The Quarrel in the Ruins

No one touched the supper.

It sat on its tray between them in the blue dusk, soup going cold in a glass bowl and bread torn in neat halves, steam rising from it in a thin thread that wavered and died. Nobody looked at it. Perrin stood with his good hand clasped over his bandaged wrist, quite straight, like a boy waiting to be caned. Casimir had risen to his feet. The light in him had dimmed to a cold glint, and the mosaic of his face was turned, with terrible slowness, toward the steward.

"Tell me," he said.

"Sir—"

"All of it."

"It will take some time."

"I have time." The words were very quiet. "I have had a great deal of it. It is evidently the only thing in this house that nobody has taken from me."

Perrin shut his eyes.

He told it in a dry whispering voice, standing in the dusk, with his glass hair stirring in the draft from the broken windows. He told it without ornament, in order, as he might have recited the inventory of the linen press. That he was a tear. That he had been born in a high white room, when a woman sang and a boy wept and the walls turned to crystal. That he had known from the first night what his master was, and what he was not, and had held his tongue for three hundred winters.

"I thought it a kindness," he said. "I thought you were happier believing it. A man in a cage is a tragedy, sir. A house in a snowstorm is merely weather. I could not bring myself to tell you that you were weather."

Casimir said nothing.

"I should have spoken. I know it. I have known it every day." His voice failed, and came again. "But you were so proud, sir. You would sit up all night, planning how to break the curse. You were so very sure that there was a door. I did not have the heart to tell you that the door was a wall, and the wall was you."

The dusk had deepened. Somewhere in the broken house a loose pane clicked in the wind.

"Is that all?" said Casimir.

"It is all I know."

"And the girl."

Perrin's head came up.

"Did she know?"

It was the quiet that did it. Not the question. The very evenness of the voice, so perfectly polite, so calm, that it was nearly unrecognizable. She had heard it before, on the first night, in a hall full of mirrors, and she had thought then that it was the coldest sound in the world.

She stood up.

"Yes," said Elowen.

…

He turned his face to her.

It was strange. She had seen him furious, in the west wing. She had seen him frightened, on the glass bridge. She'd seen him heartbroken in the hall, and wild with joy in the tower, and so tender with her over the pane that she had thought her chest would split. She had never seen him look like this. It was not anger. It was nothing so honest. It was the look of a man who has put his foot on a stair that wasn't there.

"When?" he said.

"Yesterday. In the vault. When the storm was on." She kept her voice steady. "He told me you were the house. He told me you didn't know. He begged me not to say."

"And you agreed."

"I said I'd think about it."

"For a day."

"For a night. I was going to tell you this morning, in the hall, but I—" She stopped. "I saw the vision first. I thought it would be kinder to give you the whole of it, all at once, instead of in pieces. And then everything was so..." She threw out her hands. "It was a lot, Casimir. I didn't know how to start."

"You swore to me," said Casimir.

It came out low and exact. He didn't raise his voice.

"On the gallery floor. With a thread round your wrist. I'll not keep anything that's his. I heard you say it. I wore the proof of it. You told me that I should always know."

"I know what I said."

"And a day later you were in a cellar, with my steward, holding the most important fact of my existence in your pocket like a spare coin." His laugh was brittle as thin ice. "I did not think it would be you."

"That's not fair!"

"No?"

"I wasn't hiding it! I was deciding how to say it!"

"A distinction," said Casimir, "that would be of great comfort to Rosalind."

The silence that followed was like a slap.

She stood with her fists clenched and her face burning. The words had hit her under the ribs. She felt them go in, cold and precise, and lodge. For a moment she could not breathe.

"That," said Elowen, "was a cruel thing to say."

"It was."

"Take it back."

"I cannot."

"You can. You can say you didn't mean it." Her voice was rising. "You can stand there in your ruins, with your wrists all cracked, and say that you're sorry. Because I'm not Rosalind. I'm not going to run. I'm standing right here, and I'm trying to tell you—"

"What? That I'm a house?"

"That you're more."

"That I am a grief, in the shape of a boy, whose heart is going to stop in an hour?" He was shaking. "That I have lived three hundred years on a lie, and my oldest friend knew it, and the woman I—" He stopped.

"The woman you what?"

He did not answer.

"Say it."

"I will not."

"Why? Because you're afraid?" She advanced on him. "Because you'll crack? You'll crack anyway. You're going to crack whether you say it or not. That's the whole point!"

"And that," said Casimir, "is the point that you have conveniently arrived at."

…

She stared at him.

"What does that mean?"

"I mean," he said, with dreadful calm, "that I have been thinking. It is a thing I do. I was sitting here a minute ago, listening to you tell me, so very kindly, that I am not dying but being born. And I thought: how well it fits. How very neatly it all comes together." His eyes were glittering. "The girl who walks into my house, with the fire of the woman who made me in her blood. The girl whose sister is the keystone. The girl who, by the most extraordinary coincidence, is exactly the one person who could unmake me, or complete me, or whatever the word may be. And who, having gone to the trouble of discovering it, has come to me with a solution."

"You think I planned this?"

"I think you have been useful."

"I came for my sister!"

"You came for your sister," said Casimir, "and found a man you could save."

She felt as if he had struck her.

"That isn't—"

"You have a gift for it. I have noticed. You like to mend things. The dog. Your father. The poor crippled house." His voice cracked. "Your sister. She was the one you could not mend, and I think that it has been eating you. And then I came along. A broken thing. A lonely thing. A thing that cannot be touched. How could you resist?"

"Stop it."

"I wonder what you will do," said Casimir, "when I am mended."

"Stop it! Stop it!" She was shouting, now. She did not care. "You think that's what this is? You think I'm here because I need to fix something? You think I'd sit in this wreck for a month, forgetting my mother's face, because it makes me feel useful?"

"I think you came to be needed. And I think that you have not noticed."

"And you didn't?" The words ripped out of her. "You think I don't know what I am to you? You smelled my blood, Casimir. You said so. The first night, you stood in the dark and smelled my sister on me and thought, there's a ewe for the slaughter. You didn't ask me to stay because I was clever. You asked because I was hers. Because I had her fire. You used me to warm your walls and called it a contract."

"That is not—"

"It's exactly what happened! You said you'd tell me everything and you left out the only part that mattered! You knew what I was the moment I came through the door. You knew what I could do. You sat in the dark and watched me sing, and you let me think you were just a lonely man, when all the time you were a thing that had been waiting for me."

"I did not know—"

"You knew enough!"

They stood facing each other across a yard of broken glass. The dusk had turned to dark. In the corner of the gallery a pale shape moved, the steward, trying to be a piece of furniture, and failing. She saw the white of his face. She did not care.

She was crying and shaking and furious. She was also, she realized in a distant corner of her mind, perfectly right. And so was he. That was the dreadful thing about it. They were both so very right.

…

"I need to go," said Elowen.

She said it quietly. The shouting had burned out of her, and left something raw and tired in its place.

"I need to be somewhere that's not this," she said. "I can't think here. I can't think with you in my... in every wall. I'm going to the east tower. I'm going to sit in my room and write things in a book. I'm going to try to work out which of the things you said were true." She wiped her face with her sleeve. "And then I'm going to decide what I want."

"Elowen."

"Don't."

"I did not mean—"

"Some of it you meant." She looked at him. "Some of it you did. And some of it was just you being frightened and wanting to hurt me first. I know the difference. I grew up with Elodie." Her mouth twisted. "But I can't tell, tonight, which was which. And neither can you."

He said nothing.

"I'm not leaving. I want you to know that. I'm not going down the mountain." She picked up her book. She tucked it under her arm. "I'm going to my room. I'll be there in the morning. You'll know where I am. You always do."

She turned. She walked away down the long dim gallery, with the glass crunching under her boots, and she did not look back. At the door of the stair, she paused. A faint shape stirred at her elbow: Perrin, with his bandaged wrist and his anguished face, holding a candle.

"Miss—"

"Not now, Perrin."

"I only wished—"

"I know." She put a hand on his arm. "I'm not angry with you. I understand. I'm only tired." She managed a smile. "Look after him."

"Always, miss."

She took the candle. She climbed the stairs.

…

For a long time after she had gone, he did not move.

He stood in the ruined gallery, in the dark, with his arms at his sides. The light had gone out of him. He was only a dim shape in the moonlit glass, a figure of dust and shard. He could feel her going. That was the worst of it. He felt her on every stair of the east tower, one by one, step after step, rising away from him through the body of his own house. He felt the weight of her foot on each tread. He felt the door of her room open, and close.

He had never felt anything leave him before.

I told her that she had been useful.

He stood and heard it. It was a dreadful, small, bright sound, like a pane cracking in frost. He had said it because it was the cruelest thing he could find. He'd said it so that she would be angry, and go, and not see the thing that lay behind it, which was not anger at all. It was a terror so large and so naked that he could not look at it. I am going to be a man. I am going to die. And she will watch.

He had hurt her to make himself brave. It was the oldest, meanest trick in the world. He had learned it from himself.

"Sir," said Perrin gently, at his side.

"Do not."

"I only—"

"I know what you only." He turned his head. "You are going to say that I am a fool."

"I was going to offer you a handkerchief," said the steward. "But the other, also."

He laughed. It broke in the middle. He put his hand over his mouth, the long glittering hand with the thread of green on its wrist, and stood so with his shoulders shaking.

And then, far away in the black heart of the house, in the round hall at the foot of the tower, he heard a sound.

It was quite small. It was a high, clear, ringing note, like a fingernail drawn down a goblet. He knew it. He had heard it a hundred times in the last month. He had never heard it so loud.

He closed his eyes, and followed it, down through the dark of his own body, to the place where it began.

The Great Mirror was cracking.

It was the only pane in the keep that had survived the storm. It had stood for three hundred years, unblemished and black. It had held, he thought, because someone had asked it to. And now, as he watched, a hairline ran down the center of it, from the top of the forty-foot wall to the floor, straight as a plumb line. It was not caused by her touch. She was a quarter of a mile away, in a locked room, with a candle. It was not caused by her warmth, or her song, or her breath on the glass.

It was caused by her going.

He had thought, until that moment, that it was the closeness that cracked him. That it was nearness, and warmth, and the touch of a hand. He saw now that it had never been that at all.

It was the wanting.

It was every hour he had stood alone in the dark and wished her back. It was loving, and being afraid, and wishing to be forgiven. It was everything he was and could not keep.

Ah, thought Casimir, wonderingly, as the great black pane fell open down its length with a sound like a sob. So that is what it is to be a man.