11. Chapter Eleven Seren Veyr #4
Elowen’s eyes remained on her for another moment before she answered. “Very little. He remembered waking once and seeing Elira sitting beside the bed.”
“Doing what?”
“Holding his hand.”
The image arrived too easily: Elira in the dark beside a sleeping child, silver hair pale in the weak candlelight, her sharp expression softened by something she would deny if accused of possessing it.
Seren pushed the thought aside. “And that stopped the nightmares?”
“He said she told him the singing could not follow him somewhere he had already been loved.”
Seren’s attention returned to Elowen. The healer’s face had gone quiet.
“That does not sound like relaxation,” Seren said.
“No.”
It sounded like knowledge.
Worse, it sounded like experience.
Seren studied the northern edge of the map while the pieces shifted without settling.
Elira knew the roots, understood the dreams, and spoke of the singing as though she had heard it long before arriving in Briar Hollow.
She hid weapons beneath her sleeves, lied with elegance, and offered tenderness only when she believed no one important was watching.
The contradictions should have made Seren distrust her more.
Instead, they made her want to understand. That was the more dangerous impulse.
Elowen gathered the loose herbs into a small bundle. “She helped him, General.”
“I know.” Seren’s jaw tightened.
Elowen tied the stems with a length of thread, allowing the silence to do the work of an accusation. "Do you?"
Seren looked again at the map, though her thoughts had already left it behind. “Helping someone does not mean she is telling the truth.”
“No,” Elowen said. “But lying does not mean every kindness is false.”
Seren had no answer ready for that. She disliked Elowen slightly for noticing. “She was outside when Wren sleepwalked.”
“She may have saved her.”
“I know that, too.”
Elowen softened by a fraction. “Then what is the question?”
Seren was quiet for a moment. The answer should have been simple.
Who is Elira Thorn?
What does she know?
Why do the roots react to her?
Instead, Seren’s gaze moved toward the covered well, then toward the northern road beyond the window, where every account, every dream, every sleepwalking child seemed to point.
“The question,” Seren said at last, “is whether she is part of the danger, or the only person here who understands it.”
Seren was quiet. The answer should have been simple. What does Elira know? Who is she? Why does she recognize symbols from ruins buried under centuries of history? Why do children say roots speak differently around her? Why does she look at old magic with grief rather than surprise?
“Whether she found Wren by chance?"
Elowen did not answer immediately. The fire cracked in the hearth. Outside, a child laughed once and was quickly hushed.
Finally, Elowen said, “I don’t think much happens by chance in this village anymore.”
Later that afternoon, Seren found Wren perched atop the low stone wall near the village square, wrapped in a shawl so large that only her muddy boots and the upper half of her face remained visible.
She appeared to be conducting a grave negotiation with a crow that stood several feet away, its black feathers ruffled against the cold and its head tilted with the unmistakable impatience of a creature regretting every decision that had led it there.
Wren whispered something. The crow answered with a single harsh caw. Neither party appeared satisfied. Seren paused beside the wall, grateful for a problem that did not immediately involve ancient magic, sleepwalking children, or pale roots reaching toward grieving men. “Making progress?”
Wren looked up, and the crow seized the opportunity to abandon negotiations entirely, launching itself toward the chapel roof with several offended beats of its wings.
“Not really,” Wren said, watching it go. “He doesn’t know anything.”
“That must be disappointing.”
“It is. Birds gossip constantly, but they don’t organize their thoughts.”
Seren glanced toward the crow, which had already begun shouting at the chimney. “A common problem.”
Wren patted the stone beside her. Seren considered declining.
The village hall waited behind her with a table buried beneath maps and witness accounts, the scouts were preparing to follow the northern tracks, and Roran was undoubtedly searching for another opportunity to express concern through aggressive silence.
More importantly, the child beside her had become one of Briar Hollow’s most valuable and unsettling witnesses, which made casual conversation with her feel suspiciously like work disguised as rest.
Seren sat anyway.
The shawl had pooled between them, smelling faintly of rosemary and woodsmoke. Wren resumed swinging her legs, kicking the wall lightly with each pass. “You look tired,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t nice.”
“I noticed.”
Wren studied her with the blunt concern children reserved for adults who had failed to perform basic maintenance. “You should sleep.”
“So should you.”
The kicking stopped. Wren’s mouth tightened, and the momentary quiet in her face erased some of the mischief that usually made her seem older than seven. “Sleeping is where the singing is.”
Seren’s attention sharpened at once, although she kept her posture loose and her voice mild. Children often offered the truth sideways, tucked between observations about birds and weather, and pushing too quickly could turn honesty into whatever answer they believed an adult wanted.
“Do you hear it while you’re awake?”
“Sometimes," the girl replied.
“When?”
Wren lifted one shoulder beneath the shawl. “When it wants me to.”
The answer settled slowly, resisting every harmless interpretation Seren attempted to give it.
“When it wants you to,” she repeated.
Wren nodded, apparently unaware that she had just transformed the singing from a symptom into something capable of choice.
“Does it speak to you?”
“No.” The child sounded faintly insulted by the question. “It doesn’t have a mouth.”
“A shocking limitation.”
Wren rolled her eyes. “It remembers at people.”
Seren turned toward her. Wren looked back with complete confidence, as though the meaning should have been obvious to anyone possessing a functional mind. Seren resisted the urge to interrogate the grammar before the horror of the idea had fully settled. “What does it remember at you?”
The child’s gaze drifted past the square and toward the northern hills, where the forest rose dark beneath a low sky. Something in her expression loosened and went distant, as if she were no longer seeing the rooftops between them.
“A tree under the world,” she said. “There are roads made of roots, and people walk down them.”
Seren watched the girl’s profile, the faint charcoal stains still lodged along her fingernails despite Elowen’s likely efforts to scrub them clean. “Do they come back?”
“Some of them.” The answer was too immediate.
“And the others?”
Wren frowned. “Maybe they go somewhere else.”
Seren disliked the softness of that possibility far more than she would have disliked certainty. “What happens to the ones who return?”
“They come back different.”
“Different how?”
The child thought for a moment, her brow drawing together as she searched for the nearest word. “Older.”
Cold moved over Seren’s skin beneath her coat.
She could have asked what older meant, whether Wren had seen gray hair or bent bodies or simply something ancient looking outward through familiar faces, but the girl’s legs had stopped swinging, and for the first time since Seren sat down she looked entirely her age—small beneath Elowen’s enormous shawl, tired around the eyes, and frightened by something she did not possess the language to explain.
“Do you remember walking last night?” Seren asked.
Wren lowered her gaze to her hands. “A little.”
Seren waited, allowing the silence to remain gentle rather than demanding. “Tell me what you remember.”
“I was dreaming, but the village was gone.” Wren rubbed one charcoal-marked thumb over the other. “The forest was open, like it had been waiting for me, and there was a path that shone even though there weren’t any lanterns.”
“What made it shine?”
“The roots.”
Seren imagined pale tendrils threading through black earth, illuminating a road no waking traveler had found. “And you followed them?”
“I wanted to see the sleeping tree.” The phrase landed with the weight of something she had heard before, though never spoken so plainly.
Seren kept her voice even. “Did you reach it?”
Wren shook her head. “Elira was there.”