Broken Glass, Whole Truth

The castle was a ruin, and it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

She came up out of the stone passage into a morning that had no business existing. The storm had gone. The sky above the broken roofs was a clean cold blue, the first she had seen in the Dim Snow Land, and the sun, a small white disc without warmth, had come out to look at what it had done. Its light fell through a thousand shattered panes and broke into rainbows. They lay across the floors and walls in trembling bars of violet and gold and green. They crawled up the broken stairs. They danced on the drifts of glass that had piled in every corridor like snow, and the whole great house shimmered, as though it had been turned inside out and set in the sun to dry.

She walked through it slowly, in a gown stiff with dried blood and a coat torn at the shoulder, with Perrin's shaky blessing at her back.

He had not wanted her to go. He'd sat on his barrel in the vault, ashy and chipped, and tried to argue, and finally given up and pressed on her a flask of hot cider and a bundle of bread. Whatever you find, he had said, you will find it with your own eyes. I could not stop you if I tried. I should only ask that you remember he is frightened. She had kissed his glass cheek, and he'd looked astonished, and she'd gone.

Now she picked her way along the Long Gallery with the cider flask in one hand and her skirts in the other, and every step rang.

It was not the glass beneath her feet that was strange. It was the quiet. She had been in the house for weeks and had never known it to be still. It had always ticked and murmured, a vast sleeping animal breathing in the walls. Now it was silent. It was the silence of a room where someone has just died. She found herself walking on tiptoe.

The mirrors were gone. That was the first thing she saw, and the last thing she believed. There had been hundreds. The long gallery had been lined with them, floor to ceiling, and every one had shown her a hundred Elowens trailing away into the distance. Now the frames stood empty, curled silver vines around nothing, and the silvering lay in glittering heaps at their feet. Each pane had burst. They hung like open mouths.

Through them, for the first time, she could see out.

She stopped in the gap of a shattered window, and looked at the Dim Snow Land.

It was lovely. She had not expected that. In the clear cold light the hills of glass snow rolled away in endless folds, silver and white and shadowed blue, like the sea on a still day. The distant ridges stood sharp as cut paper. Far off, at the very edge of the world, a long gray smudge hung in the sky, and she knew it was the Fog Tunnel. It looked very small.

I came from there, she thought. I walked all the way from there.

A sound made her turn.

It was nothing. It was a tiny, silvery tinkle, as of a thread of glass falling. She looked down. At her feet, among the debris, lay a fragment of mirror the size of a dinner plate. It had broken from the frame beside her, and it lay face up in a heap of splinters, bright as water.

She bent and picked it up.

…

She did not look into it at first.

Perhaps she was afraid. She held it flat against her chest, with her thumb pressed to the jagged rim, and stood for a time in the light. She had broken one, in the corridor, with her elbow. She had heard the sound that followed. She did not want to see what lay in a pane that the storm had torn from the wall.

But the glass in her hands was warm.

It was warm like a living thing, like a hot-water bottle wrapped in flannel, and it trembled against her ribs with a faint steady beat. It was alive, she thought. Whatever had been in it was still there. Only a little, only a flicker, like the last coal in a grate, but there.

She turned it over.

She had expected to see her own face.

She saw the sky.

It filled the whole plate: a vast, pale, wheeling blueness, and below it, tiny and brilliant, the Dim Snow Land. She was seeing it from above. She was seeing it from higher than a bird could fly, from a place where the valley lay spread out beneath like a map, and the castle in the middle of it like a bright pin, and the hills spread out around it in rings. She could see the Tunnel. She could see the ridge where she had stood, with the pack on her shoulder, looking up at the glass towers and thinking they watched her.

They had.

The vision swung. She was no longer above. She was in the valley, low to the ground, skimming over the snow, and she felt it, quite distinctly: the cold of it, the grit, the slow whisper of the grains against her skin. She was not touching it. She was it. It flowed through her. It ran down her sides like water. She felt every flake that fell on every slope for fifty miles, a vast and tender and unimaginably patient attention, spread out across the hills like a hand.

She tried to drop the glass. She couldn't. Her fingers would not open.

Oh, she thought. Oh. This is what it's like.

This is what he is.

…

She saw it in pieces. She did not understand it, at first, any more than a person understands a dream. A rush of color. A smell. A sound.

A room.

It was a high white room with a great bed in it, hung with furs. The windows were thick with frost. A fire burned in the grate, but it gave no heat, and the breath of the people in the room hung in front of their faces in clouds. There was a woman on the bed. She was young, or she had been. She had a long plait of dark hair, gone dull and stringy, and her face was gray with exhaustion. She had the square strong hands of a woman who worked, red-knuckled, broad across the back, and one of them was holding the hand of a boy.

He was perhaps eight. He was very small and very thin and he lay propped on three pillows, with his eyes shut, and his breath came in little shallow whistling gasps. There was a flush on his cheeks like a stain. His hair was dark and fell untidily over his brow.

Casimir, thought Elowen.

She knew him instantly. She'd have known him anywhere. It was the same long, grave face, the same high, stubborn brow, the same mouth set in a line as if to keep in a cry. He was a child, and a sick one, and he was dying.

"Hush," said the woman. "Hush, my heart. I'm here."

Her voice was low and cracked. It had an accent that Elowen knew, a hill accent, broad in the vowels. It was the voice of her own mother's mother. It was the voice of every old woman in Scenery Chalk.

"Mam?" said the boy faintly. "Mam, I'm cold."

"I know, my heart. I know."

"Don't go."

"I'm not going anywhere. I'll never go." She lifted the thin hand and kissed it. "Hush, now. I'll sing to you. Would you like that? I'll sing you the one about the ember."

"Yes."

"Close your eyes."

He closed them.

She began to sing.

She sang it very low, in a worn and trembling voice, her thumb moving back and forth across the back of the little hand. Ember, ember, keep the night. Hold it small and hold it bright. It was the tune. It was the very tune. Elowen's heart stopped in her chest. She had heard it a thousand times, in a kitchen, in a bed, in a hall of mirrors, and she had never known where it came from.

Hush the wind and hush the snow.

Warm the dark where you must go.

The boy's breath was slowing. It rattled in his throat. The woman went on singing, steadily, tenderly, without looking away from his face, and tears ran down her cheeks and fell on the furs.

And Elowen saw that there was a light around her.

It was faint at first. It came from the woman's hands, a thin gold glow, like the shimmer on a candle. It spread up her arms, and across her breast, and into her hair, and it grew, and the room seemed to grow dim around it. She was weaving. She was pulling the fire up from under her ribs, the way Elowen did, the way a bucket is drawn from a well. She was pouring it out. Not a cupful. Not a bowlful. All of it.

Don't, thought Elowen. Stop. You'll burn out.

But the woman wasn't looking at her own hands. She was looking at the child. And the child's breath had stopped.

For a moment, there was no sound at all. The woman went on singing. She sang one line, two, with her eyes on the still little face, in a voice that had stopped being a voice and become something else, a vast golden roaring tide. And when she reached the last verse, she lifted her head and said, very clearly, in a tone that rang off the walls:

"Let nothing of him be lost."

The fire burst out of her.

It filled the room. It poured through the walls, and down the stairs, and out through the doors and windows. It ran through the whole house like a river in flood, and the house caught it. Elowen saw the stones turn white. She saw them go clear. She saw the beams run to glass, and the floors, and the roof, and the whole great pile of timber and slate and mortar bloom into crystal like a frost flower on a pane. The windows blazed. The snow outside, falling, fell as glass.

And through it all the woman sang, the last verse, the one that had been left out. Elowen strained to hear it. She saw the woman's lips move. She felt the shape of it, rising, rising, to the last high note, and she leaned toward the glass in her hands with her whole soul in her ears.

The vision went dark.

…

She was on her knees on the gallery floor. She had no memory of falling.

The shard lay beside her, gone cold and clouded, like a pane in winter. Her hands were shaking so badly she could not have picked it up. Her face was wet. Her breath came in shuddering gasps. She had bitten her tongue, and blood was in her mouth.

It was minutes before she could think.

The castle is him. That was what Perrin had told her, and she'd believed him, and she had thought she understood. She had pictured a man, somehow, and a house, and a bond between them, like a spell. A curse. She had thought it a hard thing, and a sad one, and no worse than she'd feared.

It was not a curse. It was a wish.

A mother had held her dying son in a high cold room and said, Let nothing of him be lost. And the wish had been so strong, so loving, so desperate, and the fire in her so bright, that it had not stopped at the child. It had gone out into the walls. It had gone on and on. It had made a house of glass and a land of white, and it had gone on holding, and holding, and holding, for three hundred years.

It never stopped. She pressed her fists against her eyes. It never knew how.

The boy had died. She was sure of it. She had seen it. The thin chest had stopped rising. The hand in the woman's hand had gone slack. And the thing that rose up from the room, that grew into a castle and a country, that wore the shape of a young man with gray eyes and a courteous voice, was not the boy. It could not be. It was the wish. It was a mother's grief, with a child's memories inside it, like a seed in a husk.

He thought he was a man. He had been telling himself so for three hundred years. He remembered a hand on his cheek, and a woman humming, and the cold. He had taken them for his own. He did not know that they were hers.

He doesn't know. He doesn't know what he is.

And I do.

She sat on the cold floor with the light pouring over her, and wept for a boy who had died three hundred years ago, and a woman who had loved him more than the world, and a thing between them that was neither one nor the other, and had been alone all this time.

…

It was a long while before the anger came.

It came slowly, from under the grief. It came up through her like a cold current, and she felt it prickle the back of her neck. She sat up. She wiped her face on her sleeve.

He lied to me.

It wasn't quite that. She knew it wasn't. He hadn't known. But he had hidden things. He'd told her he was glass, and a man, and ill. He had told her a story with half the pieces missing and let her fill them in. He had watched her, and warmed himself at her, and said nothing. And on the other side of the house, in a pantry, a steward had held his tongue for three centuries because the truth was too heavy to say.

They all knew. Everyone knew but me.

And beneath that, colder, was the other thing. The thing she hadn't wanted to look at. Every conversation they'd ever had; every time he'd gone still in the glass when she said a thing that moved him; every night he'd listened to her sing. She had thought she was speaking to a man. She had thought he was looking at her from across a room. She had thought, God help her, that she might one day touch him.

She had spoken to a house.

She had told it about her father. She had told it about the dog. She had sat on the floor in a gown, in the dark, and let it look at her, and felt, for the first time in her life, understood. And all that while it had been the walls. It had been the ceiling and the floor. It had been the wind in the chimney and the draft under the door.

I'm in love with a house.

She said it aloud. It sounded absurd. It sounded like a thing a child would say. And as she said it, she felt the floor under her tremble, very slightly, like the skin of an animal that has been touched in its sleep.

She went still.

…

She got to her feet slowly. She walked the length of the gallery, with the broken glass crunching under her boots, and down the stair, and through the empty corridors. She did not hurry. She had stopped weeping. There was a clean hard coldness in her, now, like the first ice of winter, and she held to it as to a rail.

She came out in the great hall.

It was almost unrecognizable. The vaulted roof had fallen in at one end, and the sun poured through it in a column of white. The floor was a sea of glittering splinters. The pillars stood bare and bent. Every mirror in the place had burst, and the long dark frames hung open to the sky. Light and shadow lay across the floor in great slabs, as in the nave of a ruined church.

There was no one there.

There was no shadow in a glass. No pewter shape at the end of the hall. No voice, dry and fastidious and amused, to say good morning. She stood in the middle of the shattered floor, in the pouring light, and she realized with a sinking heart that she'd never been in this room alone. He had always been there. Not in a mirror. Not in a corner. But there, in the walls, in the roof, in the floor beneath her boots.

She was standing on his chest.

She drew a breath. It shook. She gathered every shred of courage she had left, and pulled her shoulders back, and lifted her head.

"CASIMIR!"

It rang up to the broken roof. It shook the dust from the rafters. She heard it go out through the shattered windows and across the white hills, and come back from the distant ridges, thin and faint, like the cry of a bird.

"Casimir! I know what you are! I know what you are, and I want you to come out here and tell me to my face!"

Silence.

She stood, trembling, in the white column of the sun.

Then the floor moved.

It was slight. She felt it first in the soles of her feet, a vague, deep, rising pulse, like a heartbeat heard through a pillow. It ran up through her knees. It shook the glass on the floor into a thin silver ripple. It passed through the pillars, and the walls, and the great shattered roof, and out through the empty frames of the windows, until the whole vast building seemed to expand, and settle, and let out a long low sigh.

It was the sound of something very large, and very old, and very tired, being called by its name.

It was, she thought, exactly the way he said her own.