The Rain

The crystal pillar went first.

It stood where it had always stood, in the middle of the round white room, a tall pale column with a girl asleep inside it, and for as long as Elowen had known it, it had been the one still thing in the house. Now a crack ran up it from the floor. It was a clean bright line, thin as a hair, and it climbed with a sound like a fingernail drawn along a wineglass. Another followed it. Then a third. The whole pillar began to sing, a high, pure, rising note, and every pane in the Heart sang with it, and dust came down from the ceiling in long gray ribbons.

"Elodie," said Elowen.

She was out of his arms before she knew it. She ran across the shuddering floor, with Casimir stumbling after her on his new legs, and put both palms flat against the glass. It was warm. For the first time in four months it was warm, and under her hands she felt something move. A pulse. A shift. A breath drawn in, deep and slow, by someone who has been underwater a very long time.

"Get back," said Casimir hoarsely. "Elowen, it will come down."

"She's in there!"

"I know. I know she is. Get back. Let it open."

He had hold of her coat. He was dragging at it with both hands, clumsy, unpracticed, panting like a man who has run uphill. She did not let go of the pillar. Then the glass flexed under her fingers like the skin of a drum, and she saw a face looking out at her, close to the surface, pale and sharp and sleeping, with the lashes lying dark against the cheek.

The pillar burst.

It did not burst outward. It folded. It went to snow in a single soft rush, a drift of fine white powder that fell about the girl's feet and was gone, and it left her standing there alone, swaying, in a periwinkle shawl. Her eyes were closed. Her hands were still held before her, one over the other, as though she had been carrying something fragile.

She opened her eyes.

They were brown. Elowen had forgotten that, in the last months of looking at glass: that her sister's eyes were a plain warm brown, like a mug of tea. They were fixed on nothing. They blinked, slowly. They rolled round the room, the cracked walls, the falling dust, the gold light running through the seams of the ceiling, and came to rest on a girl in a gray coat with a streak of ink on her jaw.

"Lowie?" said Elodie.

Her voice was a rasp. It was cracked and small and rusty from disuse.

"Hello, Dee."

"You look awful."

Elowen made a sound that was neither a laugh nor a sob. She crossed the room in three strides and caught her sister before she fell.

…

She was so thin.

That was what Elowen kept thinking, with her arms wrapped round her. She was so thin, and so light, and so cold. She had weighed nothing at all. She smelled of snow and dust and, very faintly, of the lavender water their mother kept in the dresser drawer. Her hair had grown. It hung to her waist in a long dull braid, and her hands, when they came up and clutched at Elowen's coat, were all bones and knuckles and shaking fingers.

"You came," said Elodie, into her shoulder.

"Of course I came."

"I told you not to. I put it in the diary. I wrote it in great big letters."

"I can't read your handwriting."

"You can't..." She gave a wet, hiccuping laugh. "Oh, Lowie. You always could not."

"I know."

"I was so frightened. I thought it would be years. I thought you'd be grown and gray." She drew back, and held Elowen's face between her hands, and looked at it hungrily, as though she were reading a page. "Look at you. You've gone thin. You've got a scar on your chin."

"Door," said Elowen.

"Of course it was a door." She was crying. She did not seem to notice. "You haven't changed. You haven't changed at all. You've still got that look on your face, as if somebody's asked you to do arithmetic."

Behind them, the floor cracked from wall to wall.

…

They went down in the dark.

There was no more pearl light in the stair. There was only the gold, flickering and fitful, that ran in cracks along the walls, and the pale shine of the steps as they crumbled to powder under their feet. Casimir led. He had a hand on the rail and a hand on Elodie's elbow, and he was swearing steadily and very softly under his breath, in a series of phrases so mild and so elaborately polite that Elowen, coming last, would have laughed if she'd had any breath.

"Is he all right?" whispered Elodie.

"He's learning."

"He's talking to the stairs."

"I think he's apologizing to them."

"I am doing no such thing," said Casimir, over his shoulder. "I am expressing my disapproval. Mind the fifty-ninth. It is not what it was."

The fifty-ninth step went out from under Elodie's foot like a sheet of ice. She cried out. He caught her by the waist and swung her bodily across the gap with an astonished grunt, and set her down on the sixtieth, and stood with his hand against his side, breathing hard.

"You are heavy," he said, accusingly.

"I'm eighty pounds."

"I did not know that was a great deal."

"It isn't," said Elowen. "You're just new."

The house shook. Far below, a long way down, something very large gave way with a noise like the end of the world. A breath of wind came up the shaft, smelling of rain.

Rain.

"Do you smell that?" said Elodie.

…

They came out into the great hall, and the hall was weeping.

It was the only word for it. The roof had opened. A wide ragged hole stood above the stairs, as though a giant had taken a bite from it, and through it fell the first gray light of day and a fine soft rain. It came down in long slanting silver threads, warm as breath, and where it touched the floor the glass ran like wax and steamed. It fell on Elowen's face, and it was not cold.

It was not water. She knew it at once, the instant it touched her lips. It tasted of salt and honey and old wood. It tasted of a kitchen.

She stood quite still.

The Echoes were all around them. She had forgotten them, in the dark of the climb, and now she saw them standing in the hall by hundreds, white and silent, with their faces tilted up. The rain was falling on them. It fell on the pale smooth brows and the cheeks that had no features, and where it fell, the features came. She watched it happen to the nearest of them: an old man with a lute. The blank face softened. The mouth appeared, a seam, then a lip. Eyes opened in it, rheumy and brown. He lifted a hand to his cheek, and stared at his fingers.

"Oh," said the old man. "Oh, I remember."

He sat down on the wet floor, and began to cry, and in the same moment the white went out of him like a candle going out. He was not a ghost. He was a thin elderly man in a patched brown coat, with a lute across his knees, and he was weeping with joy.

All through the hall it was happening. The Echoes were coming apart, softly, like snow in rain. And out of each one, as it fell, went something that she could see: a small bright motion, a spark, a drifting thread of gold. They rose in the air. They hovered, uncertain. And then, with the unmistakable air of homing birds, they turned and flew out through the hole in the roof, across the white hills, in all directions at once.

"They're going back," said Elodie, wonderingly.

"What are?"

"The memories. They belonged to somebody. They're going home." She put out her hand, and a bead of gold settled in her palm, and sank into the skin like a drop of rain. She gasped. "Oh! That's the smell of my mother's soap. I'd forgotten that."

Elowen stared at the girl in gray who stood at the edge of the crowd. The Echo of herself. It had its hands raised, palms up, in the rain. It was smiling. It was very, very faint now, no more than a smudge on the air, and as she looked, it turned its head and met her eyes.

"Thank you," it said.

"For what?"

"For not letting me go." It was fading. It was laughing. "It was lonely. I'd have liked to be you."

"You were," said Elowen. "A bit."

And it was gone, in a swirl of gold, and she felt it land in her chest like a sigh.

…

It came back in pieces.

She stood in the rain with her eyes shut and felt them return. They were not what the song had taken. She knew that. The song was gone, a bare place in the middle of her, with nothing in it but the shape of an absence. But the others came. She felt the smell of her mother's kitchen sweep over her, bread and woodsmoke and lavender, so strong that her knees gave. She felt her father's laugh: a great creaking rumble, like a barrel rolling down a stair. She felt his eyes, which were the hazel of old oak leaves. She felt her mother's face come up in her mind's eye, sharp and clear, with the gap in the teeth and the crease between the brows, and she put both hands over her mouth.

"Mam," she whispered.

It was the wrong one. It was Casimir's mother, in the tower, with her thin hands and her broken love. But it was the right one too. It was both.

"Lowie," said Elodie softly.

"I'm all right."

"You're not." She touched her arm. "It's all right. It's coming back. Not all of it. Some of it takes longer." A pause. She smiled slyly. "There's one that won't come, I think. The one you lost first. I'd wager you've been missing it for weeks."

Elowen opened her eyes.

"I have," she said.

"You used to shout it across the field."

"I know I did."

"You used to shout it so loud that Mr. Calder came out of his house in his nightshirt to see who'd died." Elodie's eyes were dancing. "He had a white sock, and one ear that stood up, and a tail like a wet mop. And when you called him he'd come over the wall like a cannonball, and you'd fall down in the grass, and he'd stand on your chest. Do you remember? You'd say, 'You thimble-headed creature.'"

Her sister paused, and said gently, "That's the name, Lowie."

"Thimble."

It dropped into her like a stone into a well.

"Thimble," said Elowen. She said it again, aloud, to the sky and the rain and the falling roof. She said it as she had said it in Calder's field, in the summer, with her hands cupped round her mouth. "Thimble! Thimble!" She was laughing, helplessly, and her face was wet. "Oh, you daft, wonderful little thing."

"He was a good dog," said Elodie.

"He was the best dog."

"He'd have liked the stairs."

"He'd have eaten the banister."

They stood together in the warm rain, laughing and crying, with their arms round each other. And Casimir, standing a little apart with his hand over his heart and an odd, startled expression on his face, said gently, "I had not known that I would mind so much."

"Mind what?"

"That I never met him." He smiled. "I think I should have liked a dog."

…

They found the others in the east passage.

There were three. They came out of the dust together, like people leaving a theater, blinking and stumbling and holding on to the wall: a thin gray man with ink-stained fingers and a roll of paper under one arm, a bony woman in a gown of faded rose, and a girl in a ruffled cap who was laughing so hard that she could hardly stand.

"Forty winters," the man was saying, in a stunned voice. "Forty. I could have sworn it was a night."

"It was ninety years," said the laughing woman. "Ninety! Oh, I've missed so much. What's the date? What's the king? Is there still a king?" She wiped her eyes. "Oh, I'm sorry, my dear, I can't stop. It's the strangest thing. I've been laughing since I got here."

"Rosalind," said Casimir.

The bony woman in rose had stopped. She stood in the wet gold dust with her hands at her sides, and looked at the tall thin young man in the heavy coat.

She had been screaming, in the West Wing, for twenty-two years. He had put her there. He had taken her fear and her anger and her loud mortal grief and turned it into a statue, because she would not stop, and because it was easier. And now she stared at him out of a face that was no longer glass, and Elowen saw her take a long slow breath, and let it out.

"You scratched it off," said Rosalind Quill. "Didn't you? I wrote 'no' on the floor. With my nail. I felt it."

"Yes."

"I don't forgive you."

"No," said Casimir. His voice was very quiet. "I did not expect it."

"I should like to. I'm told it's good for the soul." She turned her head. Her gaze fell on Elowen, and on the shawled girl at her side, and something in her face softened. "But I'll tell you what. I'll take a cup of tea and a window with a view. And I'll see about the rest in the morning."

"That," said Casimir, "is more than I deserve."

"Yes," said the woman in rose. "It is."

Behind her, the cartographer unrolled his map. He stared at it for a long moment. Then he said, in the dazed polite voice of a man who has been given the wrong parcel, "It's finished."

"What is?" said Elodie.

"The coast." He ran a finger along the paper. "I never drew the coast. I had no idea how it went. And somehow..." He lifted bewildered eyes. "It's all there. I must have done it in my sleep."

"You did," said Casimir, softly. "I did not know until now. I think you drew it every night, for thirty-nine years, in the dark behind your eyes. I think I heard the pen."

…

Perrin was not on the bottom stair.

She found the place where he had been. It was in the hall, at the foot of the east tower, where the steps spilled down into the wet gold floor. There was the napkin, and the glass hand in it, and the folded coat. There was a faint rainbow stain on the stone in the shape of a seated man.

And on the newel post, set neatly on the carved knob, there was a small round pebble of glass.

She picked it up.

It was warm. It was clear as spring water, and heavy for its size, and in the middle of it a tiny thread of silver turned and turned like a living thing. It rang when she tilted it, a high sweet tone, like a spoon struck against a cup.

"He said he would be here," she said, and her voice broke.

"He is," said Casimir.

He had come up beside her. He did not touch the pebble. He stood a little behind her, with his hands hanging, and looked at it with an expression she could not read.

"He is the first piece I ever made. He is the whole of my patience, and my good manners, and every kind thing I managed to do in three hundred years. I did not think he would be given a body of his own." He swallowed. "But I think, at the last, he asked to be small. I think he asked not to be left behind."

"Will he come back?"

"I do not know."

"Will you remember him?"

"Every day," said Casimir. "I shall wind him up each morning. I shall tell him the weather." His mouth shook. "He would find that excessive."

She closed her hand around the pebble, and put it in her pocket, next to the music box, and it ticked and chimed there together with the little brass heart.

Thank you, she thought. You absurd, wonderful old tear.

The ceiling groaned.

…

"The door," said Elodie sharply.

She had her head up. The rain was thickening. Somewhere behind them a long wall was beginning to lean, with a slow fine shriek like a bow across a string, and the gold light in the floor was going out in patches. At the far end of the hall the great doors stood open on the dawn, framed in a long white arch. Beyond them was the courtyard, the snow, and the road down the hill.

"Go," said Casimir.

"All of us."

"Go. I am behind you. I have a leg that does not yet understand its job." He half-smiled. "I shall follow. Take your sister."

"You're not—"

"I am not," he said, "going to be left behind. I give you my word." He put a hand on her back and pushed her, very gently. "Run."

She ran.

She ran with her sister's hand in hers, through the rain and the dust and the bellowing roar of the falling house, along the long hall between the weeping Echoes and the stumbling guests. She heard the cartographer shouting something. She heard a woman laughing. She heard glass shatter overhead in a long crystal avalanche, and she did not look up. The great arch grew before her, bright and white. Cold air hit her face.

She stumbled out onto the step, into the snow, and turned.

"Casimir!"

He was thirty feet behind her. He was running, a long loping lurching run, with his coat flying out and his hair in his eyes and his mouth wide open. He looked, she thought, for one wild instant, wonderfully, absurdly happy. He saw her. He lifted a hand.

And the ceiling of the great hall came down between them like a hammer.