The Castle Without a Door

It took more than two hours of wading through glass snow to reach the foot of the castle.

The nearer she came, the more the scale of it pressed on her chest, and the less human it looked. From the valley it had seemed a cluster of crystal sprouting from the earth. Standing beneath it, Elowen understood that it broke every rule of building she had ever learned.

The outer wall went up for dozens of yards, sheer and flat and clear as a window. There was no brick in it. There was no mortar, no seam, no nail. The great pillars, the tangled vaults, the spires that pierced the cloud: all of it had been cast from a single mass of glass, perfect and unbroken, and the perfection was what made her skin prickle.

She started to walk along its base, hunting for a way in.

Her boots crunched on the drifts, a dry and glittering sound. She went from the south corner to the east, and then felt her way north, and what answered her patience was glass that ran on forever. No oak door with iron studs. No gate. No gap the width of a finger. The castle was sealed, a giant glass box made to keep one old secret.

"Is anyone there?"

Her voice rose into the stillness and the cold swallowed it. No echo came back. No face moved behind the thick panes.

She pulled off her woolen glove. The hand underneath was purple-white and stiff, and she used it to knock on the glass.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

The sound was dull and lonely and sank straight into the air. Elowen pressed her gaunt face to the freezing glass and cupped her hands around her eyes to shut out the glare, trying to see in through the film of frost.

There was only a deep, bottomless dark. The inside of the castle might have been a vacuum, without life, and all it gave her back was her own small figure, standing alone in a wide gray forest of snow.

She tried everything she could think of, because she had not walked this far to be stopped by a wall.

She struck her tinderstones together, though she could not have said what she hoped to light. She dug in the pack for the little folding knife her father had given her at twelve and scored the glass with it from top to bottom, and the blade skated across the surface and left no mark at all, not so much as a scratch. She drew the cork from the plum wine and took a swallow, and the spirit went down like a lit fuse, and for a moment she was back in the shed with the vats and her father humming off-key. Then she put the flask away and called her sister's name three times, as loudly as she could, and the snow ate every syllable.

Elodie. Elodie. Elodie.

She noticed one more thing, and it nagged at her as she stood there. The glass snow had not fallen on her, but it had gathered near her. It lay in a ring around her boots, drifted higher on her side of the wall than on any other part of the base, the way a dog crowds close to a stranger to learn the smell of her. When she moved, the ring moved with her, a hair's breadth behind.

She sighed. Her breath struck the glass and clouded it at once, and she lifted her hand to wipe the fog away.

And as her finger touched the surface, her whole body went cold in a different way.

Her throat tightened. Her heart missed a beat.

She was looking into a mirror.

It was a vast, tall mirror set flush into the glass, and it showed her not one self but hundreds, a long file of Elowens receding to the vanishing end of the depth. She turned her head an inch to the left, and every one of them turned with her, in the other panels around her, all at the same instant.

Except one.

High up in the right-hand corner there was a mirror that was darker than the rest. The Elowen inside it moved half a second late.

She stood rigid. Her whole body began to tremble, and it had nothing to do with the cold.

She blinked. All the other reflections blinked with her. The one in the dark corner blinked a beat behind, like someone crouched behind a curtain of glass, wearing her face, trying hard to copy her every move and never quite keeping time.

It was looking at her.

An icy shock shot up from her waist to the crown of her head. She took two steps back, and her hand clamped over the music box in her pocket until the corner dug deep into her palm. She could not take her eyes off that mirror.

The reflection did not step back with her.

It stayed where it was, face pressed to the glass, its light-brown eyes empty and dazed. Then, very slowly, it began to smile. The smile spread wide, crooked and wrong, past the limits of any human face. And then the whole figure ran like a drop of black ink in a glass of water, and was gone into the depths of the pane.

Elowen stood breathing hard, her chest heaving.

Whatever game this place was playing, it was far crueler than she had guessed. These were not walls. They were alive. They were breathing, patient things, and they had been listening and watching her every step.

She made herself go back to the pane and look again, because a coward who looks away cannot learn anything. The dark corner mirror showed only the cold gray valley now, and a girl in a gray coat who was a little too thin and a little too pale. It could have been an ordinary reflection. It was nearly enough to make her doubt herself.

It was my face, she thought. It had my face, and it was smiling, and I wasn't.

And then, because she was honest even when it cost her, a worse thought: It was smiling the way Elodie smiled in the last month, when she told us she was fine.

She shook the thought off, hard. It left a chill behind it that no coat could cure.

…

The sky had started to darken.

Dusk in the Dim Snow Land had no orange in it and no soft rose. The ash-gray simply went out, silver to slate to a bruised, deadly purple-black. When the last pale strip of light blinked off, the cold fell on the valley like a trap.

The air thickened around her. It felt as if a thousand ice needles were being driven through her heavy coat and her skin into the marrow of her spine. All across the drifts the glass snow began to pop and crackle as the temperature plunged. The breath that left her lips turned to tiny pellets of ice and rattled onto the ground.

This was a different danger now. It was not the vague erosion of memory. This was plain death, by freezing, and it was coming fast.

A full-grown reindeer could not have lasted ten minutes in this. Her toes had stopped reporting. Her lips were bloodless. Ice rimed her lashes, so that each blink was a small knife-cut. If she did not find a way through this wall before the night closed in, she would be nothing but a block of ice before she could even recall her sister's name.

"There has to be a door," she said. "Please. Please."

She dropped to her knees before the largest pane of the great front hall.

Despair came in like a wave and carried off the last of her strength. She hammered both hands against the glass. It was as hard as diamond and did not give an inch, and all it showed her was her own white face, wet with frozen tears.

At the very edge of life, with only a single breath between herself and the end, Elowen found that she had nowhere left to retreat.

She tore off her other glove. Her bare hand, still seeping fresh blood where the music box's corner had stabbed it open, she slapped flat against the glass. And in a last blind instinct to live, she dropped her head and set her forehead against the freezing surface as well.

Warm. Please, let me be warm. I have to live. I have to find Elodie.

It happened with no warning.

The Emotion Fire, the power that ran in the blood of her family, that she had only ever used to coax a hurt out of a throat with a song or to bring comfort into a drawing, broke out of her at the last, driven by the pure need to survive.

It was not a fire of wood or coal. It was the fire of longing, of life, of love and of rage against fate.

The light came first. From the place where her bleeding palm met the glass, a blinding amber radiance blazed out and flooded the wall, and with it came the heat of a small sun, rolling out in great waves across the pane.

Crack. Crack. A slow, running sound, like a river breaking up in spring.

The glass did not shatter. Under her hand, the hard and eternal surface began to melt.

The smooth wall rippled the way a lake does when a boulder is dropped in it. The crust of ancient ice that clung to its face turned to steaming water and ran off in streams. Beneath her palm the stiff glass loosened into a swirling, misty silver liquid, which spun in a slow whorl and then drew apart, to either side.

At the heart of the whirl, a doorway took shape: a deep black arch, hollow as the throat of a well.

Elowen fell backward into the snow, gasping.

There was a red burn in her palm, shaped like a hand, bright and raw from the cold. But the fire was still running through her veins, tingling, and it drove the killing night back from her skin. The door was open. Beyond the arch lay a passage into the castle's belly.

Yet the dark in that arch was black as the bottom of a jar. There was no lamp in it, and no warmth. There was only a strange smell drifting out toward her: old snow, and cold metal, and something bitter underneath.

She scraped the ice from her lashes and wiped her fear away with it, and dragged herself up by the rippling edge of the doorway. She put one foot over the threshold, into the hollow dark.

The moment her boot heel came down inside, the silver whirl closed behind her with a soft, crisp pop, and she was locked in.

She stood in the blackness, scarcely breathing, her hand pressed over the music box.

And out of the depths of the dark, a voice spoke.

It was not an ordinary voice. It was cool and elegant, with a razor edge to it, rising and falling like music, and as clear as two silver blades drawn across each other on a winter night. It came from a hundred directions at once, and it carried a quiet threat, a haughty mockery, and a loneliness that had lasted for centuries.

"What dreadful taste. Who gave you leave to knock on my front door with such a crude, hot-tempered, abominable magic?"