Page 108 of The Thirteenth Count

“Lady Blackwell went to him at the third bell.” His voice was scraped and careful. “She sent his guards out and stayed a quarter hour. I was in the service passage.” Willem looked at her. “She told him he’d ruined himself for a Rootfolk girl. A nobody. That he’d marked himself, mutilated himself, bound himself to⁠—”

His jaw worked. “Then she said the formal words, Fern. The full old rite, before witnesses she had called for the purpose. You are no longer my son. No longer of her line or under her name.” He swallowed. “She looked at the marks around his eye and called him an abomination wearing her son’s face. A maid was weeping in the stillroom afterward.” His voice hardened. “Then Lady Blackwell walked out and ordered the seamstresses to remove his colors from her winter wardrobe. It was the only way she knew how to grieve.”

The mid-afternoon change. The blow taken. The slow, held-together beat of a man sitting idle.

Fern stood at the window with her hand pressed flat over the second pulse below her ribs. She hated Lady Blackwell and, against her will, pitied her for throwing the last warm thing on her fire to keep a cold house respectable. She drove her own pulse into a slow, steady rhythm. East through the stone, Cassius’ heartbeat strained toward hers until her knees shook with the cost.

I’m your family now, she said to herself. I’m your family now, and I’m not going anywhere.

The High came at the ninth bell.

He came with two guards wearing silver rings and collar-chains that pulsed faintly, rhythmic as the mountain, some new protocol jewelry that made the air around them feel deadened, flattened, like a room hung with wet wool. And he came with a chair, which a guard set squarely in the room’s center for him, because Aurelius Blackwell was a patient man, and patient men sit.

Fern stood by the window and did not curtsy. It was a new world. He noted the omission as he noted everything, filed, unhurried, and settled into the chair and regarded her: the missing arm, the crown of buds, the black-veined eye. His face showed nothing. His silence was the old instrument, deployed, waiting for her to fill it.

She let it lie there between them until it died of neglect. Lady Blackwell had taught her that, too.

“Soul binding,” the High said at last, conversationally. “One of the most dangerous rites ever practiced in this valley. Its surviving texts hidden—by me—for excellent reasons.” He crossed one leg over the other. “And somehow the heir of my house and a Rootfolk curiosity located a sealed chamber that appears on no schematic, translated records written in a language dead for two hundred years, and performed the rite. Successfully.” He studied her. “I’ll ask you as I asked him. Who helped you?”

“No one,” Fern said. “We did it alone.”

“The chamber⁠—”

“He found the chamber. Your son reads everything, my lord. You made him that way—every document, every language, every line of maintenance allocation in your winter accounts.” She watched that one land, watched the faint stillness at the corner of his eye. “You built a mind that could find any flaw in the mountain, and then you gave it a reason to look.”

The High studied her for a long moment.

“You are changed,” he observed. Not the marks; his gaze had barely bothered with the marks. “The girl who couldn’t hold a bow on my staircase would have filled that silence in six seconds.” He tapped one finger, once, on the chair’s arm. “Do you know what I have spent this day deciding, Miss Silverbell?”

“Whether to kill me.”

“Whether killing you is possible.” For one unguarded instant, uncertainty showed in Aurelius Blackwell’s winter eyes. Fern held his gaze and let him see that she had noticed. “The rite you performed has one unambiguous clause even in the fragments my men recovered: one life in two bodies. My heir—my only useful heir—is bound into whatever you are. Your death is his. And what the death of a bound pair does to…” He stopped himself. Recalculated. Then continued smoothly, “…to matters of state, no living scholar can tell me, because I burned the scholars’ books myself, twenty years ago, on advice I am beginning to reassess.”

He rose. The chair was retrieved. At the door, he turned, and delivered the verdict she had known was coming since she woke, in the tone of a man scheduling maintenance:

“You will remain in these rooms. You will be fed, watched, and studied. And I will decide, in my own time, whether your death or your suffering serves me better.” His pale eyes moved over her from crown to stump. “I have time to decide.”

The door closed. The lock turned.

Fern stood alone in the wardcandle light, one-armed, thorn-crowned, bound, imprisoned, and found that her hands—hand, she mentally corrected, and would keep correcting, and would one day stop needing to—had not shaken once.

You still don’t know, she thought at the closed door, at the man walking away down the corridor with his deadened silver guards. You interrogated my mother in the wrong garden and hanged my father under the wrong charge, and you have had the last Thornfield locked in your blue suite all season, and you still don’t know. Her father’s voice moved through her, mild and clear and carrying: the moment he knows, you are at war.

Take your time deciding, my lord. So am I.

The bells began at midnight.

Not the hours. Not the watch. Not even the ugly short-short-long of the escape night. This was a pattern she had never heard, slow and enormous, every bell in the Keep tolling together. Beneath it came another sound through the floor. Gears. Chains. Iron groaning through channels that had not moved in years.

The gates. All of them. The South Gate, the yard gates, the great doors, grinding shut in the dark. But something vaster closed with them. Pressure settled over the Keep like a bell jar coming down as the wards drank deep from whatever reservoir fed them and sealed.

The Blood Seal. Not the quiet cosmological kind that held back fog. The other kind: the protocol, the lockdown, no one out, no one in, jailers and prisoners alike closed into the stone together until the High finished deciding what everyone was worth.

Fern stood at her window, looking down at torches multiplying in the sealed yards. East and slightly down, through all of it, the second pulse held steady. Hers.

The mountain had locked its doors.

It had also, she reflected, locked itself in with them.