Page 75 of The Thirteenth Count

“I don’t expect you to smile.”

“Good, because I won’t.”

Fern winced.

Cassius stepped back into her space, dropping his voice so low it could barely be heard over the wind. “Every person in that room will be looking at you. Some will see a curiosity. Some will see a threat. Some will see a tool that my father has not yet decided how to use. If you crack in front of them, if you let them see rage before you understand where to aim it, they will flay you alive.”

Fern swallowed.

“This lesson,” he said, “was about tomorrow night.”

Her hands were still trembling. She curled them into the sleeves of her coat before he could correct her again.

“You should have told me.”

“I just did.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

For once, he didn’t sound smug about it.

Fern looked back over the parapet. The red haze shifted below, slow and hungry, touching the lower slope like fingers testing a seam. The thought of a banquet inside that house—music above the machinery, crystal above the blood—made her stomach twist.

“I can’t do this.”

Cassius’ answer came quietly. “You can.”

She looked at him, hair blowing about her face now.

“Not because you are calm or in control,” he said. “But because you’re angry enough to learn.”

Lina came back on the night of the banquet. She slipped into the blue suite an hour before the seventh bell with a long linen dress-cover over one arm and her eyes fixed on the floor. No apology. No explanation for the missing day. She moved with a new servant’s care, as if the air itself had rules, and when she lifted the cover to the wardrobe hook, Fern saw her flinch.

“Lina.”

“We haven’t much time, Miss Silverbell.” Lina was already unbuckling the bag’s clasps. “The water’s gone cool, but it’ll do. Sit.”

“Lina. Where were you?”

Lina’s hands stilled on the clasps. Fern thought she might actually answer. Then she drew the bag open, and the question died in Fern’s throat.

The gown was Blackwell blue.

The deep, wet-ink blue of the family that owned the mountain, the color Cassius refused to wear. Silver thread ran through the bodice in the pattern Fern had seen on every door and gate and carriage in this cursed place: roses, and the thorns that guarded them. The High wouldn’t display a curiosity in grey wool. He would put his colors on her the way one put a collar on a hound, and every Highblood in the ballroom would read it in a glance: mine.

“No,” Fern said.

“It was sent up this afternoon.” Lina lifted it free of the bag. The skirt poured toward the floor like water finding a level. “I only dress you in what’s sent, Miss. You know that.”

Fern was already moving. She crossed to the wardrobe, pushed past the anonymous silks Lady Blackwell had stocked it with, and drew out the black dress.

Her mother’s dress.

It came off the hook heavier than it looked, the fabric cool and dense as deep water. Lina had gasped over it that first night, had wanted Mrs. Cordelia to commission its twin for Lady Blackwell herself. Where did you have it made? And Fern hadn’t known. Handed down. Older than her mother, maybe older than her grandmother, its maker’s name worn off the family’s memory like a coin rubbed smooth.

“Miss Silverbell.” Lina’s voice had gone thin. “They sent the blue.”