Page 83 of The Thirteenth Count

The brush stopped.

In the looking glass, Fern watched the color drain from Lina’s face. Her eyes went to the door. To the window. To her own bruised wrist.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Lina whispered. “It’s just a tune.”

“Lina—”

“It’s just a tune, Miss.” The brush was shaking. Lina set it down before it could betray her further and gripped the back of the chair with both hands. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped to almost nothing. “Please. I am begging you. Whatever you think—whatever you heard—leave it be. They watch everything. They ask about everything. Last time they asked, they asked with my brother’s name in their mouths.” Her eyes came up and met Fern’s in the looking glass, and they were bright and terrified and terribly, hopelessly sorry. “I have Jonas, Miss. I have Jonas. Please.”

She gathered the tray and was gone, and the door clicked, and Fern sat in front of the looking glass with her half-brushed hair and her heart going like a smith’s hammer.

It’s just a tune.

Her mother’s tune. Coming out of a woman with finger-bruises on her wrist who had vanished for a day and come back moving like her ribs hurt, in a Keep where guards joked that the cellar was full, behind a door that Cassius had told her not to concern herself with, in the weeks after a letter that never arrived and a readjustment that had no end.

You said they were safe, she had shouted at him once. You said they were under surveillance.

And he had said—she made herself remember it exactly, because exactness was all she had—silence is part of their protection.

Fern looked at herself in the looking glass. Behind her own eyes, the pieces began to align. The guards in the corridor, cellar’s full enough as it is, an ugly laugh; the door in the staircase with its iron hinges and its traffic; Willem’s warning in the dark of the veins, if you go right—well. Just don’t; Lina’s missing day; Lina’s bruise; Lina’s tune.

Her letter. The driver. The timing.

Oh, Mother, Fern thought. Oh, Mother, what did I do.

She did not cry. She noticed that about herself from a small distance, as she’d noticed it at the banquet: some new cold place where the crying used to start, smooth as a planed board. Lady Blackwell had built it. Let Lady Blackwell live with what got built on top of it.

Fern stood, and began to plan.

This was the difference, she told herself that evening, crouched in the dark of the gallery with her cheek near the balustrade ivy: the letter had been a match struck in a granary. One desperate motion, no thought for the sparks. She had paid for it, and worse: others had paid for it, were perhaps paying for it forty feet below her in the dark.

Tonight she was not striking matches. Tonight she was a clerk.

From the gallery she could see the whole entrance hall laid out below her. The checkered marble. The wardcandles burning low in their evening trim. And the door—the door—built into the curve of the grand staircase, ancient oak and iron, with a Stemblood warder posted beside it like a sconce.

She had been watching for two hours, and the Keep had been teaching her, as it taught anyone patient enough to sit still in it.

At the sixth bell, a cart had gone down: two kitchen boys and a warder, bread and a covered pot and a stack of tin bowls. Tin, she’d thought, gripping the balustrade. They feed them in tin. The door had stood open on darkness for the length of the delivery, and the posted warder had spent it flirting with one of the parlor maids.

At the half-bell, the cart had come back up. Lighter.

And at the ninth bell the watch would change. She’d learned this rhythm weeks ago without knowing she was learning it, lying in the blue suite listening to the mountain’s iron pulse. The Keep ran on bells as a body runs on blood. The relieving warder came from the East Wing; the retiring one never waited for him properly; there was a yawn in the middle, a soft two-minute nothing when the post was a conversation instead of a post.

Fern had spent weeks being taught to hold still, to time her breath, to make her face a closed door. Every lesson had been aimed at making her presentable.

Look closely, she thought, easing back from the balustrade. Learn what I can do quietly.

She went down the servants’ stair in her old grey dress with her hair bound close, soft-shod, carrying a stub of candle and a flint in her pocket, and she was a ghost in her own captivity, and when the ninth bell began to toll she was standing in the shadow of the great staircase’s curve with her heart perfectly, unnaturally slow.

The bell tolled. The relieving warder came across the checkered marble, unbuckling his helm, already complaining about the banquet cleanup. The retiring one laughed and turned to meet him, and for the space of eight words about somebody’s wine-sick sergeant, neither of them was looking at the door they were both standing beside.

Fern crossed the last six feet of marble in one fluid rush.

The iron handle was cold. The door was unlocked. Of course it was unlocked; it had been swallowing carts and warders all day, and the lock was for quiet seasons. It opened on oiled hinges without a sound, because in Blackwell Keep even the secrets were well maintained.

She stepped through and drew it shut behind her, and the dark took her in.

Stairs. Stone, worn soft-edged down the middle by two centuries of boots, spiraling into the mountain inside the great staircase’s bones. Wardcandles burned at every second turning, trimmed low, their light the color of old honey.