Page 81 of The Thirteenth Count

The High rose from his seat while her hand was still warm.

“And now,” he said, as the applause folded itself away, “to the true occasion of the evening.”

Cassius froze beside her. Not the trained stillness—something that knew what was coming.

“Tonight we celebrate a harvest—and we secure one.” The High’s voice rolled down the ballroom, generous, expansive, a man distributing largesse. “Alliances, my friends, are the roots of order. And it is my great honor to announce one that will strengthen not only House Blackwell, but the very foundation of this valley’s future.”

No, Fern thought, with no idea yet what she was refusing.

“I am pleased to announce the bonding of my son and heir, Lord Cassius Blackwell⁠—”

The room drew its breath.

“—to Lady Cressida Ravencroft.”

The ballroom erupted. Applause, cries of delight, the scrape of sixty chairs as the court came to its feet, and through the wall of it doors opened at the far end of the hall, and the young woman in dove grey and gold came down the length of the room in a slow processional, her head high, her kind eyes bright and terrified in equal measure.

Fern stood at the edge of the floor in her mother’s dress with the ghost of his hand at her waist and learned what the word bonding did when it was dropped from a height.

Cressida Ravencroft passed within an arm’s reach of her. Up close she was younger than she’d looked, and lovelier, and her graciousness wasn’t performance. She caught Fern’s eye mid-processional, a stranger’s face in the roaring room, and gave her that same small, genuine nod, courage, one arranged woman to another, having no idea at all, and that was the worst of it. There was nothing in her to hate. There was no one in this room to hate but the man smiling at the head of it, and he had built the room so that hating him looked like madness.

“The ceremony,” the High announced over the tumult, lifting his glass, “will take place within the fortnight.”

The fortnight.

The word went through Fern like the lancet had—a small puncture, out of all proportion to what came pouring through it.

“Let us celebrate this union!”

Cassius stepped forward to meet Lady Cressida. Fern watched him extend his hand. He smiled, bright and effortless, and the whole room seemed to brighten with him. If she had not spent weeks learning his real face by candlelight, she might have believed it. He led Lady Cressida to the center of the floor. The quartet began something joyful.

They danced. They were beautiful. The court sighed over them. The phials glittered on the tables. And somewhere far below all of it, the pumps kept the mountain’s heart beating on the blood of people whose names were entered in a book.

“You’ll want to move, girl.” The landslide voice arrived at her shoulder, pitched under the music. “Standing alone at the edge of a floor with that face is a signed confession.”

She hadn’t noticed Darkwater rise, which she suspected was a thing he was good at despite his size. He was holding out one enormous hand with the long-suffering air of a man performing a chore.

“Dance with me. I’m told I’m dreadful at it. You’ll look tolerant and I’ll look charitable, and no one will look at either of us longer than they must.”

She put her hand in his because the alternative was her face, and her face was losing.

He was not, in fact, dreadful at it. He steered her into the anonymous middle of the floor where the crowd of couples closed around them like water.

“Breathe,” he said. “Through the nose. Good. Again.”

“I’m perfectly⁠—”

“You’re a window with the curtains torn down.” No cruelty in it. He turned her, unhurried, and his ice-green eyes moved once across the room—the dais, the doors, the paneling where a girl had been carried through the wall—the same counting she’d been caught at, except that no one would ever dare tell him it was rude. “Whatever you are feeling,” he said, “feel it tomorrow. Tonight you smile at the pretty couple like everyone else, and you live to be angry another day. Do you understand me?”

“Why do you care?” Her voice was low and raw, and she was past minding.

For three full figures he didn’t answer. The music turned them; Cassius and Cressida wheeled past in a blur of grey and black; the phials burned like little coals on the abandoned tables.

“Timing,” Darkwater said at last, “is everything, Miss Silverbell.” He spun her, caught her, set her down soft as a leaf. “Yours is coming. Waste nothing before it does.”

The dance delivered her to its end. He bowed, correct and oddly protective, a wall pretending to be a courtesy, and was gone into the crowd with the improbable quiet of a mountain going for a walk.

Fern stood in the middle of the celebration and let it roar past her.