21. Sixty Places #2
“There are always rumors. That’s what courts are for.
” He lifted his own phial from its silver stand and turned it against the candlelight, unhurried.
“White smoke at a Count. A Rootfolk girl elevated past the second tier entirely. The heir playing tutor.” The phial stopped turning.
His gaze dropped to her dress and sharpened.
“That’s fine work you’re wearing. Old work.
” He set the phial down. “Where does a Keeper’s daughter come by a thing like that? ”
“It was my mother’s, my lord.”
“Mm.” He set the phial back in its stand with a click, and whatever had sharpened was gone, folded away. “You count the room, by the way.”
Fern’s spine went cold. “My lord?”
“Since you sat down. The exits, the guards, the guests. Like a guard watching the square. Useful habit.” His gaze slid to her, green and unreadable. “Rude to show it.”
He’s testing me. Or warning me. With this man, the two wore the same face. She thought of the terrace—carelessness makes you readable—and let her attention settle on the middle distance, soft and empty, as she’d been drilled.
“Better,” said Darkwater, and went back to his wine, and Fern loathed the entire vocabulary of the upper tiers.
The first course came and went. She ate what she could.
The nobles at their table spoke over her and occasionally through her, and Darkwater herded the conversation like a sheepdog, lazily, invisibly, a nip here and a shoulder there, and Fern noticed that whenever a question came near her that she could not safely answer, it somehow never arrived.
Once, a jowled lord across the table observed, with the kind of malice courts call sympathy, that the fog was said to walk Lord Darkwater’s southern fences these seasons.
Darkwater refilled the man’s glass himself, unhurried.
“The fog walks everyone’s fences,” he said.
“Mine merely admit it.” No one at the table pursued it, and Fern filed the exchange away whole.
She was still deciding what to make of that when Marcus Blackwell decided the evening for everyone.
He was three tables up, closer to the dais, and he had been getting louder since the soup. Fern had tracked him without looking—she tracked him in any room now, as she would a wasp—and she heard the exact moment his voice tipped over from wine-loud to mean.
“—warm as spit. Are we savages? You.”
A servant stopped. Small, narrow-shouldered, a tray of decanters held level against her hip. Fern’s chest tightened.
Sasha. From the kitchens. You’ve been here since when, Green Spring?
“The wine, girl.” Marcus thrust his goblet out without looking at her, his shirt collar open, his fair hair ruined. “Cold. Properly cold. Work it.”
Sasha’s face did not change—servants’ faces never changed—but Fern saw her hesitate, saw her glance once, quickly, at the rune-etched band around the decanter’s neck, and understood.
A chilling rune. Blood-fed, like everything in this mountain.
And Sasha’s hands, when she set down the tray, bore the fine black tracery Fern had learned to recognize in the kitchens and the corridors and never, ever mention.
Oathblight, threaded across her knuckles like ink that hadn’t finished drying.
Hands that had already given today. Perhaps yesterday too. Perhaps every day since Green Spring.
Don’t, Fern thought at her uselessly. Tell him no. Drop it. Run.
Sasha pricked her finger on the rune band and fed it.
Frost bloomed up the decanter’s crystal shoulders, delicate as lace. She poured. Marcus drank, grimaced theatrically, and shoved the goblet back at her.
“Again. It’s warm as—”
“Marcus.” Lady Blackwell, from the High Table, without raising her voice.
“It’s warm, Mother.” He didn’t turn around. “Again, girl.”
Sasha fed the rune again.
Fern saw it happen. She was perhaps the only person in the ballroom watching the servant instead of the lordling, and so she was the only one who saw the blight climb.
Black vines crawled up from Sasha’s wrist—fast, far too fast—winding up her forearm, branching, thickening, thorn-tips pressing at the skin from beneath.
They crossed her elbow. Her collarbone. And Sasha’s eyes came up from the decanter with an expression Fern would see for the rest of her life: not pain.
Recognition. The look of someone greeting a thing they had always known was coming.
“Oh,” Sasha said, very quietly, to no one.
Then the thorns broke through the skin of her jaw.
The decanter hit the marble and burst. Frost and wine and crystal scattered under the table, and Sasha folded sideways into the arms of a footman who was already there—already there, as if the staff drilled for this—and a second footman took her other arm, and between them they turned her toward the wall, toward a door Fern hadn’t even seen, worked into the paneling like all their doors.
Sasha’s head lolled. Her heels trailed across the marble, two thin lines through the spilled wine.
Fern knew that door. Not this door, but she knew where doors like it went.
She had crawled through the space behind them.
She had knelt on a grate in the dark and looked down at the room that was waiting at the bottom of them, at the chairs, at the tubes, at the stout man saying disconnect and render.
The reserves were at ninety percent for the banquet. She was drinking the shortfall’s replacement with her soup.
Fern was half out of her chair before she knew her legs had moved.
A hand closed on her wrist beneath the table. Not hard. Absolute, the way the mountain was absolute. Darkwater had not turned his head. He was watching the dais, his expression composed into faint boredom, and his grip said what his face didn’t bother to.
“Eyes forward, girl,” he murmured, pitched for her alone.
“They’re taking her below—”
“Yes.” Beneath his boredom, an old hardness ran through his voice like a river under ice. “And there is nothing in this room you can do about it tonight that won’t put you on the chair beside her. Eyes forward.” His grip eased, deliberate. “Not yet.”
Not yet.
Fern sat. Her pulse was a fist against her ribs, and she reached for the cold Lady Blackwell had carved into her and pulled it over herself like a sheet over furniture in an empty house.
At the High Table, Lady Blackwell lifted one finger without pausing her conversation.
The quartet swelled into something bright, threaded with flutes.
A servant was already on his knees with a cloth, erasing the wine and the frost and the two thin heel-lines from the marble, and up and down the long tables sixty guests returned to their conversations at the exact sentence where they had left them, phials glittering beside their glasses, and the door in the paneling was only paneling again.
Fern looked at the dais.
Cassius was watching the place where the door had been, his glass untouched, his jaw a hard pale line. Then his eyes came to her across the whole gold-lit length of the room—hold, they said, hold—and she held, and hated him for being right.
The musicians finished the bright little piece and began another.
And at the center of the High Table, Aurelius Blackwell set down his glass, touched his napkin once to his mouth, and rose.
The room went silent between one breath and the next. He stood in the hush with the white branches arching over him and the harvest of his valley glittering on every table, and he smiled.