13. The Veins
The wind shifted in week three, coming down from the Thornspine with a bite that rattled the windowpanes and sent drafts whistling through stone corridors like lost spirits. Fern lay in the dark, listening to the Keep breathe.
It was distinct from the wind. A deeper, low-frequency hum vibrated the bed frame. Thrum-thump. Thrum-thump. A heartbeat of stone and iron.
But as she stared at the blue velvet canopy, black in the shadows, the Keep became a beast around her, slowly digesting her.
She held her hand up, staring at the faint silhouette of her fingers.
Precision, Cassius had demanded. Control the flow.
She focused on the blood in her veins. It was a trick she had been practicing in secret, ever since the day she formed the rose. She didn’t use the resonance crystal—that felt too loud, too bright. Instead, she just tried to feel it. The rush of warmth. The pulse.
It felt… agitated.
Restless.
She sat up, throwing off the heavy quilt. The air in the room was frigid. Sprout was a small, warm lump at the foot of the bed, his head tucked under his wing. Fern envied him. He could sleep through anything as long as he had a full belly and a warm spot.
Fern, however, was wide awake.
Questions were keeping her up. The numbers in the ledger. The Economy of Pain. The way Cassius looked so tired, his face drawn and pale, yet his eyes burned with a terrifying resolve. And the door. The locked door in the entry hall that mocked her every time she passed it.
Don’t go down there, Willem had said.
But lying here, waiting for the dawn that—according to the stories—never truly came to this cursed valley, “down” was the only direction that mattered.
Fern slipped out of bed. The stone floor was ice against her bare feet. She pulled on her boots—sturdy, work leather from home—and threw a heavy cloak over her nightgown. It wasn’t the grey wool proper dress, but she wasn’t planning on attending a tea party.
She moved to the sitting room. The fire had died down to embers, casting a faint, fading glow on the furniture. She moved to the wall near the hearth.
Willem had shown her the trick in the corridor, but he had mentioned the veins ran everywhere. If the Keep was a machine, then every room had to be connected.
She ran her fingers along the stone paneling next to the fireplace. Cool, rough mortar scraped against her skin. She pressed, prodded, searched for a groove.
Nothing.
“Come on,” she whispered. “You have to be here.”
She snapped her eyes shut and looked with her skin instead. She felt for the draft. The tell-tale breath of cold air that should be there.
There.
Low, near the baseboard, a tiny current of air that smelled of dust and rot.
Fern crouched, finding a slight imperfection in the stonework. She pressed.
Click.
The sound echoed loudly throughout the room. Fern froze, glancing at the door to the hallway, expecting guards to burst in.
There was nothing but silence.
The panel swung inward, revealing a gap of darkness.
Fern took a breath that tasted like stale air and old wood. She grabbed a small heavy candle from the mantel—she didn’t dare light it yet—and stepped into the wall.
The passage was narrow and Fern had to turn her shoulders to fit. Rough stone scraped against her cloak. It was black as pitch once she pulled the panel shut behind her. The darkness pressed against her like a blindfold.
The smell was stronger here. Damp earth. Mold. And something else, metallic and sharp. Copper.
She struck her flint and tinder a few times until the candle finally lit, shielding the flame with her hand.
The light revealed a tunnel that stretched away into the gloom, barely wide enough for one person. Cobwebs hung from the low ceiling like tattered lace, thick with years of neglect.
Walk soft, she reminded herself.
The floor was wood here, old planks that groaned softly under her weight if she wasn’t careful.
She learned quickly to step on the edges, where the support was strongest. Narrow slits in the stone looked out into other rooms. Guest chambers that were empty and covered in white sheets.
Another showed a slice of the main hallway, a guard walking past, his armor clinking.
It was exhilarating. She was invisible, little more than a ghost in the walls.
She followed the slope. Down and down and down.
The air grew colder. The metallic smell grew stronger, turning acrid in the back of her throat.
The hum she had heard in her room was louder here. It wasn’t just a vibration anymore; it was a physical sound. A rhythmic, grinding thud.
Thrum-thump. Thrum-thump.
It sounded like a heartbeat. A massive, mechanical heart beating in the heavy silence.
She reached a junction and eyed both directions.
If you go right… well. Just don’t.
Willem’s voice was cheerful and deliberate. And underneath it, the guard’s low rasp from the corridor: as long as he doesn’t look in the cellar.
Fern turned right.
As she traversed the Keep’s inner workings, the wood floor gave way to packed earth and stone. The walls were rougher, hewn directly from the bedrock of the mountain. Moisture slicked the stone, glistening in her candlelight like sweat.
She had to stoop now, the ceiling dropping.
The sound was deafening. A rushing noise joined the thudding—the sound of liquid moving under high pressure.
Iron conduits clung to the stone like veins, slick with moisture. Whatever was moving through them roared with punishing strength: pipes, far larger than any she’d ever seen.
Sections of them were reinforced glass, thick as tree trunks. Some were dark and cold. But others…
Fern stopped, lifting her candle.
A pipe ran along the ceiling, pulsing with a faint inner light. Inside, a thick, crimson fluid rushed through the glass, moving with a speed that made her dizzy.
Definitely not water.
“Blood,” she whispered.
She gagged, clamping a hand over her mouth. The rhythm she’d felt in her floorboards, the heartbeat of the Keep—it wasn’t the mountain settling. It was this. They were pumping it through the walls like water.
She followed the pipe, which led to a metal grate set into the floor.
Fern knelt, shielding the candle flame so the light wouldn’t betray her. She peered through the iron slats.
Below her was a room she’d never seen.
It was vast, a cavern carved out of the mountain’s roots. The ceiling was lost in shadow, but the floor was lit by the eerie glow of hundreds of rune-etched glass tanks.
It looked like a sunken forest of copper and glass.
Massive vats sat in rows, connected by a web of piping like tangled vines. Steam hissed from valves, venting into the cold air. Men in leather aprons—Stembloods, by the look of them—moved among the vats, checking gauges, adjusting levers.
Then she saw what was feeding them.
On the far wall, there were rows of iron chairs. And in the chairs sat the Deadwoods.
Their skin was deathly grey, mapped with the inky black veins of Oathblight. The magic had claimed them, hollowed them out. For some, the curse had gone further—fingers lengthening into crooked twigs, limbs beginning to transform into timber-like appendages.
Tubes ran from their arms—dark red lines draining that trace power into the copper machinery.
They were being milked.
Fern gripped the iron slats until the cold metal bit into her palms. She recognized one of the faces.
It was Rowan Sheely. The old cobbler who had vanished from Ashford Cross two White Seasons ago.
His eyes were fully black, swallowed by blight.
Thorns had sprouted along his jaw, and his hands were gnarled, the fingers locked into the shape of claws, but she knew the gentle stoop of his shoulders, the way his head lolled to the side.
The Count, Cassius had said. To identify the most efficient fuel.
This wasn’t a tax. This was a harvest.
“Output on Bank 4 is dropping,” a voice echoed up from below. A stout man with a ledger was walking down the line of chairs.
“Subject 4-alpha is dry,” another man replied, checking the cobbler’s arm. He pulled the needle out with a careless yank. A droplet of dark red welled up, stark against the grey skin. “Shall we disconnect?”
“Disconnect and render,” the stout man said. “The High wants the reserves at ninety percent by the Banquet. We’re behind schedule.”
Render?
Fern watched in horror as two guards approached the cobbler. They unstrapped him. He didn’t move. He didn’t wake up. His head lolled back, his mouth hanging open.
They dragged him away, his feet trailing uselessly on the stone floor. They didn’t take him toward a door; they took him toward a dark chute in the corner of the room.
“No,” Fern breathed. “No, no, no.”
She scrambled back from the grate. She had to leave.
She stumbled back up the sloping passage, the hum of pipes vibrating in her teeth.
Blind panic drove her upward. She didn’t pause to feel for the draft or the groove of the panel she’d entered through. She just ran, hand scraping against the stone, the darkness swallowing her sense of direction.
The passage ended in a small wooden door. Fern fumbled with the latch, her fingers shaking. It gave way with a screech of rusted iron, and she tumbled out into a corridor.
She jumped up, spinning around, ready to run.
Then it caught up with her: she wasn’t in her room. She was in a part of the Keep she didn’t recognize at all—a narrow hallway lined with dark portraits—and she wasn’t alone.
A figure leaned against the opposite wall, arms crossed, watching her with an expression of mild amusement.
Not Cassius.
The young man was leaner, his features sharper, with hair the color of pale gold and piercing blue eyes. Blackwell features.
Lysander. The middle son, from the lineage charts she’d been made to memorize. Fern took a step back.
“Well,” he said, his voice smooth and deceptively light. “That is certainly one way to make an entrance.”
Fern froze, clutching her cloak around her nightgown. “I… I was just…”
“Exploring?” Lysander pushed himself off the wall, walking slowly toward her. He didn’t move like Cassius, who walked as though someone were always grading him. Lysander’s gait was languid, almost bored. “Curiosity is a dangerous trait in this house, Miss Silverbell. Usually fatal.”
“I got lost,” Fern stammered, backing up until her shoulders hit the paneling she’d just fallen through.
Lysander stopped a few feet away. He looked at the open panel behind her, then back at her dust-smudged face. He leaned in, sniffing the air theatrically.
“Dust,” he listed. “Old wood. And… ah, yes. The distinct copper tang of the lower levels.” His amusement sharpened. “You’ve seen it, then.”
Fern didn’t answer. She couldn’t. The image of the cobbler being dragged to the chute was still burning behind her eyes.
“Don’t look so terrified,” Lysander said, dropping his voice. “If I were going to turn you in, I would have called the guards the moment you crashed through my wall.”
“Your wall?” Fern glanced around.
“My private corridor,” he corrected. “Ideally located for avoiding my father. And, apparently, for catching wayward Roots.”
He studied her for a long moment, head cocked.
“What did you see?” he asked quietly.
“The machine,” Fern whispered. “The tanks. The… people.”
Lysander’s jaw tightened. For a second, he looked far older than his twenty-some years. “The Distillery. Yes. It’s not a sight one forgets easily.”
“How can you let it happen?” The words burst out of her before she could stop them. “They’re people! Neighbors! My neighbors! And you just… you use them like fuel!”
“It’s not a matter of letting it happen, Miss Silverbell.” Lysander’s face grew weary. “It is the cost of survival.”
“It’s monstrous.”
“It is,” he conceded, running a hand through his hair. “But that machine keeps the wards holding back the fog on the upper tiers. It keeps lights burning. It keeps you safe in that pretty blue room of yours.”
Fern flinched.
“You hate it,” she said, watching his eyes. “You hate it as much as I do.”
Lysander’s mask slipped back into place—the bored, cynical courtier. “Hate is such a useless emotion. I prefer… pragmatic disappointment.”
He reached out, grabbing the handle of the secret panel and pulling it shut with a definitive click.
“Go back to your room, Miss Silverbell,” he said. “Take the main stairs. Keep your head down. And for the Mother’s sake, wash that smudge off your cheek before anyone else sees you.”
Fern hesitated. “Why are you helping me?”
Lysander turned away, adjusting his cuff. “Because my brother seems quite fond of you. And Cassius has precious few things in this world that aren’t trying to kill him.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “Don’t give me cause to reconsider.”
Fern didn’t wait. She turned and fled down the corridor, her pulse loud in her ears, leaving the middle Blackwell alone in the shadows.