Page 91 of The Thirteenth Count

The torchlight was growing. Willem had the grate open—Mira half through it, twisting back, one hand locked on her husband’s sleeve with everything the last twenty years had made.

“Thirty years you’ve buried other people’s dead,” she breathed. “Who buries—” She couldn’t finish it.

“The Mother keeps a garden.” Corvus took his wife’s face in both cracked hands and kissed her brow, once, unhurried, as if the boots were still beyond the Coil. “I’ll mind the gate till you’re all home.”

Then he looked at Fern, and smiled—smiled, hazel and warm and entirely unafraid, the smile from across every disaster of her life—and said the last of it quick and quiet, pressing each word into her like seeds into soil:

“The boy. The one you didn’t name when I asked where you’d learned that lesson.” A glint, even now. “The Mother doesn’t ask blood before she asks the heart, Fern. Neither did I. It’s how I got you.” His hand cupped her jaw, rough and warm. “Death makes equals of us all—it’s the living that need sorting. Go sort them. And when the time comes—” the smile deepened, went somewhere private and certain “—watch me, not the rope. I’ll show you how a Keeper does it.”

“Father—”

But he was already walking. Away from the grate, down the corridor, toward the growing light, his steps loud now, deliberately loud, scuffing, stumbling, transforming with every yard into the story the night needed—a spent old man, alone, lost in the dark he’d broken into. Willem’s hand clamped over Fern’s mouth and around her shoulders and took her backward through the grate with a strength she’d never suspected in him, and the last she saw of her father through the closing bars was his silhouette against the torchlight, arms rising slowly from his sides, palms open.

The way he stood at gravesides.

“Well,” she heard Corvus Grovekeeper say to the guards of Blackwell Keep, in a clear, mild, carrying voice, “you needn’t shout. I’m rather easily caught.”

The grate pinned shut. The wall became a wall.

She didn’t remember most of the veins.

There was her mother’s hand, birdboned and crushing hers. There was Willem ahead, setting a pace just short of ruinous. There was the mountain’s heart hammering above them, or maybe that was her own. There were the counted turnings arriving in the wrong order because her mind kept walking the other way, back down a torchlit corridor. There was the cold slap of the night air in the shadow of the tack room, and the yard, and the third wagon.

The casks stood in their cradle like a choir with one hollow member. The driver, a Darkwater man, grey-whiskered, broad as his own casks, pulled the false head from the third cask with a soft complaint of wood, and looked at the two women, and touched his cap to the older one as if handing her into a coach.

Mira turned in the wagon’s shadow and took her daughter’s face in both hands.

“Listen to me.” Her whisper had stopped shaking. Somewhere between the grate and the yard, Fern’s mother had crossed some inner border, and what stood in the cold now was the woman who had run couriers through a dying resistance with a child under her heart. “You have his blood and my spine and that man’s—” her voice caught on Corvus, held “—that man’s whole heart. That is more inheritance than any house on this mountain can claim. Spend it well.” Her thumbs pressed hard against Fern’s cheekbones. “Not fast. Well. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.” Fern was crying without sound, a skill this mountain had taught her. “Mother—where will you⁠—”

“Where the fog keeps its secrets.” Mira glanced toward Willem, then back to Fern. “When you need me, you’ll know where. He’ll make sure of it.” A jerk of her chin at Willem—or at the network behind him, the whole invisible organism of tokens and wagon-drivers and men who preferred blackthorn to parchment.

Then her mother folded herself into the cask and looked up at Fern from inside it, and despite the fear plainly on her face, began very softly to hum.

Three notes. Down, down, and the little lift at the end.

Not simply because she was frightened, Fern understood, her throat closing. But because she had decided what to do with that fear. The tune went into the dark under the false head of the cask, and the driver seated the wood with a mallet’s soft knock, and the song became a wall’s secret too.

“Go,” Willem breathed. “Gallery window. Be seen being nothing.”

Fern glanced at the cask.

Willem shook his head, eyes softening. “If you vanish too, they’ll know the escape came from inside the Keep. They’ll tear this mountain apart until they find the veins—and everyone who uses them. That’s a risk we cannot take.”

Fern stood at the gallery window in her nightgown with a shawl around her shoulders, a girl woken by commotion, nothing more, and watched the third wagon roll out under the iron teeth of the South Gate.

The yard torches crawled over it. A warder walked its length, thumped two casks with a gloved fist, checked the manifest against the seal, the seal the yard would not break, blackthorn pressed in black wax—and waved it on. The wagon passed under the portcullis and out onto the Serpent’s Coil, and the mountain’s darkness took it in one swallow, and somewhere inside that darkness her mother rode down the scarred lash of road inside a wine cask, humming the old song into the wood.

Where the fog keeps its secrets.

Behind Fern, deep in the Keep’s bones, the alarm began.

Not the hour-toll. Not the watch-change. A pattern she had never heard in all her weeks of learning this mountain’s iron language—short-short-long, short-short-long, urgent, ugly, bell answering bell down through the tiers of the house like a shout passed hand to hand. Doors began to slam somewhere below. Boots gathered and divided. Torchlight multiplied in the yard until the cobbles glowed like a hearth.

Fern watched the empty road where the wagon had gone, and did not permit herself to move, and inside her chest, in the cold smooth place, she held it in.

Watch me, not the rope.