9. Chapter Nine Seren Veyr #5
“This child did not summon your dead,” she said, her voice carrying easily across the square.
“She did not empty Eastmere, make the roots grow beneath your beds, or place dreams behind your eyes. She is not an omen because you are frightened, and she is not guilty because old things find children easier to reach than men who have spent their lives teaching themselves not to listen.”
The crowd shifted around her, but no one stepped forward.
The pale root still lay in the mud between Elira and the miller, its surface gleaming wetly beneath the rain.
Elira stepped over it without looking down, and the villagers nearest her moved backward, sending an uneven retreat through the gathering as shoulders struck shoulders and boots scraped against stone.
“She is a child,” Elira continued, lowering her voice without diminishing its reach, “and if this village has fallen so far that it requires a stranger to remind you of that, then perhaps the roots are not the only things rotting beneath Briar Hollow.”
The silence that followed contained nothing resembling peace. The villagers stood with their fear turned inward, no longer certain where they should direct it now that Elira had denied them the easiest target.
Elowen pushed between two men near the front of the gathering, one hand clutching her skirts while the other reached toward the child. Her face had gone pale enough that the freckles across her nose stood out beneath the rain.
“Wren.”
The child tore free of Elira’s hand and ran. Elowen dropped to meet her, wrapping both arms around Wren and searching her face, her hands, and the mud smeared across her clothes before drawing her close again. Over the child’s head, she looked at Elira.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Whatever softness had entered Elira’s face closed at once. “Do not thank me. Keep her away from crowds.”
“She has to play somewhere.”
“Then teach the crowd not to become wolves.”
Elowen’s grip tightened around Wren, though she did not appear offended by the answer.
She gathered the child against her side and led her toward the healer’s cottage, murmuring into her hair as the villagers parted without being told.
Only after the cottage door closed behind them did sound begin to return to the square: a low cough, the uneasy shuffle of boots, a whisper too quiet to distinguish from the rain.
No one approached the place where the drawing had fallen, and no one appeared eager to look closely at the narrow wound the root had left in the mud.
Elira remained beside it, her gaze resting on the broken earth while one hand hung loosely at her side. Her fingers curled once before disappearing into the folds of her cloak. Seren kept her eyes on Elira. “You care about her.”
Elira’s mouth hardened. “Do not make that sound like an accusation.”
“I was deciding whether it was one.” Seren glanced toward the healer’s cottage, where Wren’s shadow passed briefly behind one shuttered window before disappearing again. When she returned her attention to Elira, the woman was already watching her. “And I have not decided.”
The answer appeared to satisfy neither of them, though Elira merely tilted her head and studied Seren’s expression.
“You look displeased.”
The scholar scoffed. “I often am when it comes to mysteries that develop moral complexity.”
A faint line appeared between Elira’s brows before the corner of her mouth lifted in a smile small enough that Seren might have mistaken it for something else had it not lingered a moment longer than caution required.
“Then you must be suffering terribly,” Elira said.
“Yes.” The word emerged more quietly than Seren intended, and the almost-smile vanished from Elira’s mouth beneath an expression neither of them permitted to remain long enough to understand.
For several breaths, they stood without speaking while the village resumed its uneasy movement around them and rain gathered in the impressions left by retreating feet.
Between them, the pale root remained half buried in the mud, though its tip had shifted from the place where Wren’s drawing had fallen.
Near twilight, one of the hunters agreed to show her the tracks beyond the northern boundary, although he kept his bow clenched in one hand and looked over his shoulder often enough that Roran eventually asked whether he expected the trees to follow him home.
The hunter did not laugh. Seren brought Roran and two scouts with her, dismissing the man once he had shown them the first clear print beneath the trees.
He accepted the order with visible relief and left quickly, offering no warning beyond a muttered suggestion that they return before darkness settled fully across the forest.
The tracks crossed the damp ground ahead of them, half obscured beneath fallen leaves but unmistakably human.
Several sets overlapped in the mud, some deep enough to have been made recently and others softened by rain, although they all appeared to follow the same narrow passage between the trees.
Something human should have been reassuring, because human beings left marks, followed patterns, and could be caught when pursued, yet the silence beneath the canopy made that comfort difficult to hold.
Seren crouched beside the clearest impression. The heel had sunk deeply into the soil, while the front of the foot had barely marked the ground at all.
One of the scouts leaned closer. “Were they walking backward?”
“Possibly,” Seren said.
Roran studied the trees surrounding them before lowering his gaze to the print. “Or being dragged.”
The scout straightened and stepped away. Seren rose. “Follow them.”
For the first quarter mile, the trail remained clear enough to pursue without difficulty.
They found broken fern stems, mud smeared across exposed stone, and a long scrape against the white bark of a young tree where someone had passed too closely.
As they moved deeper into the forest, however, the signs became less certain.
The footprints appeared farther apart and faced conflicting directions, with some angled north and others turned back toward the village.
Twice, the trail crossed itself, and when Seren found a clear impression beneath an undisturbed layer of dead leaves, she knelt and lifted them carefully aside.
The footprint beneath them was fresh. Roran did not comment, although his hand settled against the hilt of his sword and remained there as they continued.
The forest grew denser around them, its branches catching at their cloaks while the last of the daylight thinned between the trunks and turned the path ahead the dark, mottled color of old bruises.
No one spoke above a murmur, and even those quiet exchanges became less frequent as the familiar sounds of the woods began disappearing around them.