What the Steward Remembered

The wall opened behind her like a mouth.

She felt it before she saw it, a draft against her shoulder blades, cold and smelling of flour and stone. Then a hand closed on her collar and hauled her backward through a gap in the glass that had not been there a heartbeat before, and a panel of mirror swung shut over the corridor with a click. The whispering cut off at once, as if a door had been slammed on a crowded room.

"Quiet," breathed a voice in her ear. "Quiet, miss. Do not look. Do not look at anything."

She was in a passage barely wider than her shoulders. It was black as the inside of a coat. The walls were not glass. They were rough, and cold, and slightly damp, and she realized with a lurch of astonishment that she was touching stone. Real stone. Gritty, sweating, ordinary stone, the first she had put her hand on since the arch of the Fog Tunnel.

"Perrin?"

"Yes, miss."

"Where did you—"

"Later. Please. Walk."

He had her by the wrist. She let him lead her. He moved quickly, stooping, with a curious limping gait, and she heard the sound of his breathing in the dark: a hollow, whistling, uneven noise, like wind in a cracked flute. Behind them, through the wall, she could hear the Echoes. They had not given up. There was a soft scratching on the other side of the stone, many fingers drawing slowly along it, and under it, still, the faint whisper of her name.

They went down a flight of steps, and along a passage, and down again. The air grew colder. At the bottom, he stopped and fumbled with a latch.

A door swung open on a faint reddish glow.

…

The room was small. She would have said it was a cellar, if the word could have been applied to anything so old. It was low-ceilinged, vaulted, and built of massive rough-hewn blocks that had never been polished. The floor was beaten earth. Along one wall stood a row of great earthenware jars, sealed with wax, and from the rafters hung bunches of dried herbs, brown and brittle with age. In a fireplace at the end, someone had laid a handful of embers. They glowed dully in the grate, like the eyes of a sleeping cat.

There was not a single mirror in the room.

Perrin shut the door, and shot three bolts, and leaned against it with his eyes closed.

She saw his face in the red light. She had never seen it unguarded. It had always been long, and grave, and perfectly courteous, a face that had been trained for decades to give nothing away. Now it was gray and sunken and webbed with silver, from the temple to the jaw. A deep crack ran down one cheek like a line drawn with a pen. The left hand was gone.

It was gone at the wrist. There was no blood. There was only a clean white break, faceted and glittering, where the glass had parted, and a thread of silver dust trickling from it onto the floor.

"Oh, Perrin."

"It is nothing, miss." His voice was a wisp. "A trifle. I was caught by a falling pane on the stair. I have mislaid it somewhere. I dare say it will turn up."

"Sit down."

"I could not possibly."

"Sit."

He sat, with astonishing suddenness, on an upturned barrel, as if his knees had been cut. She knelt beside him and took the ruined wrist in both her hands. It was cold as a pebble from a river. The silver ran over her fingers.

"Can you mend it?"

"Not I." He smiled faintly. "The master could. But he has a good deal on his hands. If I may use the expression."

She laughed. It broke in the middle, and turned into something else, and she bent her head and pressed her forehead against his knee, and for a little while the only sound in the vault was the dull crackle of the fire and the small whistling sound of a glass man trying to breathe.

…

"I broke a mirror," she said, when she could.

"I know, miss."

"I didn't want to. It had hold of me. It had my wrist and it was pulling me in. I didn't think. I just hit it." She sat back on her heels. "And he screamed. I heard it all the way across the house. I heard him say my name."

Perrin said nothing.

"That's what the second law was for, wasn't it? It's not about the glass. It's about him."

"It is a complicated matter."

"It's not complicated. It's very simple. I put my elbow through a pane, and Casimir cried out. I think a mirror is part of him." She stared at the fire. "Every mirror. All of them. Every window in this house. That's what you meant when you said they were somebody's attention. You meant his."

The steward's silence was thick as wool.

"And the storm," said Elowen slowly. "The cracks. The way the house shook. The way he went dark, all at once, in every glass, when the first wall came down. He wasn't in the mirrors. He was in the house. It was hurting him. It hurt him the way it would hurt a person to have his bones broken." She turned her head. "He said he was glass. I thought he meant like a man in a bottle. A man who happened to be made of the same stuff. But it isn't that. Is it? It isn't that at all."

She waited. She had spent six months learning to wait. She had waited on the doorstep of a house where no one answered, and at the mouth of a tunnel where the fog ate her thoughts, and under the shadow of a high dark mirror. She could wait a little longer for a steward with a broken hand.

"Perrin," said Elowen, very gently. "What is he?"

"Miss—"

"Please."

"I gave my word," said Perrin. "I have given it for three hundred years. It is the only thing I have kept." He was gazing at his ruined wrist, as if it belonged to someone else. "The master does not know. Not entirely. He has guessed it. In the night, sometimes, I think he has half known. But he has never asked me outright, and I have never had the courage to tell him."

"Tell him what?"

The fire popped. A little spurt of sparks went up the chimney.

Perrin drew a long, shuddering breath. He raised his head. His eyes were silver, in the red light, and wet.

"He is not a man who was cursed to live in a castle, miss," said the steward. "He is not a man in a glass house. There is no glass house." His voice failed, and came again. "The castle is him."

…

The words fell into the vault like stones into a well.

She waited for them to hit bottom. They didn't. They went on falling, down through all the weeks she had spent in that house, past the whisper in the mirrors and the smudge on the glass and the breathing wall, past the cracks, past the pain, down to the first night, in the dark, with the rug unfolding itself at her feet.

I never interfere.

"The walls," she said.

"Yes."

"The floors. The stairs. The rooms. It's all—"

"All of it." Perrin nodded, slowly. "Every pane. Every beam. Every nail and splinter of the Land, in a manner of speaking, though it is the house that concerns him most. He feels it as you feel your skin. He sees through every mirror as you see through your eyes. When he walks a corridor, it is not that he steps along it; it is that the corridor is his step. That is why he cannot touch." He lifted his good hand and let it fall. "A man may take a hand in his own. But how is a house to take a hand?"

"He told me he was glass."

"So he is."

"He told me he couldn't be held."

"No more he can. He can hold you, miss. He has held you in the palm of his hand since the first night. But to be held in turn..." The steward shook his head. "Think of what it would be, to feel every inch of your own body against another's. All at once. Every wall. Every floor. Every part of you that has stood alone for three centuries, gathered up in two arms. It would not be a touch. It would be a flood."

She thought of the crack in the glass between their hands. She thought of the way the whole house had shuddered, like a bell, when he sang that one note. She thought of a man leaning his forehead on a window, and a voice so soft that she'd had to lean in to hear.

"He doesn't know," she said.

"He believes that he is a man. He remembers it. He remembers a boy in a cold room, and a woman's hand." Perrin's voice was very low. "He thinks that he was cursed. That he was shut up in glass. That if he could only find the key, he might walk out of the doors and onto the hills, as other men do. It is the whole shape of his life. He has built every hour of it on that belief."

"And you let him."

"I let him." He raised his eyes. "God forgive me, I let him. What else was I to do? Tell him that he was a wall? That the thing he called his heart was a draught in the chimney? I watched him sit up three hundred winters, in the dark, thinking he was a prisoner. It seemed a gentler thing than the truth."

"It isn't."

"No." The steward's smile was a terrible thing. "I know that. I have known it since the first week."

She looked at him. She looked at the broken hand, and the silver dust, and the crack that ran down the long grave cheek, and she thought: He is part of the house, too. The thought arrived quite calmly. He is part of Casimir. He's not a servant at all. He's a piece he lost.

"What are you?" said Elowen.

"I am the first thing the master ever made, miss." He folded his good hand over the broken wrist. "The very first. It was, I think, the night he was frightened. It was a long time ago, and I was not yet anyone. I remember a cold, and a great white silence. I remember a voice, a woman's voice, singing. And a boy crying, somewhere, in the dark. A single drop fell. It struck the floor, and the floor took it, and I was there."

She sat very still.

"I am a tear," said Perrin. "I have always rather suspected it. It explains a great deal about my temperament."

She laughed. She couldn't help it. It rose out of her like a sob, and she put both hands over her mouth, and her eyes ran over. Perrin watched her with a rueful, tender, ancient expression.

"You must not tell him, miss," he said.

"What?"

"You must not tell the master that I have said this. I beg you. It is not that I fear his anger. It is that I fear what it would do." He leaned toward her, with his good hand held out. "If he were to learn that he was the house, that the walls he beats his fists against are the skin of his own hands, I do not know what he would do. I have never known. I have watched him half guess it for three hundred years. And every time, he has pulled back. Every time he has stood at the edge of it and turned away. He is a man who would rather be a prisoner than a house."

"I'll think about it."

"Miss—"

"I'll think. I won't promise." She took the glass hand in hers. "He swore to me, this morning, that he'd tell me everything. That I'd always know. I swore the same. I can't be the one who breaks it first."

"I understand."

"Do you?"

"I understand," said Perrin, "that you are very much in love with him."

She opened her mouth to deny it.

She closed it again.

The silence between them was so soft and so complete that it seemed to have a texture of its own. Outside, through the massive stone of the walls, she could hear the storm, a vast dull booming, like surf on a distant shore.

And then, as she listened, it stopped.

…

It did not fade. It did not die away, as storms do, in gusts and murmurs. It stopped like a hand clapped over a mouth. One moment the vault was full of the muffled thunder of falling glass, and the next there was nothing. No wind. No hammering. No tinkle of breaking panes. The house had gone dead quiet.

Perrin's head came up.

"Oh," he said very softly.

"What is it?"

"That is not good, miss."

"The storm's over."

"The storm is not over." His good hand tightened on hers. The silver threads in his wrist gave a small, sharp tremor. "The storm has finished its first course and is waiting for the second to be laid. I have felt this before. Only once. It was long ago." He rose, unsteadily. "We must be very still."

She rose with him. She stood, with her hand on his arm, and listened to the dreadful silence.

It was bigger than the storm had been. It pressed on her ears like deep water. It had weight. It had a kind of waiting in it, a held breath, a vast listening hush, as of a creature that has stopped to lift its head and sniff the air.

In the grate, the last ember settled, and went out.

And from somewhere above them, very far off, in the heart of the dark house, there came a single clear, high, ringing note, like a finger drawn round the rim of an enormous glass.

It was the sound of something about to break.