Page 131 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“No.” Her mouth curved faintly before she continued, “It is honest.”

“Then give me useful.”

“The well is not merely a well. It was built over an old rootway access, likely without the villagers understanding what lay beneath them. The roots have opened something below. A passage, perhaps. A threshold. I will not know its condition until I touch it.”

Mara stared at her. “That sounds encouraging in the way poison labels are encouraging.”

Aelira glanced at her. “You are learning.”

Seren did not smile. “What happens if we open it wrong?”

Aelira looked down at the green light bleeding through the planks. “Best case, nothing.”

“And worst?”

“The passage recognizes the wrong offering and closes around us before we understand we have entered.”

Coren made a small, strangled sound.

Mara muttered, “Fantastic.”

Seren looked from the well to the emptied village, then toward the northern road where the old markers lay hidden beneath snow. Aelira watched the calculation happen in her face. It was not indecision. Seren did not waste herself on that. It was triage. The villagers below if they lived. Roran. Elowen. Wren. The unknown thing beneath the tree. The Council likely watching from some safe distance, waiting to document whatever remained. The ancient seal Aelira had not yet fully explained. The general’s duty to the living weighed against the near certainty that descent would lead them into a place human command could not master.

There were no good choices—only the necessary ones. Aelira distrusted necessary things. They resembled fate too closely.

Aelira’s mouth tightened. “Command will not matter below.”

Seren looked at her with narrow eyes. “Then teach me what will.”

The request landed more forcefully than an order would have.

Aelira wanted to refuse. The instinct rose instantly, elegant, and old. She could tell Seren that rootways did not answer generals, that buried roads were not conquered by discipline, that the old earth had swallowed armies finer than any she commanded and never thought to apologize. She could tell her that ignorance would kill her. She could tell her the thing beneath the tree had noticed Aelira, that old things listened when names were spoken too boldly, that every step downward might carry them closer not only to the missing villagers but to the truth Aelira had spent ten years surviving by avoiding.

She could say all of that. Instead, she looked at the empty windows around the square and thought of Wren’s hand in sleep, open on the blanket as if she had released something into the dark and could not remember what it was.

“Do not speak names below unless I tell you to,” Aelira said. “Not mine. Not the thing’s. Not any old name you hear whispered back to you.”

Seren gave her a look before answering, which was already half the response. “Yours?”

Aelira ignored that. “Do not answer voices from the dark if they use someone you love.”

Seren’s jaw tightened at the word love, not from embarrassment but recognition of the weapon it could become.

“Do not trust light unless it has a source you can hold,” Aelira continued. “Do not trust silence if it arrives too quickly. Do not cut roots unless they cut first. Do not bleed on anything carved with old marks. Do not promise anything to anything that asks gently. Old powers rarely begin with threats. Threats make people resist. Kindness invites them closer.”

Seren listened without interrupting—that unsettled Aelira too.

When Aelira finished, she went still in the way soldiers did when the battlefield finally admitted where the trap was.

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Aelira said. “If the path below begins to feel safe, assume that is the moment it has become most dangerous.”

Mara, returning with an armful of rope and two lanterns, halted just long enough to say, “I hate every single part of that,” before continuing toward the village hall.

Coren appeared from the southern road a few minutes later, empty-handed, and more afraid for it. They moved quickly after that because speed was the only kindness left to offer the vanished. Rope was stacked near the well. Lanterns were checked. Oil flasks divided. Knives sharpened. Blankets rolled and tied. Mara found climbing hooks in the blacksmith’s storehouse and looked nearly pleased until one of the roots near the well twitched toward her boot. Coren packed food with the grim concentration of someone trying not to imagine who had baked the bread he now carried.

Aelira accepted very little: A lantern, Wren’s charcoal pouch, found beneath the healer’s table and handed to her by Coren with a look that asked too many questions, a narrow coil of rope, the stone key from Tel’Mara hidden against her ribs, the signet beneath her glove, the blade beneath her sleeve, and her own blood, that was becoming increasingly unreliable as a comfort.