Page 95 of The Thirteenth Count

“No,” Marcus agreed pleasantly. “I don’t suppose you could.” He stopped at the gallery’s midpoint, so she had to stop too or snub him. He narrowed his wine-rimmed eyes, trying for his father’s appraising stare, but looked instead like a fox sniffing a snare. “Father says you bear watching.” His eyes narrowed. “Personally, I think you’re like a cat scratching at the furniture.” He leaned in half an inch. “And troublesome animals are easily dealt with, Silverbell.”

From below the floor, faint and forever, the mountain’s pulse thrummed up through the stones. Thrum-thump. Thrum-thump.

Marcus’ eye twitched.

His head tilted toward the sound before he caught himself. Without the smirk, he looked harried and sleepless.

“Can you hear—” He caught himself. Straightened his cuffs. The smirk reassembled itself, one piece arriving slightly late. “Enjoy your walk, Miss Silverbell. My brother’s bonding soon. Busy days for us all.”

He went. Fern stood in the gallery until his footsteps faded, unclenching her hands one finger at a time, and forced herself to think through what the day had left no room for.

The watch had been warned of the night. Not the route, or the wagon would have been searched at the gate, and her mother would be in the room below the East Wing instead of beyond the Keep. Not the walls, or they would all be hanging. Someone had sold the when without ever holding the how, and the when had lived in five mouths she trusted and a handful of wordless tokens that even their couriers couldn’t read.

None of it fit. She would have to leave the question unanswered for now. She looked down the gallery at where the smirk had been. A fat new signet, on a man who had not earned anything in his life.

You sold my father for a ring, she thought at his back, with a calm that would have frightened her a season ago. And the mountain is already keeping you up at night. Listen closely, my lord. It counts everything.

The token came at dusk, by the strangest courier yet: her own laundered gloves, returned to the wardrobe smelling of soap, one finger stiffer than its fellows.

Fern worked the folded parchment free with her heart in her throat and unfolded it by candlelight.

A birch leaf. Pressed flat, gone gold at the edges. There were no words. Parchment hangs people. Words are worse. Birches grew in one place in her world, in the grove behind a cottage in Ashford Cross, and her mother had raked their leaves every Red Autumn of Fern’s life, complaining lovingly the whole while.

Home reached. Safe.

Fern sat down on the floor of the wardrobe with the leaf cupped in both hands like water. She put her forehead to her knees and let herself breathe. Her mother was off the mountain. Her mother was beyond the wards, beyond the Coil, in a place where the fog kept its secrets, alive, alive, carrying the name and the truth and the black dress’s whole history in her birdboned, unbreakable body.

Then she folded the leaf into the waxed parchment, hid it with the memory of a blackthorn sprig’s ashes, and went back to work.

The summons to the fitting came the next morning, and the fitting came with a calendar.

“The ceremony has been moved forward.” Lady Blackwell said it the way she said everything, as though reading the weather from a barometer, while two seamstresses circled Fern with pins and chalk. “Five days hence. The High feels the household would benefit from… a joyful occasion.”

Five days. This was the High reasserting his grip on the calendar as he reasserted it on everything, tightening the whole mountain’s schedule around his son’s Bonding ceremony like a hand closing. Fern stood on the fitting stool in a half-built gown of dove-and-silver, a guest’s gown; she was to be displayed at this, too, of course she was—and held still under the pins.

Lady Blackwell watched her in the triple looking glass.

She had watched Fern differently since the gallows. Fern couldn’t name the change, but she saw it in the lingering sweep over her posture, hands, and chin. Lady Blackwell’s gaze had always cataloged. Now it searched. Once, when the seamstress pinned the bodice’s black underlayer, her gaze snagged on the fabric with the same held breath it had snagged on a black dress in a ballroom doorway. Her honey-brown eyes rose in the looking glass to Fern’s face.

Neither of them looked away.

“You hold yourself well, of late,” Lady Blackwell said at last, to Fern’s reflection. Toneless. Unreadable. “Grief ruins most posture. Yours has improved.” Her gaze traveled over Fern once more. “How curious.”

“I had excellent instruction, my lady.”

“Mm.” The Lady turned back to the seamstresses, and the moment closed over. “The sleeve is wrong. Again.”

Fern stood among the pins. Lady Blackwell was piecing it together. She had seen the dress, watched the gallows, and done the needlework herself. Now she had found a thread. Whether she knew where it led, or what she would do when she followed it, Fern couldn’t tell.

The terrace was the coldest place on the mountain, and the only honest one.

Wind scoured the parapet, cracking their voices apart and scattering the pieces over the drop—no vein behind these stones, no panel, no patient ear, nothing but altitude and the red haze breathing far below. Cassius stood where he always stood, coatless in the White Season wind, as though the cold were an old debt he kept paying. He hadn’t spoken since she’d arrived. Four days of state mourning and preparations for the Bonding ceremony had passed between them since the gallows with nothing but that half-inch of knuckles, glove to glove.

“It was my plan,” he said finally, to the wind. “The casks. The timing. The route. I sat at your table and moved him around a map like a⁠—”

“Don’t.”

“Fern—”