Page 99 of The Thirteenth Count

“Fern.” Barely sound at all.

“The machine takes blood from anyone it can reach.” She laid her fingertips lightly against the cold rim of the nearer hollow. “This asks for the one thing it cannot take.”

His eyes met hers.

“It asks us to choose.”

“No,” said Cassius Blackwell.

“No,” Cassius said again, at her hearth, the next night, as though the chamber had never let them leave.

He had said it in the dark under the mountain. He had said it climbing the vein spur with the candle guttering between them. He had said it at her door before the morning bells, glove to glove, and now he stood in the firelight of the blue suite saying it a fourth time, and Fern decided she had heard it enough.

“You keep saying that word like it’s an argument.”

“It is the whole argument.” He didn’t raise his voice. He’d gone the other way and was quiet, each word placed like weights on a scale. “The pages are torn, Fern. The one thing every record refuses to name is the price. Whatever the rite requires, it takes. That’s not reassurance. It’s a blank draw written against two bodies, and you’re asking me to place mine beside yours.”

“I’m not asking you to spend me.” She stood. “I’m telling you I intend to bind myself, and asking whether you’re coming.”

“That’s the same⁠—”

“It is the opposite thing, and you know it. You taught me the difference.” She crossed to the hearth, into his light. “My father walked toward the torches. Sasha fed the rune. Your ledgers are full of people who were spent. I’m choosing what becomes of me, Cassius—which is the one thing this mountain has never once permitted anyone. That choice is precisely what the machine can’t reproduce.”

His jaw was granite. “You don’t know it will work.”

“No,” she agreed. “But the Seal is failing, and I know what happens if we do nothing. Shall I read it to you?” She counted it off on her fingers, cold and even, his own method turned on him because it was the only language his fear respected. “In two days you are to be Bonded to Cressida Ravencroft, and the alliance locks, and your father’s grip closes over another generation.

I remain a pretty trinket until his interest in my blood outweighs the usefulness of pretending I’m a guest. White smoke is too rare to leave untouched forever. Then I become a component. The Withering grows every season regardless. More blood every year, you said it yourself. It will take every field, every village, every person in Thornvale, until there isn’t a valley left to bleed. That’s the balance if we sit still, Cassius. Everything you love, everything I love, all foreclosed on schedule.”

“Then run.” It came out of him in a rush: the thing he’d been holding since the chamber, his true counteroffer, kept behind his teeth as she’d kept her name behind hers. “Darkwater’s route is proven now. The casks, the Coil, his seal. I can have you off this mountain before the Bonding bells, with your mother, beyond the fog, wherever it is she wouldn’t say aloud. You’d be alive, Fern. Hidden and alive.”

“Like my mother was hidden.” Fern held his eyes. “Twenty years, Cassius. Twenty years of a new name and a bowed head, and it bought her exactly this much: a cell under a ballroom and a husband on a scaffold. Hiding isn’t a life the Blackwells failed to find. It’s a life they farm. And you’d have me plant the next crop of it—me, and my children, and theirs, hiding in the roots of the world while the fog eats inward, waiting our turn.” She shook her head slowly. “My great-line held half this valley up with their own hands, willingly, for thirteen generations. I am not going to honor them by becoming very good at crouching.”

The fire ticked. Sprout, banished to the mantel, watched them argue with his ears flat, turning his head from one to the other as though following a shuttlecock.

“Then let me carry it alone.” His voice dropped, and there it was at last: the bedrock under all four noes. “There must be a way. One anchor, my blood, my house’s debt⁠—”

“One of the rose, one of the bough. Two, willing.” She said it gently, because it was the cruelest thing in the room. “You can’t audit your way around it, Cassius. Both of us, or neither. That’s not my condition. It’s the stone’s.”

He turned away from her, to the fire, and braced both hands on the mantel—the same stance as the night of the burned letter, as though the stone were the only steady thing left in the room. Sprout, with the timing of a creature who had never once respected a dramatic moment, leaned over and gravely licked his knuckle.

Cassius made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost broke her heart.

“He does that when you’re upset,” Fern said. “He thinks it helps.”

“It’s deeply unsanitary.”

“He knows. He doesn’t care.”

Cassius’ shoulders fell like the fight had gone out of his bones. He looked down at the little black creature, then at the fire, and when he spoke again his voice had been sanded down to the grain.

“I need you to hear the whole of it. Why I keep saying no.” He didn’t turn around. “It isn’t only the price. Whatever the stone decides to take—a limb, an eye, years—I made peace with that in the chamber. It’s that I can’t tell anymore whether I’d be agreeing because it’s right or because I—” His knuckles whitened on the stone. “Everything in my life that I have wanted, Fern, my father has found a way to make into an instrument. Every single thing. And I want this—I want it so badly I don’t trust my own instincts, and if I say yes for the wrong reason—if I let wanting you dress itself up as saving the valley⁠—”

“Cassius.” She waited until he turned. “Look at me and ask me why I’m doing it.”

His throat moved. “Why are you doing it?”

“Both reasons.” She said it plainly, without decoration, the way her father told hard truths across open graves. “The valley, and you. I gave up untangling them somewhere on the stairs last night, because they don’t untangle. But the rite doesn’t ask why we choose. It only requires that the choice be ours, freely given. I love you. I want to save the valley. Neither makes the other a lie.” She reached up and put her palm flat on his chest, over the heartbeat going hard under the black wool. “So stop putting yourself on trial for wanting something. Want it out loud. I’ll match you.”