Page 62 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Briar Hollow looked less like a haunted place and more like a body growing ill. Small failures first, sleep disturbed, attention wandering, instincts misfiring, and children being drawn toward danger before adults admitted danger had a pattern. The disease was not in the blood—it was in the roots.

Roran fell into step beside her. “You’re making that face.”

Seren did not slow. “What face?”

He pointed vaguely at his own forehead. “It starts there. The left brow lowers first.”

“Do not make it seem like my eyebrows do conduct military operations.”

“They absolutely do.”

“Roran.”

“There.” He nodded once, satisfied, and unwise. “That one means latrine inventory may be in my future.”

“It may be your future if you keep talking.” Despite herself, Seren almost let the answer become a smile.

She scanned toward the northern tree line, where fog gathered between the trunks in pale, waiting ribbons, and the almost-smile died before it could betray her.

Roran saw it too. His voice quieted. “Four children now. Five, if we count the boy by the well.”

“We count him.”

“Then five.” His jaw tightened. “All walking north.”

By midmorning, Seren had spoken with nearly twenty villagers, and every answer made the shape of the problem feel less accidental. Wren was not the only child wandering in her sleep. Three others had been found outside their homes during the nights before the boy walked into the well, barefoot and unresponsive beneath the winter sky. Another had been discovered at dawn standing in the middle of a field, his nightshirt soaked to the knees and both hands cupped around wet earth as though someone had instructed him to carry it somewhere.

When his mother shook him awake, he had begun to cry. He did not remember leaving his bed or crossing the field. He knew only that someone had been waiting for him beyond the trees. No one could agree afterward whether the child had said someone or something, and Seren suspected the difference mattered far more than any of them wanted to admit. People preferred monsters without faces. A something could be hunted, contained, or killed. A someone invited questions about intention, recognition, and why it had chosen to call a child by name.

Every account pointed north. Every dream, every vanished hour, every pair of small feet found muddy before dawn had turned toward the forest and the mountains beyond.

By nightfall, the stories no longer felt like reports. They felt like invitations. The first villager Seren found beside the well was barefoot. That was what stopped her. Not the hour, though the village had gone quiet beneath the weight of midnight. Not the snow falling thickly enough to soften the square and erase the familiar edges of every path. Not even the faint green light moving beneath the stones, because Briar Hollow had already begun fitting impossible things into the corners of ordinary sight, and Seren had learned that disbelief was a luxury best reserved for safer places.

Bare feet moved silently. An old man stood at the well wearing only trousers, a thin sleep shirt, and a wool blanket that had slipped from one shoulder and trailed through the snow behind him. White gathered in his thinning hair and along his lashes. His toes had gone dark red where they curled against the frozen stones, yet he did not shiver.

Seren recognized him immediately.

Tovan, the cooper.

He had spent part of the afternoon insisting that his cellar door had swollen shut from damp and not because pale roots were forcing their way through the foundation. He had informed Seren that she was too young to look so tired and told Roran he was too old to continue pretending usefulness was a permanent condition. Seren had almost liked him for it. Now he stood with his hands hanging loosely at his sides, staring into the well while tears slid soundlessly down his face.

There was no confusion in his expression, no slackness of sleep or empty trance. What she saw there was worse because it was lucid. He looked as though something below had given him back hope. Seren approached carefully, resisting the instinct to call for the soldiers. Too many voices might startle him, and a frightened man could be predictable, but a grieving one was governed by a logic that bent around whatever had been lost.

“Tovan.”

He gave no indication that he had heard her. Behind Seren, a door opened with a low groan. Another followed, and then came the soft movement of shutters as the village began waking one window at a time. Someone whispered Tovan’s name and was hushed so quickly that the word seemed to vanish before reaching him.

Seren kept her attention on the old man. “Tovan, step away from the well.”

His lips moved. At first, no sound emerged, and Seren wondered whether he was praying. Then his face softened with such naked tenderness that something tightened inside her before she understood what she was seeing. “She’s singing.”

Seren’s hand settled around the hilt of her sword, though steel felt useless against a voice rising from beneath stone. “Who is?”

“My Maira.” The name broke him. His mouth trembled around it, and the grief that entered his face did not appear new, though it arrived with the force of a wound reopening. For one terrible moment, he no longer looked like an old man standing in the snow. He looked newly bereaved, caught again in the first hour after loss, still waiting for someone to tell him there had been a mistake.

“She always sang when she made bread,” he whispered. “Every morning, even when I begged her not to.”

A laugh tried to escape him and collapsed into a breath that shook through his body.