Page 78 of The Thirteenth Count

“The wine, girl.” Marcus thrust his goblet out without looking at her, his shirt collar open, his fair hair ruined. “Cold. Properly cold. Work it.”

Sasha’s face did not change—servants’ faces never changed—but Fern saw her hesitate, saw her glance once, quickly, at the rune-etched band around the decanter’s neck, and understood.

A chilling rune. Blood-fed, like everything in this mountain. And Sasha’s hands, when she set down the tray, bore the fine black tracery Fern had learned to recognize in the kitchens and the corridors and never, ever mention. Oathblight, threaded across her knuckles like ink that hadn’t finished drying. Hands that had already given today. Perhaps yesterday too. Perhaps every day since Green Spring.

Don’t, Fern thought at her uselessly. Tell him no. Drop it. Run.

Sasha pricked her finger on the rune band and fed it.

Frost bloomed up the decanter’s crystal shoulders, delicate as lace. She poured. Marcus drank, grimaced theatrically, and shoved the goblet back at her.

“Again. It’s warm as⁠—”

“Marcus.” Lady Blackwell, from the High Table, without raising her voice.

“It’s warm, Mother.” He didn’t turn around. “Again, girl.”

Sasha fed the rune again.

Fern saw it happen. She was perhaps the only person in the ballroom watching the servant instead of the lordling, and so she was the only one who saw the blight climb. Black vines crawled up from Sasha’s wrist—fast, far too fast—winding up her forearm, branching, thickening, thorn-tips pressing at the skin from beneath. They crossed her elbow. Her collarbone. And Sasha’s eyes came up from the decanter with an expression Fern would see for the rest of her life: not pain. Recognition. The look of someone greeting a thing they had always known was coming.

“Oh,” Sasha said, very quietly, to no one.

Then the thorns broke through the skin of her jaw.

The decanter hit the marble and burst. Frost and wine and crystal scattered under the table, and Sasha folded sideways into the arms of a footman who was already there—already there, as if the staff drilled for this—and a second footman took her other arm, and between them they turned her toward the wall, toward a door Fern hadn’t even seen, worked into the paneling like all their doors.

Sasha’s head lolled. Her heels trailed across the marble, two thin lines through the spilled wine.

Fern knew that door. Not this door, but she knew where doors like it went. She had crawled through the space behind them. She had knelt on a grate in the dark and looked down at the room that was waiting at the bottom of them, at the chairs, at the tubes, at the stout man saying disconnect and render.

The reserves were at ninety percent for the banquet. She was drinking the shortfall’s replacement with her soup.

Fern was half out of her chair before she knew her legs had moved.

A hand closed on her wrist beneath the table. Not hard. Absolute, the way the mountain was absolute. Darkwater had not turned his head. He was watching the dais, his expression composed into faint boredom, and his grip said what his face didn’t bother to.

“Eyes forward, girl,” he murmured, pitched for her alone.

“They’re taking her below⁠—”

“Yes.” Beneath his boredom, an old hardness ran through his voice like a river under ice. “And there is nothing in this room you can do about it tonight that won’t put you on the chair beside her. Eyes forward.” His grip eased, deliberate. “Not yet.”

Not yet.

Fern sat. Her pulse was a fist against her ribs, and she reached for the cold Lady Blackwell had carved into her and pulled it over herself like a sheet over furniture in an empty house.

At the High Table, Lady Blackwell lifted one finger without pausing her conversation.

The quartet swelled into something bright, threaded with flutes. A servant was already on his knees with a cloth, erasing the wine and the frost and the two thin heel-lines from the marble, and up and down the long tables sixty guests returned to their conversations at the exact sentence where they had left them, phials glittering beside their glasses, and the door in the paneling was only paneling again.

Fern looked at the dais.

Cassius was watching the place where the door had been, his glass untouched, his jaw a hard pale line. Then his eyes came to her across the whole gold-lit length of the room—hold, they said, hold—and she held, and hated him for being right.

The musicians finished the bright little piece and began another.

And at the center of the High Table, Aurelius Blackwell set down his glass, touched his napkin once to his mouth, and rose.