elira was impossible, she concluded.

“It is not trying to kill you.”

“Encouraging.” She scoffed. Still, she eyed the root around her wrist.

“It is trying to remember you.”

Seren had no answer to that, which she found personally offensive.

Elira pulled, and for such an elegant creature, she had a startling amount of strength. Seren kicked against the fissure wall, pain flaring through her ribs and shoulder as stone tore at her coat. The root around her wrist resisted, stretching from the dark like a hand reluctant to release its prize. Elira snarled something else in that old language, and the sound of it went through the hillside like a blade drawn across bone.

Seren’s hand slipped. It happened without warning, her frozen fingers sliding through Elira’s grip as the root beneath her twisted sharply and dragged her weight back toward the darkness. For one terrible heartbeat, there was nothing between Seren and the hollow below except the scrape of her boots against ice and the sudden, breathless emptiness of falling. Elira made a sound Seren had never heard from her before—raw, frightened, stripped of every careful edge.

She lunged forward, catching Seren by the wrist before she could disappear completely, and the force of it dragged Elira onto her knees at the edge. Snow collapsed beneath them, scattering into the black opening while Seren swung helplessly against the stone, her shoulder wrenching beneath Elira’s grip.

For an instant, Elira only stared down at her. The cold composure had vanished from her face. Her eyes were wide, her breath coming too quickly, and something dangerously close to terror had broken through the fury there. Then her expression hardened. Elira seized Seren’s forearm with both hands and hauled backward with a strength that seemed impossible for someone already half-sprawled across the ice. The earth beneath them shuddered. Roots tore through the frozen ground and coiled around Elira’s legs, anchoring her as Seren fought for purchase against the stone.

“Do not let go,” Elira said, though her voice trembled around the words.

Seren tightened her grip. “Wasn’t planning to.”

The root withdrew with a reluctant scrape against stone and ice, as if the hill itself resented giving her back. Seren came up hard over the edge, dragging half the snowbank with her as she rolled onto frozen ground and sucked air into lungs that had not yet forgiven the fall. Her sword came halfway from its sheath before sense returned, before the darkness beneath her boots became snow again, and before her body understood that whatever had opened below her had closed.

Elira remained beside the edge, one hand still locked around Seren’s wrist. Her grip was painfully tight. Seren looked down at it, then back at Elira’s face. The panic was gone now, buried beneath anger and the familiar chill of restraint, but not quickly enough to convince Seren she had imagined it.

“Elira,” she said quietly.

Elira released her as though the touch burned. “You nearly pulled me in after you,” she snapped, turning away before Seren could study her too closely. “Try not to make a habit of falling into cursed holes.”

Seren flexed her aching wrist and watched her. Elira’s shoulders went rigid. The root beneath the ice gave one final groan, deep enough to tremble through Seren’s bones, and neither of them spoke again. For several seconds, neither of them moved. The fissure sealed beside them with a slow, wet sigh, snow collapsing over the place where the earth had split as though nothing had happened at all. That offended Seren more than it should have. The ground did not get to swallow her, return her, and then pretend innocence.

Seren’s pulse, unhelpfully, had not settled. “You could have let go,” she said.

Elira cringed and movement looked almost like retreat. “Yes.”