Page 77 of The Thirteenth Count

Then the official said something, and Cassius turned back, and the mask was on so smoothly Fern might have imagined it.

She hadn’t imagined it.

Oh, she thought. The same small, ruined syllable the terrace had pulled out of her, standing over the drop with the truth of the fog below.

She wanted him. In his father’s colors, with his family’s harvest glittering on sixty tables, on the worst possible night in the worst possible room, she had run out of other names for it.

You absolute fool, Fern Grovekeeper.

“Miss Silverbell.” A servant in crisp Blackwell blue bowed at her elbow. “If you would follow me. You are seated at Lord Darkwater’s table. A request made by High Blackwell.”

Lord who?

Conversations thinned as she was led down the room. She kept her chin level and her shoulders where Lady Blackwell had bolted them, and she felt the stares crawl over her—black, in a ballroom drowning in Blackwell blue. Black like mourning. Black like defiance. Black like the one man on the dais who never wore his family’s color, and she realized, three tables too late to do anything about it, exactly what the court would see.

At the High Table, Lady Blackwell’s attention found her as it always did: a single sweep, cataloguing flaws. But this time the sweep stopped. Her gaze snagged on the dress and held a breath too long. Lady Blackwell’s fingers tightened around the stem of her glass. Then Lady Blackwell turned back to her conversation as if nothing had happened at all.

Somewhere to Fern’s left, near the High Table, a young woman in dove grey and gold sat with the Ravencroft party. Honey-blonde, lovely, with the alert stillness of someone else who had been arranged. Her eyes found Fern’s with open curiosity, and she inclined her head. A small, genuine courtesy.

Fern returned it, wondering distantly who she was, and then the servant stopped, and Fern stopped wondering about anything else at all.

The man at the table’s head did not stand. He was built like something that had been asked to wear a suit as a joke: shoulders straining the tailoring, hands that could palm a wine barrel, dark hair cropped close. His eyes were the cold green of deep river ice, and they went over Fern the way a butcher’s eyes go over the day’s delivery.

“Lord Darkwater,” the servant said, “may I present Miss Silverbell.”

“The famous Miss Silverbell.” His voice was a landslide someone had taught manners. “High Blackwell speaks of you often. Sit. I’m curious whether the rumors match reality.”

Fern lowered herself into the chair beside him with her ankles together and her hands still, and hated that she did it perfectly.

“You’ll forgive me, my lord,” she said. “I wasn’t aware there were rumors.”

“There are always rumors. That’s what courts are for.” He lifted his own phial from its silver stand and turned it against the candlelight, unhurried. “White smoke at a Count. A Rootfolk girl elevated past the second tier entirely. The heir playing tutor.” The phial stopped turning. His gaze dropped to her dress and sharpened. “That’s fine work you’re wearing. Old work.” He set the phial down. “Where does a Keeper’s daughter come by a thing like that?”

“It was my mother’s, my lord.”

“Mm.” He set the phial back in its stand with a click, and whatever had sharpened was gone, folded away. “You count the room, by the way.”

Fern’s spine went cold. “My lord?”

“Since you sat down. The exits, the guards, the guests. Like a guard watching the square. Useful habit.” His gaze slid to her, green and unreadable. “Rude to show it.”

He’s testing me. Or warning me. With this man, the two wore the same face. She thought of the terrace—carelessness makes you readable—and let her attention settle on the middle distance, soft and empty, as she’d been drilled.

“Better,” said Darkwater, and went back to his wine, and Fern loathed the entire vocabulary of the upper tiers.

The first course came and went. She ate what she could. The nobles at their table spoke over her and occasionally through her, and Darkwater herded the conversation like a sheepdog, lazily, invisibly, a nip here and a shoulder there, and Fern noticed that whenever a question came near her that she could not safely answer, it somehow never arrived.

Once, a jowled lord across the table observed, with the kind of malice courts call sympathy, that the fog was said to walk Lord Darkwater’s southern fences these seasons. Darkwater refilled the man’s glass himself, unhurried. “The fog walks everyone’s fences,” he said. “Mine merely admit it.” No one at the table pursued it, and Fern filed the exchange away whole.

She was still deciding what to make of that when Marcus Blackwell decided the evening for everyone.

He was three tables up, closer to the dais, and he had been getting louder since the soup. Fern had tracked him without looking—she tracked him in any room now, as she would a wasp—and she heard the exact moment his voice tipped over from wine-loud to mean.

“—warm as spit. Are we savages? You.”

A servant stopped. Small, narrow-shouldered, a tray of decanters held level against her hip. Fern’s chest tightened.

Sasha. From the kitchens. You’ve been here since when, Green Spring?