The Face Behind the Glass

He came up out of the floor.

First there was a glitter, no more, a quiver in the heaps of shattered glass that lay across the hall like drifts after a blizzard. Then a sound, thin and bright, as of ten thousand tiny bells all touching at once. And then the fragments began to move. They slid together. They climbed over one another, splinter on splinter, shard on shard, with a soft rushing hiss like a tide drawing in over shingle, and they gathered in the pillar of light under the broken roof and rose.

She stepped back.

It was a figure. It was the figure of a man, built out of a million pieces of mirror, each no bigger than her thumbnail, each catching the sun at a different angle, so that he glittered from crown to heel with moving rainbows. He was tall. He stood with his shoulders back and his head very slightly bowed. She could see the folds of a coat, and the line of a collar, and the long fall of a hand. Where the face should have been was a mosaic of light, thousands of tiny glints, and in each one, small and sharp, was an image of a pair of gray eyes.

It was the first time she'd seen him since the storm. He looked as if he had not survived it.

"I did not think," said Casimir, "that you would call."

His voice came from everywhere, from the figure and the floor, and it was hoarse. It had been scraped raw. It had no polish left on it at all.

"You said you'd tell me everything," said Elowen.

"I did."

"You swore."

"I did."

"Then say it." She was shaking, and she did not care. "Say what you are."

He was silent.

The figure stood in the column of light, trembling very slightly, so that the million mirrors that made up his body rang and flickered. She watched the face. It was only a mosaic, a dazzle of light. But it was a face that had been waiting, she thought, for a very long time, to be asked that question, and had never once believed it would be.

"I am the house," said Casimir.

…

It was so quietly said that she almost missed it.

"I have known it for a month," he went on, in a thread of sound. "Perhaps longer. I have not known it as one knows a thing. I have suspected it, in the night, as one suspects the stair has another step. I felt it when you broke the glass. I felt the pane go, and the pain was so exact, and so deep, and in so many places at once, that I understood that it had never been a figure of speech. It is not that I live in the mirrors. It is that the mirrors are mine. They are my eyes. The floors are my feet. The walls are..." His voice broke. "I did not wish to know. I have been pretending to be a man for three centuries, Elowen. I have been very diligent."

"I know."

"Perrin told you."

"He told me what he thought you'd guessed. He begged me not to say. He's frightened for you." She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist. "He's all cracked and chipped, Casimir. He lost a hand."

"I know. I have felt it." The figure bowed its head. "I have felt all of it. Each pane of glass in the house, every one that went. I have had to sit with them all. It is not a sensation that I would recommend."

"I'm so sorry."

"No." The word was gentle. "You are not to be sorry. It was not your doing. It was the storm."

"It was my elbow."

"It was a defense." The mosaic of his face tilted toward her. "I would have broken it myself. Do you not see? I have always known that I could not hold you. I have never been able to hold anything. I could only watch, and wait, and be kind in small ways, with a rug."

She laughed. It was a ragged, wet, breaking sound, and she put her hand over her mouth.

"That rug," she said.

"It was a good rug."

"It was a very good rug."

For one second something moved in the dazzle of his face that might have been a smile. It faded at once. The figure drew itself up, with an effort, as a man does who has resolved to jump from a height.

"There is a thing I must tell you," said Casimir. "It is not a pleasant thing. And I think you have a right to hear it before you tell me what you know, because I believe that you know a great deal more than I."

…

He told her.

He told it standing, in the light, with his hands at his sides, and the million small mirrors of his body quivering with each word. He did not look at her. He looked at a point somewhere above her left shoulder, as a soldier does when he is reporting to a commanding officer. It was the most dreadful thing she had ever heard, and she listened to every word.

"Anselm Hargreave came here thirty-nine winters ago," said Casimir. "He was a cartographer. A cheerful, noisy, impossible man, with a hundred stories and an enormous appetite. He was supposed to stay a week. He stayed three seasons. I liked him better than anyone I have known. He used to argue with me about the length of rivers."

She said nothing.

"In the autumn, he began to forget. He tried to hide it. He kept a notebook, as you do. But the Land was in him. He lost his maps first. Then he lost the names of the mountains. By midwinter he could not remember what he had come to chart." He drew a breath. "He came to me one night, in the chart room, with his satchel on his back. He said he was going home. I said that he could not. I said that he would die in the snow. He said he would sooner die than forget his wife."

"He had a wife?"

"In a town to the south. Her name was Margaret. He wrote to her every week, and never posted the letters." The figure's voice was flat. "I told him that I could keep him. I said that I could stop it. I told him that if he stayed, he would remember her always, and nothing would change. I did not tell him how."

"And he said no."

"He said yes." The mosaic of the face turned toward her at last. "That is the thing, Elowen. That is what I tell myself. He said yes. I asked him if he was certain, and he said yes, and I took him at his word. And then, in the morning, he was in the west wing, and the letters were on his desk, and I found that I was..." He hesitated. "Not sure. I was not sure that I had asked."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I went through it afterward, a hundred times. I went through every hour. And I do not remember the word. I remember him standing in the door, white with fear. I remember wanting him to stay. I remember thinking, if he leaves, he will die." Casimir's voice cracked. "And then I remember the morning. Nothing between. A great blank, like a missing stair."

She understood. She felt the understanding fall through her like a stone.

"You took him," she said slowly.

"I do not know."

"You took him while he was trying to leave."

"I believe so." The figure bowed. "I believe that I did. I have not been able to say it aloud. I did the same with Rosalind. She said she was going, and I could not bear it, and I..." He stopped. "I have a gift, you see. It is not a gift. It is a defect. When I am afraid of losing a thing, I hold it. I hold it so tightly that I do not notice what I am doing. I have never been able to stop."

"They didn't want it."

"No."

"They were begging you, Casimir. She wrote no on the wall."

"I know." His voice was a whisper. "I have read it every day for twenty-two years."

…

She walked a little away from him. She had to. She stood at one of the empty windows, with her back to the hall and her arms wrapped round her ribs, and looked out at the white hills. She was breathing carefully, in and out, as she had learned to do in the fog.

She had expected to be angry. She'd been angry for the better part of an hour. She had marched through the house with fury burning in her like a coal. But now that he stood behind her, naming his sins one by one in that cracked and weary voice, she found that the anger had gone somewhere. She could not find it. In its place was a vast flat cold sorrow, the color of the sky.

"Why did you hire me?" she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The first night. The contract. You said you needed someone to warm the glass. You said it was cracking." She turned. "That wasn't the reason. Was it?"

"It was a reason."

"What was the other?"

He hesitated. She saw the mirrors on his shoulders shiver, and run together, and part.

"You smelled of fire," said Casimir. "Do you not understand? It was in the air the moment you came through the door. It was a particular fire, a particular shade of warmth. I had not smelled it for four months. And before that, only once, three hundred years ago, in a high white room." He drew a long breath. "It was her fire. It was your sister's. It was hers, and it was older than hers, and it was yours. I knew it at once. I did not know what it was. I knew only that I could not let it go."

"The woman in the room."

"I do not know any woman in a room."

"You do." She came back across the hall. "That's the other thing I came to say. I know where it came from. I know what you are, Casimir. I know all of it. I saw it in the glass."

He had gone very still.

"Show me," she said, and held out her hand.

She had not known she was going to. It rose of its own accord. The fire in her chest came up, warm and bright, and she drew it down her arm and into her palm and held it there, a small gold light, as one holds a candle. And she sang, not the song, not the lullaby, but a single sustained note, low and clear.

The fragments of his body took it up. They rang with it, like a bell struck softly. And in the shifting dazzle of his face, one by one, the little gray eyes grew bright.

She told him what she had seen.

She told it plainly, without ornament, as she'd have told the story of a harvest. A high white room. A woman in a bed with a dark plait. A boy of eight with a flush on his cheeks. She told him the words the woman said, and the words she sang. She told him about the fire, and the stones going white, and the blaze running through the walls. She told him that the boy had died.

When she reached the end she was crying again, and so, as far as she could tell, was he. The million mirrors that made up his face were running with a fine bright rain.

"It was a wish," said Elowen. "It wasn't a curse. Nobody did this to you. She loved him so much that she couldn't let go, and she poured it all out, every last bit of fire she had, and it went into the walls. And it's been going ever since."

"I am not him," said Casimir.

His voice was very small. It was the voice of a child.

"I am not him. The boy. The one who died. Is that what you are telling me?"

"I think so."

"The hand on my cheek—"

"Was hers."

"The cold—"

"Was his."

"But I remember," said Casimir, and it broke into pieces. "I remember it. I remember the room. I remember being afraid. I remember her face."

"They're his memories. She put them in. She wanted you to have them. Everything he was, every little bit, the way he talked and the way he was afraid of the dark, she wove it all in." Her voice shook. "You aren't a man in a glass house. You're the thing she made so that he wouldn't be forgotten. You've been remembering for him."

He said nothing. The figure swayed.

The sun poured over him in a long white sheet. Behind the dazzle of his face she thought she saw, for a moment, a child, with dark untidy hair and a stubborn mouth, looking up at her out of a million shards. And then the glints ran together, and re-formed, and it was only the face of the man she knew.

"Then I am nothing," said Casimir.

"That's not true."

"I am a grief."

"You're a grief that's had three hundred years to learn to be kind." She stepped forward. "You gave me a rug. You gave Perrin a name. You sat in the dark and let a girl sing to you, because she was lonely, and you didn't want her to be. A grief doesn't do that. A grief just sits."

He bowed his head.

"I was going to say something unforgivable," said Elowen. "I was going to say I'd been a fool. That I'd fallen in love with a house. But I think I fell in love with the person who lives in it. And I think he's been there all along."

She had not meant to say it. It came out in a rush, in a flood of tears, and for a moment she could hardly stand.

The mosaic of his face came up.

He looked at her. His eyes, in the thousand shards, were enormous, and wet, and bright. His mouth was open. He had the look of a man who has been struck by something from a great distance and has not yet understood that it is a kindness.

"Elowen," he said, and she heard in it every word he had never said.

…

They stood so for a long time.

When at last she spoke, her voice was steady. She had to ask. She had come to the hall for that, in the end, beneath everything else.

"My sister."

The mirrors on his shoulders shivered.

"She's in the Heart," said Elowen. "Isn't she?"

"Yes."

"Is she alive?"

"In the sense that you are," said Casimir, "no. In the sense that the house is, yes." He drew a long breath. "I will tell you all of it. But I think it is better if you see. I should like to take you to her. If you will permit it."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow." His voice was very careful. "I must warn you. She is not as she was. She asked for something, at the end, that I did not know how to refuse. And she is not, now, a thing that I can easily move."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that your sister is no longer in a pedestal, Elowen." The sun caught the edge of his shoulder, and the whole figure blazed. "She is in the Heart. She is the keystone. She is what holds up the walls."

He raised his head.

"If I take her out of it, the house will fall," said Casimir. "And everyone in it, and everything I have kept. And, I think, myself."