Page 107 of The Thirteenth Count

It sat below her ribs: a second pulse, with a direction to it, east and slightly down, through four walls and a wing of the Keep. Unmistakable, absolutely particular, the way a hand on your shoulder in the dark is someone before it is anyone. It told her nothing, and it told her everything a pulse can tell. Alive. Distant. Labored, too fast, dragging at the edges, the kind of beat her father had taught her to read at a hundred sickbeds. And alive, alive, alive.

“Cassius,” Fern whispered, to the empty room, and the empty room was not empty at all, and she lay in her own wreckage with tears sliding sideways into her hair, smiling like a fool.

Sprout lifted his head and made a small interrogative sound.

“We’re here, little love,” she told him. “Both of us. We’re here.”

Getting up taught her the new logic of her body.

Everything was a negotiation now. The roll to her right side, the push up on one arm, the balance that kept reaching for a counterweight that simply wasn’t there anymore. She swayed. She learned. By the time she reached the looking glass, she had already stopped falling toward her missing side, and she stood before her reflection and made herself do what she had made herself do at every looking glass in this Keep. She looked, and cataloged, and didn’t turn away.

The marks were everywhere on her left.

Black vines climbed from the smooth, sealed skin below her shoulder. No wound. No scar. Her flesh had closed over the absence as though the arm had never existed, and that was the most frightening thing in the glass. The vines climbed her neck, crossed her jaw, and spread over her cheekbone, thorned and intricate as embroidery. Each tip ended in a closed bud. Dozens of them. A garden planted in her skin, waiting for a season that had not yet come. They wreathed her left eye. The eye still saw—saw fine—but in the looking glass it looked back at her shot through with fine black veins, like ink dropped in water and frozen mid-bloom.

And across her forehead, delicate as a diadem: a circlet of vine and bud.

Crowned, Fern thought, staring. Somewhere east and slightly down, its twin was climbing another jaw, wreathing another eye, right where hers were left, black on white where hers were black on brown, the two of them a matched set now, mirrored, paired⁠—

Her mother’s kitchen rose up through the glass. Mira at the brewing pot, the vines swallowing half her face, her right eye going black as the Deadwood they’d buried, and a frightened girl knocking over a chair. Only temporary, her mother had said, stirring, not turning around.

Fern touched the buds along her own jaw with her one hand.

“Not temporary,” she told her reflection quietly. Testing the weight of it. Finding—to her own surprise, standing one-armed and crowned in thorns in the house of her enemies—that it held. Her mother had worn the blight to hide her. She would wear it having chosen. There was a world of difference, and she’d been taught it by the best.

The gold pin was still snarled in her curls, hanging loose. She tried to reset it one-handed until her fingers cramped and her hair escaped every pin. At last she gripped the vanity’s edge and breathed through the first true grief of the morning. Not the arm or the marks, but her mother’s hairpin, and the sudden bottomless list of small things that would now take two tries or ten or someone else’s hands.

A pulse gathered beneath her ribs, its rhythm tightening with effort. Then three slow, deliberate beats traveled through four walls and a wing of stone, pressing down the cord like a hand closing over her white knuckles. Cassius’ heartbeat, offered at a cost, arrived exactly when her grip on the vanity had begun to shake.

Fern shut her eyes. Gathered herself the same way, clumsy, guessing, spending strength she didn’t have on a working she’d never been taught, and pushed back, slow and even: here. Whole enough. Yours.

Far away, the second pulse stumbled once, then settled.

It was the whole conversation, and it was enough.

Lina came at noon with a tray, and two guards’ shadows under the door, and her performance was flawless.

“You’re to eat, and I’m to watch you do it,” she announced, flat and put-upon, setting the tray down hard enough to rattle the cup. “As though I’ve nothing better to do while the Keep is being searched than mind an invalid.”

She stripped the covers to air the bed, brisk and resentful, and under the snap of the top sheet, her whisper moved fast and low as water under ice. “The Bonding’s canceled—sudden illness of the heir, that’s the story. Lady Cressida went down the mountain at dawn with all her grey porcelain. The Keep’s sealed, every wing searched twice. Willem stands cleared, he found you, raised the alarm; they’ve made him half a hero for it.” The sheet settled. Then she said aloud, voice dripping with acid, “The soup’s gone cold already. Typical.”

Fern, propped one-armed against the headboard with her thorn-crowned face, gave her the empty look of a vain woman being served by staff she disdained, and said, “Then you’ll fetch hotter.”

Lina’s eyes glittered, but her servant’s face held. She curtsied with insulting shallowness and went. Fern ate the cold soup one-handed.

The change came at mid-afternoon, and it nearly took her off her feet.

She was at the window when it happened. The second heartbeat, steady all morning, slammed into a racing rhythm. Then, worse, it slowed. Beat by beat, it dropped into a rhythm she had heard only at the worst of her father’s sickbeds. The held-together slowness of a man sitting very still so that he did not break. Fern caught the sill. Sprout shrilled up off the mantel at the sound she made.

No content. No name, no words, no why. That was the bond’s one cruelty, and she learned it in full that afternoon: it told her the hour of every wound and withheld the weapon.

“What,” Fern gasped at the window, at the east wing, at four walls of indifferent stone, “what, what’s happened, who⁠—”

Nothing but a pulse and a direction, and every stone in the Keep between them.

Panic drove Fern’s heartbeat hard and fast. She pressed her hand beneath her ribs and forced her breathing to slow, trying to give him a steadier rhythm to follow. Across the bond, Cassius’ ragged pulse caught at hers and held like a man in deep water clinging to driftwood. It was all either of them could do. For three hours she paced from window to door. She knew that he was breaking and, like anyone waiting through a war, could only guess what had broken him.

It was dusk when Willem came, openly, tray in hand, a cleared man on sanctioned business, and shut the door on the guards’ incurious shadows, and told her.