The Crack Is Not Hers

She spent the rest of the day with the gray book, a ruler, and a bottle of ink, and by evening she had solved nothing and had a headache like a drumhead.

She had set herself up on the steps of the Long Gallery, where the broken windows let in a clean cold light, and spread out her papers on the glass. She had her own notes, in blue. She had Elodie's diary, in brown, with its torn pages and its pressed forget-me-nots. She had a sheet she'd copied from the chart room, covered with Anselm Hargreave's tiny hand. And she had, beside her, in a folded napkin, the last of Perrin's bread, which she had forgotten to eat.

Her thoughts went round and round. Casimir cracked. Elodie sang, and Casimir cracked. Elodie stopped, and Casimir stopped. Elowen came, and sang, and he cracked. It was too tidy. It was a story with the ending already in it. And she knew, with the sullen stubbornness of a girl who had once argued a cockerel into a corner, that when a story was too tidy it was usually missing a person.

"You are frowning," said Casimir.

She did not look up. She had been aware of him for some time: a faint shimmer in the air beyond the steps, a bright quiver in the dust. He had not come near. It was a courtesy. He had given her the afternoon, and she'd seen him at the corner of her eye, a pale shape pacing at the end of the gallery, and then not pacing, and then simply standing, like a man at a gate.

"I'm thinking," said Elowen.

"It does that to your forehead."

"It's a very good forehead."

"It is the best I have seen." He came a few steps nearer. The sun lit him, and his coat flickered with a thousand tiny rainbows. "Have you eaten?"

"I'm working."

"That is not a yes."

"No." She sighed, and put down the pen, and held up the bread. "I'm going to eat it. I'm only waiting until I've finished being cross with you."

"That seems fair."

"I'm cross about the cracks," said Elowen.

…

She patted the step beside her, and he sat.

It was a thing she'd have called impossible a month ago. A mosaic of light and splinter folded itself onto a glass stair, with a faint musical rustle, and the whole step shivered beneath her. He sat at a careful distance, with his hands on his knees and his head turned away. The sun lay across his shoulder in a bar of gold. She could see the green thread on his wrist.

"Tell me about Rosalind," said Elowen.

"I have told you."

"Not about the end. The beginning. Before the cracks. What did she do?"

"She read to me." He frowned. "In the evenings. She had a great many books. She had medical treatises, and a book of Latin psalms, and a novel with the cover torn off that she was fond of. She read in a low voice, with a great deal of expression. She did the voices." A faint ghost of warmth. "She was a terrible reader. She made all the villains sound like her uncle."

"Did she sing?"

"Sometimes."

"Did she warm the glass?"

"No. She could not." He turned his head. "She had no fire. She was a physician's daughter, Elowen. She had a very good mind, and a great deal of stubbornness, and a bag full of bandages. She could not have warmed a teacup."

"And she cracked you."

"She..." He stopped.

She watched it hit him. It took a moment. She could see the thought arrive, slowly, from a long way off, like a rider on a road: the way his shoulders went still, and his hands tightened, and the light in his face flickered and steadied.

"She had no fire," said Casimir again, in a different voice.

"No."

"But there were cracks. I counted them. She counted them. Fourteen, in the first four months. They came in the spring."

"When she'd been with you a year."

"When she had been with me..." He was staring at the sunlit floor. "Perhaps ten months."

"And what had changed?"

"Nothing. She had been reading to me. We had been..." His voice failed. "We had been friends. For ten months. I was very glad of her. I looked forward to the evenings."

"You loved her."

"I did not say that."

"You didn't have to." She leaned toward him. "Casimir. Listen. I'm not asking you to say it. I'm asking you to look at it. Rosalind didn't have the fire. Perrin said she never touched the glass. She sat there, and read to you, and you got fond of her. And you cracked."

"You are saying—"

"I'm saying it wasn't her fire. It couldn't be. She hadn't any. And it wasn't mine, either. Not the way you thought." She spread her hands. "I mean, mine's something, I'm not going to pretend. It's warm, and it's loud, and it has a good deal to do with it. But it can't be the whole thing. It's got to be something that Rosalind had, and Elodie had, and I have. Something in common."

"And that is?"

"That we got close."

The word fell between them.

…

He didn't answer for a very long time. He sat quite still on the step, a figure of light and splinter, with his hands on his knees, and the sunbeams moved slowly across him, and she waited.

"Three hundred years," said Casimir at last. "For three hundred years there were no cracks. I stood in this house and watched people come, and eat, and sleep, and go. Anselm. The Misses Garrity. The little blind man with the lute. Dozens. I was kind to them. I was lonely. They did not crack me."

"Did you love any of them?"

"No." The word came out slowly, as though he'd had to dig for it. "I liked them. I wished them well. I did not... they were not..." He shook his head. "It was not the same."

"What was different?"

"I wanted to keep them," said Casimir, very low. "And with them, I only wished to keep. With Rosalind it was..." He stopped. "It was not like that. At first. It was only that I wished to see what she would say next. I wished to know how her mind went. I would lie awake, in the sense in which I lie, and wonder what she was thinking. It was a very curious sensation. I had never wanted to know a thing about anyone. I only wanted them not to go."

"That's it," said Elowen.

"What?"

"That's the difference. That's the whole difference." She was on her feet now, pacing the step. "You can keep a thing without wondering about it. You can put it behind glass. You can stand in front of it, and look at it, and never change. That's what the west wing is. It's all those people held exactly as they were. It's keeping." Her voice rose. "But you can't be curious about someone and stay still. You can't want to know what she'll say next and not be moved by it. That's not keeping. That's... that's living."

"I do not follow."

"Neither do I, entirely. I'm making it up as I go." She dragged a hand through her hair. "But think about what you are. You're a wish. You're a woman's last wish, three hundred years old, and all it ever said was let nothing be lost. Hold on. Don't let go. Keep it all the same. Never change." She whirled to face him. "And then Rosalind came. And she made you want to know something. And Elodie came, and she made you laugh. And I came, and I made you—"

"Afraid," said Casimir.

"Yes."

"Glad," said Casimir.

"Yes."

"Alive."

His voice had gone very small.

She stood in front of him with the sun at her back and her hair coming down, and watched the light play over the face she'd learned to read. It was a face made out of splinters. It was the best face in the world.

"The cracks aren't from the fire," said Elowen. "They're from you. Every time you feel a thing, a real thing, something that changes you, the part of you that was made to stay the same has to give. It can't hold. It was never built to. It splits." She drew a breath. "The cracks aren't a wound. They're a seam. They're the place where the wish ends and you begin."

…

He did not speak.

He sat for a long time, looking at his hands. She saw him turn the right one over in the light, and trace the fine white line that ran up the wrist, the long thread of silver that branched at the knuckle. She saw him lift it, very slowly, and press it to the place where his chest would have been.

"It does not hurt," said Casimir.

"No."

"It never did. I thought that was because I was numb. I thought it was a symptom. A thing glass does, when it is dying." He laughed, and the sound was a small wondering ripple, like a stone dropped in a well. "It does not hurt because it is not a wound. It is the other thing. It is the thing that happens when a seed splits."

"Yes."

"And Elodie—"

"Held it shut," said Elowen, very gently. "She didn't kill you. She put a hand over the crack. For four months. She stopped you from becoming whatever it is you're becoming." Her voice shook. "And I think it nearly killed her."

"I did not know."

"I know you didn't."

"I thought I was protecting her." He lifted his face. In the tilt of his head she saw the stunned bright astonishment of someone who has been given his sight back after years in the dark. "I thought that I was a thing that destroyed whatever it touched. I thought I was a plague. And all that time, I was only..." He broke off. "Elowen. I am so very glad."

She was crying again. It was a habit, by now.

"I am so glad," he said again, wonderingly, and the whole gallery rang with it, a long bell-clear note that ran down the walls and out through the shattered windows into the evening. "I am not killing you. I am not killing anyone. I am—"

He stopped.

The light in his face went out.

It went out slowly, like a lamp being turned down, and she saw the glow drain from his shoulders and his hands, and the fine silver cracks stand out suddenly in the dimness, thick and bright. He sat very still. He was looking at nothing.

"Casimir?" she said sharply.

"I am becoming something," he said.

"I know. That's—"

"No. Listen. Listen to what I am saying." His voice was perfectly steady. It was the voice of a man reading from a page that he has just turned. "If the cracks are the line between the wish and the man. If I am, as you say, a seam. Then what happens at the end of it?"

"You become... a person."

"Yes."

"A real one."

"Yes." He raised his head. "And what is a real person, Elowen? What is it made of?"

She did not answer.

"Flesh," said Casimir. "Blood. Breath. A heart. A mortal heart, with a limited number of beats in it." His eyes were bright as stars. "I am a house. I have been a house for three centuries. I have never had a body, not once. Not a pulse nor a lung nor a drop of blood. If I should become a man, it will not be as if I had been one before. It will be as if I had been born."

"That's wonderful."

"It is terrifying." He said it quite simply. "A newborn thing does not know how to live. It does not know how to breathe. It may not know how to start. Half of them die within an hour. I have read of it. And I will have no mother, and no nurse, and no one to teach me. And every beat will be a beat I can't take back."

She dropped to her knees on the step in front of him.

"And the house?" she said, in a whisper.

"Falls."

"What?"

"The house is me." His smile was terrible. "I told you. If I should become a man, then I am no longer the house. The walls will have no one to hold them. The Land will have no soul. Elodie is the keystone, and when I am gone from the walls she will be gone with them, and every soul in the west wing, and every Echo in every glass. It will all come down. In an hour. In a day. I do not know."

She said nothing. She could not.

"And I," said Casimir, "will be a boy of twenty-five, on a mountain, in a snowstorm, with no shoes. With a heart that has never beaten. With a body that has never lived." He drew a long breath. "I think I would very probably die."

The sun had gone behind the hills. The gallery was dim, and cold, and blue, and the only sound in it was the faint creak of settling glass.

Then, very quietly, from the stair behind them, came the sound of someone clearing his throat.

It was a thin, dry, apologetic cough. They both turned.

Perrin stood at the top of the stair, in the half-dark, with a tray held in his one good hand. The broken wrist was bound in a napkin. His long glass face was streaked with silver, and he wore an expression of such exquisite, unbearable tact that Elowen wanted to burst into tears.

"I took the liberty," he said, "of bringing supper. I had not realized that you were in conference."

"Perrin," said Casimir.

"Sir?"

"I am not entirely certain that I have been told the truth."

"No, sir," said Perrin, after a very long pause. "I regret to say that you have not."

He set down the tray. The cups rattled. And the three of them, a girl and a man and a steward, sat in the blue dusk on the stairs of a broken house, and looked at the thing they had all been afraid to name.