Page 47 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“Among other things.” Again, not an answer, but a deliberate pattern this time.

Seren looked at the roots. “What do you think they are?”

For a brief moment, the woman’s expression changed. Her gaze lowered, her body stilled, and something in her seemed to listen rather than look. Seren had once seen imperial Earthspeakers do that before battle, heads bowed toward stone while soldiers laughed nervously around them. The memory stirred unpleasantly.

Then the woman looked up. “I think they are growing.”

She stared. “That much I had managed to determine myself.”

The scholar rose from the ground, taller than Seren had expected, with a kind of grace that did not seem ornamental so much as practiced into the body. There was nothing fragile in the way she moved. Every motion appeared measured, economical, and certain, as if she had long ago learned exactly how much space she occupied and had no intention of apologizing for it. Seren noticed that first, then she noticed the hands that were too still, unshaking; too controlled for a frightened academic dragged into a village unraveling at the seams.

“You’ve been here several days,” Seren said.

The woman’s gaze settled on her with mild, infuriating composure. “Long enough.”

“Long enough to see more of this than I have.”

“Most likely.”

Roran shifted behind Seren, and she could feel his attention sharpening with hers. The hall remained quiet around them now, villagers watching with the tense fascination of people who sensed that the conversation had moved beyond them without asking permission.

Seren folded her arms. “Then I’ll ask plainly. Do you have a theory?”

For the first time, the scholar hesitated. It was barely anything. A pause too brief for most people to notice, a faint narrowing of those pale eyes, a calculation moving behind her face like a knife turning beneath silk. Seren knew that look. She had seen it on officers deciding which casualties to report first, on prisoners choosing which lie might keep them alive, on councilmen arranging truth into something less incriminating.

The woman was selecting the least dangerous portion of what she knew. Finally, she said, “I think the village is experiencing symptoms.”

That caught Seren’s attention fully. “Symptoms of what?”

The scholar looked toward the northern windows, where the dark line of forest pressed close beyond the glass. For one brief moment, concern crossed her face. Not fear, exactly. Something older and far more intimate.

It vanished. “I am still deciding,” she said.

Seren let the silence stretch long enough to become uncomfortable. “That is an interesting way of saying you know more than you intend to share.”

The scholar’s faint smile returned, sharper this time and entirely too composed for someone standing in the center of a room full of frightened villagers. “And that is an interesting way of saying you dislike being excluded from conversations you did not know were happening.”

Seren almost laughed at the absurdity of it. A vanished village. Dreaming children. Roots where roots did not belong. A scholar with courtly hands and soldier-still eyes speaking in riddles as though secrecy were a second language.

“You’re right,” Seren said at last. “I do dislike it.”

“How unfortunate for you,” she said.

“More unfortunate for anyone standing between me and an answer.”

The scholar’s eyes met hers, and for one strange, unwelcome second, the room seemed to narrow around them. Seren had faced generals, kings, executioners, and men who believed violence made them gods, but this woman looked at her as if she were not impressed by titles, uniforms, or the parts of Seren’s history other people spoke about in reverent voices. It should have irritated her. It did irritate her. Unfortunately, irritation was not the only thing it did.

Roran cleared his throat behind them, the sound breaking through the silence that had gathered between Seren and the scholar without entirely dispersing it.

“Should I leave you two alone with the mutual suspicion,” he asked, “or are we still solving this whole vanished village thing?”

Seren did not look away from the woman across the roots. “We are solving the village.”

“How reassuring,” the scholar murmured. Her attention lowered briefly to Seren’s hand, still hovering near the disturbed earth, before returning to her face. There was something unsettling in the steadiness of that gaze, as though Seren were not the one conducting the examination.

Despite herself, the corner of Seren’s mouth threatened to move. “What is your name?”

The question should have required nothing more than an answer.