Page 71 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“They go quiet when you come near.”

Seren looked down at the stones, though there were no roots visible beneath them. “Why?”

Wren tilted her head and considered Seren with the solemn pity she usually reserved for adults asking obvious questions. “Because you cut things down.”

The words were delivered without judgment, which made them considerably harder to defend against. Seren thought of palace gates shattered beneath Coalition rams, imperial banners curling into flame, and libraries burning because soldiers had been told the records inside were dangerous. She remembered roots torn from battlefields after Earthspeakers raised them against her army, severed with axes and soaked in oil because no one knew what else might make them release the bodies trapped beneath.

She thought of all the things the revolution had called necessary, as though necessity absolved the hand that carried it out. “I have cut down many things,” she said.

Wren studied her face. “Were they bad?”

Once, Seren would have answered without hesitation. There had been a war, an empire, and people suffering beneath it. Certainty had been easier when viewed from a battlefield, where everything beyond the next command became a luxury for survivors to examine later.

“Some were,” she said.

“And some weren’t?”

Seren looked toward the northern forest, its bare branches woven together against the sky. “Some were in the way.”

Wren considered that with far more seriousness than most adults would have offered. “That isn’t the same.”

“No,” Seren said, the admission quieter than she intended. “It is not.”

The child slid down from the wall, nearly disappearing beneath the shawl before emerging with it dragging behind her like a defeated banner.

“Elowen says I’m not supposed to talk about the singing too much because it upsets people.”

“Elowen is probably right,” Seren agreed.

“But you asked.”

“I did.”

Wren squinted up at her. “So you upset yourself.”

Seren stared at the child, uncertain whether she had just been offered a profound philosophical observation or insulted by someone whose shoes still fastened with mismatched laces. Wren’s mouth curled with satisfaction. Before Seren could choose an answer, the crow returned to the wall and dropped something between them. A narrow strip of blue wax struck the stone.

Wren brightened. “He remembered something.”

Seren picked it up carefully. The wax bore the broken edge of the Coalition seal. Her brief amusement disappeared. “Where did he find this?”

Wren looked toward the bird. The crow cawed once and turned its head north. Wren gave Seren a triumphant smile. “See? Gossip.”

Then she darted toward Elowen’s cottage before Seren could decide whether allowing a child to recruit birds into an investigation violated any military regulation. Seren remained beside the wall with the broken seal resting in her palm and the northern forest waiting beyond the rooftops.

Beneath her boots, something in the earth went quiet.

Chapter Twelve: Aelira Ashwood

Aelira reached the dry streambed before sunset, though reached implied she had chosen the destination rather than been drawn toward it by roots that had spent the better part of an hour pretending not to guide her. They emerged only where the rain had loosened the soil, pale threads slipping between the darker roots of pine and oak before disappearing beneath stones, turning north whenever the path divided. To anyone without Earthblood, the pattern might have resembled ordinary growth distorted by poor soil, but ordinary roots searched for water, warmth, and room enough to survive.

These were returning to something. That distinction unsettled her. Aelira followed at a careful distance, stepping where the ground remained firm and refusing the invitation of every pale strand that surfaced near her boots. She had learned long ago that magic rarely announced the price of attention before it was paid, and the old earth beneath Briar Hollow had become far too eager to be noticed.

The roots were not young, despite their softness and color. They had simply never known sunlight. Surface roots grew bark as a shield against weather, animals, iron, and the careless violence of human feet, but the tendrils rising beneath Briar Hollow were flesh of the deep places, pale from centuries spent inside the dark. They belonged to an older network threaded beneath roads, ruins, forests, and kingdoms—the buried architecture through which the land carried water, power, and memory.

Earthspeakers had once called such pathways Vaelir, the remembering veins.

Aelira’s tutors had taught her that all living earth retained impressions. Stone remembered pressure. Rivers remembered the shape of their first beds. Trees held drought, fire, and every hand that had cut deeply enough to wound the rings beneath their bark. Most Earthspeakers learned to touch those memories lightly, drawing upon what remained nearest the surface and offering something of themselves in exchange: warmth, breath, pain, sometimes blood.