11. Chapter Eleven Seren Veyr #5
That caught Seren more sharply than the rest. “What was she doing?”
“Standing in the path.”
“Did she wake you?”
“Not at first.” Wren’s mouth twisted as she searched for the memory. Seren could almost see the dream moving behind her eyes, indistinct but stubbornly real.
“What did she do?” Seren asked.
“She sounded quiet.”
Seren waited, expecting the child to continue. When she did not, patience briefly failed her. “She sounded quiet?”
Wren nodded as though Seren had finally repeated the important part correctly. “Other people are noisy when they’re scared, even when they don’t talk. Their fear goes everywhere.”
Seren thought of soldiers breathing too quickly before battle, hands tightening around weapons, boots shifting toward exits while mouths insisted they were calm. “And Elira?”
“She gets quieter.”
The answer struck with more force than it should have.
Seren had witnessed Elira’s stillness often enough to mistake it for contempt, secrecy, or the ordinary arrogance of a woman convinced she understood more than everyone else.
She had not considered that the silence might be fear drawn inward and compressed until nothing escaped. “What frightened her?”
Wren looked toward the forest again. “The thing hearing her.”
Seren went still. Around them, Briar Hollow continued its fragile imitation of an ordinary afternoon. A cart groaned over the road, someone split wood behind the inn, and the baker argued through an open window about the price of salt. None of it reached Seren clearly.
“The thing hearing her,” she repeated.
Wren nodded.
Seren lowered her voice without meaning to. “What thing?”
“The one under the tree.” A faint pulse moved through the stones beneath them.
Seren’s hand closed against the edge of the wall as she told herself it had been the cart, frozen ground settling beneath its wheels, or any one of the reasonable explanations Briar Hollow had steadily taught her to distrust.
Wren leaned closer until the shawl slid halfway off one shoulder. “The roots don’t talk to you the same way.”
“So you’ve mentioned.”
“They go quiet when you come near.”
Seren looked down at the stones, though there were no roots visible beneath them. “Why?”
Wren tilted her head and considered Seren with the solemn pity she usually reserved for adults asking obvious questions. “Because you cut things down.”
The words were delivered without judgment, which made them considerably harder to defend against. Seren thought of palace gates shattered beneath Coalition rams, imperial banners curling into flame, and libraries burning because soldiers had been told the records inside were dangerous.
She remembered roots torn from battlefields after Earthspeakers raised them against her army, severed with axes and soaked in oil because no one knew what else might make them release the bodies trapped beneath.
She thought of all the things the revolution had called necessary, as though necessity absolved the hand that carried it out. “I have cut down many things,” she said.
Wren studied her face. “Were they bad?”
Once, Seren would have answered without hesitation. There had been a war, an empire, and people suffering beneath it. Certainty had been easier when viewed from a battlefield, where everything beyond the next command became a luxury for survivors to examine later.
“Some were,” she said.
“And some weren’t?”
Seren looked toward the northern forest, its bare branches woven together against the sky. “Some were in the way.”
Wren considered that with far more seriousness than most adults would have offered. “That isn’t the same.”
“No,” Seren said, the admission quieter than she intended. “It is not.”
The child slid down from the wall, nearly disappearing beneath the shawl before emerging with it dragging behind her like a defeated banner.
“Elowen says I’m not supposed to talk about the singing too much because it upsets people.”
“Elowen is probably right,” Seren agreed.
“But you asked.”
“I did.”
Wren squinted up at her. “So you upset yourself.”
Seren stared at the child, uncertain whether she had just been offered a profound philosophical observation or insulted by someone whose shoes still fastened with mismatched laces.
Wren’s mouth curled with satisfaction. Before Seren could choose an answer, the crow returned to the wall and dropped something between them.
A narrow strip of blue wax struck the stone.
Wren brightened. “He remembered something.”
Seren picked it up carefully. The wax bore the broken edge of the Coalition seal. Her brief amusement disappeared. “Where did he find this?”
Wren looked toward the bird. The crow cawed once and turned its head north. Wren gave Seren a triumphant smile. “See? Gossip.”
Then she darted toward Elowen’s cottage before Seren could decide whether allowing a child to recruit birds into an investigation violated any military regulation. Seren remained beside the wall with the broken seal resting in her palm and the northern forest waiting beyond the rooftops.
Beneath her boots, something in the earth went quiet.