20. The Terrace
Wind shoved the breath from Fern’s lungs before she could complain. It cut beneath her collar, snapped loose curls against her cheek, and sent Sprout burrowing hard against her coat with an indignant chirp.
Fern caught the doorframe with one hand.
Beyond Cassius, the terrace jutted out from the Keep like a slab of black stone pushed into empty air.
No garden. No benches. No pretty table set beneath an awning to pretend this was anything other than what it was.
Just open space, a low parapet, and the long drop down Ashford Peak waiting beyond it.
Her stomach turned.
From this position, Fern couldn’t even see the third tier as the terrace extended past. Second tier was little more than a smattering of dark roofs and narrow lanes, half-swallowed by drifting red.
Farther down, Ashford Cross barely looked real at all.
A smear of shadow. Pinpricks of wardlight.
The home she’d spent her whole life thinking too large to escape now looked small enough to crush beneath a thumb.
Fern looked away too quickly.
Cassius stepped onto the terrace as if the wind had no right to touch him. His coat shifted around his legs, but the rest of him stayed exactly as it was—straight-backed, steady, irritatingly composed.
He stopped several paces from the door and looked back. “Come out.”
“It’s freezing,” she said. “White Season has been especially unforgiving this year.”
“It has.”
“There are rooms inside.”
“Warm rooms tell me very little, Miss Silverbell.”
Her breath picked up. “About what?”
“You.”
She almost laughed. But the wind swallowed the sound before it had a chance to become anything useful. “You dragged me out of bed, laughed at my trousers, fixed my hair like you’re my mother, and brought me to the edge of the mountain because you want to learn about me?”
“I brought you here because I believe you’ve learned enough to control yourself when the room is kind to you.”
Fern snorted. She couldn’t help it.
His gaze moved briefly to her hand on the doorframe. “I’d like to see what remains when it isn’t.”
“I have control, Cassius.”
“Then step away from the door, Fern.”
Fern’s mouth shut.
The wind moved between them, worrying at her coat, tugging at the loose ends of her hair. Sprout’s claws dug lightly through the fabric at her shoulder.
Cassius did not repeat himself.
Of course he didn’t. Repeating himself would imply he cared whether she obeyed quickly or not. He simply stood there, waiting, as though the terrace, the cold, the drop, and the whole impossible morning were all pieces he had arranged and expected her to walk through.
Fern hated being arranged.
She forced her hand from the frame.
One step.
The stone beneath her boot felt steady enough, which somehow made it worse. It should have trembled. It should have warned her that nothing living belonged this high above the valley with only a carved wall between her body and the fog below.
Another step.
The wind struck harder once she left the shelter of the doorway. Her eyes watered. She blinked fast and lifted her chin before Cassius could comment on it.
He saw anyway.
“Shoulders,” he said.
Fern stiffened.
“Not up by your ears.”
She lowered them like a petulant child.
“Hands.”
She looked down. Her fingers had curled into fists at her sides. Slowly, she uncurled them.
Cassius’ expression did not change. “Better.”
“I despise that word.”
“I know.”
Cassius turned then, as if the matter were settled, and started toward the parapet.
Fern’s relief vanished. “What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer until one polished boot settled on the carved stone ledge.
Fern’s mouth ran dry. “Cassius.”
That got his attention more than her question had. He looked back at her, one hand resting lightly against the Keep wall, the wind pulling at the hem of his coat.
“Moving,” he said. “Obviously.”
“That isn’t moving. That’s begging the Mother to come collect you early.”
His mouth shifted. Barely. “Walk.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Not here.” He nodded toward the stretch of terrace below him. “There.”
The clarification didn’t help. The parapet was low enough to make her skin crawl, and with him standing on it, the drop beyond seemed to open wider, red fog shifting below his boots.
“You’re going to fall,” she said. “And then I’ll be tried and hung for the heir’s death.”
“I’m not going to fall.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know where my feet are.”
Fern hated that answer almost as much as she hated how steady he looked. No grip on the wall now. No visible tension in his shoulders. Nothing but Cassius Blackwell standing above empty air.
“Move,” he said again.
“I’m beginning to think your family has a very poor relationship with doors, walls, and basic survival.”
“And I’m beginning to think you talk when you’re afraid.”
Fern drew her mouth into a thin line.
That one hit too close, and he knew it. As if in answer, wind shoved against her back, pushing her one involuntary half-step closer to the parapet. Sprout gave a sharp little chirp and tightened his grip on her shoulder.
Cassius watched her recover.
“Again,” he said, quieter this time. “Walk.”
Fern looked down at her boots. Then at the terrace ahead. Not the drop or the fog, but the stone immediately in front of her.
One step. Then another.
Cassius moved with her from above, slow and graceful like a cat, his shadow sliding along the stone beside her. Fern kept her arms loose because he had told her to, kept her shoulders down because he had told her to, and hated every inch of herself that obeyed.
The wind hit again. Harder.
Her boot scraped against a seam in the terrace.
It was nothing, a small catch. A simple shift of weight. But her body reacted before her pride could stop it, one hand shooting toward the wall.
Cassius was down from the parapet before she touched it.
His hand closed around her elbow, steadying her without so much as a wobble from his knees.
Fern tore free the instant her balance returned. “I’m fine.”
“You weren’t.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“And I heard you, Miss Silverbell.” He looked over her face, down to her shaking hands. “Your body disagreed.”
Cassius released her, and Fern flexed her fingers once before forcing them loose at her sides. Her heart was still beating too hard for such a small misstep, thudding high in her throat as though she’d nearly gone over the parapet instead of catching her boot against stone.
“It was a misstep,” she said.
“It was fear.”
Fern looked at him, finding that careful, clean composure back on his face as though the laugh in her suite and the hands in her hair belonged to someone else entirely.
He was all lesson again, all cold instruction, standing there with death beneath them as if it were a tool set out for his personal use.
As if none of it was supposed to mean anything except whether her shoulders rose or her hands curled or if she was capable of not causing a scene.
“Fear makes the body careless,” Cassius said. “Carelessness makes you readable. And when you’re readable, court will use it before you have time to understand what you’ve given away.”
Court.
He was still talking about damn court.
A laugh pushed out of her, but there was no humor in it, no sharp edge she could use to protect herself.
It came apart almost as soon as it left her mouth, dying from the sudden rush of memory: heat under stone, copper in the air, glass tanks glowing in the dark, tubes running from black arms into machines that pulsed like a heart.
“You think my fear is about court?” she asked.
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Isn’t it?”
All she could do was look at him. At his clean coat.
His steady hands. His face trained into something almost beautiful by how little it gave away.
Weeks of lessons crowded her chest until she could hardly breathe through them: ledgers, etiquette, posture, blood theory, balance, control.
He’d spent his whole life learning how to stand inside this horror without shaking.
She’d been given weeks and was expected to do the same.
Her hands curled again, and this time she didn’t bother uncurling them.
“I saw them,” she whispered.
Cassius seemed to stop breathing, which told her enough.
“I saw the tanks,” she continued, and once the words started she couldn’t stop them from coming.
“The tubes. The chairs. The Deadwoods strapped into them like livestock. I saw what’s under this place, Cassius.
I saw what your family feeds into the walls while you sit me in the library and make me copy numbers like they aren’t people.
Like those entries aren’t bodies. Like the blood moving through this Keep doesn’t come from someone’s arm, someone’s father, someone’s neighbor. ”
The wind dragged at her coat, but she barely felt the cold now.
Her eyes burned. Her throat hurt. Sprout made a soft, anxious sound against her neck, and still she couldn’t stop looking at Cassius, couldn’t stop waiting for him to deny it, or correct her, to call what was happening some polished name that made it easier for him to live with it.
“Rowan Sheely was down there,” she said, and his name broke something in her voice. “He fixed my father’s boots. He kept peppermints in his pocket for children who came into the shop. He had a gap between his front teeth, and he laughed through it, and your family put tubes in him.”
Fern crossed the space between them.
Her hands hit the front of his coat, palms first, then fists when he didn’t step back. The impact jarred up her arms and did nothing to him. Nothing. He stood there like the mountain itself, steady beneath the wind, and some ugly part of her hated him more for that than anything he’d said.
“You knew,” she said, shoving him again. “You knew, and you let me sit in that library copying numbers. Drams. Output. Reserves. Like those words meant anything except bodies. Like they weren’t people.”
Cassius didn’t catch her wrists or tell her to stop.