The Weaving

The floor shook again, harder, and the whiteness cracked like an egg.

It did not shatter. It split along a hundred fine lines, as the glaze splits on an old plate, and through the cracks came a color she had not seen in the Dim Snow Land for six months: a thin, clean, pearl-pink light, the color of the inside of a shell. Dawn. It was coming through the roof of the world. Somewhere above them, miles of crystal were beginning to give way, and the groan of it ran down through the stones like the voice of a mountain waking.

"We have very little time," said Casimir.

"I know."

"It is the wish. It is letting go. It has begun to take the house with it." He was holding himself upright by effort, she saw, the flickering coat and the faint hands, the green thread on his wrist burning like a leaf. "I cannot hold the walls and this. I am sorry. I think I am going to have to ask you to be quick."

"I can be quick."

"You have never been quick in your life."

"I'll make an exception." She let go of his sleeve. She planted her feet on the ringing floor and took the music box from her pocket and set it on the ground between them. She took out the thread of silver and held it up, a spark in the dim light. She laid the gray book on top of the box, as a clerk lays down a seal.

She looked at him.

"Stand still," said Elowen. "And try not to be clever about it."

He smiled. It broke her heart.

"Where?" he said.

"Here."

She put her hand on his chest.

…

It was a plain gesture. She'd done it a hundred times, to a hundred animals. A calf, a sick lamb, a ewe in labor, the broad flat of the hand laid on the warm flank, to say, there now, hush, I'm here. She laid it now over his heart, on the dark cloth of his coat, and felt the cloth go thin under her palm, like breath on a pane.

There was nothing under it.

She had known there would not be. She had been told, on the cellar steps, by a steward with a broken wrist. But she was not prepared for how it felt. There was no beat, no warmth, no stir of breath. There was only a hollow, a sort of round quiet space the size of her fist, where a man's life should have been. It was cold as a well. It went down and down.

Under her hand, he trembled.

"Oh," said Casimir faintly. "That is very strange."

"Does it hurt?"

"No. It is only... I had not known it was so empty."

"Not for long."

She closed her eyes. She drew in a breath, all the way down, to the roots of her ribs. She felt the fire there, banked and waiting, as it had always been; the little hearth in the center of her that had warmed her mother's kitchen and her father's shed and a hundred cold mornings in a sloping bed. She did not call it. She asked it, as one asks a friend. Now, please. As much as I can spare.

It came.

It rose through her slowly, like sap in spring, gold and sweet and exact. It went out through her shoulder and her arm and the flat of her palm. She felt it pass into the cold hollow under her hand, and the hollow drank it. And she felt, at the same moment, the second thing, the thing she had been dreading: a gentle pull, from somewhere inside her, like a hand reaching for a thread in a skein.

There it is.

Here comes the price.

She opened her eyes, and began to sing.

…

She sang the first verse as she had always sung it.

Ember, ember, keep the night,

Hold it small and hold it bright.

It came out of her clear and low. The cracks in the white floor brightened. The gold light spilled from her hand over the front of his coat, and as it spread, she felt the first thing go.

It was not much. It was a smell: woodsmoke, and a wet wool shawl. It was the particular warm draft of a kitchen on a winter night, with a fire going and the door barred and the cat in the ashes. She was five. She was lying on a pallet by the stove. There was a hand on her forehead, broad, and floury, and warm. She felt it lift away.

Hush the wind and hush the snow,

Warm the dark where you must go.

She sang the second line, and her throat tightened, and she saw the thread that she had put on the floor, the thin silver filament of Elodie's stillness, rise from the boards in the air in front of her, and begin to turn. It spun like a drop of dew on a spider's web. It drew out. It lengthened, brightening, until it was a ribbon of moonlight as long as her arm, and it coiled round her wrist, and slid up her sleeve, and was gone.

It was in her now. She could feel it, cool and calm, like a hand at the small of her back.

"Elowen," said Casimir, very low. "You are losing it."

"I know."

"It is the song. I can hear it going. It is going out of your voice."

"It's all right."

"It is not all right!"

"It's the price." She smiled at him, shakily, through the tears. "I told you it'd be small. It's only a tune."

It's only a tune. She sang the third verse, and it was the strangest thing: she felt it unravel as she sang. It was like walking along a plank that was being taken up behind her. She knew the words. She knew them as she went. But the moment each was past, it fell away into nothing, and she could not have said what she had just sung.

She felt her mother's voice go. She felt the creak of a rocking chair. She felt a long gray afternoon in the Calders' barn, and Elodie's small cold hand, and the whisper in her ear, I know the rest of it. I'll sing you the rest of it. All of it, every evening of her childhood, every night with a quilt up to her chin, every hush and every kiss and every drowsy murmur, going out of her one by one, like lamps along a road.

She stopped.

She stood in the white, with her hand on his chest, and her mouth open. She did not know why.

"I... what was I..."

"Elowen," said Casimir.

She looked at him. She knew him, of course. She knew every line of his face. But she could not remember what she had been doing, or why she was holding him, or what the little brass box was that lay on the floor at her feet.

"There was a song," she said, bewildered.

"Yes."

"I had it a minute ago. It was..." She groped. "I can't find it. I can't find the end. It was something about a... an ember? Something about night? Oh, God. Oh, I can't find it."

And Casimir took her hand.

…

He did it with his free hand, the left. He lifted it and laid it over hers, on his own chest, and the fingers closed. It was the first time he had held her without a layer between, and it was cold, and trembling, and it was terrified.

"Ember, ember," said Casimir, in a shaking whisper, "keep the night."

She stared at him.

"Hold it small and hold it bright." His eyes were wet. "Hush the wind and hush the snow. Warm the dark where you must go." His voice cracked, and steadied, and went on. "I have it. Do you hear? I have it all. I have been listening to it for three hundred years. I know every word. I am going to hold it for you."

"You can't."

"I can. I am very good at it." A watery, trembling smile. "It is, I find, the one thing I was made for. Go on. Sing the last. Sing the one that is new. Do not worry about the rest. I shall carry it. I shall carry every note."

She was crying so hard she could hardly see.

"You'll... you'll give it back?"

"Every night," said Casimir. "For the rest of my life."

She laughed. It was a ragged, helpless, shaking laugh. She did not know why it was funny. She did not know what she had lost. She knew only that there was a man in front of her with his hand over hers, and his eyes on her face, and that he was holding something that she could not.

She looked at him. And it came to her, out of nowhere, that she knew the other thing.

It was not a tune. It was a language. It was an old, rough, rolling speech, full of hills and weather, and it lay in her like a seed in snow, quite untouched. The price had not reached it. Elodie had put it there, a new thing, a late thing, a verse the song had not yet had time to forget.

She breathed in.

She opened her mouth.

She sang the last verse.

…

Ember, ember, leave the night,

Go where the morning is bright.

What I held I hold no more:

Open, my heart. Open the door.

She did not sing it in English. She sang it in the old speech, that her sister had taught her through a pane of glass, and the words came out of her in a long slow tide of sound, soft and rough and golden. The meaning went into her like water. She understood each syllable as it left her. What I held I hold no more. It was not a spell. It was a prayer. It was a mother putting down a child that she had carried too long, and saying, very gently, go on.

The house heard it.

She felt it hear. The groan of the falling roof stopped. The cracks in the floor stilled. All around her, in the thin pearl light, the walls drew a long, slow, tremulous breath. And then the light came.

It started under her palm. A single bright point, no larger than a seed, in the center of the cold hollow where the heart should be. It glowed there, a clear, steady, rose-gold spark. It beat.

Thud.

She felt it come up through the bones of her wrist. She felt it in her teeth.

Thud.

It was so slow. It was so tentative. It was the beat of something that had never beaten and wasn't quite sure how, like a child learning to walk who puts out a foot and stares at it. She held her breath. She held her hand very still.

Thud. Thud.

It quickened. The seed of light swelled. It spread outward from her palm in veins of gold, in branching lines of fire, along the dark cloth of his coat and up his throat and out to his fingertips. And she saw, with a rush of wonder that nearly brought her to her knees, that they were not new. They were the cracks.

The silver lines that ran across his skin, the fine white threads he had counted every night, the seams that had frightened him so much, were filling with light. They glowed. They ran with gold like a map of rivers. They were not wounds. They had never been wounds. They were the places where the new thing was coming through, and it was beautiful. It was like watching the dawn find its way along a hundred cracks in a frozen pond.

"Casimir," she whispered.

He did not answer. He had thrown back his head. His eyes were open, enormous, filled with light, and his chest was rising. She saw it rise. She saw the cloth of his coat lift, and fall, and lift. He drew a breath, a long, shuddering, ragged breath, the first of his life, and it caught in his throat, and he coughed.

He coughed. And then he laughed.

…

It was not a graceful beginning.

He doubled over, wheezing, with both hands clasped to his chest, and the gold ran up and down him in waves. He staggered. He grabbed at her shoulder for balance and nearly pulled her over. He was coughing and laughing and weeping at once, in great gasping gulps, like a man pulled half-drowned out of a river, and she held him up with both arms and was laughing too, with the tears pouring down her face.

"It hurts," said Casimir.

"I know."

"It hurts so much. It is in my chest. It goes in and out." He stared down at his own hands. "They are heavy. Elowen, they are so heavy. I did not know they would be so heavy."

"Hands are."

"And I am cold." He said it in tones of the profoundest astonishment. "I am cold and I am hot and my feet are... my feet are there. They are at the end of my legs. It is the most extraordinary thing."

She wiped her face on her sleeve. She could not stop smiling.

He was changing. She saw it happen. The flicker went out of him. The faint glimmer of the shard and the splinter, the translucence, the edge of frost: it drew in, and settled, and thickened. His outline firmed. A faint color came up in his cheeks, wind-bitten and pink, and she saw the hairs of his brows and lashes, the first dark stubble along his jaw. His hair, which had been a drifting shadow, was thick and black and damp. His coat, from threadbare mist, became a coat: wool, heavy, patched at one elbow. He was a man, a tall thin tired man of five-and-twenty, with an enormous nose and a very good mouth, trembling on his feet.

He looked at her.

His eyes were gray. They were not the gray of ice. They were the gray of rain, and flint, and a pigeon's wing. They were the eyes of a human being, red-rimmed and bloodshot and wide with wonder. And they were looking at her as though she were the first thing he had ever seen.

"Oh," said Casimir. "There you are."

She could not speak.

"You are..." He lifted a hand. It shook. It hovered an inch from her cheek, warm, solid, real, with a faint dusting of gold along the knuckle. "You are not the way I thought. You are a great deal more freckled."

"I did tell you."

"You did. I did not listen." His fingers came to rest, very lightly, against the side of her face.

She felt it.

She felt the warmth of his palm. She felt each separate finger, and the roughness of the pad of the thumb, and the pulse beating in his wrist against her jaw, quick and light and alive. It was nothing like a glove. It was nothing like glass. It was a hand. It was a living hand, and it was touching her, and the world went quiet.

"Elowen," said Casimir, softly.

"Yes."

"Is this—"

"Yes."

"I do not—"

"I know." She turned her face into his palm. She shut her eyes. "I know. Me too."

He drew her toward him. She came. His other arm came round her back, slowly, unsurely, as though afraid of what would happen. She felt the warmth of him through the wool. She felt his heart beat against her ribs. She put her face in his coat, and breathed in woodsmoke and rain and clean cold air, and the whole of her body sighed.

And the house began to fall.