17. Chapter Seventeen Aelira Ashwood
Chapter Seventeen: Aelira Ashwood
Above ground, Listener’s Rise looked almost peaceful.
The General had insisted they remain at Listener’s Ridge for another full day and night, claiming she needed more time to gather whatever scraps of information the place might yield, though the stiffness in her movements after the fall—and the way she favored one leg when she thought Elira was not watching—made the true reason painfully obvious.
The storm that rolled through the hills was only an unexpected addition.
The standing stones circled them like patient guardians, their ancient carvings veiled by frost and the last blue remnants of day.
Beyond the ridge, the forest thickened into black shapes, branches webbing across the dim sky like veins beneath translucent skin.
Briar Hollow lay somewhere south and east, too far for its hearth smoke to be seen, close enough that Aelira felt the direction in her body like a pulled thread.
Wren would be asleep by now, perhaps. Or pretending well enough. Children rarely slept deeply once the world began whispering beneath their dreams.
The thought unsettled her more than she wanted to admit.
Wren with her solemn eyes and strange drawings.
Wren with blue thread around her wrist. Wren who had drawn Listener’s Rise before the roots delivered the symbol like a summons.
Aelira had known many kinds of fear in her life, but there was a particular cruelty in watching children become interesting to old powers.
Adults could at least pretend their choices had led them to the blade. Children were simply found.
Aelira turned from the horizon and found Seren watching her.
The general was speaking to Coren, her posture angled toward the boy, her expression arranged into something practical and attentive, but Aelira had survived too many years in court to mistake divided focus for indifference.
Seren’s gaze moved once from the standing stone to Aelira’s hand, then away again, swift enough that most people might have missed it.
Seren had seen the roots move. She had felt the false name weaken between them. Questions were gathering behind those gray eyes, sharpening themselves with all the patience of knives being laid out before a careful interrogation.
They made camp inside the stone circle because the old site, for all its unsettling habits, offered better shelter than the exposed ridge.
Mara built the fire low and narrow, feeding it with careful hands so the flames would not carry too far across the hill.
Coren rubbed down the horses and muttered apologies to them as if they had personally endured political betrayal.
Seren laid a rough map across a flat stone and marked the stair entrance in charcoal, frowning at the land as though imperfect terrain were an insult directed at her command.
Aelira watched them work with an irritation she did not immediately name. It had been a long time since she had traveled with people who became useful without needing every breath ordered into place.
Ashwood had moved differently. Beautifully, yes, but beauty could suffocate as easily as it pleased.
In the palace, servants anticipated desire before it became language, guards obeyed before thought complicated loyalty, and ministers smiled with knives hidden in the grammar of every sentence.
Every footstep knew its proper echo. Every meal, every bow, every silence belonged to expectation.
Here, Mara swore when the fire smoked. Coren dropped a saddlebag on his own foot and looked personally betrayed by leather.
Seren corrected the map with the burned end of a stick and muttered something that sounded very much like an insult to geography itself.
No one bowed. No one announced. No one watched Aelira as if her existence were a political weather pattern.
Except Seren, but Seren watched everyone. That was, at least, what Aelira told herself.
Dinner was not worthy of the name, though everyone was too tired to insult it properly.
There was hard bread, dried meat, and a handful of winter apples bruised from the saddlebag, their skins dented and dark from the road.
Mara produced a flask from somewhere within her coat with the smug efficiency of a woman who believed preparedness should include bad decisions, took a swallow, and offered it to Seren.
“Medicinal?” Seren asked after smelling it.
“Makes me feel better,” Mara said. “That seems medical.”
Coren reached hopefully for it.
“No,” Seren and Mara said together.
He sighed with the tragic dignity of youth denied corruption. “Almost seventeen.”
“And yet,” Seren said.
Aelira found herself watching the exchange with an unwelcome stillness.
There was no performance in it, no courtly edge, no hidden test waiting beneath the warmth.
Mara’s affection hid itself inside mockery because soldiers were often cowards around tenderness.
Coren accepted correction because he trusted the hands that gave it.
Seren did not smile fully, but her mouth softened when the boy sulked into his apple, and Aelira felt the small betrayal of noticing.
Small loyalties were often the most dangerous.
Grand oaths could be broken in public, and banners burned beautifully when the world changed its mind, but these quiet bindings were harder to sever cleanly.
They rooted in the unnoticed places. They made leaving feel like betrayal before anyone had the cruelty to ask you to stay.
Mara passed the flask to her.
Aelira considered refusing, because refusal was sensible.
She did not drink from unknown flasks in ancient stone circles after root chambers whispered through blood.
She did not accept easy camaraderie from soldiers who would one day learn her true name and decide whether fear or duty moved faster.
She did not allow herself to become part of small circles around small fires.
But Seren was looking down at the map, not at her. Mara’s expression was neutral, almost deliberately so, and Coren was still sulking into his apple with admirable commitment.
Aelira took the flask.
The liquor burned like insult and pine smoke.
“Stronger than it smells,” Aelira said.
“Most decent things are.”
Seren’s gaze lifted from the map for one brief moment, and Aelira felt it with the impossible precision of touch before the general looked down again.
The day had held too much—the white road, the marker beneath the arch, Seren’s hand closing around her sleeve, the descent into the chamber, and the roots bending toward her like courtiers recognizing a sovereign beneath rags.
The black basin had shown them the well, the child’s hand, Briar Hollow threaded through with something old and hungry, and the chamber had heard the name Elira and refused it—old magic was so often impolite.
Aelira sat opposite Seren while the others settled into the cold.
The fire remained low between them, bright enough that neither could pretend not to see the other clearly.
Mara took first watch near the northern stone with her bow across her knees.
Coren was ordered to sleep on the grounds that horses required someone conscious and useful in the morning.
He accepted this with the solemnity of a boy promoted to sacred office, then fell asleep almost immediately.
Mara glanced back at his bedroll and shook her head. Seren’s mouth softened again. Aelira saw it anyway. Her chest tightened in a way she disliked.
“You collect them,” Aelira spoke low only to the woman next to her.
Seren looked up from the map. “What?”
“Strays.”
Seren followed her gaze to Coren, then Mara. “They would object to being called strays.”
“Mara would object for sport. Coren would be secretly flattered.”
Seren studied her across the fire, her eyes sharper than the softness at her mouth had suggested. “You are observant.”
Aelira looked into the flames. “That sounded like an accusation.”
“It may have been.”
“Then you are correct.” The fire snapped softly between them.
Aelira expected Seren to let the conversation die there, which would have been wiser.
The night was too old, the hill too attentive, and the chamber beneath them too freshly opened for either of them to go looking for sharper truths.
But Seren Veyr had a talent for stepping precisely where caution had placed its warning signs.
“You speak as if caring for people is a weakness,” Seren said.
Aelira laughed under her breath. “No. Weakness would be simpler.”
“What is it, then?”
“A liability.”
Seren leaned back against her saddle, firelight catching on the tired angles of her face until command wore thin enough for the woman beneath it to look through. “That sounds lonely.”
The words came quietly, not pitying. That made them worse. Aelira lifted her gaze. “Do not mistake solitude for loneliness, General.”
“Do not mistake my endurance for preference.” The answer came too quickly, too precisely, and it struck beneath armor.
Aelira forgot the shape of her own face for one dangerous heartbeat, though nothing in her expression betrayed her.
The mask remained where it belonged, cool and composed and faintly unimpressed, because she had been taught from childhood that feeling was only dangerous once given a body.
A softened mouth could become weakness. A startled breath could become confession.
A flicker of grief, witnessed by the wrong eyes, could be turned into a blade and placed against one’s throat.
So, Aelira gave Seren nothing. She sat very still beside the low fire and let the general’s words pass through the air between them as though they had not found some hidden door inside her and opened it without permission, but they had done exactly that.
Do not mistake my endurance for preference.