The Storm That Ate the Light

The storm did not break so much as arrive, all at once, like a door kicked in.

One moment the tower room was full of a dead green stillness, and the hills outside lay flat and silent under a sky the color of a bruise. The next, the first gust hit the castle broadside, and the whole structure rang like a struck bell. Elowen was flung against the wall. She heard Perrin cry out. Every window in the round room went white, and a roar poured in through the glass, a vast hammering rattle, as if someone had upended a mountain of gravel on the roof.

She understood, in the sliver of a second before she lost her footing, that it was not wind. It was the snow itself. The glass snow was coming down in sheets, in solid curtains, whipped to a speed that no snow should have, and it struck the panes of the tower like a thousand shot. The windows bowed inward. Cracks ran across them, branching and joining, white and bright.

"Down!" cried Casimir. "Down the stairs! Now!"

His voice came from every pane in the room at once, and it was more than she had ever heard in it: not fear, but a kind of fierce stripped urgency, like a captain's on a sinking deck. She caught Perrin's sleeve. They plunged for the stairwell together. Behind them the tower windows burst, one after another, with a sound like cannon, and the storm came roaring in.

…

She never knew afterward how they got down.

She remembered a spiral of steps that rang under her boots, and the wall rushing past her in a blur of silver, and a hundred panes in a hundred frames lit up one after another, like torches along a road. In each of them, a dark figure, running. His mouth was moving. She could not hear the words. The roar was too loud. The whole stair shook under her feet, and glass came raining down from above in glittering handfuls, and she put her arm over her head and kept going.

At the bottom of the third flight, Perrin stopped dead.

"Miss," he gasped. "The cellars. The old vault, behind the kitchens. It has no mirrors. The master has asked that you—"

"I'm not going to a vault!"

"He insists!"

"I'm not leaving him!"

"Miss, you cannot help him!" He caught her by the shoulders. His long glass fingers were trembling, and the silver web on his neck had spread to his jaw. "The house is... it is not itself. Do you not feel it? There are things in the glass tonight that are not the master's. He must hold the walls, and he cannot hold the walls and you. Go. I beg you. I will follow."

"Perrin—"

A crash split the air above them. The stairs lurched. A slab of wall the size of a barn door sheared away from the stairwell with a shriek of tearing crystal, and slid down past them into the dark, and Perrin shoved her.

She went. She stumbled out of the stairwell into a long gallery, and the door swung shut behind her, and when she turned to look for the steward, there was nothing but a wall of white.

"Perrin!"

Nothing.

She stood in the gallery, alone, panting. It was the one with the star-spangled ceiling. In a better hour she'd have called it beautiful. The storm had turned it into a hall of nightmares. The great windows on the north side were bellying inward like sails, and the mirrors on the south wall were cracking, one after another, with a ringing noise like the plucking of strings. Light flickered in them, white and green and sickly. Lines ran across the silvering. A sheet of glass the size of a table fell from the ceiling and burst on the floor a yard from her feet.

"Casimir!"

She turned in a slow circle. "Casimir! Where are you? Can you hear me?"

The mirrors answered.

They answered all together, in a long cracked chorus: every pane in the gallery lighting at once, brilliant and wild, and in each of them, a figure. There were forty. There were a hundred. A hundred tall dark men, at forty different angles, with their mouths open and their hands thrown out, all screaming a single word that she couldn't catch.

Then the lights went out.

They went out as a candle goes out, all in a breath, and left her in pitch dark with the storm hammering at the walls.

…

"Casimir?"

Her voice was small. She stood with her hands out in front of her and her heart battering at her ribs, waiting for the answer. There was none. There was only the roar of the snow against the windows, and the slow continuous splintering of the glass, and under it all, from very far below, a deep dragging groan, as of a great animal in pain.

It's the house, she thought. It's the house, and he's in it, and it's dying.

She did not know how she knew.

She began to walk. She went by feel, with one hand trailing on the wall, along the length of the gallery toward the double doors at the far end. The floor was strewn with glass. It crunched under her boots. Once, she cut her palm on a shard as long as a knife, and she bit down on the cry, and wrapped her fingers in her sleeve. The roar of the storm drowned out everything. She could not hear her own breathing.

She had gone perhaps thirty paces when she realized that the wall under her hand had changed.

It was no longer cold. It was warm, and faintly yielding, like the flank of a sleeping animal. And it was moving. She felt it breathe. She felt a slow rise and fall under her palm, in a rhythm that was not her own, but very close. In. And out. In. And out.

She snatched her hand away.

A light had come up in the pane beside her. Small. Pale. It spread slowly, like milk in water, until she could see her own face: a white, smudged, bleeding face, with eyes too large for it, and hair coming down in rags. She stared.

The girl in the mirror stared back.

"Don't," whispered Elowen.

The girl smiled.

It was a gentle, shy, apologetic smile, with a sort of terrible hunger underneath. It was the smile she had seen in the glass of her bedroom. It was her own, grown a little warmer since the last time, a little more practiced. The girl in the mirror tilted her head. She raised one hand and set it against the glass from the inside, palm flat, fingers spread. And Elowen watched her own hand, quite without her will, lift to meet it.

No. She tried to pull away. Her hand would not move.

It's learning, she thought wildly. It's been practicing for weeks. It's got my face, and my voice, and the way I hold my head. It's been eating the things I lose. The dog's name. The color of my father's eyes. The smell of Mam's kitchen. Every bit of me that the snow took, it kept.

The palm in the glass was warm. It pressed against hers, and the glass between them thinned. She felt fingers close round her wrist.

They were her own fingers. They were very strong.

"Let go," said Elowen, through her teeth.

The reflection leaned toward her. Its lips moved. She could not hear what it said. But she saw the shape of the word, quite clearly, in the hungry brightness of the glass, and she knew with a dreadful lurch of the heart that it was a name, and that it was not hers.

It was short. It had a soft sound in the middle, like a hand patting a flank. She watched the lips close on it, and she knew it, the way you know the face of someone you have loved, and in the same instant it slid out of her head like a coin through a hole in a pocket.

It was her dog's name. She knew it as surely as she knew her own. It was in that mirror, and the girl in the mirror had it.

The shock of it went through her like a blade. She stopped fighting. She stood staring, with the tears running down her face and the thing on the other side of the glass gripping her wrist.

Give it back, she thought, with a rush of the purest desolate longing. Please. Give it back to me.

The girl in the mirror smiled, and began to pull.

…

It took her a full second to decide.

She would remember it for the rest of her life: the sick, clear moment of choice. She knew the second law as well as she knew her own name. You are not to break a mirror. She had been warned, she had been told that every pane was somebody's attention, and she'd thought about it, and not understood. But she could feel the pull on her arm. She could feel the glass thinning, softening, taking her in to the wrist. Another moment and it would have her to the elbow. Another and it would have the rest.

Forgive me, thought Elowen.

She wrenched her free hand back and drove her elbow into the pane with all her strength.

The glass exploded.

It broke inward, in a long bright burst, and the hand that held her went with it. She felt the grip slacken, and tear, and fall away. Shards sprayed across her arm and her face. She staggered back, and caught her balance, and stood gasping in the dark with blood running down her sleeve.

For a heartbeat there was no sound at all.

Then, from somewhere very far away, from the deep center of the castle, came a cry.

It was not like anything she had heard before. It was a man's voice, raised in a single sharp note of agony, and it went through her like a spear. She had heard a dog howl like that once, when it was run over by a cart. It was the sound of a creature struck from behind and wholly unprepared.

"Elowen—"

It broke off.

The whole gallery shuddered. The cracks in the mirrors on the south wall ran together with a shriek. A section of the ceiling gave way. And then the storm roared up like a living thing and swallowed every other sound.

She stood quite still, with the shards at her feet.

I did that, she thought.

I broke a mirror. I broke a pane, and he cried out.

It was not Perrin's warning she heard now, but Casimir's, in the very first week, so long ago, in the dark. I do not interfere. And she saw, with horrible, cold clarity, that he had never said the thing he feared. He had never said what it meant for glass to be somebody's attention. That it was not a figure of speech. That every mirror in the house was a window out of him, an eye, a hand, and that she had just put her elbow through one.

"Casimir!" she screamed. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Can you hear me?"

No answer.

…

She ran.

She ran the length of the gallery, with her arm clasped to her chest, and out through the doors, and down a corridor she had never seen. It was lined with mirrors, all of them dark. They were not reflecting the corridor. She saw that at once. They showed her other halls, other floors, other rooms she had never entered, as if she were walking through a house made of windows, each one opening on a different place. In one she saw the gray room where she slept. In another, the pantry. In another, a long white hall with statues. Her own figure ran along beside her in the glass, but it was never the same figure. Sometimes it ran ahead of her. Sometimes it lagged.

She took one turning, then another. The floor tilted. The walls leaned. The mirrors began, one by one, to light.

They did not light with his shape. They lit with hers.

There were hundreds. They stood in the panes on both sides of the corridor, one in each, pale and bleeding and half-mad, with their mouths slightly open and their eyes wide. They were all her. They were all slightly wrong. One had no color in her hair. One wore her father's coat. One was a child of ten. One was an old woman. One was a gaunt, hollow-eyed thing with her mother's face, and she wept without sound.

They were the things she had lost.

They kept them, she thought, with a deep, sick, spreading dread. All of it. Every bit. They've been collecting it all this time.

The Echoes watched her pass. They did not reach for her. They only stood, in the mirrored walls, and turned their heads as she ran, a long slow ripple of faces following her down the corridor like a field of flowers following the sun.

She was nearly at the end when the whispering began.

It started very softly. It was no louder than the rustle of a dress. It came from the glass on her left, and then her right, and then from all around, rising and overlapping and tumbling together, until the whole corridor was one long breathy murmur.

Elowen.

She stopped.

Elowen. Elowen. Elowen.

They were saying her name. All of them, together, in a hundred voices, young and old, high and low, some tender and some gloating and some so cracked with weeping that she could hardly bear it. They said it over and over, in every key, with a longing so naked and so enormous that it made the hair rise on her arms.

Elowen. Elowen. Come and be remembered.

She backed against the wall, with her hands pressed over her ears, and the storm shrieking through the broken roof above, and the mirrors on every side swelling with pale, eager, hungry light.

Come and be remembered.

Come home.