17. Quiet Hours
After the silver teapot, Lady Blackwell shifted tactics. There was no more baiting, no more Marcus lounging within kicking distance of the table. Instead, there was a relentless, grinding pressure, like the slow turn of a millstone.
Fern learned to walk with a book balanced on her head—The History of Thornvale, heavy and leather-bound—until her neck screamed.
She learned to speak without inflection.
She learned to sit still through hunger.
She learned that a raised eyebrow meant disapproval, a tapped finger meant impatience, and a smile meant danger.
But even stone erodes.
After one particularly grueling lesson, Fern stumbled back to her room, her legs trembling from six hours of posture drills in the freezing Drawing Room.
The fire was already dying in the grate, casting long, skeletal shadows across the velvet furniture.
The room should have offered relief. Instead, it was used up and empty.
Lina was already by the hearth, mending a tear in one of Fern’s petticoats. She looked up as Fern entered.
“You look done in, Miss,” Lina said, setting aside her needle. “Did she keep you standing the whole time?”
Fern groaned as she sank onto the vanity stool, too exhausted to unpin her hair. “She said my spine was too flexible. Too… willow-like. She made me stand against the wall until I forgot how to slouch.”
In the corner, Sprout chirped from his makeshift nest of silk scarves. He fluttered over, landing lightly on Fern’s shoulder, nuzzling her ear with his soft nose.
“At least someone is happy to see me,” Fern murmured, leaning her cheek against his warm fur.
Lina made a sympathetic noise in her throat and moved behind Fern, pulling silver pins from her hair. Her fingers were cool but gentle, working through the tangled curls.
“The Lady believes the spine is the anchor of the soul,” Lina murmured. “If it bends, so does the spirit.”
“My spirit feels bent,” Fern whispered. She watched her reflection in the looking glass—brown skin gone ashen with fatigue, her eyes gone hollow, lips pressed into a thin line.
She didn’t recognize the girl staring back.
“I feel like I’m disappearing, Lina. Like she’s carving away pieces of me until there’s nothing left but a doll that knows which fork to use. ”
Lina paused, her hands resting on Fern’s shoulders.
“You’re not disappearing,” she said firmly. “You’re learning how to live through this place. That isn’t the same thing.”
Fern leaned back into the touch and closed her eyes. “Feels a lot like surrender.”
Lina picked up the brush again. “Surrender is when you stop. You haven’t stopped. You’ve just learned to keep going quietly.”
Fern opened her eyes. “Why do you stay?”
Lina didn’t stop brushing, but the rhythm skipped once. “Miss?”
“You’re a Stemblood,” Fern said, turning on the stool to face her. “You have magic. Not as much as a Highblood, maybe, but enough to be… useful somewhere else. Why stay here? In this miserable place where you walk on eggshells and scrub up after people who barely look at you?”
Lina’s expression closed off. In an instant, she looked every inch the servant again.
“It’s a good position,” she said stiffly. “The pay is reliable. I’m fed.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Fern said softly. “Please. Not you.”
Lina looked at the brush in her hand. She traced the silver handle with her thumb.
“My brother,” she said finally, her voice barely a whisper. “Jonas. He serves in the East Wing guard.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“The Keep conscripts based on ability,” Lina said, her eyes dark. “Jonas has the strength of an ox, but his mind is slow. He’s gentle. If he were sent to the mines, or to the outer patrols, he wouldn’t survive a week. He doesn’t understand cruelty.”
She looked up, deep brown eyes shimmering with unshed tears that made Fern’s heart ache.
“As long as I serve the Blackwells well,” Lina whispered, “as long as I am invisible and perfect… Jonas stays in the warm corridors. He stays safe. That’s my price, Miss Silverbell. That’s why I wash feet and mend tears and swallow my pride.”
Fern reached out and took Lina’s hand. It was rougher than her own now—chapped from lye soap and cold water.
“We both have our reasons,” Fern said.
“Yes,” Lina agreed, squeezing Fern’s hand. “You’re holding on for your family. So am I.”
She pulled her hand away gently and picked up the brush again.
“Now turn around, Miss. If we don’t get these tangles out, you will look like a wild thing tomorrow.”
By the time Fern reached the library, the storm had broken in earnest. Snow battered the high windows hard enough to rattle the panes, sealing the Keep off from the valley beyond.
Inside, the cold clung to the stone and books alike, and Cassius was already waiting at their usual table, tucked away in a dusty alcove.
He rested his chin against his fist as he looked out the window, watching the snow come down.
His book lay open at his elbow. Fern slowed a little as she took him in.
His profile stood dark against the blinding white, and for a moment, he looked less like the heir and more like a statue forgotten in a garden.
“You’re late,” he said without turning around.
Fern bit back a grimace as she crossed to the table. He always knew she was there.
Cassius turned then, and up close he looked wrong. Dark circles bruised the skin beneath his eyes, and the top button of his high collar hung undone, as if he’d stopped caring halfway through fixing himself. Not a statue forgotten in a garden after all. Left too long to wind and rain.
“Your mother kept me.” Fern dropped into the chair across from him in a way that would have made Lady Blackwell pull her hair out. “I’ve been informed that my posture is an affront to the natural order.”
Fern winced. The words were clipped and polished, and she hated hearing them in her own mouth. She sounded like the Keep. Like Lady Blackwell.
A faint smile touched Cassius’ lips. Brief, but real. “A devastating flaw.”
Fern left the pile of books untouched. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him properly. There was a slight sag in his shoulders, and his smile was already fading. He looked worse once it did.
Cassius shifted. “What could you possibly be looking at?”
Fern held his gaze. “You.”
“How illuminating,” he said flatly.
“You look terrible,” she said.
Cassius stiffened. “My physical condition is not part of your curriculum, Miss Silverbell.”
The name scraped at her. She looked down at her hands, still folded too neatly in her lap. Folded in a way that absolutely was Miss Silverbell, proper Stemblood.
“Don’t call me that,” she whispered.
Snow ticked against the glass, filling the library as they stared at one another in silence.
When he spoke again, his voice lost some of its edge. “Fern.”
Her throat tightened so fast it hurt. Hearing her name from him like that was too much.
“I hate it.” The words forced themselves past her lips and then kept coming.
“I hate hearing it. I hate that they took Grovekeeper from me and made me choose a new name—a better name. A name fit for a Stemblood.” She let out a breath that shook on the way out.
“They expected me to be grateful.” She swatted at a rogue tear that worked its way down her cheek.
“I hate that I know how to sit now, as if the way I sat before was wrong. I hate that I think before I speak, as if feelings are shameful. I hate that I can hear this place in my own voice.”
She looked away, blinking too hard. “Your mother watches me like she’s waiting for me to slip.
She keeps at me until my back aches and my head aches and I don’t even sound like me anymore.
” Her laugh was ugly. “Maybe that’s the point.
Maybe if she keeps chipping the Rootfolk out of me, there won’t be much left to object. ”
“Fern.” His voice was a warning.
But she was past the point of stopping. “She wants less of me,” Fern said. “That’s what this is.”
Cassius’ hand came down hard against the table. The crack of it made the wood jump. “She’s the High Lady,” he said, leaning toward her. His voice trembled with the effort to contain it. “And she is my mother. You’ll speak of her with respect.”
They stared at each other across the table while the storm battered the windows.
Then, slowly, the fight went out of him. Cassius sat back and dragged a hand over his face, suddenly looking younger than he had a moment before.
“She wasn’t always like this,” he said quietly.
“Or… maybe she was, and I was too young to see it.” His mouth twisted.
“The Keep does this to people, Fern. I’ve seen it in the staff.
In the courtiers. In my own family.” He looked around the room as if he were seeing beyond the library’s walls.
“This place… drains life from them, bit by bit.” He looked at her then. “Until all that’s left is duty.”
“So what?” Fern asked. “You let it happen?”
“We endure,” Cassius said. His voice was stripped of the heir now. “Better to be the wall than the thing thrown at it.”
Fern understood, maybe for the first time, that nothing about him was effortless. The Keep had worked on him too.