Page 82 of The Thirteenth Count

The court swirled. The quartet played. At the head of the room Cassius Blackwell was smiling at Lady Cressida as though nothing in the world could please him more. Lady Blackwell watched her son with an expression of perfect crimson satisfaction. The High watched everything. And somewhere below stairs, a girl named Sasha was a line item being balanced.

Fern’s hand found her pocket.

Her mother’s dress had pockets—of course it did; it was made by people whose hands were for working—and her fingers closed around the small cool shape she had carried against her hip all evening without letting herself ask why.

The empty phial. Lavender, faint as a memory, and nothing else. Sent up to her once, before another performance, with a message about direction.

She held it, hidden in the black folds of a dead house’s needlework, and looked down the glittering length of the ballroom at all those little phials of crystal and blood.

Hers was the only one in the room with no one inside it.

Fern closed her fist around the emptiness, and kept it.

The note arrived with breakfast, propped against the teapot in Lady Blackwell’s faultless hand. Lessons are suspended until after the ceremony. Comportment is expected regardless.—L.B.

Fern read it twice, then set it down beside the toast she wasn’t going to eat.

For weeks, the bells had divided her life in this mountain. Lessons. The library at the tenth. Dinner at seven. Frame, chin, breathe in the spaces between thoughts. She had hated the schedule. Now it had vanished overnight to make room for the Bonding, and the day yawned before her like the drop past the terrace wall. Only then did she understand how much that hated routine had been holding her together.

The ceremony. As if there were only one. As if the fortnight had a single event in it, and she was not required to survive the other thirteen days around it.

Sprout picked his way across the table and stood on the note.

“Thank you,” she told him. “That’s exactly where it belongs.”

Her voice was scraped and over-steady. The voice of a woman being comportful. She had lain awake most of the night listening to the Keep digest its celebration, carriages grinding down the mountain road until the small hours. Beneath the exhaustion and the wine-sour air, the whole house was different this morning. A trap, after you’ve watched it close on someone else.

Her name was Sasha.

I know.

He had known. He carried all of it, every name, every line of the ledger, and last night she had watched him give that bright, effortless smile to a kind woman in dove grey while his father sold them both.

Lina came late and carefully.

Fern had learned Lina’s movements over these weeks, quick and bird-bright, with hands that talked even when her mouth had been trained not to. This morning the hands were wrong. She gathered the untouched breakfast one plate at a time, favoring her left side, and when she reached across the table, her sleeve rode up. Fern saw the bruise circling her right wrist plain as day. It was days old and going yellow-green at the edges, with four darker marks in it the width of fingers.

“Lina.”

“You should eat something, Miss. Cook made the⁠—”

“Lina. Your wrist.”

The plates settled onto the tray with a chime. “I caught it in the linen press,” Lina said to the teapot.

“The linen press has fingers?”

Silence. Outside, far below, a carriage rattled away down the mountain with the last of somebody’s houseguests. Lina stacked the saucers, aligned their edges, moved the note from the teapot to the tray and back, and Fern watched her decide, twice, not to speak—and then, because her hands needed somewhere to go, Lina picked up the hairbrush and set to work on Fern’s curls, and after a while, in the absent way of the exhausted, she began to hum.

Three notes. Down, down, then the little lift at the end, like a question the singer already knows the answer to.

Fern’s whole body stiffened.

She knew those three notes as she knew her own pulse. Her mother hummed them over bread dough. Over mending. In the Count line with her hand crushing Fern’s fingers, humming under her breath because Mira Grovekeeper sang when she was frightened, always had, a cradle-song of the grove so old nobody remembered past its first verse—the Mother keeps a garden where her tired children sleep⁠—

Rootfolk sang it. Only Rootfolk. In the whole of this blue-and-silver mountain there was no reason for a Stemblood house servant to have those three notes in her mouth.

“Lina,” Fern said quietly. “Where did you hear that song?”