20. Chapter Twenty Seren Veyr #2
Something brown lay beneath the fallen chair beside the table. Seren stopped breathing. One of Roran’s gloves rested half hidden beneath the wooden leg, worn smooth across the palm and split along a side seam he had been claiming he would mend for three years.
She knew that glove. She had thrown it at him once during a winter campaign because he had used the torn seam as an excuse for losing a card game.
He had worn it through rain, snow, mud, and half a dozen assignments because, according to him, replacing something merely because it was falling apart encouraged weakness.
Seren crouched. The movement felt far away. Her fingers closed around the leather.
Of course it was cold. Yet the instant she touched it, the hall vanished.
She was twenty-three again, kneeling in a ditch outside Ashwood with arrows cutting through the smoke overhead while Roran bled through both hands.
She remembered pressing hard against his side and screaming at him to keep pressure on the wound because she did not have time for him to die.
He had laughed—actually laughed. Blood on his teeth, face gray with pain, and the bastard had told her that if she let him die he would haunt her incompetently out of spite.
She remembered swearing at him until her voice broke.
He had survived. He had survived Ashwood.
He had survived the palace siege and the famine road.
He survived fever outside Halewick while Seren sat beside him for two nights pretending not to count his breaths.
He survived the eastern mutiny, two attempts on Seren’s life, and one assassination attempt directed at him because he had insulted the wrong duke’s nephew with such precision that the man apparently decided murder was the only reasonable response.
Roran survived because that was what Roran did. He remained. Through every battle, every failure, every version of Seren that came home meaner or more tired than the one who left, he remained. And Seren had left him here.
The glove trembled in her hand.
“No.” The word escaped before she could stop it.
There was no one there to obey. Seren closed her fist around the leather until the split seam bit into her palm.
Her mind seized upon that immediately because the mind was cruel enough to manufacture hope from absence.
He could be somewhere else. He could have followed the villagers.
He could have fought. He could have gone after Wren or Elowen.
He could have been dragged north. He could still be alive.
Every possibility hurt worse than death because none allowed grief to finish becoming itself.
“Roran.” His name broke differently the second time.
The sound that followed was smaller. Not a sob.
Seren did not think she remembered how to make one properly anymore.
It was only a fracture in the breath, one ugly little sound escaping around years of discipline, but the instant she heard it she hated it because it meant the pain had gotten out.
She bowed her head over the glove. For several seconds, she let herself fail.
She let herself remember Roran sitting beside a fire outside Halewick, stealing half her supper because he insisted rank entitled her to better provisions and friendship entitled him to redistribute them.
She remembered him beside her after the palace fell, both of them too exhausted to celebrate while the city burned below.
She remembered every time he had stood between Seren and someone with a blade, a title, a threat, or an opinion.
She remembered that she had never once asked whether he would follow her.
She had simply looked back. And he had always been there.
The grief came then, not cleanly and not mercifully, but as pressure so deep she thought for one terrible moment it might fold her inward. Seren gripped the edge of the table.
She could not lose him. The thought was childish. She had lost too many people to tell herself loss became easier through repetition. It did not. The heart did not become wiser. It merely learned where to place the bodies so there remained enough room to keep beating.
Seren shut her eyes. Then she saw the unfinished note again.
Wren says singing changed.
Her eyes opened. The grief did not leave. That was not how grief worked. It remained beneath her ribs, raw and expanding, but something colder began forming around it.
Structure.
Direction.
Purpose.
Seren straightened slowly. She looked at the map, then at Roran’s glove in her hand. If he was dead, she would find out how. If he was alive, she would find him. If every person in Briar Hollow had been pulled beneath the mountains, she would follow them into whatever old darkness had taken them.
The pain settled deeper, compressed beneath discipline until it became something she could carry. She had done this before. Turned terror into orders. Turned grief into movement. Turned rage into something sharp enough to survive using.
Seren tucked Roran’s glove inside her coat and looked again at his unfinished notes and let herself read the final line until each word burned itself into memory.
The singing changed—so had she.
Whatever had taken Briar Hollow had mistaken her absence for safety.
Seren intended to correct that misunderstanding.
Work could hold the body upright when grief tried to take the bones out of it.
Work could give her hands something to do besides shake.
Work could keep the others alive, and if there was anything left of Roran to find, anything at all, she would find it.
Outside, Mara crossed the square at a run. Her face gave the answer before she spoke.
“No one east,” Mara said. “Doors open. Fires lit. Found meals on tables. A woman’s shawl caught on a chair. No blood.”
Coren emerged from the southern lane moments later, breathing hard. “Road is empty. No tracks leaving. No wagon marks. Nothing past the old mill except our own trail from earlier.”
Seren nodded once—the movement felt mechanical. “Elowen’s house,” she said.
They went together. The healer’s door was unlocked.
Inside, warmth remained. That nearly undid her.
Elowen’s house smelled of herbs, milk, ashes, and the faint sweetness of dried lavender.
A kettle sat near the hearth, not boiling now but still warm when Seren touched it.
Blankets lay spread across the floor where children had slept in groups after the night terrors began.
Blue threads were tied around several small pillows, little wrist loops left behind like charms that had failed their purpose.
A bowl of green soup sat on the table beside a spoon. A chair had tipped backward. On the floor near the hearth, Wren’s charcoal sticks lay scattered. Seren stopped breathing.
Elira entered behind her and went utterly still.
Seren moved toward the hearth. A fresh drawing lay half-crumpled beside the ashes.
She picked it up carefully. The charcoal had smeared at the edges, as if Wren had been interrupted while drawing or someone had stepped on it in passing. Still, the image was clear enough.
Briar Hollow. Not as it appeared above ground—below.
The houses were drawn small and crooked, each wrapped in thick black roots.
The well extended downward like a throat.
Beneath the village, deeper than the child had ever drawn before, roots formed a tunnel.
Along that tunnel moved tiny figures, all in a row.
Men, women, children. No faces. Only bodies held upright by roots around their wrists.
At the bottom of the page, Wren had drawn a tree.
Not the underground tree from before. This one was larger.
Darker. Its branches reached down instead of up.
Beneath it, two eyes watched from a black shape full of thorns.
Seren’s vision blurred. She blinked once, hard. She turned the page. On the back, in uneven letters, Wren had written:
it said not to be scared
it said the roots remember the way
it said elira came too late
The room moved around Seren. For one dangerous moment, she wanted to turn on Elira.
Not because it would be fair. Because grief required somewhere to go, and Elira was standing there with secrets in her blood and old roads answering her name.
Elira had known things. Not all things, perhaps.
Not enough. But more than she had said. More than Seren had been able to force from her.
More than might have mattered had she spoken sooner.
The thought rose cruel and hot. Seren closed her fist around it until it broke.
No. Blame could wait. The villagers could not.
She folded the drawing with care that felt obscene and tucked it inside her coat.
Elira had not moved. Her face had gone very pale.
Seren had seen Elira wear composure like armor enough times now to recognize when something struck beneath it. The message had wounded her.
It said Elira came too late.
Good, some ugly part of Seren thought. Then she hated herself for it immediately. “Elowen?” Seren called.
No answer came back.
“Wren?”
The house held its breath.
Seren checked the small bedroom, though she knew.
The bed was unmade. A shawl lay on the floor.
A cup of water rested on the windowsill with a thin crust of ice beginning at the rim.
No bodies. No blood. No broken glass. No sign that anyone had fought hard enough.
If they had fought, perhaps Seren could have forgiven herself a fraction.
If there had been blood, overturned furniture, splintered doors, anything that said Roran and Elowen and the villagers had stood against it until overcome, there would at least be proof of resistance.
But this looked like surrender without consent.
As if the whole village had simply listened—and gone.