Page 100 of The Thirteenth Count

For a long moment he stood looking down at her hand on his chest.

“In a kinder world,” he said at last, low and wrecked, “there’s a version of this where I met you in a market in Ashford Cross. No Count, no Keep, no wall of red fog. I’ve been building it in my head since the night of the letter—every detail. It’s obscenely thorough. There’s a stall, you sell herbs, and you’re rude to me about the prices—and I need you to know that in that world, with nothing at stake and no valley to save and no name to hide, I choose you. I would choose you in every version of the world, Fern. This one just happens to charge for it.” His hand came up and covered hers. “You. Not the bough. Not the fourteenth name. The woman who checked her wine for poison the first night and slapped me with her whole body and reads ward theory like it insulted her mother. You.”

Tears slipped down Fern’s cheeks.

“I love you,” she said. Just that. It was the plainest sentence she had ever built, and the hardest. “I loved you before I knew what you were carrying. That’s how I know it’s mine and not the mountain’s—I signed nothing, no one arranged it, it has no use. It’s the one thing in my life the Count never found.”

“Fern—”

“Tomorrow night,” she said, “I’m going down to that stone. I’d rather go with you than for the valley. But I’ll take both.”

Cassius closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was no hesitation.

“Then we should write it,” he said.

They wrote the vow at her small table, by firelight, with the last of the good candles and a bottle of the strong gold wine, and it was, she would think later, holding the memory up against everything that came after, the finest hour of her life.

Because it turned out you could not draft a vow with Cassius Blackwell without editorial warfare.

“You can’t say whatever we become,” he said, appalled, quill hovering. “It’s imprecise. Become encompasses unfavorable outcomes⁠—”

“It’s meant to encompass them! That’s the entire—give me that⁠—”

“The rite records that words were given, which implies a standard of consideration⁠—”

“It implies no such thing. It’s a gift, not a contract⁠—”

“Everything is a contract⁠—”

“Nothing about this is a contract. That’s why it works. Have you understood a single⁠—”

Sprout fell off the mantel laughing, or the mosswing equivalent, a chittering collapse into the cushions, and both of them were laughing then too—really laughing, helpless, foreheads nearly touching over the ruined draft—and Fern thought: This. Whatever the stone asked, whatever the torn pages hid, this was what thirteen generations of paired hands had carried down into the dark.

Not solemnity.

This.

In the end, the vow was short. They pared it and pared it, trading words like drams, until what remained fit on half a page in two hands, his letters narrow and disciplined, hers rounder, snarled at the descenders, and neither of them would say it aloud tonight. By unspoken agreement, the words stayed on the parchment, banked, waiting for stone old enough and deaf enough to bear witness.

Only one line escaped, at the very end, because it refused to stay written.

Fern read it off the page in a whisper, testing its weight. “Whatever we become—I’ll find you.”

And Cassius, watching her across the candle with the firelight in his winter eyes, answered the way she would hear it across every dark to come.

“And I’ll find you. Always.”

The candle burned down. The wine went unfinished. He stayed until the fire was embers, her head on his shoulder, his cheek against her curls, the drafted vow folded into her hand like a struck match waiting for its moment. Neither of them reached for more than that, because tomorrow they would bind their lives together and let the stone name its price, and tonight was for the third thing, the one the mountain had never taught them to name.

She woke before the morning bells on the settee, his coat laid over her, the man himself gone to be seen being ordinary.

The valley’s changeless red light stood in the windows. Below, faint and far, the Keep was stirring into its last day of preparations—silver and flowers and forty casks of Darkwater’s wine—and somewhere in the East Wing, a kind woman in dove grey was beginning the eve of her Bonding.

The ceremony was tomorrow.

“Then tonight,” Fern told the empty room, and rose to dress for the end of the world.

The Keep spent its last day rehearsing joy. Fern moved through it like a ghost with good posture. Garlands went up the grand staircase by the armful: white roses, red roses, the same two flowers for everything, harvest and gallows and Bondings. The ballroom doors stood open to a blizzard of servants. Somewhere a quartet rehearsed the processional, the same eight bars, over and over, until the melody wore a groove in the air.