The Door Left Open

He was waiting on the threshold, which she should have expected, and which broke her heart anyway.

The great doors stood open to the night. The road of lit windows ran up the slope to the sill, and at the end of it, in the arch, where she had once knelt in the snow with her hand on the glass and begged for a way in, there was a figure. It was made of moonlight and splinters. It had its hands clasped behind it, and its head bent, and it wore the look of a man who has been standing a long time in the wrong weather and does not intend to move.

She stopped at the foot of the steps.

They looked at each other.

The night was very still. The glass snow shone under her boots. Behind him, through the arch, she could see the wreck of the hall, and the dim glow of the lamps that Perrin had lit along its length, and the long crack in the Great Mirror at the far end, silver in the dark like a seam of ore.

"I thought you might not come back," said Casimir.

"I thought about it."

"For how long?"

"About an hour." She came up two steps. "It turned out to be a very uncomfortable hill."

His mouth moved. It was not a smile. It was the place a smile would have been, in a man who had lost the habit. "I should like to tell you that I did not follow."

"You lit the windows."

"I did. That was all. I swear it. I kept to the walls." He bowed his head. "I could not have borne to be outside them and not have you know. But I could not have borne to take the choice from you either. So I made a road. And I stood here, and I waited."

"Like a dog."

"Like a house."

She laughed. It hurt. It came up out of her like a cough, and she put a hand to her side and bent over, and when she straightened her eyes were running and she was grinning like a fool.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," said Elowen.

"I am aware."

"You're not supposed to joke. I'm supposed to be furious."

"Are you?"

"Terribly." She wiped her face. "I'll let you know when it comes back."

…

They sat on the steps.

It was a thing they'd never done. For a month they had talked across glass, and in halls, and through the wide cold air of a hundred rooms. But they sat now on the broad white stairs of the great front door, with the moon on the snow and the road of windows glowing behind them, and for the first time there was nothing between them but a hand's breadth of night. She did not touch him. He did not touch her. She drew her knees up, and wrapped her arms round them, and he sat with his hands on his own, as stiff and careful as a boy at church.

"I was cruel," said Casimir.

"Yes."

"I said that you had been useful."

"You did."

"I said it because I was afraid, and I wished to hurt you before you could hurt me." He spoke slowly, as though reading from a book he had written in a hurry. "I want you to know that I know that. I have gone over it a hundred times. I have taken every word apart. And I find that I meant almost none of it. I meant that I was terrified."

"Some of it was true."

"Elowen—"

"Some of it was." She turned her head. "I do like to mend things. I always have. You were right. It's why I carried the basket, and it's why Dee looked after me. She was the one who made messes, and I was the one who sorted them out." Her mouth twisted. "And I think I did come looking for someone to need me. I hadn't had it since Elodie left. I didn't know how much I missed it."

"That is not a crime."

"No. But it isn't all of it, either." She looked at her hands. "I want to say it plainly, because I think we've both been lying a bit. I came here for my sister. And I stayed for a lot of reasons. Some of them were silly. Some of them weren't very good. And then, somewhere along the way, I stopped staying for reasons at all." She breathed in. "I'm just here. Because it's you."

He did not move. The light in him had gone very still.

"I should have told you about Perrin," said Elowen. "The minute I knew. Not in the morning. Not when I'd had time. I swore it with a thread round my wrist, and I let a night go by. I'm sorry."

"It was a night."

"It was your night."

"Then I forgive it." He lifted his head. "And I ask you to forgive the other."

"I already have."

"You went up a hill in the dark."

"I forgave you somewhere around the top." She smiled, shakily. "It was a long climb."

…

Perrin had made tea. Of course he had.

He had been waiting in the old stone cellar behind the kitchens, where the last of the herbs hung from the rafters and the embers were coaxed back to life in the grate, and when the two of them came down the passage in the small hours, a girl with snow in her hair and a shimmer of light at her heels, he looked up from the pot and said, "Ah," in a voice so full of private relief that she nearly burst into tears again.

He had set out three cups. He had found a fourth, chipped, and put it at the end, with a saucer. He poured, and handed round the bread, and then sat himself on an upturned barrel with his bound wrist in his lap and his long glass face composed.

"I have been thinking," he said.

"That makes a change," said Casimir.

"I take that as the warmest of welcomes, sir." The steward inclined his head. "I have been thinking, as I sat here, about what is to be done. It is not, I fear, a problem which will keep. Miss Elowen has made a very reasonable discovery. And the master has drawn a very reasonable conclusion. But I do not think that either of them has laid out the whole of the board."

"Then lay it out," said Elowen.

"Gladly." Perrin set down his cup. "There are, so far as I can see, two roads."

He held up a finger.

"The first is the road we know. The master remains what he is. The house stands. The wish holds. The Land goes on as it has gone for three hundred years, taking whatever comes into it, and keeping it." His voice was dry. "The cracks may be mended, with care. There is, I believe, a method. A person with the fire may hold them shut, as Miss Elodie did. It is a great labor, and it requires the whole of the weaver's attention, and she will in time become what Miss Elodie has become."

Elowen put down her bread.

"A keystone," she said.

"Another one. Yes."

"So that's the first road. Casimir stays a house, and I stay a pillar."

"Or you go home," said Perrin, with a gentleness that made it worse. "That is also a possibility. You would go home, and the master would be as he was, and the Land would take another traveler in the autumn."

"No."

"I thought not."

The second finger went up.

"The second road is the one you have found. The master becomes what he is becoming. A man. A whole one, with a body and a pulse." He paused. "And I will tell you what I know of that, which is very little. There is a rule of weaving. Miss Elowen knows it already. A warmth that is meant to pass costs the weaver a mood. A warmth that is meant to last, costs a thread of memory. And a thing that is meant to live—"

"Costs more," said Elowen quietly.

"Yes."

"How much more?"

"I do not know." The steward spread his hand. "I have thought, and I have thought. I was there, you understand, in the beginning. I watched the lady weave. She did not stop at a thread. She gave everything she had. All of it. Her name. Her husband's face. The road to her mother's house. When the house was done, she had nothing left. She sang the last of her song, and went out into the snow, and I did not see her again." He looked at his hands. "I have always thought she did not know how to stop."

Nobody spoke. The embers settled in the grate.

"I do not say that you would need to give all," said Perrin. "Her wish was larger than the one you would be making. She was weaving a country. You would be weaving a man. It might take a handful of memories. It might take a dozen. It might take, I fear, the lot." He met her eyes. "I should not like to guess. I would only say that you must be sure."

"What about Elodie?" said Casimir. His voice had gone harsh. "What of the others?"

"If the master becomes a man, the house falls. The wish ends. The Land is no longer held." Perrin hesitated. "And the ones he has kept, I believe, will be freed. They are held by his will. When it is gone..." He stopped. "But I do not know, sir. Nobody has ever undone a wish. I cannot say whether they will wake, or whether they will crumble. I cannot say what Miss Elodie will be, when the pillar goes. I can say only that she is the keystone, and that she is, at this moment, as good as the last stone in an arch."

"So it all depends on me," said Elowen.

"It depends on all of you, miss." He bowed. "That is the difficulty. It always has."

…

They did not speak for some time.

She sat with the cup between her hands. It had gone cold. She watched the light of the embers move on the stones, red and gold and deep rose, and thought about Calder's field, and the plum trees, and a girl in a periwinkle shawl. She thought of a cold glass cheek, and a pearl of water that would not fall. She thought of a mother in a high white room, and a thin small hand in hers, and the awful, bottomless generosity of a woman who had given everything she had to a child who was already dead.

I'd do it, she thought. I know I would. If I had to.

She wasn't sure whether the thought frightened her or steadied her. She thought it did both.

"It is not only yours," said Casimir.

She glanced up.

He was sitting on a barrel across the hearth, a pale glimmering shape in the firelight, with his hands in his lap. He was looking at her with great steadiness. All the fear had gone out of his face, and what was left was something simpler and grayer and more resolute.

"It is not yours alone to choose," he said. "I want that to be understood. I am not a prize. I am not a thing to be won at the cost of your whole life. I am the one who is to be born, or not. I have a say."

"Of course you do."

"Then I shall say it." He drew a breath. "I do not know yet what I want. I cannot tell you. I have been a house for three hundred years, and I have only been a man for a month, and I do not know which I should prefer. I know that I am afraid of both. I know that I am afraid of dying, and of staying, and of what each would do to you." His voice shook. "But I know one thing. I will not decide it for you. Not again. I have done that to too many people."

"Casimir—"

"Let me finish." He leaned forward. His hand came out, slowly, across the space between them, and stopped in the air above the hearthstone, an inch from hers. She could see the green thread on his wrist. She could see the fine silver cracks that ran up the back of it, bright in the firelight like a map of rivers.

"Whatever we choose," said Casimir, "we shall choose it together. I will not choose for you. I will not let you choose for me. If it is to be the first road, I shall stay. If it is the second, I shall go. If it is some third thing that no one has thought of, we shall find it. But it will be ours."

She looked at his hand. She looked at her own.

She had a wool glove in her pocket, one of the cut-off ones that Perrin had found her. She drew it out, and pulled it onto her right hand, and flexed the fingers. It was thick and gray and a little frayed. It was the thinnest layer she possessed.

Then she laid her hand in his.

It was the first time. There was a layer of wool between them, and a world of difference. She felt his palm close over hers, light as a breath, and cool, and impossibly careful. She felt each of his fingers settle in turn across the back of her hand. She felt the faint, fine tremor that ran through all of him, and the slow, steady, wondering weight of a hand that had never held anything before.

It did not crack.

She had thought that it would. She had braced for it. But the glass was warm under her palm, and still, and the only sound in the cellar was the soft tick of a dying ember and a small, shaken, joyful breath from Perrin's barrel.

"Whichever way we go," said Casimir, in a voice she had to lean in to hear, "I shall choose with you. Not for you." He swallowed. "Together."

"Together," said Elowen.

And she held on.