The Girl Who Crossed the Line

For four days she did not sing.

It was the longest she had been silent since she came. She woke each morning to a gray light and a tray of porridge, and Perrin's careful nothing-at-all expression in the copper of the kettle, and she ate, and washed, and went out into the house with her notebook in one pocket and a ball of twine in the other. She did not go near the great hall. She did not warm the east gallery. She did not so much as hum on the stair. When the dusk came she shut herself in her room with the shawl over the mirror and read, or tried to read, in Elodie's brown book, and when the words blurred she lay on her back and counted plum trees.

It was not a sulk. She wanted that understood, if only by herself. It was reconnaissance.

By the third day she had found the central tower. It was not hard. It stood in the very middle of the keep, a great round column of pale blue glass that rose from the ground floor through every story of the castle and out the top, higher than any of the spires, and she'd been looking at it from windows for a fortnight without once asking what it was. She walked all the way around it, on every floor. She counted the doors. There were none.

There was only the base. On the ground floor, below the long gallery, in a hall so large and so cold that her footsteps seemed to fall into it like pebbles into a well, the pillar ended in a wall. It was a perfectly smooth wall, forty feet high, curved like the inside of a bowl, and it was made of a single mirror.

She stood in front of it for a very long time.

It was the largest pane she had ever seen. It showed the whole of the dark hall behind her, and herself, a small gray figure in the middle of the floor, and her lamp, a spark in an ocean of black. It was cold as the bottom of a lake. When she put her hand against it, the cold went up her arm to the shoulder. It gave back her touch as stone does, absolutely, without the faintest flutter of life.

"This is the way in," she said aloud.

It didn't answer.

"Isn't it?" Her voice rang up into the dark. "The tower doesn't have a door. So the door's got to be in here, somewhere. In you." She laid her palm flat on the glass. "Open up."

Nothing.

She waited a long time. Then she took her hand away, and wiped it on her skirt, and said, in a small, tired voice, "All right. Not tonight."

But she knew, as she walked back out through the dark with her lamp swinging, that she was going to come back. And she knew exactly how.

…

On the fourth night, she came at midnight, alone, without the rope.

She had thought a great deal about the rope. It would have been sensible. But the rope was a tether to the door and the door was the way out, and she had not come for the way out. She had come for the way in. So she came empty-handed, in her gray gown and her cut-off gloves, with the lamp unlit on the floor beside her, and she stood in the center of the great round hall under that forty-foot wall of dark and drew breath into the bottom of her lungs.

Right, thought Elowen. Let's see what you've got.

She had never done it. Not once, not even in the fog. She had spent her whole life learning to keep the fire small, to tame it, to bank it low under her ribs like a fire kept in overnight. A hum to soothe a baby. A flicker to warm a bowl of broth. She had learned at her mother's knee that a person who burned too bright burned out, and she had been careful. She had been so very careful.

She let go.

It came up out of her like a river in spate. She felt it in the soles of her feet first, a rising thrum, as if the whole floor had begun to hum. It went up through her knees and her belly and her chest, and out through her throat, and when it reached her mouth she did not so much sing as pour. Her voice broke open. It was no longer a country girl's voice, hoarse and low and a little flat. It was huge. It was bright as a trumpet and dark as a bell and it filled the hall to the roof.

Ember, ember, keep the night!

The light came out of her in a flood.

It rolled across the floor in waves of amber and gold, and where it touched the glass the glass flared. It ran up the walls. It poured into the pillars. It filled the vast cold bowl of the hall like water filling a cup, until the air was shimmering and thick and honey-sweet, and the great mirror at its heart began, with a long low groan, to glow.

She sang the second verse. She sang the third. She sang the song of every winter night of her life: of her mother's hand on the quilt, and Elodie's cold feet, and the smell of woodsmoke, and the sound of a gander being hit with a ladle. She sang for the dog whose name she had lost. She sang for the green field with a gap in it. She sang for the man who had said a lapse, and for the silence in his voice when he said it, and she sang the thing she'd never said to anyone, that she was frightened, so frightened, all the time, and so tired of being brave.

Hold it small and hold it bright—

The pane shuddered.

It shuddered all over, from the bottom to the top, the way a horse shudders when it is struck with a whip. A ripple ran across it, in a great concentric ring, as though a stone had dropped into the middle of a pond. Another. Another. The mirror was no longer smooth. It was moving. It was flowing, slowly, like quicksilver, and the whole hall flowed with it. The pillars melted into long soft streams. The floor rippled. The air itself seemed to bend, and everywhere she looked the glass was running, in silver sheets, in slow bright curtains, in waterfalls that fell upward and drifted out into the dark.

Somewhere, a very long way off, she heard something crack. It was a high, thin, ringing sound. It went on and on.

She was losing something.

She felt it go, even as she sang: a small, clean pulling, as if a thread had been drawn from her. It was not a memory. It was lighter than that. It was a kind of reflex, a small inward tug of caution that had been with her all her life, the little voice that said careful. It had told her not to climb the plum tree. It had told her not to cross the millpond. It had told her, over and over, in the voice of her mother, that she must not go too far, nor ask too much, nor want more than she was given.

It went, and the song poured out of her, and she did not stop.

Hush the wind and hush the snow,

Warm the dark where you must go—

"STOP."

…

It was not a shout. It was something far worse. It was a sound that came out of the walls themselves, the floor, the roof, the pillars, a vibration that she felt in her breastbone before she heard it. It rang through the hall like the note of a tuning fork, and for one dizzy instant every flowing mirror in the place froze in mid-fall, and held, bright as spun glass.

She cut off her voice. She stood with her chest heaving and her hands spread, and the light drained slowly out of the air.

"Elowen." It was low. It was shaking. "Stop. Please. You do not know what you are doing."

She turned her head.

The great mirror had changed.

It was no longer a wall. The black silvered glass had gone clear, as clear as a winter pond, and its surface moved gently, like a curtain stirred by a breath. Behind it, deep in its heart, a light was burning. It wasn't the amber of her own fire. It was white, and cold, and very bright, the color of the sky before snow. And in front of the light, walking slowly toward her through the depths of the pane, was a man.

He came forward like someone coming up a long flight of steps.

She saw his boots first, then the dark, close-buttoned coat, then the hands, long and fine and slightly curled, as if they'd forgotten how to hang at his sides. She saw his shoulders. She saw the collar, and the line of the throat, and the pale bare skin where it opened. She saw the face.

It was a young face. That was the first shock. She had thought him old. She'd thought of him, without ever admitting it, as a creature of three hundred years, withered and fastidious, a Lord of the Manor in a shroud. But the man who came up out of the white light was not past twenty-five. He was tall, a hand taller than she, and thin, with a long grave face made all of planes and hollows, and dark hair that fell untidily over a high brow. His skin was very fair, and blue-veined at the temple, and lit from within, so that when he moved the light slid over his cheekbones like water.

His eyes were gray. Not the dull gray of old pewter, or the warm gray of rain. They were the cold clear gray of ice with a lamp behind it, and they were wide open, and fixed on her, and shining.

She had never seen anything so beautiful in her life. It frightened her half to death.

He came to a stop on the other side of the glass, a pace from her, and put out one hand and laid it flat against the pane.

"You absolute fool," said Casimir.

It was not what she had expected. His voice cracked. He was staring at her with a face she'd have called furious if it hadn't been so white. Fine lines of silver were spreading from the corner of his eye, across the high cheek, in a pattern like frost on a window: tiny, delicate, running in all directions. His breath was coming short. Under the glass of his skin the pulse in his throat was beating, a flicker of light, rapid and uneven.

"You could have killed yourself," he said. "You could have burned out your lungs. That is not a gentle fire, Elowen, not at that heat, not in a house like this. Do you have the slightest notion what that would have..." He stopped, and drew a ragged breath. "Why did you do it?"

"Because you wouldn't open the door."

"That was not a door."

"It was a wall, then." She was shaking so hard that her teeth chattered. She did not feel the least bit careful. She felt as though she'd been cut loose from something. "You hid behind it. You locked yourself in a glass house and sat in the middle and told me I was a lapse. So I knocked, Casimir. I knocked the only way I know. I didn't think you'd come."

"You did not think I'd come."

"I thought I might have to take the house apart."

"You very nearly did." He gave a harsh, startled breath that was almost a laugh. "Look at it."

She looked. The great round hall was a ruin of light. The pillars stood bent like candles that have been left too near a stove, running down into their bases in slow silver tears. The floor was rippled. The air was filled with a fine glittering mist, and everywhere the glass was still faintly moving, in long soft folds, as a lake does after a storm.

And the pane between them was running with a low, steady heat. She could feel it on her skin. It was as warm as a living thing.

"Oh," said Elowen.

"Yes," said Casimir. "Oh."

…

They stood and looked at each other.

It was the first time. She knew it, and he knew it. In all her weeks in the house she'd seen him as a shadow, a smudge, a voice, a dark outline in the glass. Never a person. Never a man with a face and hands and a pulse, standing in front of her, close enough to touch, with nothing between them but a pane of light.

There was no distance. That was what she kept thinking. There was nothing in the way but air.

She stepped forward. He did not step back.

She raised her hand and set it on the glass, an inch from his own. It was not cold, now. It was warm, like the side of a kettle. His fingers lay flat and long against the other side, and the lines of silver ran across the back of the knuckle, a thread of white, narrow as a hair. She saw that his hand was trembling. She saw that he knew she'd seen.

"It's not me," she said. "Is it? It's not my fault."

"I do not know."

"You're lying."

"I do not know," said Casimir, and his voice broke wide open. "I do not know what you are doing to me. I only know that I have not slept in four nights. I have not eaten, which does not signify, for I cannot. I have stood in this house and listened to you not singing, and it was the loudest sound I have ever heard." His eyes were burning. "I told you to go. I told you in the cruelest terms I could devise. And you came into my house and burned it down and I would not trade a minute of it."

She had stopped breathing.

"You said it was a lapse," said Elowen.

"It was. It is." He closed his eyes, and opened them. "It is the only thing I have ever done wrong that I wished to go on doing."

The pane hummed between their hands. Behind him, the white light had begun to pulse in time with her heartbeat. She could feel it, a slow, steady thrum, rising and falling, as warm as breath.

"You don't know what you're doing," he said again, very low. "You have no idea. I am not a thing that can be... I am not what you think. If you go on, if you come any nearer, I will not be able to protect you from it. Or you from me. I tried. God knows I tried."

"Then tell me," said Elowen.

"I cannot."

"Then tell me what you can."

He looked at her for a very long time. His face in the light was bare and pale and young, and she saw that what had hidden it for so long wasn't pride at all. It was fear. A fear so old and so deep that it had become a sort of architecture.

"I'll tell you the first thing," he said. "And you must not say anything. You must not be kind about it."

"All right."

"I am glad," said Casimir, in a voice so quiet that she had to lean toward the glass to catch it, "that you did not listen."