Page 105 of The Thirteenth Count

A smile found her from somewhere the fear couldn’t reach.

“Even if the circumstances weren’t exactly romantic,” she said. “Candles and doom and a funeral’s worth of herbs.”

Cassius looked around the chamber—the glowing channels, the waiting stone, the little phial standing in its worn cradle—and then back down at her.

“It was perfect,” he said, with the whole of his terrible sincerity.

Somewhere far above them, the first midnight bell traveled faintly through the stone.

They dressed each other in silence.

It was not like being dressed by Lina, and not like the lacing on the morning of the terrace; it was a third thing, unhurried and grave, each button and hook and ribbon passed between them like the words of a rite. He worked the laces of the sage dress with steady hands and pressed his lips once to the nape of her neck when he finished. She buttoned his waistcoat, smoothed the lapels flat with both palms, one deliberate stroke, and reset his collar, and combed his pale hair into order with her fingers while he stood and let her, eyes closed, memorizing.

Every touch carried a new meaning now. Every touch was also a countdown.

When she stepped back, dressed, with the gold pin righted in her curls and the funeral herbs sweet in the air, Fern was neither sacrifice nor supplicant. She was one half of the vow.

They took their places at the stone, the two worn hollows, facing each other across the channels of light, and Cassius unfolded the vow between them, and they read it through once, silently, together, and then did not look at it again.

“The rite records no words,” he said quietly.

Fern took a breath that had her whole life in it.

“I give what cannot be taken,” she said, and her voice rang clear and mild and carrying—her father’s voice. “Not my blood—they’ve had my blood. Not my name—they’ve had three of those. This: my choosing. Freely, first, and forever. I bind my life to yours, Cassius, not only because the valley needs it, but because I looked at you across every room they locked me in, and chose, and would choose again in any life I was given.”

The channels’ light rose. Somewhere beneath the stone, something vast and patient turned toward them like a face.

“I give what was never mine to keep,” Cassius said. His voice didn’t shake. It had gone the other way—quiet and absolute. “My life was promised before I understood what that promise was. And that promise be damned. I’m taking it back now so I may give it freely—to you. I bind my life to yours, Fern, freely and forever. You are the first choice no one else made for me.”

The stone was humming now. She could feel it through the soles of her feet, through the air, in her teeth: the chamber gathering itself, the ten thousand carved roots seeming to lean inward from the walls, and the last lines came the way they would come across every dark to follow, traded between them like a flint striking:

“Whatever we become,” Fern said, “I’ll find you.”

“And I’ll find you,” said Cassius Blackwell. “Always.”

The vow, parchment lying in the channel-light between the hollows, curled at its edges, blackened, and burned to nothing without a flame—the rite records that words were given—and the light in the channels turned from glow to blaze.

“On three?” Fern whispered.

His eyes held hers across the stone. “On three.”

“One.”

The hum deepened. Sprout pressed himself flat to his ledge.

“Two.”

Father, she thought, clear as a bell. Watch me.

“Three.”

Together, they laid their palms in the hollows worn by thirteen generations of hands—and the mountain took hold of them.

There was no pain at first. That was the terrible mercy of it: the working began as warmth, rising through her palm from the stone, gentle at first, and Fern had one full heartbeat to think, oh, it’s kind, before the warmth reached her wrist and she understood that it was not kind and not cruel; it was thorough, and it had started to collect.

The marks came first.

She watched them arrive on her own arm as frost arrives on glass. Black vines unspooled from beneath her palm, climbing her wrist and forearm in swift, delicate lines that branched and flowered, much like embroidery stitching itself in her skin with a needle made of fire. Across the stone, Cassius’ right arm was blooming the same way, black on white, looking glass to her black on brown, the two patterns racing each other up toward shoulder and throat, and where each vine ended, the tip swelled into buds. The marks were budding. Small swollen points along the vine, the first sign that this one wasn’t going to stay black-and-white and still.