Page 102 of The Thirteenth Count

“Third bell,” she said, and stepped into the wall.

They had gone twenty feet into the dark when a light bloomed in the passage ahead, and Fern’s heart slammed into her ribs—and then steadied, strangely, at the sight of pale gold hair and a languid slouch against the old stone.

Lysander Blackwell stood in the mouth of his private corridor, holding a candle and an expression of profound, theatrical boredom.

“Well,” he said. “That is certainly one way to make an exit.”

Neither of them spoke. Cassius went still beside her. The brothers measured each other across a hand-span of candlelight, a lifetime of captivity beneath the same roof passing between them without a word.

Lysander’s gaze traveled over them: the lantern, the satchel, the trousers, Sprout’s yellow eyes gleaming at Fern’s collar. His brows rose at the whole arrangement, and he visibly decided not to draw obvious conclusions.

“You’ve been wearing your deciding face for two days,” he said to Cassius. “It’s a dreadful face. Father hasn’t noticed because Father only reads ledgers. Mother reads needlework, and she has been unpicking some private seam since the banquet. Whatever you are about, be about it quickly.”

“Lysander—”

“I was never here.” He lifted the candle in a lazy half-salute and turned back into his corridor. “I generally never am. It’s my finest quality.” And then, pausing, not turning around, his voice for once without any lacquer on it at all: “You have precious few things in this world that aren’t trying to kill you, Cassius. I’m pleased you’re finally keeping one.” The light withdrew down the passage. “Do try to still exist by morning. Funerals bore me.”

The dark took him. Fern let out a breath she’d been holding since the light bloomed.

“Your brother,” she whispered.

“I know,” said Cassius, and his voice caught on the second word. “He’s been rehearsing his indifference since we were children. He’s still terrible at the ending.”

She had dressed for it the way you dress for the most important service of your life, because that was what it was.

She chose neither servant grey nor Blackwell blue. She had worn her mourning already and burned it to a white ember on a windowsill. Instead, she chose the sage dress with the golden flowers. Her father’s favorite. The one he always said complemented her skin tone. A different girl had worn it up the mountain. Later, Lina had tucked it into the back of the wardrobe like a pressed leaf. It still fit. Better now. The season had rebuilt her. She set her own curls because her mother’s hands were beyond the fog, then fastened the little gold leaf pin with its solitary emerald. The emerald caught the light whenever she moved.

Her father’s favorite dress. Her mother’s favorite pin. She wore both beneath the heavy cloak that had first walked the veins with her. White Season went all the way down, and a Keeper’s daughter did not perform rites with frozen fingers. With Sprout at her collar, the vow folded over her heart, and the empty phial cool against her breastbone, she descended not as a Silverbell, not even quite as a Grovekeeper, but as the last daughter of the house the dark had been waiting for.

The old passages opened before them. The Distillery’s pulse faded above. And at the bottom of everything, at the end of the vein spur, the black iron door with its rose and its bough stood just as they had left it—patient, ancient, unlocked now and forever to her blood.

Cassius stopped before it. In the lantern light his face was pale and settled, all the weather come to rest at last, and he looked at her as he had across the ballroom, openly this time, and held out his hand.

“Fern Thornfield,” he said.

Her true name, in his mouth, for the first time—spoken like a vow’s first word.

She put her hand in his.

“Together,” she said, and they went into the stone.

The chamber received them like a held breath released, and they worked by the light of six candles, set where the old wax-stains said candles had always stood.

Fern found the smoke marks on the niches without looking for them, her hands moving through the preparations with a surety that frightened her a little, as though the room were remembering through her fingers.

Sprout made one circuit of the carved roots high along the walls and settled on a ledge, his tail wrapped around his feet and his yellow eyes enormous.

The satchel gave up its contents onto the slab’s edge: candles, flint, the knife, water. From her glove, she took juniper, rosemary, and the thistle she’d dried on her windowsill. She crushed them and scattered them around the stone’s base as she had dressed a hundred braziers for her father, with thistle at the quarters and juniper between. The Keeper’s order. As the oils woke, the chamber went green and resinous, and for a moment Whittle’s Rest stood around them.

He should be here, she thought, and then, laying the last of the rosemary, He is. This was always his table. I’m only setting it.

The sigil channels waited, dry as bone.

Cassius stood across the slab, coat off, sleeves turned back, reading the folio’s rite one final time with the fixed calm of a man triple-checking a sum he already knows. “The channels take the blood mingled,” he said. “Not poured separately—mingled first, then given. One phial.”

Fern lifted the cord over her head.

The phial swung between them in the candlelight, small and empty and patient, carried against her heart from a banquet to the gallows and every dark mile since, the only phial on this mountain that had never held anything stolen. She uncorked it and set it upright in the channel’s cradle-notch, where a phial-shaped hollow had been worn into the stone, and heard Cassius’ breath catch as he understood what she’d understood. Thirteen generations of pairs had stood exactly here, with exactly this, and the stone had been missing it for twenty years.