Page 86 of The Thirteenth Count

Fern said nothing.

“The Blackwells.” Her mother’s thumb moved over her knuckles, back and forth, an old soothing motion from fever nights. “And another. As old as they were. Stronger, some said. Their claim to the High Seat ran as deep as the mountain’s, and Tiberius knew it, and his son knew it better.” Her thumb stilled. “I was young. I carried letters, for people who believed the valley could be otherwise. Couriers don’t ask what they carry, but they learn who they carry it for, and one of the men I carried for was the last son of that other house.” Her voice changed around the next words, went soft and terribly young. “He was kind, and he was hunted, and I loved him, Fern. And by the spring I was carrying more than letters.”

The candle burned. Her mother’s hands enclosed hers. The floor of Fern’s whole life tilted, slow and enormous, like a ship beginning to turn.

“Mother,” she said thinly. “What are you telling me?”

“The Blackwells found the safehouse.” Mira’s eyes had gone somewhere twenty years away. “We got word too late: a missive, half a page, in his hand. He didn’t run. He wrote instead. He told Corvus—” her voice broke on the name, mended itself, went on “—to take me somewhere safe. To take us somewhere safe. He knew about you by then. Only that you existed. Only that.” Her hands tightened. “He died never knowing your name.”

He. Fern’s gaze went, slowly, to the man standing at her mother’s shoulder, to hazel eyes and freckled pale skin and thinning tawny hair. When she was younger, she’d search for Corvus in her face in the looking glass… she never found it. Never thought to question it. You have your mother’s eyes, her mother’s friends always said, and nobody’s nose, and everyone laughed, and no one ever finished the sentence.

“Father,” she whispered.

“You never looked like me, honey cake.” Corvus’s voice was rough and steady, and he did not look away from her, not for a heartbeat. “Not your nose, not your skin, not the way you stand when you’re angry, that’s all him, every inch of it, and do you know, I used to thank the Mother for it. Because it meant he wasn’t gone.” He reached through the hatch and took her free hand in both of his, cracked palms folding around it. “I was there the night you were born. I cut your cord with a grafting knife because it was what I had. I have been your father since before you drew breath, and I will be your father when I’ve none left.” His grip tightened around her hand. “Blood is their religion, Fern. Not ours. Never ours.”

Fern was crying. She noticed it distantly, tears running silent and steady beyond the cold place inside her. She gripped her father’s hands. Her father’s. She would fight anyone who said otherwise; she would fight the word itself. Then she made herself ask.

“His name.”

Mira’s breath stopped. Even now. Even here.

Corvus held his daughter’s hand through the iron, and when he spoke it was quiet and formal as a rite: the Keeper’s cadence, the voice for the words no one else would say.

“Your father was Aldric Thornfield,” he said. “Last lord of the valley’s other house. And you are Fern—daughter of Aldric, of the line of Thornfield—and everything that man upstairs has built is standing on the grave his family dug for yours.” His hands pressed hers, once, warm through the cold iron. “He knows the old blood came back the moment your smoke went white. What he does not know is whose. And as long as he doesn’t, you are a curiosity. The moment he does, you are war.”

Thornfield. One word, in the dark, under the mountain.

“That’s why they’ve gotten nothing from you,” Fern breathed, understanding arriving all at once, cold and clean. “He’s been asking about grandmothers. Mother’s line. He’s digging⁠—”

“—in your mother’s garden,” Corvus agreed. “Where nothing is buried. As long as Thornvale believes you are mine, the trail ends in a Keeper with no magic worth a dram.” The ghost of his old wryness surfaced, exhausted and unbeaten. “For twenty years, the most useful thing about me has been how thoroughly ordinary I am. I take a certain pride in it.”

“And the—” Fern’s thoughts were spilling over each other now, twenty years of small strange silences resolving at once into a single desperate architecture of love. “The brew...”

“His,” Mira said. “He taught it to me by candlelight the week before the safehouse fell. Said if the child carried his blood, she would need a way to bank the fire. To go unheard.” Her mouth bent. “It was the only inheritance he had time to leave you.”

“Control isn’t suppression,” Fern murmured, before she knew she was saying it. “It’s direction.”

Her father’s eyes came up, arrested. “Where did you hear that?”

“A—” Careful. “Someone here. It’s a lesson.”

“Hm.” A long look, hazel and knowing, filed away. “Then someone here has been reading things he ought to burn.” He leaned closer to the hatch, and his whisper dropped further still. “Hear me, Fern, because we may not get another half-bell. The Blackwells never destroy what they can bury. His people built what this mountain is standing on—the old rites I keep are crumbs from their table, the Last Bough included. If you ever need what the Thornfields knew, you dig beneath what the Blackwells built. It will be there. It is always there.”

The candle guttered. Fern stood with her hand in her father’s while twenty years of her life rearranged themselves. Beneath the shock, her anger steadied.

The dress, she thought. By the Mother—the dress.

“Mother. The black dress. You told me it came down from your mother—I wore it. Two nights ago, at their banquet, I wore it into their ballroom, and Lady Blackwell looked at it too long, and a lord asked me where a Keeper’s daughter came by old work⁠—”

Mira had dropped her gaze. “It was his mother’s,” she said faintly. “Carried out of Thorncroft before the fires reached the wardrobe wing. I told you it came from mine because everything of his had to become something of mine, or it couldn’t exist at all.” And then, with a strange, fierce light coming up through the exhaustion: “You wore it there.”

“I didn’t know⁠—”

“No.” Her mother smiled despite the tears in her eyes. “But she would have. Oh, she would have loved you for it.”

“Thorncroft,” Fern repeated. The word tasted like the gasp it had been in ten thousand mouths at the Count—the word her parents had forbidden in their own sitting room. “The city. It’s a city.”

“It was,” Corvus said. “His family’s seat, out beyond the far groves. The fires took it in a season, and the fog came after and grew over what the fires left, and now it sits inside what you were taught to call the Withering, and Rootfolk children are whipped for saying its name without ever learning it belonged to a place.” His jaw worked. “You cannot erase a house while its city stands, Fern. So they stopped its name in every mouth in the valley, and let the fog finish the argument.”