The Keystone

The Great Mirror had survived the storm.

It was the only pane in the whole keep that had. It stood at the center of the round hall, forty feet of dark glass curved like the inside of a bowl, with the morning light pouring through the broken roof and spilling across the floor in long white blades. Not a flaw marked it. It was as smooth and black as a well. And when she stood in front of it, with Casimir a glimmering shape at her shoulder, she saw her own face reflected in it, small and pale, with a bandage on her arm and her hair tied back with a bit of string.

"It would not break," said Casimir.

He had gathered himself into something nearer a man by now, a shape of light and shard and shadow, walking beside her over the floor of the hall with a faint tinkling at every step. He kept his eyes down.

"I did not hold it. I should like to say that I did. But it was not I. It was something older than I, and it did not let go." He paused. "I think it was her."

"Elodie?"

"She is behind it."

The mirror rippled.

It was not a gentle movement. It ran across the dark glass in a slow concentric wave, like a stone dropped in a lake, and the reflection of the hall broke up and re-formed. A seam appeared down the center, as fine as a thread. It widened. The two halves of the great pane slid apart without a sound, as the doors of a vault do, and behind them was a stair.

It was made of light.

She knew at once that it was not a staircase in any sense she'd understood the word. There were steps, a spiral of them, rising away into a narrow shaft of pearl-white radiance, but they were not stone or wood or glass. They were warm. They were faintly translucent. They had a soft pulse in them, and when she set her foot on the first, she felt it give very slightly under her weight, like the flank of a living animal.

"Are you coming?" said Elowen.

"I am the stair," said Casimir.

She looked down at her boot, resting on the first step.

"Oh," she said.

"I did not think it would be easy to say. I find it is easier if I do not think about it."

"Does it hurt?"

"It tickles," said Casimir, with great dignity. "Please do not tell Perrin."

…

They climbed for a long time.

She went first, with one hand on the wall. The wall was warm, and the pulse in it was slow and steady. She could feel it come up through the soles of her boots, through her knees, through the long muscles of her thighs. It was in time with her own heart. At first she thought it was a coincidence. After a while she understood that it was not, and that he was matching his rhythm to hers, as a man shortens his stride for a child.

She did not speak. There was nothing to say. She climbed, step after pale step, with the light growing brighter around her, and her breath coming harder, and the knowledge in her chest like a stone: that the thing she had walked across a country to find was at the end of this stair, and that she was afraid to see it.

Six months, she thought. I've been going toward this for six months. And now I'm almost there, and all I want is to go back down.

"Elowen."

His voice was beside her. Not in a mirror. In the air.

"You do not have to."

"I do."

"Then I shall say only this." He seemed to be searching for the words. "Whatever she is, whatever she has become, she is not a thing to be pitied. She chose it. She had the strength to choose. I have seen very few who did."

"I know."

"And I would not have you think that it was easy. For her. She thought of you every day. She told me so. She said, Lowie will come. She said it with such certainty that I did not like to ask what she meant."

Her throat tightened.

"She said that?"

"She said that you would come with your chin up and your fists clenched, and your pockets full of plums." A pause. "I confess that I have been looking for the plums since the day you arrived."

She laughed. She couldn't help it. It broke out of her in a rush, and the stair rang with it, and the pulse in the wall gave a little skip, like a heart startled by a joke.

"I ate them in the fog," she said. "They were frozen. I'm very sorry."

"I forgive you."

"You'd forgive me anything."

"I have been trying," said Casimir softly, "to decide if that is true."

…

The stair ended in a door.

It was a plain arch, set in a curving wall of pearl, and it stood open. Beyond it was a great round chamber, the size of a chapel, lit from within by a pale shifting radiance that came from no source she could name. It was not a lamp. It was not the sun. It was the soft white light of a thing alive, and it moved across the walls in slow bright waves, like the light at the bottom of a pool.

In the middle of the chamber was a pillar.

It rose from the floor to the roof, a column of clear crystal as thick as an oak, and it was threaded from base to crown with veins of living silver. They branched out through the walls in every direction, thin as hair, fine as the roots of grass. They ran down into the floor and up into the roof. She could see them pulse. She could see the light flow along them, in and out, in and out, and she knew that every vein in the house began here, in this room, in this pillar. She knew it as one knows the pulse in one's own wrist.

The Heart, she thought. It's his heart.

And in the crystal, as in a block of ice, stood her sister.

…

She had expected to feel it as a blow.

She had steeled herself for it. She'd thought of it on the stair, in the dark, in the fog, for six months. She had imagined a hundred ways it might look: a corpse, a ghost, a statue, a stranger. She'd braced herself to scream.

She did not. She stood in the doorway, and stopped breathing, and could not move.

Elodie was standing with her head bowed and her arms crossed over her chest, as if holding herself against a cold. She wore a blue gown, a dusty periwinkle, that fell to her feet in long soft folds, and her dark braid hung over one shoulder, tied with a ribbon. Her face was in profile. It was thinner than Elowen remembered. It was calm. The long lashes lay against the cheek. The mouth was a little open, as if she'd been about to speak.

She had the look of someone listening to a song that no one else could hear.

She was glass. She was clear as a winter pond, and tinted faintly blue, and at the base of her gown, where the folds touched the floor, they merged into the crystal of the pillar and became one with it. Silver veins ran up from her feet, through the hem of her skirt, and into her chest. They pulsed.

"Elodie," whispered Elowen.

She took one step into the room, and then another. Her legs would not hold her. She sank to her knees on the warm floor, a pace from the pillar, and put out a trembling hand. She did not touch. She hovered a finger's width from the cold, smooth, shining cheek.

"Oh, Dee," she said. "Oh, you stupid, stupid girl."

The ribbon in the braid was a bit of blue silk, and one end had frayed.

"She is not asleep," said Casimir, from the doorway. His voice was very quiet. "She is not awake. She is in the wall, if you like. She is in all of it. Everything I am, she is holding up. She has held it for four months. It was the thing she asked." He swallowed. "She said she would be the keystone. I said I did not know how. She said she would show me. And she did."

"You let her."

"I did not know what else to do."

"You let her turn herself into a pillar!"

"I let her do the only thing that would stop me from breaking," said Casimir. "She was right, Elowen. It worked. For four months, until you came, there was not a crack in the house. I have thought about that, every night. I did not wish to look at it. But I cannot pretend that it is not so."

Elowen put her forehead against the crystal.

It was warm. It was as warm as a living arm. She closed her eyes.

Wake up, she thought. Please, Dee. Please.

…

She did not decide to do it. It was something her body did, like breathing.

She drew the music box from her pocket. It was worn and warm, and a little battered from the storm, and the six-petaled snowflake on the lid was nearly gone. She set it on the floor at her sister's feet. She turned the key twice.

The tune began.

Ember, ember, keep the night.

It fell into the chamber like rain into a pond. The walls took it up. The pale light shivered. All down the length of the great silver veins, a ripple ran, faster and faster, and the pillar began to hum.

Hold it small and hold it bright.

She sang with it. She did not choose to. It came up out of her, through the ache, through the grief, low and rough and cracked. She poured the fire into it, a little at a time. She sang for Elodie on the landing in the blue shawl, and Elodie in the hayloft, and Elodie in the millpond, blue and swearing. She sang for the girl who put her fist through a window. She sang for the crooked knot at the end of the stitching.

Hush the wind and hush the snow.

The music box stopped. It stopped where it always stopped, one note short.

There was a silence.

Then, from above her head, a single note, clear and high and sweet, pitched a half-tone higher than the tune. It rang off the walls like a silver bell.

She looked up.

Elodie's eyes were open.

…

They were dark, as dark as Elowen remembered. They were enormous in the thin white face. They moved slowly, without haste, from the ceiling to the floor, and found her, kneeling there with the tears running down her cheeks.

"Lowie," said Elodie.

It was her voice. It came from the pillar, and from the walls, and from the air, soft and a little rough, as if from a throat that had not been used for a long time. She did not move her lips. She did not need to.

"Hello, Dee."

"You came."

"Of course I came, you fool."

"I knew you would." The glass face smiled. It was so like the old smile that Elowen's heart cracked. "I told him. I said she'll have her chin up. I said she'll be covered in dirt."

"I'm filthy."

"You're beautiful." A tear ran down the clear cheek, and did not fall. "You've got thin."

"So have you."

"I don't eat much." A ghost of the old mischief. "Has Mam stopped humming flat?"

"No."

"Thank God."

They laughed. They laughed together, through the tears, like two girls in a hayloft, and the light in the chamber warmed and brightened, and Elowen reached out and laid her palm against the glass of her sister's hand. It was cold, and then it was warm.

"I'm so angry with you," said Elowen.

"I know."

"I want to shake you."

"I know that, too."

"You left a music box!"

"I left it because it was the one thing I couldn't take." Elodie's voice shook. "It was Edmund's. I couldn't bring it here. I couldn't bear to hear it in a house where there wasn't any room for him. I thought, if I leave it for Lowie, she'll have something. She'll have a bit of him. And a bit of me." She drew a breath. "I didn't think she'd walk across a mountain with it."

"What did you think I'd do?"

"Cry, mostly. And then be sensible." A watery smile. "I always forget you're not sensible. You're just very good at looking it."

…

She did not know how long they talked. It was not long, she thought. The chamber was too bright, and the light too thin, and Elodie's voice kept fading, and returning, like a lamp in a draft.

Her sister told her why.

She told it quietly, without excuse, in the cadence of someone who has said it to herself so often that it has worn smooth. She told it as if she were describing a journey she had taken long ago. She said that after Edmund died she had stopped being able to tell what hurt. That every morning had been the same morning, and every night the same night, and the whole world had been a room in which a chair stood empty. She said that she'd seen her mother lay a place for him, and had gone up to the attic and wept until she was sick. She said she had thought: I will not be this. I will not be the girl who lost him.

"And then I saw a door," said Elodie. "In a dream. A door in a mountain, with a mist in front of it. And I thought, that is the place where nothing is lost."

"It isn't."

"No." The glass lashes lowered. "But it's the place where nothing changes. I thought they were the same thing. I thought that if I could just stay in the best hour, I'd never have to say goodbye to it." She was quiet. "I was very tired, Lowie."

Elowen said nothing. She held her sister's hand.

"I didn't plan to do this." The voice dropped. "When I came, I only wanted to rest. A season, perhaps. And then he began to crack, and I thought it was me. And I couldn't bear it. I couldn't be the thing that killed him, too. So I asked to be... put somewhere. Where I couldn't hurt anyone."

"It isn't you."

Silence. The silver veins pulsed.

"What?"

"I don't think it's you. I don't think it's me." Elowen's voice shook. "I think it's something else. I think there's a reason, and nobody's found it. He thought it was your fire. And when you went still, it stopped. But I don't think that's the same as being the cause."

"Lowie—"

"You didn't kill him, Dee. You held him. That's what you did. You held him up." She swallowed. "And I think it's cost you."

The dark eyes searched her face for a very long time.

"You're in love with him," said Elodie.

Elowen opened her mouth.

"Don't. I'm in his walls. I can feel it." She was smiling, now, with tears on her cheeks. "I could feel it before you came through the door. It's in the stairs. It's in the roof. It's in the way the whole house leans toward you like a plant. He's been singing your name for a month."

"I haven't said—"

"You said it in the hall. Yesterday. I heard every word." Her voice was soft. "I'm so happy for you, Lowie. And I'm so frightened."

"Why?"

"Because I know what that kind of love does." The hand beneath hers trembled. "It wants to hold on. It wants to keep. And the thing about holding is that you can't stop. Not unless someone makes you."

"Is that why you stayed?"

"That's why I stayed." She was fading. The light was drawing back from her face. "And it's why I'm telling you not to. Do you hear me? There's a difference between love and keeping. There's a difference between staying and standing still. If you can't tell them apart, you'll turn into me."

"Dee—"

"Listen. He taught me the verse. The one that was left out." The voice was thinning. "I don't think it's a song. I think it's a key. I think it opens something. But there's a price, Lowie, and it isn't small, and I wasn't brave enough to pay it." A final, aching smile. "You are."

"What price? What is it? Elodie!"

"I love you."

"Dee—"

"Be warm, Lowie."

The light went out of her eyes.

…

The chamber dimmed. The silver veins ran slow, and steady, and the pillar was only a pillar again, clear and still and faintly blue. A single tear lay on the glass cheek, round and bright, like a pearl.

She knelt for a long time with her hand on the floor.

Behind her, in the doorway, she heard a footstep, and the faint chime of glass, and then nothing. He did not speak. He did not come near. He stood in the arch with his head bowed, and let her weep, and she was more grateful than she could say.

When at last she rose, her legs ached. The music box lay at the foot of the pillar. She picked it up, and wound it, and set it down again, and listened to the small silver notes fall into the quiet. It stopped one note short. It always would.

Love and keeping.

She stood and looked at her sister's face. At the calm closed lids, the lashes, the faint smile. At the fine silver veins running up through the folds of the gown to the heart.

Is that what I'm doing? she thought.

It was the question she had been dreading since the stair. It rose slowly, cold and clear, from the bottom of her mind. Is this love? Or is it another way of hiding? I came here to find my sister. I found a man in a looking-glass. I've stayed a month, in a house where nothing changes, with a creature who has promised to hold me. I told myself it was for Elodie. I told myself it was for the dog. But what if I'm just like her? What if I'm tired, too? What if it's only that I've found a place where I can stop?

She put her hand on the pillar.

It was warm, and living, and it thrummed against her palm in time with her pulse. And somewhere in the house, in the stair, in the walls, in the quiet light, she felt him waiting, and listening, and holding his breath.

I don't know, said Elowen.

It was the most honest thing she had said in weeks.

I don't know. And I'm going to find out.