Page 89 of The Thirteenth Count

“A seal no one questions, then.”

Willem looked at her, and one corner of his tired mouth lifted. “Now she’s thinking like a criminal. There are three seals in the valley the yard won’t break. The High’s. The Lady’s.” He paused, deliberate as a man laying down a winning card. “And the seal of any house currently provisioning a Bonding ceremony.”

Fern stopped, listening carefully. Down in the yards, even at this hour, she could hear it faintly: the ceremony’s logistics grinding day and night, wagons up, wagons down, flowers and silver and wine and linen, a river of crates flowing through those gates with the High’s blessing on every manifest.

“The Bonding ceremony,” she said slowly. “His Bonding. You want to carry my parents out inside his own⁠—”

“Lord Darkwater,” Cassius said, “has generously undertaken to supply the wine.” He was looking at the map, but his voice had an edge she’d never heard him turn on his father before. “Forty casks, by wagon, over the next twelve days. His drivers. His seal. My father’s documents.” He looked up, shrugging a shoulder. “He signed my ledger. It only seems fair.”

Fern looked between them.

“How long,” she said, “have the two of you been doing this?”

Willem and Cassius exchanged a look over the low candles, an entire negotiation conducted in a second and a half.

“Longer than you’ve been here,” Willem said. “Not as long as we should have been.” He stood, rolling the map, all business again. “I’ll get word down the hill tonight. His lordship prefers a token to parchment—parchment hangs people.” At the door, he paused, and the mockery left his face. “For what it’s worth, Miss Silverbell—Sasha was the last straw for more people in this house than you’d credit. You didn’t start anything. You just walked in around the time the kettle finally screamed.” And he was gone into the dark of the passage.

Which left the two of them, and a table of dead candles, and a map-shaped absence, and the whole rest of it standing in the room with the fortnight and the cellar, patient and enormous.

Cassius reached for his coat.

“You should sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow we begin being very, very boring. Routine is the only camouflage that⁠—”

Fern crossed the room and took hold of his lapels.

He went statue-still under her hands. The same coat, the same hands. Once, she had cracked her palm across his cheek and beaten her fists against this exact wool while he stood like a mountain and let her. She gripped the lapels as she had then. This time, she pulled.

The kiss was brief and fierce and half-desperate, tasting of candle smoke and the terrible day. Cassius couldn’t hide his shock, but then his hand came up and cradled the back of her head like something breakable, and he kissed her back, once, hard, with weeks in it.

They broke apart an inch. His forehead came down to rest against hers. He was breathing like a man who’d been run through.

“Fern.” Ruined, that voice. “The fortnight⁠—”

“I know what the fortnight is. I know what you are, what I am, and what this mountain does to people who forget it. I didn’t do that because I forgot.” She released his lapels. “I did it because I wanted to. And I’m tired of pretending I don’t.”

Cassius looked at her for a long moment.

Then he was gone.

The door clicked, and Fern stood alone among the dead candles with her heart going like the mountain’s pumps and Sprout staring at her from the mantel in frank, judgmental astonishment.

“Not one word,” she told him.

The token arrived at noon the next day, by way of Lina. It was a small twist of waxed parchment pressed into Fern’s palm during the fitting of a grey walking dress, delivered with a blank face and a curtsy and no comment at all.

Inside was a pressed sprig of blackthorn. And beneath it, in a hand rushed and heavy, pressed hard enough to nearly tear the parchment, one word.

When?

For three days, Fern Silverbell was the most boring woman on the mountain.

She embroidered. She transcribed. She took her meals at the correct hours, complimented the soup, and walked the gallery at a pace that suggested no destination had ever occurred to her. She did not look at the door under the stairs. She had become, at last, everything Lady Blackwell’s lessons had aimed her toward, composed and decorative and empty, and the irony of it sat in her chest like a swallowed coin. It was the finishing they’d forced on her, and it had finished into this.

Below her windows, preparations for the Bonding ceremony flowed uphill.

Wagons at all hours, groaning up the Serpent’s Coil and through the South Gate, carrying silver and hothouse flowers, linens, lamp oil, crates of glassware packed in straw. A river of freight with the High’s blessing on every manifest, and every returning wagon rolling back down empty.

Not every one, Fern thought, watching from the gallery window with her hands folded like a painting of a girl. Not on the fourth night.