Page 106 of The Thirteenth Count

Then the working reached deeper, and the mercy ended.

She would never find language for it afterward and would stop trying. The rite read every vein, every year, every grief, turning the whole history of her page by page. Behind that reading, the bond took shape. It strung a single cord between them. Down that cord came a heartbeat not her own, hurried, hard, unmistakably his, while her own went out to beat beneath his ribs. Two lives strung on one line, braided by vast and patient hands.

The rite takes what it takes.

It took slowly and without malice. The moment it decided, she understood what it had chosen—one heartbeat before it happened.

Her left arm went not with agony but with absence. The channel-light rose over her hand, wrist, and forearm, engulfing them in white-blue radiance shot with black. Within that light, her arm passed out of her flesh and into the working. It was not cut or torn, but rendered up the way the blackthorn had rendered on the candleflame. Across the stone, the light had swallowed Cassius to the right shoulder. His head was thrown back. The marks had reached his jaw, his cheek, the corner of his eye.

The pain arrived then, all of it at once. It was enormous, a mountain’s worth, and it mattered so much less than the other thing arriving down the new-strung cord to meet it: his heartbeat, slamming, ragged, staying—refusing its own retreat, a man throwing his body over a falling friend.

Her knees buckled. She kept her palm in the hollow.

His voice reached her across the blaze through the ordinary air, hoarse and breaking and absurdly fond, the last words either of them would manage:

“You’re still so beautiful.”

Fern laughed, or sobbed, or the sob sounded like a laugh, blood-warm, alive, and gave him the last coin in her purse:

“Ridiculous man.”

The light took the chamber whole.

Her legs gave way. The stone released her palm, the great patient hands finished their braid, and the roots came off the walls.

She saw it in the final second of seeing. The ten thousand carved white roots, glowing, moving, flowed down from the walls across the floor toward the slab. Not to take them, she understood, falling, unafraid, into the white. They came to receive her and Cassius, as the roots received the honored dead, as they had received every offering ever laid on this stone.

Mother take us. Mother guide us. Mother return us⁠—

Darkness.

She wasn’t alone in the darkness.

Beneath her ribs, where there should have been nothing: a second heartbeat, unmistakable, impossible, there—answering hers, slightly out of time, the way two bells toll almost together.

No voice. No words. There would never be words.

There didn’t need to be.

Immeasurably far away, iron hinges moved. Light stuttered against her eyelids. Willem’s curses reached her in a runner’s whisper: third bell, I said the third bell, by every root and branch. Then came a languid drawl scraped young with horror. “By the Mother. Their arms—Willem, their—” Hands lifted her from the cooling light, urgent and careful. A small, furious creature chittered against her throat and refused to be parted from her. Fern let the distant world move around her. Beneath her ribs, the second heartbeat remained.

She was not alone.

She had never, in all her life, been less alone.

She came back to herself in pieces, and the first piece was the absence. Not pain, the absence of pain, localized, specific. A place on her left side where sensation simply stopped, the way sound stops past a closed door. Fern lay in her own bed in the blue suite and, without opening her eyes, took inventory of everything she could sense as Lady Blackwell had taught her.

Linen. Eternal twilight filtering through the drapes. A small fierce warmth pressed under her jaw. It was Sprout, wedged between her shoulder and her ear, his heartbeat rabbit-quick against her throat, and by the salt-stiff state of the fur there he had been crying in whatever way mosswings cried, and had not moved for a very long time.

Her right hand. Her right arm. Both legs.

And on the left, sensation ended at her shoulder.

So it’s true, she thought, with a strange floating gentleness, the mind wrapping the wound in cotton before showing it to her. It took the arm. It really⁠—

Then the second fact arrived, underneath the first, and every other thought in her went quiet.

She was not alone.