Page 87 of The Thirteenth Count

Down the corridor, stone carried a sound to them: distant yet, but coming. A door. Boots on the spiral stair, unhurried.

The warder. Early, or the half-bell had drowned in her heartbeat. Either way⁠—

“Go,” Mira breathed, instantly, her hands already pushing Fern’s back through the hatch. “Go.”

“I’m coming back.” Fern gripped the hatch’s frame. “Listen—both of you. I’m getting you out. There are people—I can’t say more, but there are people, and there’s a way off this mountain, and I am getting you out⁠—”

“Fern.” Her father’s whisper cut through the panic, calm as a service. “Look at me.”

She looked. The boots were on the stairs. His hazel eyes held hers, steady, terribly gentle, and he said the thing she would carry to a scaffold and a stone chamber and the far side of the fog:

“Whatever comes—you do not trade yourself for us. You are the only thing your mother and I have ever smuggled worth the price. Do you hear me? Nothing buys you back once you’re spent. Promise me.”

The boots reached the corridor’s turning.

“I promise,” Fern lied, in her smallest voice, and slid the hatch shut on her parents’ faces.

She went up the dark with her candle snuffed and her heart in her mouth, into the wardcandled turnings, past the copper breath of the Distillery level, timing the last spiral against the murmur of two warders comparing grievances below her, and slipped out of the door under the stairs into the empty gleam of the entrance hall between one bell and the next. The checkered marble stretched away, black and white, patient as a game.

She crossed it fast and soundless, up the grand staircase and along the West Wing, her mind roaring with Thornfield, two houses, a war. She let herself into the blue suite on breath she’d been rationing for three floors.

The sitting room was lit.

One wardcandle, trimmed low, on the table by the hearth. Sprout sat on the mantel with his wings folded tight and his yellow eyes wide with apology, and in the wingback chair, in the small gold ring of light, sat Cassius Blackwell—still in his evening blacks, elbows on his knees, hands folded, with the stillness of a man who had been holding one posture for a very long time.

His eyes came up to hers. Cobalt, unreadable, taking in the grey dress, the bound hair, the soft shoes, the candle stub in her fist. He missed nothing.

“Where were you?” said Cassius.

“Where were you?”

Fern stood just inside her own door with a snuffed candle stub in her fist and a dead lord’s name ringing in her skull, and looked at Cassius Blackwell sitting in her firelight like a sentence waiting to be read, and discovered she had nothing left in her for careful.

“Ashford Cross,” she said.

His brow drew down. “What?”

“That’s where my parents are. Isn’t it? That’s what you told me.” She came forward into the light, and whatever was in her face brought him up out of the chair. “Your parents are in Ashford Cross. They are under strict surveillance. You sat in the library and fed me that sentence like a dose of medicine. Silence is part of their protection. Do you remember saying that? Because I do. I have been living on that sentence for weeks. I recited it to myself at night like a rite.”

“Fern—”

“They’re in the cellar.”

The words went off in the quiet room like dropped crystal.

“They are forty feet under your ballroom, Cassius. They have been there since the second week of Red Autumn. My mother sings in the dark down there because she’s frightened, and my father needs a wall to stand up, and I have spent this entire evening with my hand through a slot in an iron door because that is as close as I can get to my family, whom you told me—you told me—” her voice was climbing and she couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to “—were home. Watched, but home. Safe, but silent. You told me.”

She watched the words land on him.

She had spent weeks learning every small change in his face. By the light of one low wardcandle, she watched his confusion turn to understanding, then horror.

Cassius Blackwell went white.

Not pale—he was always pale. White, like expensive parchment, the blood simply leaving, and he took one step back as though her sentence had a recoil, and his hand found the mantel and gripped it.

“No,” he said. Not to her. To the arithmetic.

“I saw them⁠—”