A Board with Too Many Pieces

She found out what the hill had cost her at breakfast, and she did not tell anyone until the porridge was gone.

It was a small thing. It came to her as she was blowing on a spoonful, thinking of nothing, listening to Perrin hum under his breath over the stove. She heard him laugh at something, a thin dry glassy chuckle, like a spoon tapped against a cup, and she thought: Papa laughs like that. Papa laughs like... And reached.

There was nothing there.

She knew he had laughed. She knew that he had a laugh. She could have told you that it was loud, and rather high, and that it started in his belly and came out through his nose like a kettle. She could have described it. But when she tried to hear it, the actual sound, she got only a smooth gray quiet, like the inside of a shell.

She put down the spoon.

"What is it?" said Casimir.

He was sitting across the table from her in the stone cellar, in a stray gleam of light from the high window. He had made the effort to be solid. It cost him; she could see it in the strain of his shoulders. He wore the shape of a man in a dark close-buttoned coat, with his hair falling over his brow, and he had put a cup of tea in front of him that he was not going to drink, because he had read that this was how people looked when they were being company.

"Nothing," said Elowen.

"You have gone white."

"I'm fine."

"You keep your left hand in your pocket when you are lying."

She took her left hand out of her pocket. She looked at it. She laughed, shakily, and set it on the table.

"My father's laugh," she said. "It's gone. I had it yesterday. I think it was the hill."

"Ah."

He said nothing more. He did not need to. He sat looking at her, with all the warmth and horror and tenderness that a face made of splinters can hold, and then he laid his own hand flat on the table, six inches from hers, as a man does who is trying to say I am here without making a sound.

She wrote it in the gray book. She put the date. She underlined it once.

"It's all right," she said. "It's only a laugh. I've still got him."

"Elowen."

"I have." She raised her chin. "I'll tell you something. I used to think the worst thing in the world was losing someone. Dying, or leaving. And I think it's actually this. Standing in the same room and not knowing how they sound." She breathed out. "So I know what it costs. I'm not guessing. I've paid a bit of it already."

"That," said Casimir, very low, "is the argument against."

"No. It's the argument for." She met his eyes. "I know what a memory is worth. I'm not going to throw them about. But I'd rather lose all of them in a good cause than a few at a time for nothing."

…

They laid it out on the table like a campaign.

Perrin brought paper. He brought a ruler, and four colors of ink, and a lamp, and an expression of enormous satisfaction. He was, she realized, thoroughly enjoying himself. He had been three hundred years a steward in a house where nothing ever happened, and now that something had, he was drawing arrows. He sat at the end of the table with his bound wrist propped on a cushion and a quill in his good hand, and wrote, in a fine slanting script, a heading at the top of the sheet.

THE PROBLEM.

"I propose," said Perrin, "that we take it in order."

"Naturally," said Casimir.

"First. The house cannot stand. We know this. The cracks have begun to run of their own accord. The Great Mirror split from crown to floor last night, and has not mended. I have been through the east tower this morning and I count thirty-one new lines in the walls." He underlined thirty-one. "At the present rate, I should say we have a week. It might be less."

"A week," said Elowen.

"It is a guess."

"It's a good one." She was looking at the paper. "And the Land?"

"The Land is angry. You will have felt it. The snow is thicker. The Echoes are bolder. I saw three in the kitchen yesterday, pressed up against the pot." Perrin's mouth tightened. "They are not what they were. They are hungry, miss. And they have a great deal more to be hungry for, now that the glass is broken."

"They want to be remembered."

"They want to be whole."

She nodded slowly. She thought about a smooth, clean, kind-eyed girl on a hill. I'll be here.

"Second," said Perrin, and underlined it. "The cure. Such as it is. We know the rule of the weaving. We know the sort of cost. What we do not know is the means."

"The verse," said Elowen.

"Just so."

She had been thinking of it all morning. It was in the book, in the diary, on the lips of a glass woman in a pillar. He taught me the verse. The one that was left out. I think it's a key. She had been through the evidence like a clerk through a ledger. The song was the lady's. The verse was the last line of it, the one she'd sung as the house turned to crystal. It had been missing from every cradle in Scenery Chalk for three centuries. It was in Elodie's dreams, and in the pitch of a note that Casimir sang without words. It was the end of the wish. It had to be.

"The verse is the way to unmake it," she said slowly. "Or to finish it. I don't know which. But whatever we do, we do it with that. It's the thread. If I sing the whole song, with the last verse, while I'm weaving a heart, then it'll... take. It'll hold. It'll be the pattern."

"That is my own reading," said Perrin.

"And Elodie has the words."

"Yes."

"Casimir doesn't."

"I have the tune." He turned his cup. "I have a single note. A shape. I could hum you the whole of the melody, I think, if I tried. But the words are not in me. They have never been. It is as if the lady sang them, and the house heard them, and they went into the walls and could not be got out again." He shook his head. "Your sister had them in a dream. She carried them in her blood. She said them to me one night, in the hall, and I did not understand a syllable."

"What did they say?"

"I have no idea. They were in no tongue I know." His eyes were distant. "I remember only that they were the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard. And that when she finished, I wept for an hour, and did not know why."

Elowen was silent.

"So we need Elodie," she said.

"We need Miss Elodie awake," said Perrin. "For longer than a minute. And in a state to speak. I do not know whether that can be managed. She is the keystone. If she rouses, the walls rouse with her."

"And if she does not?"

"Then we have a very pretty tune, miss, and nothing to put to it."

…

"There's a third thing," said Casimir.

He had said very little, until then. He had sat with his hands folded, watching Perrin write. But there was a note in his voice now that made them both turn.

"Third," said Perrin. "Yes?"

"The cost." He lifted his eyes. "I wish it written down. I wish it said plainly, in this room, before we go any further. What is to be asked of her."

"We do not know."

"Then write we do not know."

Perrin wrote it. The quill scratched.

"And write this beneath," said Casimir. "That I do not consent."

The cellar went quiet.

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

"I do not consent. It is, I believe, a form of words." He drew a long breath. "If the cost is a thread of memory, I will not take it. If it is a dozen, I will not take them. If it is all that she has, I would rather stay as I am, and be a wall for another three hundred years. I will not be made at that price."

"Casimir," said Elowen.

"It is not yours to give."

"It's mine to give however I like."

"Then I refuse the gift."

"You can't refuse it. It isn't yours." She was on her feet. "That's what together means. You said it. You sat on that stair and you said you'd choose with me. You didn't say you'd choose over me. Do you think I'm a fool? Do you think I haven't added it up?"

"I think you are brave."

"That's different."

"It is not, in your case." He had risen too. The light in him had flared, a bright thin blaze around the edges, like a flame in a draft. "I know you, Elowen. I know what you will do. You will say that it is worth it. You will say that you will manage. You will give me a memory, and then another, and another, a little at a time, because I am sick and you are strong. And one morning I will wake, in a body I do not know how to use, and look for you, and you will not know my name."

"That isn't going to happen."

"It has happened to others."

"Not to me!"

"Especially to you." The word cracked. "I have watched the Land take better people than either of us. I have watched your sister go into a pillar. I will not stand by while you walk into the same fire."

"It isn't the same!"

"It is exactly the same!"

They stood glaring at each other across a table covered in arrows. Perrin sat very still at the end of it, with his quill raised, wearing the expression of a man who has just been made the unwilling witness of a marriage.

"May I observe," he said, to the ceiling, "that the two of you are arguing about the same thing from opposite ends?"

"Be quiet, Perrin," said Casimir.

"Yes, sir."

"He's right," said Elowen.

"I know he is."

"You want to protect me."

"Yes."

"And I want to protect you."

"Yes."

"And neither of us is going to give an inch."

"No," said Casimir. He sat down heavily. "I am afraid that is the fault of your hair."

She stared at him. "What?"

"It is red. In certain lights. I should have known."

She burst out laughing. She could not help it. She sat down on the bench with her hands over her face and her shoulders shaking, and after a moment she felt, through the gap between her fingers, a warm wash of light, and knew that he was laughing too.

…

It was Perrin who heard it first.

He sat up straight, in the middle of a sentence, and the quill dropped from his fingers and rolled across the table. His glass hair went still. His head tilted a fraction, like a dog's, listening.

"What is it?" said Elowen.

"Sh."

They sat. The lamp hissed. Somewhere in the dim vaults above them, through three floors of stone and crystal, there was a sound. It was very faint. It was not a crack, or a groan, or a footstep. It was a sound like a bell struck with a feather, a pure, high, shuddering note that she felt in her back teeth.

Casimir had gone rigid.

"The west wing," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"It is one of them."

"I believe so."

"Which?" She was on her feet again. "Which one? What's happening?"

He didn't answer. He stood with his eyes closed, his face turned up, his hands open at his sides. And she saw his lips move, soundlessly, as though counting. She saw the silver lines on his wrists brighten and darken in time with that thin sweet ringing.

"It is the laughing woman," said Casimir at last.

His voice was strange.

"The one by the door. She was the first. She came here ninety years ago, with a bottle of wine and a broken heart, and asked me to let her stay. I said yes. I liked her." He opened his eyes. "She has been laughing for ninety years. I used to go and listen to her."

"What's happened to her?"

"She is cracking."

It rang through the house like the toll of a distant bell. And as they stood there, mute, in the lamplight, it came again. And again, a little louder. A little nearer. Another note joined it. A second voice, higher, then a third, until the whole house was ringing softly with it, a vast, delicate, tremulous chime, like a thousand glasses touching all at once, a long way off, in the dark.

"It is starting," said Perrin quietly.

"How long?" said Elowen.

"I do not know, miss."

"How long?"

"Not a week," said the steward. He took up the quill. His hand was shaking. "I think we must say, rather less."

On the table before them, the arrows lay in their four colors, neat and bright and fine. She looked at them. She looked at the man beside her, with his splintered hair and his grave gray eyes. She looked at her own left hand, lying open on the table, which had held a laugh yesterday and did not now.

Right, thought Elowen. Then we'd better begin.