Page 51 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“Do not touch it,” Seren warned, stepping forward even as Elira ignored her with the effortless consistency of someone who had never considered obedience a necessary part of conversation.

“Elira,” Seren said again, sharper this time.

Elira raised one hand, though she did not reach toward the root. Instead, she held her palm out to Wren, her gaze remaining on the child while the dark line continued to spread across the page between them. “Give me your hand.”

Wren shook her head, pressing both fists against her chest until the charcoal beneath her fingernails marked the fabric of her dress.

“I know,” Elira said, and something in her voice shifted beneath the coolness she wore so easily. The control remained, but its edges softened into something quieter and startlingly gentle. “I know, little sparrow, but fear is easier when it has somewhere to go.”

The root continued drawing while Wren stared down at it, trembling so violently that the blue thread tied around her wrist shook against her skin. For several breaths she did not move, and no one in the square seemed willing to breathe loudly enough to disturb her, but at last she lowered one hand and slid her small fingers into Elira’s waiting palm.

The root stopped. The square seemed to stop with it. Behind Seren, Roran murmured something beneath his breath that sounded suspiciously like profanity losing its nerve and becoming prayer. Elira lowered her head, allowing her silver hair to slip over one shoulder and conceal part of her face as her thumb passed once over the blue thread around Wren’s wrist.

“Look at me,” she said.

Wren’s eyes remained fixed on the page.

“Not at them, and not at the root. Look at me.”

Slowly, the child raised her head.

Elira’s other hand hovered above the mud, close enough that the moisture clinging to the root should have touched her palm, though she never allowed her skin to meet it. Her lips moved, shaping something too quiet for Seren to hear, and the air tightened around them until pressure filled Seren’s ears and descended through her body, settling deep within the bones of her feet.

The earth gave one slow pulse beneath her boots.

It was not violent enough to be called a tremor, nor natural enough to be dismissed as the shifting of unstable ground. It felt more like a response offered by something that had been listening beneath them.

The pale root recoiled from the drawing, dragging a narrow trail through the mud before stopping several inches away, its tip remaining angled toward Elira’s hovering hand. Wren released a broken sob, and Elira picked up the ruined drawing by its cleanest corner before anyone else could move close enough to see what had appeared upon it. Mud fell from the page in heavy drops as she folded it inward and returned it to the child’s bundle.

Wren crushed the bundle against her chest, though her gaze remained fixed on Elira. “It changed.”

Elira’s fingers paused against the cloth. Around them, the villagers had not yet begun breathing properly. The miller stood with one hand raised, as though he had forgotten the accusation that had brought it there, while Seren remained close enough to draw steel before anyone reached the child.

“Drawings do not change,” Elira said softly.

Wren looked down at the folded page before lifting her face again, and the solemn disappointment in her expression belonged to a child beginning to understand that adults sometimes lied not because children were foolish, but because the truth frightened them too.

“This one does.”

For the first time since the root had appeared, Elira glanced toward the surrounding crowd, although the look passed so quickly that Seren could not determine what she had sought there. She lowered herself until Wren no longer had to crane her neck to meet her eyes.

“Then keep it hidden until someone worthy asks to see it.”

Wren’s fingers tightened around the bundle. “Are you worthy?”

The question should have invited laughter, but no one in the square seemed to find anything absurd about it.

Elira’s mouth curved faintly with an expression too weary to be amusement. “No, little sparrow, but I am useful.”

Wren considered the answer with grave attention before nodding once, as though usefulness would have to serve where worthiness had failed. Elira rose without releasing her hand, and only then did she turn toward the miller.

“If you touch her again,” she said, “you will spend the rest of your life apologizing with fewer fingers.”

The man opened his mouth, but whatever reply he had prepared failed him beneath Elira’s stare.

A sound nearly escaped Seren before she smothered it, though the brief temptation toward amusement vanished when Elira directed her attention toward the rest of the village.

“This child did not summon your dead,” she said, her voice carrying easily across the square. “She did not empty Eastmere, make the roots grow beneath your beds, or place dreams behind your eyes. She is not an omen because you are frightened, and she is not guilty because old things find children easier to reach than men who have spent their lives teaching themselves not to listen.”