Page 103 of The Thirteenth Count

“Your hand,” she said.

He gave it to her, palm up, steady. She set the knife to it and stopped, because his fingers had curled gently around hers, cradling her hand and the blade both, and when she looked up, he was watching her with the ghost of a ceremony in his face.

“Don’t be scared,” Cassius said softly. “This will be over before you know it. You’ll be fine.”

The words went through her like a bell tolling backward through the whole year: a dais, a crowd of thousands, a stranger’s blue eyes, and a blade over her palm at the beginning of the world.

“You said that to me once,” Fern whispered.

“I’ve been saying it ever since.” His thumb moved over her knuckles. “You keep being fine in ways I never planned for.”

She cut his palm, and then her own, and they held their hands together over the phial’s mouth—her blood and his blood running together down their joined fingers, indistinguishable by the time it fell, and where the mingled drops struck the glass, smoke rose from the blood, making Sprout stand straight up on his ledge.

Smoke. Barely a thread of it, rising off the blood itself: white shot through with blue, twined around a ribbon of deepest black, the two of them curling about each other as they climbed. Not fighting, not consuming: braiding, the way the rose and the bough braided in the iron of the door.

“Oh,” said Fern, the syllable her life made.

“The Count told the truth after all,” Cassius murmured, staring. “It just never had anything worth reading until now.”

They filled the phial. They walked the channels together, pouring thin and careful, and the old grooves drank the mingled blood and woke: a light coming up along the sigil-lines like dawn arriving underground, white-blue and black-veined, spreading outward from the slab through the whole carved floor until the root-covered walls glowed faintly from below and the chamber stood inside its own quiet aurora. Warmth breathed up out of the stone, the first this room had made in twenty years.

The stone was lit. The herbs were burning sweetly on the candle flames. The vow sat folded on the slab between the two worn hollows.

There was nothing left to prepare.

They looked at each other across the waiting stone, in the light their blood was making, and the last of the distance, a season of it, a lifetime of it, tiers and Counts and collars and every wall the valley had ever built between a Rootfolk girl and the mountain’s heir, burned off like fog.

Cassius came around the slab.

The kiss was slow and deep and desperate all at once, tasting like goodbye and hello in the same breath, and Fern rose into it with her hands sliding up the familiar wool of his waistcoat, past the lapels she’d pulled, past the chest she’d beaten, up into his hair, done forever with half-inches. His arms closed around her like something long-rehearsed was finally performed.

“Fern.” Against her mouth, wrecked and reverent. “We don’t have to—there’s time before⁠—”

“There’s only time before.” She drew back far enough to see his eyes, blown dark and candle-gold at the edges, and said it plainly, as she said the true things now. “Once we put our hands on that stone, it takes what it takes. First, I want to give what I choose. All of it. To you, not to the working.” Her fingers found the top button of his waistcoat. “Unless you’d rather review the documents again.”

The sound he made was half laugh, half surrender, all hers.

On his ledge, Sprout gave one scandalized chirp, turned his back with tremendous dignity, and tucked his head under his wing.

She had imagined, in the private dark, on nights she’d refused to count, that she would be nervous, and she was; and that he would be careful, and he was. She had not imagined how strange it would feel to stand before him with nothing left between them—not wool or silk, not rank or duty, not even the lie of her name.

Cassius touched her as though he had all the time the mountain did not. His mouth followed the slope of her neck while his hands learned her waist, her hips, the curve of her back. Every place he uncovered, he paused over, watching her face until she pulled him closer or whispered his name.

There was nothing cold in his attention now. Nothing measured. When his composure finally broke beneath her hands, the sound he made against her throat sent a startled heat through her, followed by something fiercer: the knowledge that she could undo him. Cassius Blackwell, who met every disaster as though he had prepared for it, trembled when she touched him.

She wanted to do it again.

So she did.

They laughed once, breathless, when the logistics of a stone chamber asserted themselves.

“—the coat, spread the coat⁠—”

“I am aware, Fern⁠—”

The laughter didn’t break anything. It belonged. It was theirs.

Her sage dress and his black wool made one tangled heap at the slab’s foot, gold thread and mourning cloth. The light their mingled blood had lit moved over bare skin—hers brown, his pale—the same aurora on both, making no distinctions, reading no tiers.