Page 61 of The Thirteenth Count

“Fern.” His voice was a warning.

But she was past the point of stopping. “She wants less of me,” Fern said. “That’s what this is.”

Cassius’ hand came down hard against the table. The crack of it made the wood jump. “She’s the High Lady,” he said, leaning toward her. His voice trembled with the effort to contain it. “And she is my mother. You’ll speak of her with respect.”

They stared at each other across the table while the storm battered the windows.

Then, slowly, the fight went out of him. Cassius sat back and dragged a hand over his face, suddenly looking younger than he had a moment before.

“She wasn’t always like this,” he said quietly. “Or… maybe she was, and I was too young to see it.” His mouth twisted. “The Keep does this to people, Fern. I’ve seen it in the staff. In the courtiers. In my own family.” He looked around the room as if he were seeing beyond the library’s walls. “This place… drains life from them, bit by bit.” He looked at her then. “Until all that’s left is duty.”

“So what?” Fern asked. “You let it happen?”

“We endure,” Cassius said. His voice was stripped of the heir now. “Better to be the wall than the thing thrown at it.”

Fern understood, maybe for the first time, that nothing about him was effortless. The Keep had worked on him too.

Moving through the Keep no longer gripped Fern with dread. The nightmares had thinned. She slept more easily now, woke more rested. She wasn’t happy there—far from it—but she was getting used to it. And she hated that most of all.

She knew which stair on the west dipped under her weight. She knew which corridor held onto the cold longest and which servants lowered their eyes out of caution rather than contempt. She knew the sound of the eighth bell from the tenth, the hour Lady Blackwell preferred for posture drills, the exact moment Lina would appear with her brush and pins and quiet hands.

It was the knowing that unsettled her now. Not fear. Not misery. Habit. The Keep had settled around her, and every small thing she learned about surviving it was a betrayal of the girl who had first been dragged through its gates.

That morning, instead of going straight to her assigned reading, Fern found herself back in the library, thinking not of embroidery or posture or Marcus Blackwell’s gaze, but of a single line in the ledger she’d read weeks ago.

Shroud repulsion.

The words had lodged deep and refused to move. So had Cassius’ voice from the Count. The Withering is spreading.

She had spent weeks treating the Keep and the Blackwells as the same thing. Lately, she’d begun to suspect the distinction between the two mattered. The place was too deliberate for simple cruelty, burdened with sealed doors, strange warmth behind stone, and corridors built less for living than for containment.

Architectural digests, ward treatises, and old ledgers lay open across the table in a sprawl that would have earned a look from Lina. Fern hauled another volume toward her and turned the pages too fast, more intent on finding something useful than preserving a dead man’s careful bindings. A corner caught beneath her thumbnail and tore.

She winced. Then kept going.

They had given her run of the library. If something delicate suffered from it, that was hardly her concern.

Every text assumed whoever opened it already understood the shape of the world it described.

Foundational integrity. Peripheral load. Resonant pressure. The phrases repeated themselves from text to text, neat and bloodless, as if they explained anything at all. One treatise referred three separate times to breach suppression without ever saying what, exactly, was being suppressed. Another described ward fatigue in language so dense Fern had to read the same paragraph three times, only to come away no wiser than before.

But the ledgers were worse. They named things plainly enough to be infuriating—lamp fuel, reinforcement, shroud repulsion—then moved on without explanation, as if no one with any sense would need one.

Fern flattened her hand over the open page and stared at the words until they blurred.

Shroud repulsion.

And still the Withering crept wider across the valley.

If the valley needed protecting, then from what?

She lifted her head and took in the stone around her. The library had been the safest room in the Keep. Lately, even here, she noticed too much—a faint warmth in the stone where there should’ve been only cold, sealed doors tucked into graceful paneling, corridors that bent strangely, as though built around pressures she couldn’t see.

Fern had known for weeks that the Keep was more than a house. She’d heard it breathe, felt its veins in the walls, followed its hunger down into the dark. What she didn’t understand was what all that machinery was meant to hold in place.

She had once thought the whole thing came down to greed. More blood meant more power, more comfort, more reasons for Highbloods to keep their boots on everyone else’s necks. But greed didn’t explain shroud repulsion.

“Repelling it from where?” Fern muttered under her breath.