20. The Terrace #2
Fern struck him again, the heel of her hand landing against his chest with a dull sound.
“He was a person. Rowan Sheely was a person. He had a shop. He had hands. He had a wife who used to bring soup to the Grove when White Season took half the village sick, and now he’s dead while the other Deadwoods are under your house with tubes in their arms because your father decided they were more useful that way. ”
“Fern.”
“No.” Her voice tore around the word. “Don’t say my name. Don’t you dare say my name like that makes any of this smaller.”
Her fists hit him again, weaker this time. She could feel the weakness and hated that too, hated the way grief stole strength from her muscles while leaving too much of it inside her chest. Tears slipped hot down her face. The cold air should have cooled them—it didn’t.
“How many?” she demanded. “How many are down there? How many were from Ashford Cross? How many did my father perform Rites for over empty graves because your family dragged them below and called it order?”
Cassius’ face changed.
Not enough. Never enough. But his eyes gave him away with a flinch most people would have missed. Fern saw it, and it only made her angrier.
“You all talk about order as if the word is clean.” She gripped the lapels of his coat and pushed him again, though by then it was barely a push at all.
“As if blood stops being blood when someone important writes it on a sheet of parchment. As if the machine cares whether it’s draining criminals or neighbors or fathers or cobblers who kept sweets in their pockets. ”
She was done and she hated the sound that came out of her after it, small and wounded and nothing like the woman Lady Blackwell had been carving from her piece by piece. No, this was Fern Grovekeeper.
Cassius looked down at her hands twisted in his coat.
After a moment, he said very quietly, “Because without it, the fog comes through.”
Fern gaped at him, as if her body had forgotten what to do with all the rage it had been carrying. Her hands loosened from his coat, but she didn’t step back.
“What?”
Cassius’ eyes stayed on hers. “The fog comes through.”
At first, she couldn’t make sense of the words. Then anger came back, hot enough to stand on.
“No.” She shoved away from him, stumbling half a step before catching herself. “No, don’t do that. Don’t take what I saw and dress it up as sacrifice. Don’t stand there and tell me Rowan Sheely had tubes in his arms because your family is noble enough to make terrible choices.”
Cassius didn’t move toward her. “It isn’t noble.”
“Then what is it, Cassius?”
“Necessary.”
Fern laughed once, broken and ugly. “Of course. There it is. The Blackwell answer. Necessary. Order. Balance. Put enough pretty words around a body and it stops looking like murder.”
His face tightened. “It’s not weather we’re keeping out.”
Fern’s mouth opened, but nothing came.
Red mist moved below them in slow, restless folds. It had always been there. Above them. Beneath them. At the edge of every story, every warning, every road that ended where no road should end.
Cassius looked past her, toward the valley. “The Keep is part of the Seal. Not symbolically. Not ceremonially. The foundations, the old channels, the ward-stones under the mountain—all of it holds the fog back.”
Fern swallowed against the rawness in her throat. “With people.”
His eyes came back to hers. “Yes.”
Fern waited for more. Waited for some explanation that would make the yes less monstrous, some Highblood turn of phrase polished enough to hide the blood under it.
None came.
“Then let it fail,” she said.
“And when Ashford Cross falls with it?”
“Don’t.” Her voice shook. “Don’t put that on me.”
“It’s already on all of us, Fern.”
“That’s rubbish and you know it.” The words came out harsher than intended, but she didn’t take it back. “Ashford Cross has stood for generations. The fog has always been there.”
“The fog has always been held.”
“By draining people dry?”
“By blood,” he said. “Yes. Too much of it. More every year.”
“There’s nothing else you can take!” Fern shook her head. “Not from us. Not from the Rootfolk.”
“You’ve seen the Withering.”
The terrace went quiet around her, even with the wind clawing at the stone.
Cassius didn’t soften. “Surely you’ve walked near it. The dead soil. The grey water. The skeletal trees with dead roots and a hollow middle. You were taught to think of it as a sickness in the land.”
Fern’s breath thinned.
“It’s what happens when the fog touches it.”
The words sank in slowly. Not because she didn’t understand them, but because she did.
The Weeping Rise. The spongy ground. The dead branches near Whittle’s Rest. Her father saying they had to hurry.
The itch in her skin whenever she walked too near the river.
The way everyone spoke of the Withering as if it were simply part of Thornvale, another misery to endure because misery had always been there.
Not sickness. Contact.
A scar.
Fern looked over the parapet, down into the red haze shifting at the mountain’s base.
“Oh,” she whispered.
And hated that there was nothing else to say.
Cassius watched her for a long moment, the wind cutting between them. He didn’t look pleased to have convinced her. If anything, he looked worse for it.
“Why are you telling me this now?” Fern asked.
He closed in on her before she could step back. His thumb brushed beneath her eye, wiping away an escaped tear as if it were another weakness she wasn’t meant to show.
“Cassius,” she said, nearly breathless.
He dropped his hand. “Tomorrow night my father is hosting the Count banquet.”
Fern gaped. How, after everything that just happened, Cassius could casually bring up a banquet, was beyond her.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No,” she said again, nearly yelling. “You cannot drag me onto this terrace, scare me half to death, tell me the Withering is what happens when the fog touches land, admit your family is bleeding people to hold it back, and then expect me to stand in a room full of Highbloods and Stembloods and smile over puff pastry.”
“I don’t expect you to smile.”
“Good, because I won’t.”
Fern winced.
Cassius stepped back into her space, dropping his voice so low it could barely be heard over the wind.
“Every person in that room will be looking at you. Some will see a curiosity. Some will see a threat. Some will see a tool that my father has not yet decided how to use. If you crack in front of them, if you let them see rage before you understand where to aim it, they will flay you alive.”
Fern swallowed.
“This lesson,” he said, “was about tomorrow night.”
Her hands were still trembling. She curled them into the sleeves of her coat before he could correct her again.
“You should have told me.”
“I just did.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
For once, he didn’t sound smug about it.
Fern looked back over the parapet. The red haze shifted below, slow and hungry, touching the lower slope like fingers testing a seam. The thought of a banquet inside that house—music above the machinery, crystal above the blood—made her stomach twist.
“I can’t do this.”
Cassius’ answer came quietly. “You can.”
She looked at him, hair blowing about her face now.
“Not because you are calm or in control,” he said. “But because you’re angry enough to learn.”