12. Chapter Twelve Aelira Ashwood #3
Seren’s attention shifted from the roots to Aelira. “Remembered by what?”
There it was—the question humanity had asked for centuries and then ruined entire civilizations trying to answer with certainty.
Aelira’s mouth curved faintly. “That is the question wiser people spent lifetimes learning not to answer too confidently.”
Seren did not appear satisfied.
Aelira moved one finger above the parallel tendrils without allowing skin to meet them.
“Surface Earthspeakers work with what might be called nearby memory. A burned tree retains something of fire. Stone from a collapsed wall may hold the pressure of its breaking. Rivers remember their first courses long after people force them elsewhere. Skilled speakers can sometimes draw those impressions forward or persuade living things to repeat an old pattern.”
Roran glanced at her. “Persuade. Not command?”
“Command is possible.”
Memory rose before Aelira could stop it.
Her mother beneath the Ashwood boughs, blood bright across her palm. Roots lifting around her in dark, impossible arches. Not servants answering a queen, whatever the histories later claimed, but something ancient recognizing the terms of an agreement older than either of them.
Aelira forced the image down. “It is also crude,” she continued, “costly, and rarely forgotten. The earth obeys force much as people do.”
Roran’s expression hardened slightly. “Resentfully.”
Aelira looked at him. Perhaps the captain possessed more intelligence than his humor suggested. “Precisely.”
Seren returned her attention to the roots twisting through the mud. “And these remember Briar Hollow?”
Aelira felt the truth settle heavily against the back of her tongue.
The roots beneath them had crossed kingdoms before borders possessed names.
They remembered the first agreements between blood and land, the seven doors, the bindings beneath the sacred tree, and every act of violence committed by people foolish enough to believe burial and death were the same thing.
Buried things were rarely dead. They were merely given time.
“They remember more than Briar Hollow,” Aelira said and pointed north.
“The roots beneath the houses were spreading upward and inward, moving through foundations and following warmth. These are different. They are traveling in a single direction, as though something farther north has become strong enough to alter the movement of the entire network.”
Seren followed the angle of her hand. “The mountains.”
“Something beneath them.”
Roran shifted toward the place where boot prints converged with the pale growth. “The tracks stop here.”
“Yes,” Aelira said.
Seren leaned over the mud. “There should be prints beyond them.”
“There are not.”
Roran looked at Aelira. “Can roots erase footprints?”
An interesting question. Her mouth twitched. “Ordinary roots cannot.”
“And these?”
A faint ripple moved beneath the nearest strand, barely visible where damp soil clung to its surface.
Aelira watched it disappear. “I am beginning to find the word ordinary increasingly useless.”
The roots were thick as fingers in places, braided through the bank with such precision that the soil rose over them like skin stretched across tendons.
Human tracks followed their course for several yards before disappearing entirely at the densest growth.
The old rootways had once carried more than water and memory.
The earliest Ashwood records spoke of priests entering one sanctum and emerging leagues away from another, though not all returned unchanged.
Some came back older. Some returned with decades missing from memory.
A few had emerged unable to remember the names they entered with.
The rootways did not move bodies as roads moved travelers. They persuaded distance to become uncertain. Her ancestors had sealed most of them for a reason.
A faint vibration passed through the network. Aelira straightened before instinct could make her reach for it. Near the largest cluster, a thornlike spur had curled around something dark—fabric. Seren saw it in the same instant.
They both reached. Aelira stopped herself before her fingertips made contact.
Green—Council green. Recognition struck so quickly that she had no time to prepare her face.
The cloth was too finely woven for soldiers or villagers, the dark formal shade favored by Coalition clerks and senior administrative offices—the kind worn by men who preferred to destroy bloodlines through records, decrees, and sealed orders because ink kept one's hands cleaner than blood.
Aelira had seen enough of it to hate the color. Seren lifted the cloth carefully from the thorn and examined the mud-darkened edge.
Then she looked at Aelira. “You recognize it.”
Aelira gathered her expression into stillness, though the mask arrived a fraction too late. “No.”
The lie was immediate and therefore poor, but hesitation would have been worse.
Seren already suspected the Council. Aelira could not explain why Coalition clerics might be searching for a rootway connected to one of the old seals without explaining how she knew those rootways existed—and that question had teeth.
Who taught you?
Where?
When?
Under what name?
Seren folded the cloth into her palm. “That answer was terrible.”
“You asked with very little charm," she replied, swift as silk.
“I asked clearly.”
“Tragic that clarity and charm remain strangers to one another.”
Seren rose. Aelira followed immediately, unwilling to remain kneeling while the general stood over her.
Up close, the difference in their height became mildly irritating, though the true disadvantage had nothing to do with inches.
It was Seren’s attention. Those gray eyes settled upon her with the relentless steadiness of someone accustomed to waiting out fortified positions.
“Do you ever answer directly?” Seren asked.
“When people ask questions they deserve answers to.”
Something hardened in Seren’s expression. “And who decides what people deserve?”
Aelira drew her cloak closer, concealing the hand that had almost betrayed her. “Usually the person who understands whether the answer will cause more harm than ignorance.”
“That is convenient.”
“No.” The coldness in her own voice surprised her, cutting cleanly through what remained of their banter. “It is experience.”
The forest held the silence after her. The scouts lingered near the clearing’s edge with hands resting close to their weapons.
Tommen had pressed his back against a tree and stared at the roots as though expecting them to climb his boots.
Roran’s earlier amusement had vanished entirely; his attention moved between Aelira and Seren with the alertness of a man who understood that danger often entered a conversation before anyone reached for steel.
Seren studied Aelira. Lying beneath that gaze felt increasingly like standing beneath a suspended blade and pretending not to notice its weight.
Aelira knew what Seren must see. A scholar who knew too much.
A woman too composed around impossible things.
Someone who had reacted to Council cloth before denying she recognized it.
A stranger withholding information with the practiced ease of a person who had learned that truth carried consequences.
“You’re suspicious,” Aelira said quietly.
Seren’s fingers tightened around the scrap of cloth. “You know an extraordinary amount about what is happening.”
Aelira waited half a heartbeat too long. Seren’s left brow lifted. It was an ugly, accusatory little thing, and Aelira found herself bizarrely distracted by how poorly it suited an otherwise disciplined face.
“You always seem to be one step ahead,” Seren said.
The words struck where exhaustion had worn Aelira thin.
One step ahead.
For an instant, the clearing disappeared.
She saw Ashwood beneath fire. Roots writhing beneath palace stone.
Her mother’s blood running bright over an ancient door while the old bindings screamed through the earth.
If Aelira had been one step ahead ten years ago, perhaps she would have recognized the fractures in the seals before the palace burned.
Perhaps she would have understood why the Worldroot opened passages that had slept for centuries only after there was no kingdom left to save.
Perhaps her mother would not have died holding a door closed with blood and bone while Aelira fled through the dark.
One step ahead.
What a lovely phrase for the living to use when they had never spent a decade wondering which single moment they should have understood sooner.
Aelira turned toward the roots before Seren could read too deeply into her face.
“Trust me,” she said, and the exhaustion in her voice escaped before she could stop it, “if I were one step ahead of this, I would be considerably happier.”
Too honest. She knew it immediately. Seren’s attention changed.
Suspicion did not disappear, but it loosened enough to make room for something quieter—belief.
Aelira preferred suspicion. Suspicion created distance.
It kept Seren sharp and Aelira armored. Belief was more dangerous because belief invited sympathy, and sympathy was merely curiosity after setting down its weapons.
Seren looked toward the roots before speaking again. “Wren said they recognize you.”