What a Wish Can Still Do

She fell asleep at the table, over the arrows, with her cheek on her folded arms and a smear of blue ink along her jaw.

He had not woken her. He'd stood over her for a long time, in the gray after-midnight, in the cold stone cellar where the lamp had burned down to a blue bead. He had listened to her breathe. It was a small, slow, regular sound, a little rough at the end of each exhalation, like a saw drawn through soft wood. He had learned it by heart. He knew it better than the ticking of his own walls. He knew when it caught, which was when she dreamed of the fog, and when it sighed, which was when she dreamed of home.

Papa, she had murmured once, and frowned. And then, very faintly, in her sleep: What did he sound like?

He had made himself not hear it.

Perrin had gone up an hour ago, with the candle, in the manner of a man withdrawing from a room where two people are about to say something they should not have an audience for. He had paused at the stair. He'd looked at Casimir, over his shoulder, in the dark, and said nothing at all. It had been a very long look. It had had three hundred years in it.

He knows, thought Casimir. Of course he does. He is the first thing I ever made.

He sat down on the floor beside her chair, with his back against the stone, and looked at the dying lamp.

…

It was not a sudden decision.

That was what he would have liked her to know, if there had been any means of telling her. He had not woken in a fever, or stood in the moonlight with a sword. He had simply gone over it, and over it, as he had once gone over the cracks in his own arm. He'd taken it apart and put it together. He'd laid the pieces side by side. And in the end, with the clarity of a man balancing a ledger, he had arrived at a sum.

She will give everything.

That was the first line. He knew it as he knew the number of steps in the east tower. She would stand before the pillar with her hands out, and sing, and pour her fire into a lump of crystal until there was nothing left but a woman who did not know her own name. She would say it was a fair price. She would smile at him. She would say, It's only a laugh, and It's only a smell, and It's only my mother's face, with her chin up, and her fists clenched, and her pockets full of plums.

And he'd let her. That was the second line. He would let her, because he was weak, and because he was tired, and because there is no creature in the world more selfish than a man who has just been taught to want.

And at the end of it, said the third line, quietly, I should be a boy of twenty-five on a mountainside in the snow, with a heart that has never beaten, and she would be a girl with no past, standing beside me, and neither of us would know the other.

He closed his eyes.

There was another way.

It had come to him in the middle of the argument. It had arrived, as true things sometimes do, in the space between two sentences, while he was shouting at her about the fault of her hair. It had been there for some time before he looked at it. It was very simple. It was so simple that he'd laughed.

A wish that is granted ends.

That was all. That was the whole of it. A wish is a want, and a want, once satisfied, has no more to say. It does not need to be fought, or paid for, or made into a man. It needs only to be finished. The mother had wished that nothing of the boy be lost. And nothing had been. For three hundred years, not a hair of him, not a freckle, not a memory had gone astray. The wish had done what it was made to do. It had no more work to do. It was only that no one had told it to stop.

She never knew how, Perrin had said. She went out into the snow.

He could tell it.

He could stand in the center of his own heart, in the room where the pillar stood, and say to the whole of himself: It is enough. He could say it to the glass, and the snow, and the Land. He could say: You have kept him. You have kept him well. You may let go. And the wish, if it were a wish, would hear him. It would open its hands.

And the Land would stop. And the house would fall. And the ones who were kept would be freed, or would not; he did not know; but at the least their stillness would end. The statues would crack, one by one. Elodie would wake, or would not. The Echoes would drift home like leaves.

And he would be gone.

He thought about that. He turned it over, with some care, as one examines a coin. He found that he did not mind it as much as he had expected. It was not death, precisely. He did not know what it was. It was the end of a long sentence. It was the full stop at the foot of a page.

It costs only me.

That was the thing. That was the thing that decided it. She would give a hundred memories to make him a man. He would give the one thing he had, which was himself, and it would cost her nothing. She would wake in the morning to an empty house, and weep, and be angry, and in time, perhaps, forgive. She would take her sister home. She'd go back to the plum trees, and her father, and the quiet kitchen. She would keep her name.

He thought: It is the only gift I have ever given anyone that did not have a hook in it.

He looked at her sleeping face.

…

She stirred.

She made a small sound, and turned her head on her arm, and the lamplight slid over the line of her cheek. A strand of hair had come loose from the braid and lay across her mouth. It lifted a little with each breath.

He did not touch it. He had a hand, or the shape of one. He could have brushed it back. But he knew now, with a clarity that was almost happiness, that if he laid so much as a finger on her cheek he would not be able to do what he meant to do. He would break. He would stay. He would sit by this chair until the house fell on them both.

I promised, he thought. Together. I swore it on the steps.

It was true. He had. He would be forsworn.

He had been forsworn before. He had said to a girl in a periwinkle shawl, No, it is nothing. He had said to a woman with a notebook, Stay. He'd told a hundred half-truths in a hundred nights. It was strange: he had thought that he was an honest man. He had been telling the truth, he supposed, as a house tells it: by saying nothing and leaving the doors open. Now he was going to break his word for the first time in his life, to the only person he had ever wished to keep it to.

She will hate me.

Good.

It was a mean, thin, cold little thought, and he held it close. Let her hate me. She will go home. She will live. A woman who is angry is a woman who is alive. And he thought of a gallery, and a dark pane, and a voice saying coward, and he smiled, and the smile hurt.

I am sorry, Elowen, he thought. I find that I am not brave. I find that I am only fond.

He rose.

…

He wrote her a letter.

He had never done it before. He was, he found, rather bad at it. He tried a dozen times. He tried the frost on the cellar window, with the tip of a finger that was not quite a finger, and the letters came out stiff and tall, like a row of pines. He rubbed them out. He tried again.

Forgive me.

That was the first line. It seemed to him adequate, as a beginning.

I have broken my word, and I will not pretend that I have a reason that is good enough. I have only one that is mine. You were willing to give everything. I am not willing to take it.

He stopped. He considered. He breathed on the glass, and the frost thickened, and he went on.

Of all the things I have held in three hundred years, you are the only one I did not hold. I did not know that this was a difference until I had met you. I think it is the whole of what I have learned.

Take your sister home. Take Perrin, if he will go. Walk out through the Tunnel in the morning, and do not look back. The Land will not touch you. I will see to that.

You asked me to tell you the truth. Here it is. It is the only time I have ever said it without being afraid.

The frost trembled on the glass.

It was a very good rug.

He stood back.

It would do. It was not a masterpiece. But it was his, and it was honest, and when the light came up over the hills it would be there on the window of the east tower, in her own room, where she would see it as soon as she woke. It was written in his own breath. It would last until the sun touched it.

He did not write the other word. It had come to him, a dozen times, and he had put it from him. He did not have the right. He would not leave her a thing like that to carry. It would be a burden, and a hook. He had learned, at the last, the difference between giving a thing and keeping it.

Perhaps in some other life, he thought, I shall say it to her face.

…

He began with the mirrors.

It was the part he had dreaded most, though it was also the simplest. There were not many left. The storm had broken so many. But the ones that remained were the ones he loved best, the dark windows that gave back the moon, the long pane on the east landing, the small round glass in the corridor outside her room. He went to each of them, one by one, through the body of his own house, and laid his attention upon them, as one lays a hand upon a sleeping child. And he thought of the moment he had first known her in each.

The window of the great hall. She had stood there with a lamp in her hand and a smear of blood on her palm, and said, I'm sorry about the door.

The glass on the east landing. She had laughed at him, a high startled bark, on the night he told her he hated a dog.

The little round pane in the passage. He had watched her, here, when she did not know it: coming home at dawn with ink on her chin, a book under her arm, and a look of such fierce, private, exhausted satisfaction that his heart had stopped.

I loved you in this one, he thought. I loved you here. I just did not know the word.

He let go.

It went out like a lamp. It was the strangest sensation. It was not pain, or loss, or even sorrow. It was a slow quiet closing, like the lowering of an eyelid. The window dimmed. The moon faded in it, and the frost, and the edge of the frame, and then there was only a pane of black.

He felt the next.

He felt them all. He felt them go, one by one, as the candles in a great church are snuffed after the last mass: the east landing, the servants' stair, the library, the hall, the long dim gallery where she had sung her first song. Each one went dark with a soft small sigh. Each one took a piece of him with it, a flake, a splinter, a memory of a voice. He felt himself getting lighter. He felt himself thinning. He felt, quite distinctly, the first edge of the thing that he had been for so long begin to let go of the floor.

It is all right, he told the house. It is quite all right. You have done well.

The house sighed.

Go now. Go to sleep.

Far away, in the tower, in a pillar of crystal, something stirred and turned its face toward him, and he felt the old sad patient love of it, like a hand on his cheek.

Mam, said a very small voice, in the back of his head.

He did not know whose it was.

…

She woke with her heart pounding.

She did not know why. The cellar was dark, and cold, and quiet. The lamp had gone out. She sat bolt upright, with her face stiff from the table and her arm numb under her, and for a moment she could not remember where she was.

Then she remembered. And in the same moment, she knew that something was wrong.

It was the quiet. It was not the quiet of the house, which she knew well now, a ticking, shifting, murmuring stillness, full of small lives. It was an emptiness. It was the quiet of a room from which a clock has been taken.

"Casimir?"

Nothing.

"Perrin?"

She was on her feet and out of the cellar before she knew she'd moved. She ran up the stone passage, in the dark, with one hand on the wall. She came out into the main corridor, and the corridor was dim. It was the dimmest she had ever seen it. The lamps had burned low. The windows were black.

All of them. She stopped dead.

The windows were always silver at night. She had seen them a hundred times, glinting in the dark like fish scales, giving back the moon. But the tall pane at the end of the passage was only black. She went to it. She laid her palm on it, and it was cold, and blank, and flat as slate. It gave nothing back.

She turned. The round glass on the wall beside her, the one she had looked into every morning for a month, was dark too.

It was not broken. It was not shuttered. It had simply been put out, as one puts out a candle, and she stood in the empty hall with her hand against the cold blank face of it and understood that someone had gone away.

"No," whispered Elowen.

And she began to run.