Page 85 of The Thirteenth Count

“Then use it well and listen,” Mira said. “You cannot come back here. Whatever you had to do to reach this door, you cannot⁠—”

“How long?”

The question came out of Fern flat and quiet, and it stopped her mother cold.

“Fern—”

“How long have you been down here? They told me you were home. They told me you were in Ashford Cross, under watch, and letters couldn’t reach you because the region was—” the word curdled in her mouth “—readjusting. How long, Mother?”

Silence, the kind with a decision inside it. Somewhere down the corridor, someone coughed once, low and careful, and went quiet.

It was her father who answered. He had never once lied to her, and he did not begin now, though she watched him understand exactly what the truth would do.

“They came at night, the second week of Red Autumn,” Corvus said gently.

The candle shook. Fern watched its light shudder across her parents’ faces and understood that her body was doing it.

“The letter was mine,” she spat out. “I wrote it. I paid a driver. I tried to warn you. I thought-I thought if you knew the stories weren’t true…” Her forehead went back against the wood. “I did this. You’re in the dark because I⁠—”

“What letter?” Mira asked.

Fern blinked.

“Mother, the letter! That’s why-it’s my fault. I-”

“Stop.” Mira’s grip crushed her fingers. “No letter ever reached us. Men put us in the dark. Not you. You will not carry what taints their souls, Fern, do you hear me? I forbid it.”

“Mother—”

“She forbids it,” Corvus agreed mildly, “and I’ve never once seen her lose.”

An awful laugh slipped past Fern’s lips. It was awful and small and mostly water. She wiped her face with her free hand and made herself do what she had come to do, because the half-bell was coming, because it was always coming, because this whole mountain ran on a clock made of other people’s blood.

“They question you,” she said. “Don’t tell me they don’t. Lina—a servant, a friend—she came back from below with bruises and your song in her mouth, Mother. What do they want?”

Corvus and Mira looked at one another, sharing something unspoken when her father finally turned to Fern.

“You,” her father said simply.

“They ask about your grandmother,” Mira said. Her whisper had gone very careful, each word set down like a stitch. “My mother, and hers. They ask about the brew. About incidents, that’s their word, incidents of inherited magic. Whether there were others. Whether there are records.” Her fingers tightened around Fern’s. “The High comes himself, sometimes. He is very patient. He brings a chair.”

A registrar asked me the same questions, Fern thought, cold crawling through her. The day they took my name. Praxis with her hovering quill—no grandparent of unusual talent? We will verify. The first tooth of a machine that had been chewing toward this cell since the smoke went white.

“And you’ve told him⁠—”

“Nothing,” Corvus said. “There is a discipline to confession, Fern. I’ve kept other people’s silences for thirty years. I can keep ours.”

“Then give it to me.”

The words landed in the dark and sat there. Her father’s face went still. Her mother’s fingers loosened, just slightly, around hers.

“You made me drink that brew,” Fern pressed, low and shaking. “You told me it was for my blood and told me nothing else. In our own sitting room you begged me never to speak of it, and I didn’t, and I came up this mountain blind, and they have been circling what I am for weeks while I curtsied and copied ledgers and learned to hold my face still. Mrs. Tanner knew more than I did, a neighbor, Father, warning me about old blood over the garden fence. I am done being the only person in Thornvale who doesn’t know what’s in my own veins.” She looked from one to the other. “There’s no parlor to protect now. There’s no gallows worse than the one we’re already standing under. Tell me.”

The half-bell was somewhere out there, swimming toward them.

Corvus looked at his wife. Fern remembered her mother rising in their sitting room, fists clenched, forbidding this very conversation. Now Mira closed her eyes and nodded. The tension left her shoulders.

“Twenty years ago,” Mira said quietly, “there were still two founding houses in this valley.”