Page 67 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Elira resisted every one of them.

“I did not say she was cruel.”

“No,” Elowen replied. “But you were placing her in one of your little boxes.”

Seren lifted her gaze from the map.

Elowen met it without flinching. Most villagers either looked away too quickly or stared too long, seeing the title before the woman burdened with carrying it. Elowen did neither. She looked at Seren as though rank were only another symptom to account for.

“I do not have little boxes,” Seren said.

“You have categories.”

“Categories are useful.”

“They are tidy.”

“Tidy things are often useful.”

Elowen’s mouth curved, though there was little humor in it. “People rarely are.”

Seren looked back down at the map, tracing the northern road without touching it. The healer was right, which made the observation considerably less welcome.

Elira would have been simpler if she were cruel. Cruelty possessed reliable edges. It announced itself in what a person was willing to take, whom they allowed to suffer, and how easily they looked away afterward. Seren knew how to work with cruelty; she had negotiated with it, fought beneath it, and ordered men killed because of it.

But Elira had sat beside a frightened child until he slept.

She had threatened a grown man for laying hands on Wren.

She spoke of human beings as though disappointment were her natural state, yet continued helping them when no one was watching closely enough to reward her for it.

None of that made her safe.

Seren resented that some part of her had begun insisting the distinction mattered.

“What did Jacob say?” she asked.

Elowen’s eyes remained on her for another moment before she answered. “Very little. He remembered waking once and seeing Elira sitting beside the bed.”

“Doing what?”

“Holding his hand.”

The image arrived too easily: Elira in the dark beside a sleeping child, silver hair pale in the weak candlelight, her sharp expression softened by something she would deny if accused of possessing it.

Seren pushed the thought aside. “And that stopped the nightmares?”

“He said she told him the singing could not follow him somewhere he had already been loved.”

Seren’s attention returned to Elowen. The healer’s face had gone quiet.

“That does not sound like relaxation,” Seren said.

“No.”

It sounded like knowledge.

Worse, it sounded like experience.