What the Glass Remembers

He did not sleep, because he could not, and he did not rest, because there was no rest in him. But he stood for a great part of the night before the long mirror on the east landing, with his sleeve pushed back, and looked at the arm.

The line had grown.

It had been a hair across the knuckle yesterday. Now it ran up the back of the hand and the inside of the wrist in a delicate branching tracery, like a river and its tributaries drawn on a map, and the finest of its threads reached nearly to the elbow. It was pale and shining. It did not hurt. That was the strange part. There was no pain in it at all. There was only the sense of a seam coming open, very quietly, along some old fault in him that he had never known was there.

He pressed his thumb to it. The skin was warm.

It had not been warm for three hundred years.

Eleven, he counted. He had been counting since the night in the Great Hall, as a man counts the knocks on a coffin. Eleven nights she had sung in his house since the day she melted his wall. Eleven mornings he had stood in front of one glass or another and found a new thread of white. On the night she burned the tower hall, there had been four at once. On the night they stood palm to palm, he had felt a long soundless fissure open up through the center of him, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, and he had thought, quite distinctly: This is the moment.

He had been right. He had only not guessed how much he would want it.

He looked at the arm. He looked at the line.

She will not understand, he thought. She is too young, and too fierce, and too good. She will look at this and she will say it is nothing. She will tell me it is a trick of the light. She will go on, and on, and on.

And I will let her.

That was the thing he could not bear. He had known it as soon as he saw the arm: that if she smiled at him, and said it's all right, he would believe her. He would believe her because he wished to. He would stand in the warm bright place she made for him, with the cracks running up his arms and across his chest, and let himself break by inches, with a smile on his face, until there was nothing left.

He had done it once before.

He had stood in front of a girl in a blue shawl, and she had said you're cracking, and he had told her it was nothing. And she had believed him. She had stayed. She had sung to him night after night in his great cold house, and the cracks had come, and she had watched them come, and on the last night she had come to him white-faced and trembling and said, I think it's me.

He had said, No.

She had said, Then why does it stop when I stop?

He had no answer. He had never had one.

…

"You're avoiding me again."

It was dusk, or what the Land called dusk. The great oval was dark. He had not lit a lamp. He stood at the back of the glass with his hands behind him and his sleeves pulled down, in a coat that buttoned to the throat, and he watched her come across the floor of the hall.

She looked rested. That was the worst of it. She'd slept, and she had washed her hair, and there was a high color in her cheeks and a light in her eyes that he'd never seen there before. She carried no lamp. She walked as a woman walks who knows the room, with her chin up and her arms swinging, and he saw her glance at him in the glass and away, and a flush climb her neck.

"I am not avoiding you," said Casimir.

"You've been gone for two days."

"I have been engaged."

"In what?"

"In thought."

"Oh, thought." She stopped a pace from the pane, and he saw her try not to smile. "That sounds dangerous. I had a feeling you'd start thinking, after the other night. Perrin said you would. He said it'd be like a kettle being left on the fire."

"Perrin is an interfering old woman."

"He's very fond of you."

"Elowen."

She looked at him. Properly, this time. Whatever she saw in his face made her light go out. It did not die all at once. It guttered, as a candle does in a draft, and then steadied, small and watchful.

"What's happened?" she said quietly.

He turned his arm over, and drew back the sleeve.

…

He had meant to say it calmly. He'd rehearsed it, in the long hours, in the voice of a magistrate reading a verdict. He had meant to lay the facts before her, one by one, like a row of coins, and let her draw her own conclusions.

But he heard her breath stop, and the sound of it went through him like a nail, and the whole fine speech went out of his head.

"It's grown," said Elowen.

"Yes."

"It's a lot."

"Yes."

"But it doesn't hurt?" She had come close to the glass. Her hand was half raised, as if to touch it, and she checked it. "It doesn't? You'd say, wouldn't you?"

"It does not hurt. That is not the point."

"What is the point?"

"The point," said Casimir, "is that I have counted."

He told her. He went through it slowly and without ornament, the way a physician describes the course of a disease. The day she arrived, a crack, a single line, in the mirror in the hall. The night she sang first, another. The night of the west wing, and the night of the storm, and the night in the tower. He gave her the dates. He gave her the hours. He had them all by heart, every one, each tick of the glass as exact as a toll of the bell.

"It follows you," he said. "That is the pattern. There has never been a crack in this house in three hundred years that did not come within a day of some warmth. I did not see it. I did not wish to. But it is perfectly plain. When you sing, the glass warms. When the glass warms, the glass cracks. When the glass cracks—"

"It's you."

"It is me." His voice was perfectly level. "I am not a man in the sense that you suppose. I am glass. The glass cannot bear heat. I have told you that. I did not tell you the whole of it, because I did not know it, but I know it now." He drew a breath. "Your fire is not warming me. It is breaking me."

For a long moment she did not speak.

"No," said Elowen.

"I beg your pardon?"

"No. That's not it." She shook her head, quick and angry. "That's not what's happening. You were cracked before I touched you. You had a crack on your hand the day you shut me out. You told me yourself you'd found it that noon."

"I found it after you had been in my hall for a month."

"That doesn't mean—"

"It does."

"It doesn't prove anything! A thing can follow another thing without being caused by it. That's what Mam says about the cockerel and the sun." She was breathing hard. "There could be something else. The storm. The snow. The Land itself. You don't know. You've said so yourself. You don't know what's making it happen."

"I know what happened before."

He had not meant to say it. It came out low and harsh and flat. He saw her go still.

"Before?" said Elowen.

"Your sister." There was no turning back now. He might as well tell it all. "She sat in that chair. She sang the same song. She said what you said, in nearly the same words. It's the Land. It's the snow. I wished to believe her. God, how I wished it. And then, one night, when she had been in the house for a season, she came to me white as paper and said, Casimir, it stops when I stop."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that when she did not sing for three nights, there was not one crack in the house. Not one. And when she took up her song, they came again. We tested it, she and I, as you propose to test it with your cloth and your thin glass. We tried and tried. And it was true. It was always true." He closed his eyes. "She did not leave me because she was weary of the world, Elowen. She did it because she thought she could not stay without killing me. She said she would not be the thing that broke me. She asked me to take her out of it. She asked me to stop the clocks."

Her face had gone the color of whey.

"The diary," she said. She fumbled in her coat. She had it there, the brown cloth book, with the corners worn soft. She pulled it out and thumbed with shaking fingers to the back cover, and held it up to the glass. "She wrote it. At the end. He is cracking, and I think it is because of me."

He read the line. He did not need to. He had known it.

"She was not wrong," said Casimir, with great gentleness. "That is what I am telling you. She was never wrong. And after she was gone, after she had done what she did, the house was quiet. For four months. Not a flaw in the glass. Not a hairline." He lifted his eyes. "And then you came."

…

The silence in the hall was terrible.

She stood with the book in her hand. She did not weep. She stood looking at the line he had shown her, the faint silver tracery on the inside of his arm, and he could see her thinking, fiercely, desperately, like a drowning woman casting for a rope. He watched her try one argument and discard it. Try another. He watched her mouth open, and close.

"It can't be right," she said at last.

"I should like very much for it not to be."

"There has to be some other reason."

"Then find it."

"I will."

"I know." He smiled at her, faintly, and it hurt more than he had thought it would. "You are very like her. I have said so before. I did not say how much. I shall not say it again."

She bit her lip. She was crying now, though she did not seem to know it, and she dashed the water from her cheek with the back of her wrist and glared at him through the pane.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I should like you to stop."

"Stop what?"

"Everything." The words came out cool and clear, like pebbles dropped into a pond. "The singing. The warming. The tower. This." He gestured at the glass between them. "It need not be a farewell. We might still meet. I should be glad to see you, in the daylight, with Perrin present. We might talk in the old way, through a thick pane, at a distance of some feet. I might help you look for her, in so far as I am able. But you will not warm my house again. You will not put your hand to my glass. You will not—" He faltered. "You will not stand so near."

"Casimir."

"It is not a request."

"You can't do this."

"I can. I have." He made himself meet her eyes. "I am sorry. I am more sorry than I know how to say. But I have done this once already, and I do not mean to do it again. I would sooner have you hate me, and walk out of that door, and live, than—"

"Than what?"

"Than watch you stay," said Casimir, "and learn what it costs."

…

She did not answer. She stood, quite still, with the book against her chest, in the failing light. Then she did a very strange thing. She lifted her right hand, and laid it softly against the glass, not as she had before, with the palm open, but with the fingers curled in, as one rests a hand on a sleeping child.

"You're an idiot," she said.

"I have been told."

"You're the most infuriating man I've ever met."

"I should say that is a matter of record."

"And I don't believe you."

He didn't speak.

"I don't. I can't. I can't make myself, even though I can't find the hole in it." Her voice was ragged. "It's too tidy. Things don't work so tidy. People aren't glass. They don't just... crack for a reason, like that. There's always something else. There's always a thing you don't see yet." She pressed her forehead to the cold of the pane. "I'll go. I'll do what you say. I'll sit through your daylight and your Perrin and your thick glass. But I'm going to find out what's really happening. And when I do, I'm going to come back here and stand in this hall and sing every song I know, and you're going to listen."

"If you are right—"

"I am."

"—I shall be more glad than I can say."

"Good." She stepped back. She wiped her eyes. She looked very small in the great gray hall, with her shoulders hunched and her chin lifted, and she looked at him for a long time without a word.

Then she turned, and went.

He did not watch her go. He could not. He turned his back, in the dark of the oval, and bowed his head, and listened to her footsteps fade across the floor.

…

She stopped at the door.

She had not meant to. She'd meant to go straight through, and up the stairs, and shut herself in her room and weep. But as she put her hand on the frame, she glanced back, out of habit, and saw him in the mirror, at the farthest end of the room.

He had not moved. He was standing with his head down, in the dark, one hand held out before him in the dim light. She could see it quite clearly. The sleeve had fallen back from his wrist. And as she watched, a new thread of white came creeping out across the pale blue skin. It ran up between the first two fingers. It was so fine she could hardly see it. It shone, and spread, and branched, like frost spreading across a window on a winter night.

He looked at it. He looked at it with a dreadful quiet face, the face of a man watching the last grains run out of a glass.

What if he's right? thought Elowen.

It was the first time she had let herself think it. It came softly, and it came whole, and it filled her up like water.

What if it's me? What if every song I sing is a nail in him? What if I'm the thing that's killing him, and the harder I love him, the faster he goes?

She stood in the door with her hand on the cold frame and her heart going like a stone down a well.

Should I stop?

She did not know. She had not the faintest idea. She only knew that on the far side of that glass, in the dark, a man she'd have walked through the fog for was breaking apart by degrees, and that she was holding the hammer.

The door chimed shut behind her. In the great black oval, the thread of white went on creeping up his wrist.