Page 92 of The Thirteenth Count

She stood at the window until the fog thinned to reddish grey, and the bells wore themselves out, and the Keep beneath her settled into the particular humming silence of a kicked hive deciding whom to sting.

Sprout had not left her shoulder since she’d come back through the panel. He didn’t chirp. He didn’t sulk. He sat against her neck with his wings drawn tight, and Fern understood that he had heard the bells too.

The knock came at the hour breakfast should have arrived—one knock, wrong, too soft.

Lina stood in the doorway. She was in yesterday’s apron. Her hands were empty, no tray, no linens, nothing to hide behind, and her face was wan, and her mouth opened, and closed, and opened.

“Miss,” she said. And could not say the rest.

This time the gown was blue, and this time no one asked.

It was laid out on her bed when she returned from breakfast, Blackwell blue, silver thornwork, the collar high—and beside it, on parchment heavy enough to be a verdict of its own, the summons. The language was administrative. In accordance with valley law, the households of Keepers shall bear witness to all sentences carried out. Attendance is required. Carriages depart at the eleventh bell.

Valley law. Keepers and their families witnessed every sentence. She had thrown that fact at her father once, in their sitting room, when he tried to frighten her into silence with talk of the gallows.

Now they were using it to make her watch his.

Lina dressed her without a word. Her hands shook the whole time, and twice she stopped and pressed her lips together and breathed, and Fern stood still and let herself be laced into the collar of the house that was hanging her father, because the alternative was to start screaming, and she did not know where the screaming would end.

In the looking glass, the woman in Blackwell blue had a face like a closed door. The face of a Keeper.

Good, Fern told her. Stay that way.

She had come up the mountain in a blood carriage, once, a lifetime ago, watching Ashford Cross fall away beneath her in slow, sickening inches.

Now she rode it down—one cage among a procession of cages, iron and brass, the Oathblight darkening on some servant’s hand at the front of the line to pay for every foot of her descent, and watched her whole world rise back up to meet her. The market square. The birch groves behind a cottage she could not look at. The winding streets she’d walked all her life, filling now, street by street, with everyone she had ever known, because attendance was required, because the High’s generosity extended even to spectacle.

They had built the scaffold on the Count platform.

She understood it the moment she saw it, the way you understand a sentence in a language you wish you’d never learned. The same boards. The same square. Red and white roses on the dais posts, because the same hands decorated everything on this mountain. Here her smoke had gone up white over ten thousand people.

He stages it where I was found, she thought, cold to the marrow. Because this isn’t a punishment. It’s correction.

The Blackwell household arrayed itself on a viewing stand hung with blue. Fern was placed—placed, a hand at her elbow, a spot marked out—in the front rank, between Lady Blackwell’s crimson stillness and the empty air where Cassius arrived a moment later, black-coated, grey-faced, close enough that his sleeve nearly brushed hers. Marcus stood nearer the High than she had ever seen him stand, wearing a new silver signet and the expression of a man attending his own investiture.

Below, the square was a sea of the faces of her childhood. She found Mrs. Tanner’s white head near the well. She found—her heart lurched—Elise, both hands over her mouth. She found a hundred others, bakers and foragers and grove-hands, every face turned up toward the stand where Fern Silverbell stood in Blackwell blue above them like a dead thing posed for display.

Look at what they made of the Keeper’s girl, she imagined them thinking, and stood straighter, and hated herself for it, and did it anyway. The stillness was the only thing she had left to give him.

Snow began to fall, fine and dry and unhurried, the first of the White Season’s heart. It gathered on the scaffold rail like sifted flour.

The bells tolled noon. And then, they brought her father out.

He looked both small between the warders and not small at all.

That was the thing Fern would keep, afterward, sorting the day’s wreckage in the dark: Corvus Grovekeeper came up the platform steps of his own accord, unhurried, in the plain clothes of his trade, and every line of him was a man arriving at work. He had stood on those boards a hundred times in his life—beside the dying, beside the dead, beside the condemned when no one else would stand there—and his body knew the place, and refused to be a stranger in it.

An officer of the High unrolled the charges. His voice carried flat and enormous over the square. Over ten thousand held breaths.

“Corvus Grovekeeper, of Ashford Cross. You stand condemned of the smuggling of persons from the High’s custody. Of conspiracy against the peace of the valley. Of the corruption of oaths sworn to House Blackwell.” The parchment crackled as the officer shifted his grip. “For these crimes, the sentence is death.”

Lies stacked on lies stacked on one buried truth. Fern stood in the falling snow and held the true charge—he loved a hunted man’s family more than his own life—and understood, with a clarity like ice water, that she was the only soul in this square who knew what was actually being killed here. Not a smuggler. A shield. The last name between the High and the war he didn’t know he should be fearing.

“State your name for the record of the valley.”

Her father lifted his head, found the viewing stand, and found her. His gaze settled warm as a hand on the crown of her head. Then he answered in the clear, mild, carrying voice that had once answered for her on these same boards.

“Corvus Grovekeeper.”