Page 88 of The Thirteenth Count

“I hear you.” His voice had gone strange and distant. He sounded like a man reading his own ruin over his shoulder. “I hear you. Be quiet a moment. Please.”

And because the please cracked in the middle, she was.

The fire ticked. Sprout sat frozen on the mantel inches from Cassius’ whitened knuckles, wings drawn in tight. And Fern watched the heir of Blackwell Keep stand at her hearth and do what he did—what he always did, what his terrible father had built him to do—she watched him audit.

“Requisitions,” he said at last, barely aloud. “The kitchen drew an increase against the lower stores at the end of Red Autumn. Flat rate. Recurring. I signed it. It crossed my desk with thirty others, provisioning always rises before White Season, I didn’t—” His jaw flexed. “Tin service, one crate, charged to the garrison. A warder rotation added below stairs—below stairs, the order said, storerooms, I signed that too. Lamp oil. Tallow.” His eyes closed. “I signed for their bread, Fern. Every week. He ran it through my own ledger.”

The room was very quiet.

“He didn’t hide them from me in some vault.” Cassius’ hand left the mantel. He turned. She would remember his face. The mask hadn’t slipped; it had burned off. His mouth shook once before he mastered it. “He hid them in my handwriting. He told me Ashford Cross, watched me believe it, and then had me sign their captivity into my own accounts week after week, because it amused him, or because it was efficient, or because those are the same thing to him.” He gave one short, humorless laugh. “And I stood in that library and gave you his sentence. Word for word. I thought I was comforting you. I was his mouth.”

The temperature dropped ten degrees, and the pressure reached Fern before understanding did. Sprout flattened himself to the mantel with a thin sound as the fire guttered in the grate. Even the air leaned away from the man standing in the middle of it. She had encountered his resonance twice before. Once, it had covered the square during the Count like a warm blanket. Then, in the solarium, it had quieted her panic like a cool hand. This was its third face. It was a terrifying gift released from its keeper, filling the room as deep water fills a lung.

“Cassius.”

His eyes came to her—and the pressure vanished. Reeled in between one heartbeat and the next, banked so hard and fast that the fire jumped back up in the grate, and the effort of it left him standing with his hands open at his sides.

“I believed him,” he said quietly, laying each word down like evidence. “That is the part you should weigh, Fern. Not whether I lied to you. Decide that as you like, I was the lie either way. But I believed him. Twenty-eight years in this house, knowing exactly what he is, and he said Ashford Cross and I wrote it into my ledger of things that were true.” His mouth twisted. “He doesn’t need my loyalty. He has my bookkeeping.”

Fern stood with the candle stub in her fist. All the fury she had carried up three flights remained, with nowhere to go and years before it found a place. But it was changing state. She had entered ready to fight a liar and found a man discovering he was an instrument.

Both of us, she thought. He plays us both against each other and calls it order.

“The eighth bell came and went,” she said.

He blinked. “What?”

“At the banquet. You said I could hate you at the eighth bell.” She set the candle stub down on the table with exaggerated care, because her hands needed a task that wasn’t shaking. “I tried. I want you to know I made a genuine effort.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “And?”

“And I’ve decided to hate your father instead. It’s simpler.”

“Fern Silverbell.” He said her false name like a prayer to the Mother. “Choosing enemies in a burning building.”

“You taught me to be practical.”

“I did.” The almost-smile died. “Then tell me everything. The door, the timing, the corridor, the warder’s round. Every detail, in order, and leave nothing out because you think it protects someone. The time for protecting people from me is finished.”

So she told him. The bells and the tin bowls, the two-minute yawn in the ninth-bell watch, the old stones below the Distillery level, the hatch, her mother’s hands. She did not say Thornfield. She did not say Aldric. The names sat behind her teeth the whole time, enormous, and she kept them, not out of distrust, or not only; out of a promise, and a corridor’s worth of her father’s voice saying the moment he knows, you are a war. One war at a time.

When she finished, Cassius stood at the window with his back to her, looking down at the dark where the valley was, and said: “Willem.”

“What about him?”

“Get the door.” He didn’t turn around. “He’s been standing in the service passage for ten minutes. He always knows. It’s his most irritating quality.”

Fern opened the door to find Willem leaning against the passage wall with a candle and an expression of profound, weary unsurprise, like a man arriving at a fire he had predicted in writing.

“Evening,” Willem said. “Or morning, strictly. I brought tea.” He hadn’t brought tea. He’d brought a map.

They worked at her small table until the candles were puddles. The heir, the runner, and the daughter, three heads bent over a drawing of the mountain’s bones that no Blackwell had ever been shown—or so she assumed.

“The cellar block is old work—it predates the house.” Willem’s finger traced the corridor she’d walked. “Which means the veins pass behind it, here and here, and the warders trust the iron more than they should. Getting to your parents was never going to be the problem.” His finger slid up, and up, through kitchens and yards, to the gates. “Getting them off the mountain is the problem. Nothing leaves without a seal. Every cart, every crate, every coffin, searched at the yard and searched again at the Coil, and twice as hard now.”

“Then we need a cart no one searches,” Fern said.

“No such cart.”