A Name on the Wall

The new rules held for exactly six days.

They were, Elowen had to admit, very good rules. They had been drawn up in the manner of a treaty, with clauses. She was permitted to attend upon the master at noon, in the long gallery, in daylight, for the period of one hour, in the presence of the steward. She was permitted to speak. She was permitted to sit, at a distance of not less than four yards from the glass. She was not to sing, hum, whistle, or so much as drum her fingers on a table. She was not to touch the mirror. She was not to look at it for longer than was civil. At the end of the hour the steward would escort her to the foot of the stair, and she would withdraw.

"It's like visiting a prisoner," she told Perrin on the second day.

"I should say it was more in the nature of a state occasion, miss."

"Is it supposed to be funny?"

"I regret that it is not." He poured her tea with great concentration. "The master composed the terms himself. He asked me to read them over twice. I believe he was afraid of leaving a loophole."

"Was there one?"

"A small one." Perrin's face did not change. "He did not say I mightn't leave the room."

So for the length of an hour each noon she sat on a hard chair in the long gallery with her hands in her lap and the gray light falling on her knees. She talked to a mirror, at a distance of four yards, about the weather and the roofs. Perrin stood by the wall with his eyes on a point above her head, and every five minutes remembered something that urgently required him in the pantry. And on each of those occasions, for the space of about a minute, the figure in the glass would turn his head, and look at her with that grave, intent, ravenous attention, and she would look back, and neither of them would say a word.

It was a very poor substitute. It was better than nothing. She hated it.

She used the other twenty-three hours to look for a reason.

…

She went through the house like a bailiff.

She went through the library on the third floor, where the books were glass and had no pages, and the cartographer's room, with its green brass instruments, and the long cold pantry where Perrin kept the stores of the dead. She read the plates on every pedestal in the west wing. She counted the cracks in the mirrors. She made a map of them, in the gray book, in blue ink, with the dates, and sat for a whole afternoon on the stairs trying to see a pattern that did not point at herself.

There was none. There was only the trail of fine white threads, running through the glass like a sentence she couldn't read.

On the fifth day she went to the old servants' stair, to look at the little cracked mirror on the landing where he used to sit. There was nothing in it. It showed her a pale face, dark with sleeplessness, and a bit of frozen window behind. But on the wall beside it, at about the height of her shoulder, scratched into the pale blue plaster with something sharp, were two letters.

R.Q.

They were small. They had been cut with a pin or a point, in a hasty, trembling hand. Beneath them, in the same careful scratch, was a date. She had to bend to read it. It was twenty-two winters old.

"Perrin," said Elowen.

She said it very quietly. It was a measure of how well he knew her that he came at once.

…

"I did not mean to speak of it," said the steward.

He had brought her to the pantry. It was his last stronghold, a cold little room at the back of the kitchens, lined with shelves of preserves, where he went when he wanted to be alone with his dignity. He stood in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest, looking at a point on the floor to her left, and the amber buttons of his coat shook faintly with the effort of holding still.

"You said there was another guest," said Elowen.

"I said there had been many."

"Not like this one."

He did not answer at once. He took a jar from the shelf, and put it back. Then he took another, and held it a moment in his long clear hands, and set it down.

"Her name was Rosalind Quill," said Perrin. "She came in the autumn of the year, twenty-two winters ago, with a pack on her back and a medical bag in her hand. Her father was a physician in a town to the south. He had died of a wasting sickness that spring, and she had, I understand, nursed him to the end. She had heard that there was a house on a mountain where nobody ever died. She came to learn how it was done."

"She wanted to cure him."

"She wanted to cure everyone." The steward's mouth twisted. "She was a very determined young woman. She said the master was suffering from a condition. She said he was cold, and starved of touch, and that the remedy was company. So she took up her residence in the east tower, in the room you now occupy, and for the better part of a year she sat with him. Every day. Every night. She read to him. She sang." His voice was dry as paper. "She did not, I believe, ever put her hand to the glass. She was most correct. She had been very carefully told."

"What happened?"

"She fell in love with him."

Elowen sat down on an upturned crate.

"It was inevitable. I had said so to the master. I told him it would end badly. But he was lonely, miss. He had been lonely so long. And she was clever and warm and kind, and she had a way of laughing at him that no one else dared, and for a season I think he was happier than I have ever seen him." Perrin drew a long breath. "And then the cracks began."

She said nothing. She was cold to the bone.

"She watched them come. She counted them, like you. She kept a book. She was, if I may say so, a very orderly woman. And in the end she came to a conclusion, which she brought to the master one night, in the long gallery, in tears. She said she was killing him. She said that it was her warmth that did it. She said she would have to leave."

"And he let her?"

The question was out before she knew she'd asked it. Perrin's eyes came up, then, and met hers in the copper of a saucepan on the shelf, and she saw in them something that was not quite anger, and not quite grief, but a long, tired, aching mixture of both.

"He did not," said Perrin, "wish to be alone."

"What does that mean?"

"I would rather not say."

"Perrin."

"It was a very long time ago, miss."

"Twenty-two years."

"It is not a long time," said the steward, very low, "in this house."

He turned his face away. He stood so for a moment, looking at the shelves, with his shoulders hunched, and a faint dry whispering sound came from the threads in his wrists. Then he straightened and said, in his usual voice, "I have said too much. I shall go and see about the roofs."

"Perrin—"

"I will say only this, miss. The master is not a cruel man." He did not look round. "He is a frightened one. It is a different thing. But I have never been quite certain, in the long run, that it is a better."

He went out, and left her sitting in the cold with the jars.

…

She went to the west wing that night with a lantern and no rope.

She did not go into the hall. She went round it, by a narrow passage behind the pillars that she had not noticed before, a service corridor with a floor of plain black glass. It ran along the north wall, behind the statues, and ended in an alcove at the far corner of the hall. She had not seen it on her first visit. It was a small, dim, low-vaulted nook, almost hidden by a pillar. And in it, by herself, with her back to the wall, stood a woman.

Elowen knew her at once. She did not know how.

She was perhaps twenty-six. She wore a plain, high-necked traveling gown, with a leather bag slung from one shoulder, and her hair had been scraped back from her face in a knot that was coming undone. Her features were sharp and clever and fine-boned, and there was a smear of what looked like ink on her chin. She was in the act of turning. She had one hand flung out behind her, grasping at nothing, and the other pressed to her breast. Her head was thrown back. Her mouth was open.

She was screaming.

Elowen stood in front of her for a long time without breathing.

None of the others had looked like this. She had told herself, in the west wing, that they were happy. That they had been caught in the middle of a joke, or a kiss, or a quarrel over a game of chess, in the best hour of the best day of their lives. She'd seen what the Land called peace, and it had been terrible, and it had been kind. She had understood it, even in horror.

This was not kind.

This was a woman running from a door.

The glass of her face was so fine, so perfect, that Elowen could see the muscles in the throat, the tendons straining in the neck. She could see the way the eyes had been caught, wide and white, in the instant before they closed. They weren't looking at a lamp. They weren't looking at a friend. They were fixed, in terror, on something at the end of the hall.

At the foot of the plinth was a plate of bronze.

ROSALIND QUILL. Physician's daughter. Came in the twenty-second winter back. Remained.

And scratched into the black glass below it, so lightly that she had to tilt the lantern to see, in a trembling hand she recognized:

no

She stood and looked at the word.

It was small and clear and had been written with something very sharp. The letters were uneven. The o had been gone over twice. It was not a signature. It was not an epitaph. It was a thing a woman writes on a wall with her nail when she has nothing else, and has been told no one will come.

"I didn't know," said Elowen aloud. Her voice sounded strange. "I didn't know there were any who didn't want to."

Behind her, the mirror in the alcove lit.

…

"I wished to tell you," said Casimir.

He had not shouted. That was what frightened her. He spoke quietly, from the glass at her shoulder, in a voice drained of everything but weariness, and she knew without turning that he stood very still.

"You've been watching," she said.

"I have been watching since the hour you arrived. It is merely that I have just begun to find it difficult."

"She didn't want to stay."

"No."

"You did that to her."

"Yes."

There was no excuse in it. It was flat and simple, like the last stone dropped on a grave. She turned. In the glass, a pace behind her left shoulder, he stood with his head bent and his arms at his sides, in the dim light of the lantern, looking at the thing he had made.

"Tell me," said Elowen.

"I cannot tell you tonight."

"Why not?"

"Because I do not know how to say it," said Casimir, "and because if I do, you will leave."

"I might."

"Yes."

"I might walk out of the door and go home." She heard her own voice, level and cold. "I might never speak to you again."

"I know."

"And you'd still rather I didn't know."

"I would rather," he said, very softly, "that you knew it from me."

She turned back to the woman. The terrified glass face stared out at nothing, with its mouth frozen open on a sound it could never make. She felt the cold of it on her skin, like a hand.

"Is that what you'd do to me?" she asked. "If I tried to leave?"

"No."

"You said that to her, too, I expect."

"I said nothing to her." There was something dreadful in his voice. "I did it in the night, while she slept, and I told myself it was mercy. I told myself that she would fade, in the snow, and be forgotten. That she was too far gone to be saved. I told myself a hundred things. I have been telling them to myself for twenty-two years." He drew a shuddering breath. "It is not the same. Not with you. You must believe that."

"Why? Because I'm better than she was?"

"Because I am not the man I was."

"How? How are you different? You've just told me you're the same coward who locked a woman up for trying to go home."

"I do not know how!" It cracked out of him, raw and ragged. "I only know that when I look at her I feel sick, and when I look at you I feel— I do not have a word for it. It is like the first time. It is like nothing I have felt before. It is different, Elowen. This time is different. I swear it. I cannot explain it."

"That's not good enough."

"No," he said. "I know."

She stood in the dim alcove, with the lantern shaking in her hand, and looked at the woman who had wanted to live. Behind her, the man in the glass stood and breathed. And between them, like a third presence in the room, was the knowledge she could not push away: that in all her long weeks of wanting, she had never once asked herself what it meant to be loved by something that kept what it loved.

"I'm going to bed," said Elowen.

"Yes."

"I don't know if I'll come to the gallery tomorrow."

"I understand."

"Don't follow me."

"I shall not."

She went. She went all the way to the foot of the east stair before she realized she was running, and she did not stop until she was in her room with the door shut and her back against it, and her hands pressed over her mouth.

…

She slept at last toward dawn, and she dreamed.

She was in the west hall. The statues stood around her in their rows, laughing and quarreling and playing at chess, and the white light fell over them in long pale bars. She walked among them. She did not feel the cold. She came to a place where the floor was blue, and there was a woman standing with her back to her, in a dusty periwinkle shawl, with a long dark braid hanging down her back.

"Elodie," said Elowen.

The woman turned.

She was thinner than Elowen remembered. Her face was white as paper, and there were hollows under her cheekbones, and her eyes were enormous and dark and very kind. She wore a bit of blue ribbon in her braid. She was smiling. It was the smile Elowen knew, the one she'd worn the night before she left, the one that said I'm perfectly fine.

"Hello, Lowie," said Elodie.

Nobody had called her that for eleven years. A tear slid down Elowen's face.

"Where are you?"

"Here."

"Where's here?"

"In the middle. Where everything's kept." Elodie's smile wavered. "It isn't bad, you know. It isn't cold, or lonely. It's just so very still. I think of you every day. I think of Mam, and the plum trees, and Edmund's chair. I think of it all at once, and it never gets any further away."

"Come back."

"I can't."

"Please."

"I can't, Lowie." She put out her hand. It did not touch. It hung in the air between them, pale and clear as glass, and Elowen saw that the fingers were beginning to crack. "And I don't think you should stay, either. You mustn't. Not for him. Not for me. Not for anything."

"I don't want to leave you."

"I know." The dark eyes filled. "Oh, I know. That's what I'm trying to tell you." She drew a breath, and her whole thin body shook. "Don't be like me, Lowie."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't stop. Don't stand still. Don't think you can keep a thing by holding it." Her hand was fading, now. The light was shining straight through it. "Don't be like me."

"Elodie—"

But the hall was swimming, and the statues were running together like wet paint, and the light was growing brighter, and brighter, and her sister's voice came to her from a long way off, thin and clear as a bell at the bottom of a lake:

Don't be like me.

She woke with the words in her mouth and the pillow wet beneath her cheek.

It was gray in the window. The glass ticked softly in the walls. And on the floor beside her bed, where she had left it the night before, the music box lay open in a patch of light, its tiny comb quivering, as if someone had just stopped playing it.