6. Chapter Six Aelira Ashwood #4
Three hundred and seventeen deaths. She remembered every number.
Three hundred and seventeen people killed to keep twenty-two thousand alive.
That was the truth, ugly and exact. People remembered the smoke.
They remembered locked gates. They remembered stories of the Butcher Princess standing above the city while the condemned screamed below.
Nobody remembered the plague that never spread.
History rarely celebrated disasters prevented—only disasters witnessed.
The tavern returned around her.
Aelira realized her grip had tightened around the cup and loosened it at once. The arithmetic remained unchanged and always would. Yet for the first time in years, she found herself wondering whether that thought comforted her as much as it once had.
Across the room, the customers continued debating her crimes.
The list had expanded considerably. Apparently, she had poisoned a river, assassinated a king, and once transformed an army into trees.
That last one was admittedly imaginative.
Aelira almost admired it. At some point, she noticed something more fascinating than the stories themselves.
No one sounded truly afraid—not anymore.
The revolution was outdated now; a tavern tale.
A cautionary lesson poured alongside cheap ale.
The Butcher Princess had become a character, not a person.
She had become a monster safely buried in the past. Dead things were easier to understand.
A strange sadness settled over her, not because they hated her.
That, at least, would have been intimate.
She was no longer Aelira Ashwood. She was a lesson—a warning.
Perhaps that was inevitable. People were far more complicated, and complication required more mercy than most could afford.
When Aelira finally rose to leave, she found herself carrying an unexpected weight.
Outside, the evening air felt cool against her skin.
The sounds of the tavern faded behind her, swallowed by the open road and the first rising notes of night.
Above, stars began emerging one by one. Her horse waited where she had left him, looking as unimpressed as ever.
Aelira mounted and turned north. For several moments she sat silently in the saddle. Then she laughed. The sound was quiet and bitter. “Apparently, I drowned a city.”
The horse flicked an ear. “I know.” She gathered the reins. “Personally, I thought turning an army into trees was much more impressive.”
The horse remained unconvinced. Aelira could not blame him.
The village disappeared behind her long before midnight.
Aelira preferred traveling at night. Darkness made fewer assumptions.
The road wound north through forests silvered by moonlight, pines crowding the hillsides while their shadows stretched long across the earth.
Mist hovered low over the ditches. The world had grown quiet again, though not silent.
Crickets sang somewhere beyond the trees.
An owl called from deeper in the forest. Wind moved gently through the branches overhead.
Small sounds—living sounds.
The sort she had spent ten years teaching herself to appreciate. Eventually, she guided her horse off the road and into a small clearing overlooking a stream.
“This will do.”
The horse swished his tail.
“Your enthusiasm humbles me.”
She built a fire first. The flames burned low as Aelira sat beside them and stared into the darkness beyond the trees.
The journey north would take several days, perhaps longer if the old roads had deteriorated further since the revolution.
Another irony—the empire had built roads so future generations could forget who built them.
Across the stream, moonlight reflected on the water’s surface, and for a brief moment she imagined another figure sitting beside the fire; Broad shoulders, dark hair, and an infuriating grin. The image arrived so naturally that she did not immediately recognize it as memory.
“You’re staring again,” her brother said. The voice existed only in her head. Of course, it always did.
Aelira sighed softly. “I know.”
He would have laughed. He always laughed, even during war—especially during war. The trait had driven her insane once. “You’re brooding.”
“I am thinking,” she retorted.
“The difference remains unclear.”
Aelira shook her head. The conversation unfolded exactly as it always did, the same words, the same responses.
It was a decade of repetition that had worn familiar grooves through her thoughts.
She knew what he would say before she imagined it.
The problem was that she also knew what she would say.
The arguments continued anyway. The dead rarely respected efficiency.
The fire crackled, sending sparks upward into darkness. For several moments neither she nor the memory spoke.
Eventually, she broke the silence.
“I think I was tired.” The admission surprised her, only because she rarely allowed herself to acknowledge it.
Ten years of carrying an empire’s corpse.
Ten years of carrying responsibility for decisions no one else wanted to remember accurately.
Ten years of surviving while everyone else became story.
Survival itself was exhausting.
The imagined version of her brother smiled, gentler this time. “You always were.”
The answer tightened something in her chest because he would have articulated exactly that.
No comfort. No reassurance. Only truth. He had always preferred truth, even when it hurt.
Especially when it hurt. Aelira looked away from the fire and toward the stars.
Thousands of them scattered across the sky, ancient and indifferent and impossibly patient.
Her brother should have seen them. The thought emerged unexpectedly. Simple, sharp, and unbearable.
Her composure faltered for only a moment before she steadied herself with one slow breath.
It was not the first time the memory of her brother arrived.
It would not be the last. People spoke of grief as though time softened it, as though the heart eventually forgot the original shape of pain.
Aelira had never found that to be true. Grief did not shrink—life simply grew around it, layer by layer, like a tree wrapping itself around a blade.
The metal remained, the tree only learned how to hold it without dying.
She could still remember the last time she saw him. Smoke in the corridors, shouting from the lower gates, the terrible knowledge moving through the palace like poison, that Ashwood would fall before dawn.
Her brother’s hand on her shoulder.
“Go.” A prince’s order—a brother’s final gift.
She had obeyed. The memory had never become easier.
A branch snapped beyond the clearing. Aelira’s eyes opened at once.
Instinct replaced grief before the second sound came, her hand finding the blade at her side as silence settled between the trees.
A deer, she decided after several moments.
The bond between herself and the earth had frayed long ago, but every so often, the world remembered how to whisper.
Tonight, it offered little. The stream continued flowing.
The stars held their places. The horse tore at the grass with complete disregard for drama.
Aelira slowly lowered her hand from the blade.
The pressure returned. Faint at first, then stronger, pulsing once through the soles of her feet before vanishing.
Aelira stared into the flames. For the first time since receiving the letter, fear truly arrived.
She feared not for herself—never for herself.
She feared for everyone else, because if she was right, if the signs meant what she believed they meant, then the disappearances were not the disaster.
They were the opening note. A cold knot settled in her stomach, old and familiar, the same feeling she had known as a child beneath the Worldroot Tree while her father explained burdens meant for rulers alone.
For the first time in a decade, she wished she could ask his advice.
The earth had remembered her, that did not make her chosen—it made her responsible.
And responsibility, Aelira knew, was only another name for a debt that had finally come to be collected.