Page 84 of The Thirteenth Count

Fern went down with one hand on the wall.

Ten turnings, and the wall began to hum. She knew the pulse before she could hear it—thrum-thump, thrum-thump—the mountain’s mechanical heart, the sound she had followed once through the veins to a room full of glass and copper that she would spend the rest of her life trying to unsee. The Distillery was somewhere off to her left now, breathing behind the stone. The air went warm and coppery, and a corridor branched away toward the pulse, wide and lit and rutted with cart tracks.

She did not take it. The stairs kept going down.

Below the Distillery level, everything changed.

The warmth died first, then the copper smell, then the hum, muffled layer by layer until it was only a feeling in her teeth. The wardcandles gave out and she had to stop and coax her stub alight with the flint, shielding it, and in its small gold circle she saw that the walls had changed too.

The upper stairs were Blackwell work, dressed blocks laid in crisp lines of mortar. These stones were older. Massive, irregular, fitted against each other without mortar at all, so closely a knife wouldn’t slide between them—the same fitting as the grove’s oldest boundary wall, the one her father always said was standing before the first Blackwell drew breath. Down here the Keep stopped being a house and became what it had been built on top of.

What was hidden, she thought, and a shiver walked up her spine that had nothing to do with the cold.

The stairs ended in a low corridor. Doors ran down its right-hand side, heavy and iron-banded, each with a sliding hatch at eye height and a tin bowl’s worth of space beneath. The air smelled of tallow, damp stone, and the particular human smell of too many people and not enough water. Somewhere in the dark ahead, a chain shifted. Somewhere else, someone was breathing in the shallow, deliberate way of a person managing pain.

Cellar’s full enough as it is.

Fern stood at the corridor’s mouth with her candle shaking the shadows, and hated every soul in this mountain who had known.

A warder’s rounds—there would be rounds; there were always rounds—but the corridor stood empty for now, and she made herself move, past the first door, the second, hatch after closed hatch, and she had no plan for this part, no clerk’s rhythm, nothing but the thing pulling her forward by the sternum.

Then she heard it.

Three notes. Down, down, and the little lift at the end.

Faint and cracked, coming from behind the fourth door on the right—a voice worn thin as old cloth, humming to itself in the dark because it was frightened, because it had always sung when it was frightened, over bread dough and mending and the long wait in a Count line with a child’s hand crushed in hers.

She moved so quickly the candle guttered.

She reached the door. Her hands found the hatch. It stuck, then slid with a sound like a drawn breath, and the humming stopped, and in the darkness on the other side something moved—a shape rising, thin, chains murmuring—and came toward the little square of candlelight.

“Mother?”

The word came out of Fern in her smallest voice, her child’s voice, the voice from below the hem of a black dress.

And Mira Grovekeeper’s face came out of the dark.

Her mother’s face had learned the dark.

That was Fern’s first thought: Mira Grovekeeper’s face, hollowed at the cheek and grey beneath the eyes, tilting toward the hatch’s candlelight the way a plant tilts toward a window it has memorized. Her grey eyes came into the little square of gold and went very wide, and her lips moved around Fern’s name without daring to give it sound.

“Mother.” Fern’s hand was through the hatch before she could think better of it, fingers spread in the tallow-smelling dark.

Cold fingers closed around hers. Thin. Shaking. Real.

“Oh,” Mira breathed. “Oh, my girl. My girl.”

Chains murmured deeper in the cell, and a second shape resolved out of the black, slower, favoring one knee, one hand braced against the wall, and her father’s face came into the light beside her mother’s, and Fern’s whole chest caved in around what the weeks had done to it. The paunch was gone. The freckles stood out like a scattering of rust on parchment. His hazel eyes found her and filled, and he smiled anyway, because he was Corvus Grovekeeper and he had smiled at her across every disaster of her life.

“Well,” he whispered, hoarse. “There’s my honey cake.”

Fern pressed her forehead against the iron-banded wood because it was the closest she could get to holding them, and for a moment none of them managed anything at all.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Mira found her spine first—she always found it first—and her whisper turned fierce, both hands wrapping Fern’s one. “How are you here? If they find you⁠—”

“The warder passes at the half-bell,” Fern whispered back. “I counted his round. We have time.”

Her parents exchanged a look she knew from childhood: the when did she grow look, worn threadbare now, and frightened.