Page 95 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Mara’s mouth twitched, but she did not smile. “You are not most scholars.”

“No.” The honesty settled between them, light but sharp.

Mara rose and crossed to the hearth with the silence of someone accustomed to waking in hostile places. She crouched, stirred the embers, and coaxed them back toward flame. Sparks brightened beneath her hand. Aelira watched the scout work, watched the efficient economy of her movements, the absence of wasted gesture. Seren had chosen well, and Aelira found that irritating too.

“You trust her,” Aelira said.

Mara did not ask who. That was answer enough. “Yes.” She spoke simply.

Aelira looked toward Seren despite herself.

Mara fed another sliver of wood to the growing fire. “She comes back.”

The words were plain. Nearly ugly in their simplicity. They should not have troubled Aelira, and yet they did, because there were some kinds of loyalty that sounded less like devotion and more like evidence. Mara did not soften the explanation. She spoke as though giving a report. Seren came back when roads closed, when orders went wrong, when commanders with cleaner boots sent others into mud and blood and dark. Seren came back bleeding, usually furious, usually carrying whoever could still be carried. Seren came back from fields where other officers sent condolences. She came back from ruins. She came back from Ashwood.

At that name, something in the room changed. She felt it the way old grief could tilt the air around a word. Mara’s hand waited over the kindling. She looked at Seren, and there was something in the scout’s face that was not reverence and not pity. Recognition, perhaps. The kind one soldier offered another wound.

“She came back from Ashwood,” Aelira said quietly.

Mara’s answer was softer than before. “Not all of her.”

Aelira went still. She should have hated that. Poor Seren, then. Poor beloved general, carrying ghosts from a palace she had helped burn. Poor hero, burdened by the ruins that made her famous. The thought rose not unlike venom, ready and familiar. But it dulled before striking—that was becoming a problem.

Mara did not defend Seren. That was the worst part. Defensiveness would have given Aelira something to cut. Mara only returned her attention to the fire and spoke with the flat certainty of someone who had stood beside a wound long enough to know its shape. Everyone who walked out of the capital carried something. Some carried flags. Some carried gold. Some carried bones. Seren carried ghosts.

Aelira looked at the sleeping general again. Hatred stirred beneath her ribs, but it no longer moved alone. Before Aelira could decide whether that was weakness or simply inconvenience, Seren woke.

Her hand moved first, fingers closing around the hilt beneath the table before her eyes had fully opened. Aelira saw it clearly. Seren did not return from sleep as other people did, dragged upward by light or noise or discomfort. She woke prepared. She woke as if the world had already betrayed her once and might do so again before breakfast. Her gaze found Aelira first. Of course it did. For one breath, neither of them moved. Then Seren blinked, sat upright, and removed her hand from her sword with the weary dignity of someone pretending she had not just woken half-ready to kill the furniture.

They left once the sun had climbed high enough to turn the forest blinding. The horses picked their way through drifts and hidden stones, breath steaming in the cold. Snow weighed down pine branches until they bowed over the road resembling supplicants before a cruel court. Every few minutes, one released its burden with a soft rush, scattering white powder across the path and startling Coren badly enough that Mara eventually threatened, without much emotion, to attach a bell to him so the trees would know where to aim.

Aelira rode near Seren because the universe had apparently committed itself to inconvenience. For a while, neither spoke.

It was almost peaceful, if one ignored the ache in Aelira’s hand, the key warming near her ribs, the old road dragging them deeper into land that remembered blood better than names, and the presence of the general beside her. Almost.

Mara’s words followed her through the white forest.

She comes back every time.

Aelira wondered what loyalty like that had cost. Not loyalty offered to crowns, bloodlines, banners, or gods, but to a person who returned often enough for survival to become faith. Ashwood had taught obedience better than loyalty. Courts worshipped hierarchy and called it devotion. Ministers bowed while calculating weakness. Guards swore oaths to her father and quietly counted which faction might outlive him. Even love, in the palace, had often been watched by the walls before it reached the heart.

Seren’s people trusted her because she returned. How plain. How inelegant. How difficult to dismiss.

The old road began revealing itself in fragments beneath the snow. Here, a line of black stone too straight for nature. There, a half-buried marker leaning at an angle, its carved surface veiled in ice. Once, they passed beneath an archway so consumed by moss and winter that Coren nearly rode under it without looking up.

Aelira knew the shape before she brushed frost from the base. Three roots beneath an open eye. The sight struck something deep and old in her, memory unfolding beneath memory. Lessons beneath the Worldroot Tree. Her father’s tired hands guiding hers over carved stone. Her mother’s voice low in the dark, telling her that old places did not forget simply because people stopped praying there. Aelira had been a child then, bored by solemnity, eager to escape underground chambers and return to sunlight. How unforgivably well protected she had been from the cost of knowing.

Seren dismounted beside her. Aelira did not need to look at her to feel the general studying the mark, the archway, the pattern of Aelira’s silence. A warning, Aelira told them, because some truth had to be offered in lesser amounts or it would poison the air.

It had been a warning, just not against entering as they assumed. It warned against entering carelessly. Which, of course, they were. A general, two scouts, one exhausted false scholar, no proper rites, no fasting, no silence, no washing, no grounding, no days spent contemplating the smallness of the self before the vastness below. They had eaten stale bread an hour before walking into a holy wound—doomed aesthetically as well as spiritually, then.

Listener’s Rise appeared shortly after noon.

It rose from the forest similar to the back of some buried beast, a long white hill ringed by standing stones half-hidden among the trees. They were taller than Wren’s drawing had suggested, though perhaps the child had understood their proportions better than Aelira wanted to admit. The stones leaned inward slightly, weathered by centuries, their surfaces carved with marks nearly erased by lichen, frost, and neglect.

The air changed at the base of the hill.

Mara stopped first, one hand lifting to still the party. Coren’s horse sidestepped nervously. Seren went quiet in that battlefield way of hers, all humor and irritation vanishing beneath command. But Aelira felt the shift more intimately, as if the hill had placed a hand inside her chest and closed its fingers around something that had always belonged to it.