Page 119 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Seren stepped closer.

Aelira reached the final mark and felt the old dread settle fully into place.

The script was etched into stone.

Return.

Recall.

The rootway was recalling what it had touched. The village had already been marked by roots, dreams, sleepwalking, and Wren’s drawings. Aelira had assumed they had time because the pattern had not yet reached its final stage. She had assumed the vanished villages were warnings, predecessors, symptoms of a broader failure.

Assumptions, how human. How stupid. Aelira looked toward the south, though the ridge hid the village from view. A low vibration moved beneath the sanctuary floor again.

“What is it?” Seren demanded.

Aelira turned toward her. “There is movement in the rootway.”

Seren went utterly still. “Movement where?”

“South.”

Mara’s expression darkened. “Toward Briar Hollow?”

“Yes.”

Coren looked between them. “What kind of movement?”

Aelira’s mouth felt dry. There were words that would make this neater. The sort of language scholars used when they wanted terror to appear manageable from the safe side of a desk. None of them fit.

Something was moving through the old road. It was traveling along root and memory and old command, slipping through pathways built to carry guardians, warnings, and, in times of catastrophe, whole settlements beneath the earth. Its attention had been stirred by Listener’s Rise, by the key, or by Aelira’s blood close enough to old seals for the rootway to remember what authority tasted like.

“Something has answered,” Aelira said.

Seren’s face tightened. “Answered what?”

The silence held that accusation without either of them giving it breath. The roots along the broken descent brightened again, then dimmed. A pulse moving away from Tel’Mara. Back along the buried road. Back toward the village full of people who believed soldiers and locked doors could keep their children from answering a call beneath their beds.

Seren turned at once. “We are leaving.”

Mara was already moving toward the horses. “Weather will slow us.”

“Then we ride through it.”

Coren’s face had gone pale. “General, if the road is buried—”

“Then we follow the markers.”

Seren looked at Aelira. For once, there was no demand in her expression. No suspicion sharpened into interrogation.

Only urgency, clean and immediate, the kind that left no room for pride.

“Can you track it?”

Aelira almost laughed despite herself.

Can you save them?

Can you pay what your blood owes?