A Vow Between Two Mists

She went to him at dawn, because she had run out of reasons not to.

She had not slept again. She'd lain on top of the quilt with her boots on and the gray book on her stomach, and watched the window go from black to charcoal to the color of a mussel shell, and rehearsed what she would say. She'd rehearsed it as a lawyer does, with exhibits. One: you are a coward. Two: you are a liar. Three: you are the most exasperating creature that has ever been put into a looking-glass. By the time the glass snow had turned from slate to silver, she had a case of nineteen points and a headache.

She forgot all of them the moment she walked into the gallery.

It was the long one, on the second floor, with the windows that were also mirrors. The light there had a particular quality in the early morning, thin and clear and cold, like water in a basin. It lay on the floor in long bars. At the far end, in the great oval frame, a tall figure stood with his back to her, looking out through the window at the hills.

He had been there for a long time. She could tell by the way he held himself. It was the stillness of someone who has stopped waiting for anything to change.

"Casimir," said Elowen.

He didn't turn. "I told Perrin that you would not come."

"Perrin's wrong a lot."

"He is wrong about the roofs. I find he is generally right about people." A dry breath. "I thought you would go home."

"I thought about it."

"And?"

"I got as far as packing." She walked down the gallery, slowly, with her hands in her coat pockets. "I got my boots on. I had the potatoes in the bag. I stood at the door for a good ten minutes. And I thought, if I leave now, I'll spend the rest of my life wondering what the answer was. And that I'm a very bad liar. And that Mam always said I'd rather finish a bad book than leave it half read."

He turned his head. She stopped, at the distance that was permitted. Four yards. She'd measured it with her feet.

He looked terrible. It startled her. She had expected the old composure, the cold civil mask. But he stood in the pale light with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and the silver lines ran up both forearms now, and across the back of the left hand, and there was a hollow under each of his eyes that she could have put her thumb in. He looked like a man who had been awake for a century.

"You came to say that you forgive me," he said.

"No."

"I did not think so."

"I came to say that you don't get to decide this alone." She took a breath. "I'm angry. I'm so angry I can hardly see. I saw that woman, Casimir. I saw what you did. I'm not going to pretend I didn't, and I'm not going to pretend I understand it, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's all right, because it isn't, and you know it isn't. If you wanted me to be a saint about it, you've come to the wrong girl."

"I did not want you to be a saint."

"What did you want?"

He considered it. He seemed to take it seriously.

"I wanted you to stay," said Casimir. "I did not think I had the right."

…

It was not a conversation either of them had ever had before.

They did not argue. They had done that, and it hadn't helped. They sat, she on the floor of the gallery with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up, he on the other side of the glass with his shoulder against the frame, a long way apart, and talked in low voices as the light climbed up the walls. It felt like confession. It felt like being very tired, and having someone put a blanket over you.

He told her about Rosalind. Not all of it. He told her what he could, in short broken sentences, with his eyes on the floor. That she had come with a medical bag and a notebook and a terrible, wonderful faith. That for a year he had been happy. That the cracks had begun in the spring, and she had counted them, and wept, and said she must go. That he had tried to talk her out of it, and then to talk himself out of it, and failed.

"I do not recall deciding," said Casimir. "That is the worst of it. I recall the night before. I recall standing at the glass while she packed. And then it was morning, and the east tower was empty, and the Land was quiet, and in the west wing there was a new pedestal." He drew a long breath. "I told myself she had been dying. I told myself she would have been lost in the snow. I told myself that the kindest thing was to keep her where nothing could reach her. And I believed it. God help me, I believed it for twenty-two years."

"And now?"

"Now I have seen her face."

She said nothing.

"I went to look at her, after you left. I had not done it in a decade. I stood in front of her for an hour." His voice wavered. "She wrote something on the plinth. Did you see it?"

"Yes."

"I never knew. I did not know she could. I thought she was asleep."

Elowen put her forehead on her knees. She stayed so for some time. When she lifted her head, her eyes were hot, but dry.

"You're going to tell me the rest," she said. "Not today. I don't think I can hear it today. But you're going to tell me everything, one day, with no bits left out. All of it. What you are, and what's behind the door, and what happened to the others. And I'm going to hate some of it."

"I am certain of that."

"And you're going to say it anyway."

"I will."

"And you're never," said Elowen, "never, ever going to do that to me."

"On my life," said Casimir. "Such as it is."

"That's not enough."

"Then on yours."

She laughed. It came out of her in a startled wet burst, and she covered her mouth. "That's a terrible thing to swear on."

"It is the only thing I have that I value more than my own."

She looked at him through her fingers. He was not smiling. He was looking at her with such plain, unguarded earnestness that her heart hurt.

Oh, she thought. I'm in so much trouble.

…

"I want to make you an offer," she said later.

The sun, or what the Land had in place of it, had climbed above the hills. The glass snow outside was burning silver, and the windows were full of shifting light.

"I'll keep the rules," she said. "Your rules. The four yards and the noon hour and Perrin in the corner. I won't put my hand to the glass. I won't sing without leave. I'll go on looking for a reason, and I'll tell you everything I find. If it's me, if it really is my fire that's doing this, I'll stop. I swear it. I'll go to the Tunnel myself, with my pack on, and I won't look back."

"Elowen—"

"But I want something in return."

"Name it."

"I don't want to be kept out." She said it slowly. "That's the worst of it. Not the distance. The shutting of the door. If you're frightened, say so. If you're ill, say so. If you've found a new crack in the night, you tell me at breakfast, not three days later when I find you standing in the dark. And you don't decide for me what I can bear."

He did not speak.

"I'll tell you what I can't bear," said Elowen. "It's being managed. My whole life, people have decided what's good for me. My father and my mother and the whole of Scenery Chalk. Elodie, most of all. She decided I wasn't to know how bad it was, and I wasn't to be hurt, and I was to stay home with the plums." Her mouth shook. "And she left me a note, and a music box. I don't want to be left a music box."

"I will not leave you."

"You can't promise that."

"No." His eyes were bright. "I can promise to tell you. Whatever comes. I can promise that you will always know."

It was, she thought, the only promise in the world worth having.

"Then we need something to seal it," she said.

…

She'd had the idea in the night, among the nineteen points, and had thought it foolish. But she dug in her pocket now, and drew out a bit of green wool, a thread no longer than her finger, rather frayed, and wound twice round a fingertip. She'd found it under the bed in the first week. It had been Elodie's, she thought. It was the green of the quilt.

"What are you doing?" said Casimir.

"It's called a binding. It's something Mam used to do, at weddings, and when a child was born. You tie a bit of thread round two wrists, and you say what you mean, and it holds." She grimaced. "It doesn't do anything. It's more of a promise. A knot to look at when you forget."

"I cannot take it."

"You don't have to. I'll tie it round mine, and I'll make it for yours, through the glass. It'll be there on both sides." She held the thread up in the light. "It'll be... I think I can weave it. A true one. A proper weave, Mam would call it. The old way."

He had gone still.

"There is a cost," he said slowly.

"I know."

"A binding of that kind, laid across glass, in a house of this nature—"

"There's always a cost. I know. It's nothing." She lifted her chin. "It's a small one. It's only a small thing."

"Elowen."

"It's only a smell."

She had not meant to say so. She hadn't known it, till the words were out. But she felt it, then, the way one feels a coin in a pocket: the quiet knowledge of what the thread would take. It was small. It was the smell of her mother's kitchen on a winter morning, yeast and woodsmoke and wet wool. She would have given a good deal not to have to give it. But it was a small, plain, ordinary thing, and she had a great many of them, and she thought that of all the things she possessed, it was the one she could best afford.

She wound the thread round her left wrist. She tied it. She laid her right hand over the knot, and shut her eyes, and drew the fire up from the place beneath her breast, as one draws a bucket from a well. It came slowly. It was not the roaring thing of the Great Hall. It was thin, and bright, and exact, a cord of warm gold running down her arm and out through her fingers.

She spoke. She did not sing. She said the words as plainly as if she were reading a recipe.

"I, Elowen, of Scenery Chalk, bind myself to this house and the man in it. I'll not leave him without his knowing. I'll not lie to him, nor keep anything that's his. I'll not forget him if I can help it, and if I can't, I'll leave a mark." Her voice was steady. "I'll tell him the truth, and I'll ask for it. I'll stay as long as I can. And when it comes time to go, I'll say so to his face."

The thread caught fire.

It did not burn. It glowed. It shone for an instant with a clear gold light, from the knot on her wrist to the tip of every fiber, and the light ran down her arm like water, and out through her fingers and into the glass. She felt it go. She felt the pane take it. The mirror drank the gold, and held it, and gave it back on the other side as a faint warm sheen on the arm of the man within.

He held up his wrist.

There was a thread on it. A single strand of green, bright and slightly frayed, wound twice about the bone and tied in a small neat knot. It lay over the white lines of the cracks like a ribbon on a wound. It was not glass. It was wool. She could see the little fibers standing up from it.

"Oh," said Casimir.

His voice had gone small. He turned his wrist over and over in the light.

"It's real," he said. "I can feel it. It is warm."

"It's wool."

"It is warm," he repeated, and looked up at her, and she saw that his face was wet.

…

They said very little after that. There seemed no need. She sat on the gallery floor with the green thread on her wrist and the long gold light on her face, and he sat on the other side of the glass with its twin on his, and for a long time the only sound in the world was the quiet ticking of the castle settling around them. It was like sitting in a boat on a still lake. It was like being very, very safe.

At some point, she noticed that the smell had gone.

She noticed it the way one notices a missing tooth, with the tongue. She tried to think of her mother's kitchen. The table was there. The checked cloth. The stove. But when she reached for the warm wet smell of yeast and wool, there was nothing, a smooth white blank, like a wall.

She did not say so. He was looking at her with such shining gratitude that she could not have said it for the world. She closed her fingers over the knot, and smiled at him, and told herself that it was a fair price, and it was.

It was.

"Casimir," she said.

"Yes?"

"I'm not going anywhere."

"I know."

"I mean it. Not tomorrow. Not after the next crack. Not if the whole house falls down."

"I know." His mouth trembled. "God help us both."

…

Perrin came into the gallery at a run.

She had never seen the steward run. He did not do it well. He came through the door in a long flapping rush, with his coat-tails flying, and his glass hair streaming, and the amber buttons chattering, and he skidded to a halt in the middle of the floor with one hand clutching his side.

"Miss," he said. "Master."

His voice was thin and high. He was shaking from head to foot. A fine web of silver lines had sprung up along the back of his neck, and she realized with a cold shock that he was afraid.

"What is it?" said Casimir sharply. He had risen. All the warmth had gone out of him in an instant. "Perrin."

"The north windows, sir. I went up to see about the roofs." The steward pressed a hand to his chest. "You had better look. You had better both look."

They went.

She would remember it for the rest of her life: the long run up the north stair, with Perrin's coat flapping in front of her, and the green thread tight on her wrist, and the hundred reflected figures of a man keeping pace with her in the panes along the wall. They came out at the top of the tower, in a round room full of windows. And Perrin pointed.

The sky had gone dark.

It had not done so all at once. It was a slow darkening, a bruise spreading outward from the north, as though a great hand were pressing on the horizon. A wall of cloud stood at the edge of the world. It was black, and purple, and green at the heart, and it reached from the ground to the top of the sky, and it was moving. It was rolling over the hills of glass snow in a slow, silent tide, devouring the light as it came. Under it the whole valley had gone the color of old iron.

And there was no wind.

That was the dreadful thing. Not a breath. Not a flake. The air in the tower room was perfectly still, and the glass on the hills lay waiting, with a dead flat shine, like the eye of a beast about to spring.

"I have lived here three hundred years," said Casimir, softly, from the pane beside her. "I have never seen anything like it."

Nobody answered.

Far away, over the last of the ridges, the dark cloud flickered. A thread of green fire ran down it, and was gone. And then, a long time after, so deep and so low that she felt it through the soles of her feet rather than heard it, the sound of the thunder came rolling across the valley.

It sounded very much like the breaking of glass.