The Thinnest Wall

Neither of them spoke for a long time, and the silence was so full that she could have leaned on it.

The hall had stopped melting. The last slow ripples were dying in the floor, and the pillars hung bent and glimmering in the half-light like the ribs of some enormous sleeping animal. The air was warm. It tasted of metal and honey and the faintest ghost of rain, and somewhere under it, if she held her breath, she could hear a sound she had never heard in the castle before. A slow soft thud, thud, thud. It was coming from the glass.

It took her a while to understand that it was his heart.

He stood on the other side of the great pane with his right hand against hers. He had not moved it. She had not moved hers. They were two palms laid flat on a sheet of glass no thicker than a finger, and she could feel each separate fingertip of his like a small warm coal.

"You are staring," said Casimir.

"So are you."

"I have good reason. I have not seen a face in three hundred years."

"You've seen mine."

"In a mirror. At an angle. By lamplight." His gaze moved over her, slow and grave, from her hair to her chin, as a man reads a page in a language he used to know. "It is not the same."

"What's different?"

"You are looking back."

She had no answer for that. She thought it was the truest thing anyone had ever said to her.

She had broken Perrin's rule, of course. The moment she'd stepped before that glass and let her eyes rest on his, she had felt the faint cold tug at the back of her skull, the nibble of the Land. A fingernail's worth of memory, no more. She'd lost something. She did not yet know what. It might have been the name of a street or the shape of a bird. She found, to her astonishment, that she did not care in the least.

"You should not look at me," said Casimir, with painful gentleness. "It costs you. You know that."

"Do you want me to stop?"

A long breath. "No."

"Then I won't."

…

"I'd like to try something," said Elowen.

He closed his eyes. She saw it. It was as if she'd announced she meant to walk off a cliff, and he was trying to decide whether to catch her or to look away.

"Elowen."

"Not a touch. You said it's weight, I think. You said it's the warmth. But we don't know." She kept her voice level. "I'm not going to put my hand through. I'm only going to ask the glass to be thin."

"Thin."

"As thin as it'll go."

"It cannot be done. It is a house, not a window."

"Isn't it the same?"

The gray eyes opened. He looked at her, and then at the pane, and she saw him thinking. She saw the long fingers curl against the glass, and straighten, and curl again.

"If it fails," he said slowly, "if it breaks, you will be cut. I will not be able to stop it. You could lose a hand. You could lose..." His voice caught. "I would rather stand behind the wall for ten thousand years than have you bleed on it."

"It won't."

"You cannot know that."

"No," said Elowen. "But I know you."

He made a sound she'd never heard from him, a short, dry gasp, like a man who has been struck in the chest. For a moment she thought she'd gone too far. His hand fell away from the pane. She felt the loss of it like cold air on a burn. He turned his face aside, and put the back of his wrist to his mouth, and stood so for a time with his shoulders shaking.

Then he turned, and laid his hand against the glass again.

"Do it," said Casimir.

…

She did not sing this time. It would have been too much. She closed her eyes, and drew a slow breath, and laid the fire down in her hands like a bowl of water she was afraid to spill.

It came, but it came gently. It pooled in her palm, a small warm weight, and spread to her fingertips. She pressed it into the glass.

Thin, she asked. Please. Just for tonight.

The glass listened.

It warmed beneath her hand. It softened. She felt the surface change, slowly, the cold hard crystal going supple and clear, the way ice goes on the first day of spring when the sun gets under it. She felt it thin. It became a membrane, a skin, a film of light so fine that it hardly seemed to be there. The warmth of his palm came through it, and the pulse of his blood, and the feather-faint grain of his skin.

She opened her eyes.

They were standing very close. She hadn't noticed him lean in. He had bent his head so that his forehead rested against the glass, an inch from hers, and she could see the fine silver lines running into his hairline, and the dark crescents of his lashes, and a pulse beating in his temple. His breath fogged the pane. Hers rose to meet it. The two clouds mingled in the space between, and thinned, and cleared.

"Can you feel that?" she whispered.

"Yes."

"Does it hurt?"

"No." His voice was a thread of sound. "It is the opposite of hurt. I do not have the word. It is as if I had been walking in a dream for three hundred years, and someone had put a hand on my shoulder and said, wake."

She laughed, softly, shakily. A tear ran down her nose.

His other hand came up. It did not touch her. It hovered, an inch from her cheek, on the far side of the glass. She turned her face into it. She could feel the warmth coming off his palm like heat from a stove. He traced the line of her jaw in the air, the curve of her ear, the place where her pulse beat under the skin. He did it so slowly, so reverently, that it might have been a prayer.

"There is a freckle," said Casimir, "under your left eye. You do not know it is there. I have been looking at it for a month."

"It's an ugly one."

"It is the loveliest thing in this house."

She shut her eyes. She was shaking all over. It felt as if every nerve she possessed had been strung with wire and set to humming. She had never in her life been looked at like that. She had been looked at as a helper, as a daughter, as the plain sister, the steady one, the girl who carried the basket. She had never been looked at as if she were a window that someone had been waiting three hundred years to see out of.

"Casimir," she said. It came out as a whisper.

"Yes."

"I want you to know that I'm not frightened."

"I know."

"I want you to know I'm not."

"I know that, too." The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. "You said it once already. In the hall. I have not been able to think of anything else."

…

She did not know how long it lasted. Time had a strange texture in that room, soft and slow, like honey falling from a spoon. She stood with her hands flat to the glass and her face turned up, and he stood with his, and the light of the white heart behind him beat against her skin in long gentle pulses. She could feel the shape of him all along the pane. She could feel him leaning, and the glass leaning with him, and the shy, uncertain pressure of his fingertips as they moved against hers.

At some point she realized she was crying. She had not known. It was not sadness. It was a thing that had no name, a loosening, an opening, a sense of something enormous and bright coming slowly into the room.

"May I ask something?" she said.

"Anything."

"The box."

His eyes opened.

"My sister's. The music box. It's in my pocket." She swallowed. "I've carried it six months, and never wound it, and never played it. I was afraid. I thought if I wound it in this country it'd all go quiet. That the Land would eat the sound." She drew a breath. "I'd like to wind it now. If you'll let me."

"Why?"

"Because I think it wants to be heard."

He did not answer at once. He stood quite still, the white fire at his back, and she felt his hand tense on the glass.

"Yes," said Casimir. "I think that it does."

She took the box from her breast pocket. It was warm from her body, and a little damp, and the six-petaled snowflake on the lid had printed itself into her skin. She turned it over. There was the winding key, worn smooth at one side by her sister's thumb. She set her own thumb in the dent.

One turn, she thought. Two.

The little mechanism ticked and caught. She felt the spring tighten. She set the box on the floor at her feet, in the spill of white light, and opened the lid.

It began to play.

…

It was smaller than she remembered, and clearer. A string of tiny silver notes, falling one after another like drops of water onto glass. The tune was the same as it had always been. Ember, ember, keep the night. It climbed, and hung, and fell. It wandered, a little, as it had always done, around the middle, in a loop that Elowen had known so long she'd forgotten it was strange. And it rose to the last line, to the place where the song turned for home.

Hush the wind and hush the snow,

Warm the dark where you must...

And stopped.

The final note was missing. It wasn't a silence. It was a gap, round and clean, like the place where a tooth has been. The mechanism whirred, and caught, and went still, and the whole hall waited, as one waits at the end of a stair for a step that is not there.

On the other side of the glass, Casimir drew a breath.

"May I?" he said.

She nodded. She could not speak.

He sang it.

It was one note. That was all, one note, sung in a voice she knew without having known it, a low warm baritone with a crack in it like an old cello. He held it. He let it go out into the hall, and the pillars took it up, and the glass hummed, and the whole round tower shivered with it from the floor to the vaulted roof. It was not the note she had been expecting. It was a half-tone higher, brighter, with a kind of rising lift in it, like the last step of a staircase that you didn't know went up. It turned the whole song upside down. It turned a lullaby into something else. It became a question that had been waiting for its answer.

She felt it in her bones.

She felt it in her teeth and the roots of her hair and in the soles of her feet. She felt the music box tremble on the floor, and the fire in her chest flare up in answer. She felt, with a sudden, dizzy certainty, that she'd been missing this note for her whole life. That it had always been there, a hair's breadth off, waiting to be sung, and that it had been him she was waiting for.

"That," she said unsteadily, "is not how Elodie ends it."

"No." His eyes were wet. "It is how it ends."

…

The glass between them was almost nothing now.

It had thinned as the note rang, thinned and warmed and gone bright, until it was only a skin, a soap-bubble, a breath held on the air. The light that came through it was golden. She could see the tiny tremor in his lashes. She could see every grain of the faint silver lines at his temple, and the exact place where the pulse beat in his throat, and the way his lips parted when he breathed.

They were so close that she felt each exhalation on her mouth.

"I am going to ask you one thing," said Casimir. "And then I shall not ask for anything again."

"Ask."

"Stay as you are."

She did not move.

He lifted his face. He brought his brow against hers, through the film of the glass, so lightly that she hardly felt the weight, only the warmth, the slow, steady warmth of a man breathing against her skin. She could hear him. She could hear the long unsteady breath, the quick thud of his heart. She could feel every line of him, from his temple to his wrist, along the length of the pane.

Their palms pressed together. Their fingers wove. She could not tell where hers ended and his began.

Closer, she thought. Closer.

It was the only thought she had.

Her mouth was an inch from his. The glass between was thin as a petal, bright as a lantern, and she felt it quiver against her lips like the surface of a pond just before the rain. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to lean. To close the distance. To press her mouth to the warm bright skin of a man who had been dead in all but name for three hundred years, and tell him with her body what she could not tell him with her tongue.

She leaned. He leaned.

A sound came from the pane.

It was very small. It was a tick, high and clear, like a fingernail tapping a goblet. She opened her eyes.

A line had appeared in the glass between their joined hands. It was the finest of lines. It was no more than a hairline, silver-white, and it ran from the heel of her palm across the center of the pane, a finger's length, no more. It ran through the middle of their clasped fingers like a thread through cloth.

She saw him see it. She saw his eyes go to it, and widen, and his whole body go still.

Neither of them drew back.

It was the strangest thing. She'd have expected one of them to snatch away. She'd have expected an apology, or a cry, or the stampede of a long-held fear. But he stood with his hand pressed to hers and his eyes fixed on that white thread, and she looked at it, too, and felt it humming through her bones like the string of a lute.

"It's cracked," she whispered.

"Yes."

"Casimir—"

"I know."

"Should we—"

"No," said Casimir, very low. His fingers tightened on hers, and she felt the tremor in them. She felt the answering ache in her own chest, and the fire, rising. He lifted his eyes from the crack, and set them on her face, and what she saw there was fear and wonder and a joy so enormous that it looked very much like grief. "No. Not yet. Not for this. Let it be."

She let it be.

The tiny line glittered. It did not grow. It did not close. It lay between them like a vow, fine as a hair, and the music box on the floor ticked once, softly, and went quiet, and above their heads, in the vaulted dark of the old tower, the last note of the song went on ringing, ringing, ringing, long after it was done.