Page 26 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

The woman thought she was offering rumor when the truth was something deeper. She was offering confirmation. Aelira looked toward the northern road, where mist clung low between the trees and the mountains waited like dark teeth against the sky. Old maps stirred in her mind unbidden: rootways, seal lines, forgotten temples, villages built too close to wounds no living farmer had names for.

The world had spent ten years pretending Ashwood’s secrets had died with Ashwood’s bloodline. How comforting that must have been. How catastrophically wrong. Rootway maps had never been sensible things. They did not obey distance. They marked pressure, memory, grief, blood, and old belonging. A rootway did not lead a person where they wished to go. It led them to an answer. That was why humans found them impossible. They wanted roads—the earth gave them judgment.

“People see strange things in the north,” Aelira said at last, her voice smooth enough to make the sentence sound almost careless.

The woman nodded quickly, relieved to be believed without realizing she had not been understood. Aelira did not correct her. Some truths were safer when mistaken for kindness. Some warnings were more useful when left in the mouths of those who did not know what they carried. She tucked the woman’s fear away with the rest of the morning’s evidence: the sunken road, the disturbed soil, the way the earth had answered too slowly and then too eagerly beneath her hand.

The north was waking, and if the north was waking, then something beneath it had begun to remember the name history had tried so hard to bury. Aelira turned back toward the road before the woman could see her face change.

“Go home before dark.” It sounded like advice. It was mercy, refined into warning. “Oh, and dear?”

Aelira turned. “Yes?”

Hana’s gaze flicked toward the road where Aelira’s horse waited. “Whatever you’re searching for, I hope it’s worth the trouble.”

Aelira followed her gaze northward and the old pull stirred again, faint but insistent, like a hand closing gently around a buried nerve. Worth the trouble? No, Aelira decided at once. But some things ceased to be optional long before they became worthwhile.

“So do I,” she murmured beneath her breath.

She finished the bread, thanked the woman again, and walked toward the tavern as evening settled over the village. Behind her, Hana watched longer than necessary, eyes narrowed with the beginning of recognition or perhaps only suspicion. She would not place Aelira’s face. People remembered monsters more clearly than history tended to.

The tavern was louder than Aelira remembered taverns being. Or perhaps she had simply grown too accustomed to silence.

For years, the only sounds accompanying her evenings had been wind scraping across stone, the crackle of a lonely fire, and the occasional protest from her horse whenever food arrived later than expected. Compared to that, the common room felt almost indecently alive. Laughter rolled in uneven waves. Tankards struck wood. Chairs scraped against floorboards. A fiddler sat in the corner producing music technically recognizable as a song, though only through mercy.

Aelira chose a table near the wall. She settled into the chair with a mug of watered wine and a bowl of stew she had no particular desire to eat. The room smelled of roasted meat, wet wool, woodsmoke, spilled ale, and all the chaotic warmth of human places. They always smelled alive and messy—like bodies, like appetite, like mortality making noise before it vanished.

Around her, conversations rose and fell: Crop yields, road conditions, a wedding planned for autumn, the theft of three goats and the ongoing debate over whether the goats had been stolen or merely demonstrated initiative. Ordinary concerns. The concerns most rulers spent remarkably little time understanding. Aelira found herself listening despite herself. For centuries, emperors had claimed to govern for people like these. Few had ever bothered speaking to them unless ceremony required it. That realization had become more uncomfortable with age.

The wine was mediocre. The stew was worse. She finished both. Exile had lowered many standards.

A burst of laughter erupted from a nearby table where four merchants sat in dusty cloaks and road-worn boots, wearing the particular exhaustion of people who spent more time in motion than at home. One slammed a tankard onto the table.

“I’m telling you, the village is cursed.” A merchant with a dark beard said, as if telling a ghost story.

“Cursed?” Someone scoffed. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Exactly!” The table laughed and Aelira ignored most of them until one phrase drifted across the room.

“—like something from the old empire.”

Her attention sharpened. The first merchant leaned forward dramatically. “The entire place was abandoned.”

“So they say.”

“My cousin saw it himself.”

“Your cousin also claims he once wrestled a bear.”

“He did.”

“He absolutely did not.”

“Perhaps a small bear.” More laughter erupted amongst the group.

Aelira hid a smile behind her cup. The bartender, refilling their mugs, joined without shame. “I hear the Coalition is investigating strange symbols in the villages.”

The words slid coldly beneath Aelira’s ribs. The stories were spreading quickly—faster than she had expected. Panic moved through populations much like fire through dry grass. The wrong rumor could kill as effectively as an army, and armies at least had the decency to require feeding.