Page 73 of The Thirteenth Count

“You knew,” she said, shoving him again. “You knew, and you let me sit in that library copying numbers. Drams. Output. Reserves. Like those words meant anything except bodies. Like they weren’t people.”

Cassius didn’t catch her wrists or tell her to stop.

Fern struck him again, the heel of her hand landing against his chest with a dull sound. “He was a person. Rowan Sheely was a person. He had a shop. He had hands. He had a wife who used to bring soup to the Grove when White Season took half the village sick, and now he’s dead while the other Deadwoods are under your house with tubes in their arms because your father decided they were more useful that way.”

“Fern.”

“No.” Her voice tore around the word. “Don’t say my name. Don’t you dare say my name like that makes any of this smaller.”

Her fists hit him again, weaker this time. She could feel the weakness and hated that too, hated the way grief stole strength from her muscles while leaving too much of it inside her chest. Tears slipped hot down her face. The cold air should have cooled them—it didn’t.

“How many?” she demanded. “How many are down there? How many were from Ashford Cross? How many did my father perform Rites for over empty graves because your family dragged them below and called it order?”

Cassius’ face changed.

Not enough. Never enough. But his eyes gave him away with a flinch most people would have missed. Fern saw it, and it only made her angrier.

“You all talk about order as if the word is clean.” She gripped the lapels of his coat and pushed him again, though by then it was barely a push at all. “As if blood stops being blood when someone important writes it on a sheet of parchment. As if the machine cares whether it’s draining criminals or neighbors or fathers or cobblers who kept sweets in their pockets.”

She was done and she hated the sound that came out of her after it, small and wounded and nothing like the woman Lady Blackwell had been carving from her piece by piece. No, this was Fern Grovekeeper.

Cassius looked down at her hands twisted in his coat.

After a moment, he said very quietly, “Because without it, the fog comes through.”

Fern gaped at him, as if her body had forgotten what to do with all the rage it had been carrying. Her hands loosened from his coat, but she didn’t step back.

“What?”

Cassius’ eyes stayed on hers. “The fog comes through.”

At first, she couldn’t make sense of the words. Then anger came back, hot enough to stand on.

“No.” She shoved away from him, stumbling half a step before catching herself. “No, don’t do that. Don’t take what I saw and dress it up as sacrifice. Don’t stand there and tell me Rowan Sheely had tubes in his arms because your family is noble enough to make terrible choices.”

Cassius didn’t move toward her. “It isn’t noble.”

“Then what is it, Cassius?”

“Necessary.”

Fern laughed once, broken and ugly. “Of course. There it is. The Blackwell answer. Necessary. Order. Balance. Put enough pretty words around a body and it stops looking like murder.”

His face tightened. “It’s not weather we’re keeping out.”

Fern’s mouth opened, but nothing came.

Red mist moved below them in slow, restless folds. It had always been there. Above them. Beneath them. At the edge of every story, every warning, every road that ended where no road should end.

Cassius looked past her, toward the valley. “The Keep is part of the Seal. Not symbolically. Not ceremonially. The foundations, the old channels, the ward-stones under the mountain—all of it holds the fog back.”

Fern swallowed against the rawness in her throat. “With people.”

His eyes came back to hers. “Yes.”

Fern waited for more. Waited for some explanation that would make the yes less monstrous, some Highblood turn of phrase polished enough to hide the blood under it.

None came.