6. Chapter Six Aelira Ashwood #3
“That must be exhausting.” The woman laughed and shook her head. “Well, if you insist on heading north, stop at the tavern before you leave. Travelers hear things before anyone else does. Most of it is nonsense, but occasionally nonsense arrives early and proves useful.”
Aelira inclined her head. “Thank you."
The woman’s warning should have been easy to dismiss.
Villagers warned of many things when winter pressed too close to their doors and roads began swallowing wheels.
Wolves in the tree line. Bandits on the old trade paths.
Ghosts near abandoned shrines. Bad omens in the flight of crows or the shape of smoke over a chimney.
Fear made people inventive, and the north had always been generous with shadows.
Aelira did not dismiss this. She kept her expression mild, perhaps even faintly amused, because strangers expected that from a woman too well dressed to believe in peasant superstition.
Her face gave nothing away. Her hands remained still.
Only her attention sharpened, quiet and lethal, turning the woman’s words over like a blade beneath candlelight.
Something wrong in the north.
Children were dreaming badly.
Roots where roots did not belong.
Roads shifting after rain.
The woman thought she was offering rumor when the truth was something deeper.
She was offering confirmation. Aelira looked toward the northern road, where mist clung low between the trees and the mountains waited like dark teeth against the sky.
Old maps stirred in her mind unbidden: rootways, seal lines, forgotten temples, villages built too close to wounds no living farmer had names for.
The world had spent ten years pretending Ashwood’s secrets had died with Ashwood’s bloodline.
How comforting that must have been. How catastrophically wrong.
Rootway maps had never been sensible things.
They did not obey distance. They marked pressure, memory, grief, blood, and old belonging.
A rootway did not lead a person where they wished to go.
It led them to an answer. That was why humans found them impossible.
They wanted roads—the earth gave them judgment.
“People see strange things in the north,” Aelira said at last, her voice smooth enough to make the sentence sound almost careless.
The woman nodded quickly, relieved to be believed without realizing she had not been understood.
Aelira did not correct her. Some truths were safer when mistaken for kindness.
Some warnings were more useful when left in the mouths of those who did not know what they carried.
She tucked the woman’s fear away with the rest of the morning’s evidence: the sunken road, the disturbed soil, the way the earth had answered too slowly and then too eagerly beneath her hand.
The north was waking, and if the north was waking, then something beneath it had begun to remember the name history had tried so hard to bury. Aelira turned back toward the road before the woman could see her face change.
“Go home before dark.” It sounded like advice. It was mercy, refined into warning. “Oh, and dear?”
Aelira turned. “Yes?”
Hana’s gaze flicked toward the road where Aelira’s horse waited. “Whatever you’re searching for, I hope it’s worth the trouble.”
Aelira followed her gaze northward and the old pull stirred again, faint but insistent, like a hand closing gently around a buried nerve. Worth the trouble? No, Aelira decided at once. But some things ceased to be optional long before they became worthwhile.
“So do I,” she murmured beneath her breath.
She finished the bread, thanked the woman again, and walked toward the tavern as evening settled over the village.
Behind her, Hana watched longer than necessary, eyes narrowed with the beginning of recognition or perhaps only suspicion.
She would not place Aelira’s face. People remembered monsters more clearly than history tended to.
The tavern was louder than Aelira remembered taverns being. Or perhaps she had simply grown too accustomed to silence.
For years, the only sounds accompanying her evenings had been wind scraping across stone, the crackle of a lonely fire, and the occasional protest from her horse whenever food arrived later than expected.
Compared to that, the common room felt almost indecently alive.
Laughter rolled in uneven waves. Tankards struck wood.
Chairs scraped against floorboards. A fiddler sat in the corner producing music technically recognizable as a song, though only through mercy.
Aelira chose a table near the wall. She settled into the chair with a mug of watered wine and a bowl of stew she had no particular desire to eat.
The room smelled of roasted meat, wet wool, woodsmoke, spilled ale, and all the chaotic warmth of human places.
They always smelled alive and messy—like bodies, like appetite, like mortality making noise before it vanished.
Around her, conversations rose and fell: Crop yields, road conditions, a wedding planned for autumn, the theft of three goats and the ongoing debate over whether the goats had been stolen or merely demonstrated initiative.
Ordinary concerns. The concerns most rulers spent remarkably little time understanding.
Aelira found herself listening despite herself.
For centuries, emperors had claimed to govern for people like these.
Few had ever bothered speaking to them unless ceremony required it.
That realization had become more uncomfortable with age.
The wine was mediocre. The stew was worse. She finished both. Exile had lowered many standards.
A burst of laughter erupted from a nearby table where four merchants sat in dusty cloaks and road-worn boots, wearing the particular exhaustion of people who spent more time in motion than at home. One slammed a tankard onto the table.
“I’m telling you, the village is cursed.” A merchant with a dark beard said, as if telling a ghost story.
“Cursed?” Someone scoffed. “You’ve been drinking.”
“Exactly!” The table laughed and Aelira ignored most of them until one phrase drifted across the room.
“—like something from the old empire.”
Her attention sharpened. The first merchant leaned forward dramatically. “The entire place was abandoned.”
“So they say.”
“My cousin saw it himself.”
“Your cousin also claims he once wrestled a bear.”
“He did.”
“He absolutely did not.”
“Perhaps a small bear.” More laughter erupted amongst the group.
Aelira hid a smile behind her cup. The bartender, refilling their mugs, joined without shame. “I hear the Coalition is investigating strange symbols in the villages.”
The words slid coldly beneath Aelira’s ribs. The stories were spreading quickly—faster than she had expected. Panic moved through populations much like fire through dry grass. The wrong rumor could kill as effectively as an army, and armies at least had the decency to require feeding.
Another traveler shook his head. “Probably raiders.”
“No raider takes an entire village.”
“Witches, then.”
“Witches aren’t real,” the bartender said, offended.
“That sounds exactly like something a witch would say.” The table bubbled with drunken laughter again.
Aelira stared into her wine and for one strange moment, she almost felt normal. Just another traveler overhearing foolish stories. Just another woman passing through.
Then someone said, “The Butcher Princess would’ve known.”
The laughter died immediately. Interesting, and deeply inconvenient. Even now, after ten years, the air still changed with those words. Subtly, but unmistakably. Names had gravity—some pulled curiosity, others pulled fear. Hers, apparently, still knew how to silence a room.
The merchant lowered his voice, which of course ensured everyone heard him. “My grandfather fought in the revolution.”
Aelira resisted the urge to sigh.
Another leaned forward eagerly. “Did he see her?”
“Oh, he saw her.” The man nodded solemnly. “Terrifying woman.”
Naturally. Aelira took another drink.
“They say she drowned an entire city.”
“No,” said someone at the bar. “She burned it.”
“No, that was another one.”
“I thought she fed prisoners to monsters.”
“—Maybe she did all three.”
The table considered this and, with the intellectual rigor of drunk men everywhere, appeared satisfied. Aelira closed her eyes briefly. Remarkable, humans truly were creative.
“My father said she was a devil,” one merchant added.
Of course he did, she thought. Every story needed a devil.
“Said she’d kill ten people to save one.”
That almost made her laugh. The reality had always been the opposite.
The arithmetic had simply never been pretty.
Aelira stared into the dark surface of her wine, and the common room blurred.
Suddenly she was not in a tavern. She was twenty-four years old, standing atop city walls while smoke rose into a violet evening sky.
The city had been called Veylos. Most people had forgotten the name—Aelira never would.
Twenty-two thousand civilians had been trapped behind its walls.
Three hundred rebel infiltrators hid among them.
One plague ship sat anchored in the harbor, its crew already dead or dying.
By the time they understood what had entered the city, it was too late.
The plague spread slowly at first. That was how mercy deceived people—slowly.
Politely. As if offering time. If the disease escaped Veylos, tens of thousands would die.
The eastern provinces would collapse and trade routes would fail.
Famine would follow. Everyone in that war room understood the mathematics.
No one wanted the answer. Generals argued, advisors hesitated, and every face searched desperately for a kinder solution, as though kindness were something one could summon by wanting hard enough. The problem with better solutions was that they often did not exist.
Someone had to choose.