The Night That Offered to Forget

She broke the third law at a quarter past midnight, and it was the first thing she'd done all week that felt like her own idea.

It was not that she had planned it. She had meant to stay in her room. She'd sat on the bed with the gray book on her knees and a pen between her teeth, and tried, as she had promised, to work out which of the things he'd said were true. She wrote them down. Useful. A man you could save. You came to be needed. She wrote the answers beside them, and crossed out the answers, and wrote others. By eleven she had a page of scribble and a wet face and the sick sour certainty that she did not know herself at all.

At half past, she gave up and went to the window.

The glass was frosted. She scraped a hole in it with her thumbnail and looked out at the Land. It lay under the moon like a drift of broken pearls. Every slope shimmered. Every ridge shone with a faint cold light, and the sky above it was a deep, clear, starless black, so enormous that it made her dizzy. There was no wind. She could see for miles. She could see the tiny gray thread of the Tunnel, far off, and nearer, the long white sweep of the valley down which she had walked on her first day, wading through snow with her potatoes and her flask and her fool's courage.

You came all that way, she thought. For what?

And her feet were moving before she knew she'd decided.

…

The great doors were open. They had been open since the storm; there was nothing left to close them. She went out through the wreck of the front hall, across the glittering floor, and over the sill where she had once melted a hole in a wall with her bare hand, and found herself standing in the snow.

It was cold. It was not the killing cold of that first dusk. The moon had softened it, somehow, and the stillness. She stood in the drifted glass with her coat buttoned to the chin and her breath going up in a thin silver thread, and for a time she did not move.

She was not afraid. She noticed it with some surprise. She had thought she would be. She'd been told so often about the dusk, and the dark, and the Land that came close to learn the shape of a thing by standing near it. She had been warned by Perrin, in his calm civil voice, that a guest who slept with a window ajar would wake rather lighter than she went to bed. She knew perfectly well what she was doing.

Let it, she thought. Let it come.

She walked.

She went up the long slope behind the keep, where the glass snow lay in great shining waves. It crunched under her boots with a sound like crushed sugar. The castle fell away behind her. She walked until the lights of it were small, and the broken towers black against the stars, and the only sound in the world was her own breath. At the top of a ridge she stopped, and turned, and sat down.

The castle stood below her, in its valley of light.

It was so lovely. She hadn't known. In the daytime it was a ruin, all splinters and gaps. But under the moon the missing windows glittered like jewels, and the spires rose up into the dark like a crown of ice, and a faint pale breath hung about the roofs like steam from a sleeping horse. It looked like something in a story. It looked like a place where a girl might go, and be happy, and not come back.

I could stay here, she thought. Forever. All I'd have to do is not get up.

She took out the gray book.

…

She read it by moonlight.

It was an odd thing to do. The letters were small and blue-black, and her fingers were numb, and she had to hold the pages close to her face. But she turned them one by one, slowly, from the beginning, and read what she had written in her own hand.

My name is Elowen. My father is Thomas. He brews plum wine in October. He is bad at lying.

I lost the color of my father's eyes in the second week.

Today I could not see my mother's face. But I remember her hands.

Elodie knew the end of the song. Where did she learn it?

She read the list of the neighbors, in order of their quarrels. She read the line about the gander. She read, in letters that shook, the oath on the first page: I am here to find my sister. I will find her. I will not forget her. She read all of it, to the end, and then turned back to the beginning and read it again.

When she had finished, she sat for a long time with the book open on her lap.

Well, she thought. I did.

It was true. She had. She'd walked through fog, and wrestled a reflection, and climbed a mountain. She had found her sister. She had stood in a chamber at the heart of the world and held a cold glass hand. She had done the thing she'd come to do, and she was still here, with a sore throat and a broken heart and a pocketful of ink.

So why are you still here?

It was not a question she had let herself ask. It had been lying there for days, like a stone in a shoe. She was a practical girl. She had not walked six months across a country in winter to sit on a hill and look at the moon. She had come to find Elodie, and she had found her. And Elodie could not be brought out. Not yet. Not without the house coming down.

So she could go home. She could pack her bag in the morning and walk to the Tunnel. She would lose a few more things on the way. Her mother's voice, perhaps. The name of the village. But she would come out, in the end, with her father's plum wine in her pack and a box that played a tune that was missing a note. She would tell them that Elodie was safe. She'd tell them that she had chosen. She would sit in a kitchen with a blue-checked cloth, and be sensible, and do the washing.

That's what you'd do. That's what you always do.

Why don't you?

The answer was so plain that it frightened her.

Because I don't want to.

She sat very still.

Because I don't want to go home. Because I'd rather be in a wrecked house with a man who can't touch me. Because I'd rather ache here than be comfortable there. She pressed her hand against her mouth. Because it's him.

It was not an escape. She saw that at once, and with a rush of something like relief. It was not a hiding place, or a rest, or a door in a mountain. She had not come to stop. She had come to go on. She'd been moving since the night she left her house, and she'd never stopped. She was cold, and tired, and frightened, and in love, and it was the most alive she'd ever been.

That's the difference. That's what Dee meant.

She laughed, out loud, in the empty snow. The sound was thin and glad and cracked.

"You're not the same," she said, to her sister, to the sky. "I'm not you. I'm not."

And the snow in front of her stirred.

…

It rose out of the drift like breath off a pond.

She had seen it before. She had seen it in a bedroom mirror, and in a storm-battered gallery. She had seen a hundred of it in a corridor, with their faces turned to follow her. But she had never seen it outside, in the open, in the moonlight, with the glass snow swirling up around its feet like a skirt.

It stood a pace from her, on the slope, and looked down.

It was herself. It was herself as she would have been, if she'd been allowed to rest: smooth-faced, rested, serene. Her hair was brushed. Her coat was clean. The bandage on her arm had gone, and the dark shadows under her eyes, and the lines at the corners of her mouth. She looked about twelve years old. She looked like a girl who had never once been afraid.

"Hello," said the Echo.

Its voice was her own. It was higher, and sweeter, and without the rasp. "You've been crying."

"A bit."

"It's cold out here."

"I know."

"You'll catch your death." It knelt in the snow, with a rustle of gray wool, and looked into her face. It had light-brown eyes, and they were kind. "May I sit with you?"

"I don't suppose I can stop you."

"I wouldn't if you said no." The Echo settled beside her, its knees drawn up, its hands wrapped round them. "I don't do anything you don't let me. That's the thing nobody understands. I only take what you give."

She did not answer. She was watching her breath go up between them.

"You're so tired," said the Echo gently.

"Yes."

"Everyone's been taking from you. Your mother. Your father. Elodie, most of all. She went away and left you a box. And he said that dreadful thing in the gallery. Did you see his face? He was enjoying it." The voice was soft and sorrowing. "You don't deserve any of it, you know. You've been so good. You've been so patient. And all anyone's ever done is ask for more."

"That's not quite—"

"I could take it from you."

She turned her head.

The Echo was looking at her with its head tilted, calm and affectionate, as one looks at a favorite child. "It's very easy," it said. "I do it all the time. It doesn't hurt. You just give it to me, the whole weight of it: the chair, and the note, and the dreadful things he said. And I'll carry it. I'm very strong. I've carried a lot." It smiled. "You could be so light."

She felt it. That was the horror. She felt the tug in her chest, the gentle seductive pull, like a hand that offers to take a heavy pack. It would be so easy. She would put it down. She would never feel the ache again. She'd walk back into the castle with a clear head and an open face and say good morning, and none of it would hurt.

"And I'll give you something," said the Echo, very low.

"What?"

"I've got your dog."

The wind did not blow. The stars did not move. The whole slope held its breath.

"I have his name," said the girl in the snow. "I've been keeping it for you. It's very safe. I'd hate for it to get lost." Her eyes were enormous and tender. "You could have it back. Tonight. All you have to do is give me Elodie. Just the pain of her. Just the bit that hurts."

Elowen did not speak. She sat with her hands in her lap, and the tears ran down her face, and the glass snow glittered in the moon.

The dog's name, she thought. His name.

She remembered a ginger-brown flash across a field. She remembered the weight of him on her feet. She remembered the way he'd looked at her, with his ears pricked, when she came home in the dusk. She remembered it all but the word. And the word was there, a hand's breadth away, in a pair of smooth white palms. She wanted it so much that her whole body ached.

And she looked at the girl beside her, and the clean unlined face, and the serene brow. And she thought about what she was being offered: not the dog. The peace. The freedom to look at her sister's glass face and feel nothing at all.

"No," said Elowen.

…

The Echo's smile did not change.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said no." She wiped her face. "It's kind of you. But no."

"You'll lose it anyway."

"I know."

"The snow takes everything. You said so yourself. In a month, in a year, it will have your mother and your father and your sister's voice. You won't remember what she looked like. You won't remember that you cried."

"Then I'll have lost it having felt it."

"What good is that?"

"I don't know." She said it slowly. "I don't know what good it is. But it's mine. It's the only thing that is. Every other bit of me the Land can have. The names and the colors and the smell of bread." Her voice shook. "But not that. Not what it cost. If I give you the grief, then I've lost the reason for it. I'd be a girl who had a sister and doesn't mind. And I'd rather mind."

"That's foolish."

"Probably."

"You'll be unhappy."

"Yes." She laughed, wetly. "I think that's rather the point. If you can't be unhappy, you can't be anything. That's what she forgot. That's what he forgot. You can't keep the good and throw out the pain. They come in the same box." She turned to face the thing in the snow. "Thank you. I mean it. You've been very patient. But I'm not giving you Elodie. And I'm not giving you him. And I'm not giving you the bit of me that knows what it cost."

The Echo looked at her for a long time.

Slowly, the smile left its face. It did not become cruel. It was worse than that. It became wistful. It was the look of a child who has been told that its friend is not coming to play.

"I only wanted to help," it said.

"I know."

"I'm very lonely."

"I know that, too." She put out a hand, and stopped. "I'm sorry. I'd hold you if I could."

"No you wouldn't."

"No," she admitted. "I'd probably scream."

The Echo laughed. It was her own laugh, high and startled, and it rang across the empty hill. Then it rose, slowly, and stood in the moonlight with its hands at its sides and its clean face lifted to the stars.

"Goodnight, then," it said. "I'll be here."

It dissolved. It did not fade, or melt, or vanish. It simply came apart, flake by flake, into the glass snow, and the snow lifted it on the air and carried it away across the slope in a long, soft, silver drift.

She sat alone in the dark, and shook.

…

It was a long while before she could stand.

Her legs had gone to stone. She had to take hold of her own knee and drag herself up by it, and for a moment, standing on the ridge with the stars wheeling overhead, she thought she might fall. She was so cold. The cold had got into her bones. She could feel the Land nibbling at the edges of her, all along the line of her coat, patient and tender and hungry.

She did not know what she had lost. She'd find out in the morning.

She turned to go.

She had thought it would be dark, down in the valley. She'd been dreading the descent, the long slither through the drifts, the groping toward the castle by the light of the stars. But as she turned, she saw something that stopped her where she stood.

There was a light.

It was a single window, high in the east tower. It was small and yellow and warm, a square of gold in the dark face of the keep, and it burned steadily, without a flicker, like a lamp left on for a traveler. It was her own window. She would have known it anywhere. She had left no candle there. There was no one in the room.

But it was lit.

And as she stood and looked at it, with the snow glittering round her feet and the Land holding its breath, she saw a second window kindle beneath it. And a third. And a fourth. They lit one after another down the length of the tower, floor by floor, in a slow glowing stair, until a whole slender ladder of gold ran from the roof to the ground.

It was a path. It was a road, laid out in light across the slope. It ran right up to the great doors.

It looked, she thought, with a sudden sweet ache that nearly brought her to her knees, exactly like a house that was waiting up.

"All right," said Elowen, to the dark, to the stars, to the thing that lived in the walls. Her voice cracked, and steadied. "All right. I'm coming."

She started down the hill.