Page 76 of The Thirteenth Count

“And I’m wearing this one.”

“Miss—”

“They took my home.” Fern laid the dress across the bed, smoothing it with both palms. “They took my name and made me pick a prettier one. Tonight they’ll take my face and my posture and every lesson your Lady carved into my spine, and parade all of it around that ballroom like a horse they broke.” She looked up. “The dress is mine, Lina. It’s the last thing in this mountain that is. They can have everything above the skin.”

Lina stood with the blue gown draped over her arms like a body. Fern watched the fear move through her—Jonas, always Jonas, the arithmetic Lina did before every risk—and then watched her resolve win.

“Then we do it properly.” Lina laid the blue aside and was suddenly all motion, all pins and purpose. “Gloves, at least. The blue ones, to the elbow, so you wear their color somewhere, and I can swear on the Mother I put it on you.” She was already pulling them from the drawer. “Let them argue with gloves.”

Fern let herself be washed and laced and pinned, holding still as she’d been taught. Then Lina turned her toward the long looking glass.

Her mother had worn this dress on service days, on Count days, on every day that required the family to stand up straight in front of the valley. Fern had watched it move through crowds from below, from a child’s height, one fist knotted in its skirts. Now it fit her like it had been waiting. The woman in the looking glass had Lady Blackwell’s posture and Mira Grovekeeper’s dress and eyes that belonged to neither of them anymore.

I’m wearing her into their house. The thought steadied the rattling in her chest. Let them look.

On the mantel, Sprout gave a low, betrayed chirp.

“Not tonight, little love.” She crossed and scratched the spot beneath his chin, and he leaned into it, sulking magnificently. “There isn’t a corner of that room safe for you. Guard the suite. Bite Lina if she tries to leave.”

“He will not,” Lina said, and for one breath the old warmth surfaced in her voice before the careful blankness took it back.

Fern had passed the grand ballroom’s doors a hundred times, always shut, always flanked by their carved black roses. Open, they made the entry hall look like a servant’s closet.

The ballroom ran the length of the east wing’s second floor, its ceiling lost somewhere above three tiers of chandeliers, each one crowded with wardcandles until the room glowed amber. Black marble columns rose along the walls, and between them—Fern’s step faltered—white branches had been trained up the stone and woven overhead, red and white roses cascading down them in a slow, frozen spill.

She knew this decoration. She had stood beneath it once before, in a square at the base of the mountain, waiting in a line to bleed.

They had dressed the ballroom as the Count.

Of course they had. This was the Count banquet. The harvest festival. And here was the harvest, laid out at every place setting down the long tables, glinting in silver stands beside the wine glasses, each one ribboned in Blackwell blue.

Phials.

Slim crystal phials, no longer than a finger, filled with liquid so darkly red it drank the candlelight. Party favors. Guests were already lifting them, turning them, holding them to the chandeliers the way her father used to hold a jar of honey to check its clarity.

“—a full dram each, I’m told. Generous, for a house that counts.”

“Red Autumn pressing. You can tell by the color. The White Season draws are always thinner⁠—”

“—third-tier refinement, surely. Aurelius wouldn’t serve raw.”

Fern stood very still at the head of the room and counted, because Cassius Blackwell had taught her to, and because she could not stop.

Sixty places. Sixty drams. A dram from a Rootfolk vein was a pint, near enough; she had copied the conversion until her hand cramped. Sixty pints. The human body held eight, and could spare three before it started forgetting how to be a body.

Twenty people had been emptied into the favors on these tables.

She thought of a gap-toothed smile. Of peppermints. Her stomach rolled once, slow, and she breathed as Lady Blackwell had taught her, in the spaces between thoughts, until the room steadied.

That was when she felt it. The particular weight of being watched.

She looked up, past the tables, to the dais at the far end where the High Table stood beneath a canopy of white branches.

Cassius was mid-conversation with a Stemblood official, wine glass in hand, wearing black in a room full of blue. He had glanced toward the doors, an idle flick at movement.

And stopped.

It lasted half a second. Less. His gaze caught on her and the sentence he’d been speaking simply—ended, his glass arrested halfway to his mouth, and for that half second there was no heir in his face at all, no mask, no lesson, nothing careful. Just a man looking at her as if the room had lost its other occupants.