What Was Kept

The noise went on for a long time, and then it stopped, and the silence that came after was the loudest thing she had ever heard.

She was on her knees in the snow. She did not remember falling. The great arch of the doorway was gone, and where it had been there was a long slope of broken crystal, tumbled and glittering and steaming gently in the rain, higher than a house. Dust hung over it in a gold fog. Pieces were still shifting and sliding and ringing as they settled, each with its own small clear note, like a thousand glasses being put away.

Somewhere behind her, Elodie was calling her name. She did not turn.

"Casimir."

The rubble did not answer.

"Casimir!"

She was up. She was on the slope with her bare hands on the glass, hauling at a slab bigger than a door, and it would not move. It was slippery with rain and razor-edged, and it opened her palm in a long thin line. She did not feel it. She set her shoulder to it and heaved until her vision went white at the edges, and a voice in her head said, quite calmly, you gave him a heart so it could be crushed in a doorway, you gave him a heart so he could be crushed, and she said aloud, "Shut up, shut up," and heaved again.

"Lowie. Lowie, stop."

"No."

"You'll tear your hands off."

"Then I'll tear them off." She was sobbing now, with great ugly gasps. "He said he'd follow. He gave me his word."

"I know. I heard him." Arms came round her waist from behind, thin and fierce. "Listen. Listen to me. Stop moving and listen."

She stopped. She stood with her chest heaving and her face running wet, and listened.

For a moment there was only the rain.

Then, from somewhere under her feet, from deep in the glittering heap, came a small, muffled, thoroughly irritable cough.

…

He was alive.

It took the five of them an hour to prove it. The cartographer found the first gap, a narrow black seam between two fallen beams, and Rosalind Quill, who turned out to be the only one small enough to wriggle in, went down on her stomach with a lantern and a great deal of language. She came out gray with dust and said briskly, "Leg's pinned. He's got a bump on the head the size of an egg. He says he is perfectly well, and that we are not to fuss."

"Is he bleeding?"

"Like a pig. He seems delighted."

"Delighted?"

"He keeps staring at it." The older woman wiped her hands on her gown. "He says it's very red. I told him that was the general idea."

They dug.

The old lute player lent his shoulders. The laughing woman, who had, to everyone's surprise, a grip like a blacksmith, dragged out the smaller shards and stacked them in a row, hiccuping with mirth the whole time. Elodie ran messages. Elowen, who would not be moved, worked at the lip of the seam with her hands wrapped in strips torn from her own skirt, and talked to the dark below the whole while, steadily, in a low unbroken stream, about nothing at all.

She told him about the plum trees. She told him about the shed, and the goat that had eaten her father's hat. She told him that the fourth step was loose. She told him she had a great many things still to say, and that if he went and died on her in a hole she would never speak to him again, and he would have to listen to her not speaking, which was worse.

"That," said a thin rough voice from under the ground, "is a most alarming threat."

She stopped with a beam in her hands.

"You're awake."

"I am extremely awake. I believe I have never been so awake. My leg has opinions." A cough. "Elowen, there is a great deal of pain in this. Nobody told me. I had thought the books exaggerated."

"I could kill you."

"You will have to get me out first."

She laughed. She wept. She hauled on the beam, and it came up, and a long thin shaft of gray daylight fell down into the gap, and lit a man's face.

He was lying on his back in a hollow no bigger than a coffin. His right leg was trapped from the knee down under a slab of crystal. His hair was full of dust and there was a long smear of red from his temple to his jaw, and he was looking up at her through the hole with an expression of such absolute, dazzled, childlike wonder that she thought her heart would stop.

"Oh," said Casimir. "It is a sky."

"It's a sky."

"It is gray."

"It's going to rain all day."

"I have never been rained on," he said happily. "Not properly. May I?"

…

They got him out in the end.

It took the lever of a roof beam, and the lute player's weight, and four people shouting, and a final sudden slither of glass that sent the slab rolling away down the slope with a crash. Casimir came out of the hole in the arms of the cartographer and a woman in rose, swearing in a high thin polite voice. His leg was bent at the shin. It was not broken, Elodie decided, after poking it. It was only very badly bruised, and cut in a number of interesting places, and swelling like a loaf.

They laid him on a coat in the snow, at the foot of the heap, and he lay there on his back with the rain falling on his face.

He had his eyes shut. He had his mouth open. He was catching drops on his tongue.

"This is the best thing that has ever happened to me," he said.

"You were buried," said Elowen.

"That was extremely interesting. But this is better."

She sat down in the wet beside him. She did not know what else to do. She was shaking all over, with exhaustion and aftershock, and her hands were cut to ribbons, and the rain ran down inside her collar. She looked at him: the dusty hair, the patched wool, the long white throat with the pulse beating in it, the cut above his eye. She looked at the fine gold lines still running along his hands, fading now, like the last glow in a coal.

She put her fingers on his wrist. She found the beat. It was fast, and light, and perfectly steady.

"You're all right," she said. It came out like a question.

"I am cold. I am wet. I believe I am hungry. I have a head that is trying to leave." He opened his eyes. "I am, in short, entirely all right. Come here."

She came.

…

It was not a kiss. Not at first.

She lay down beside him in the snow, with her cheek against his coat, and her cut hand in his, and they lay there together for a long time without moving, while the gray light rose over the hills and the rain softened to a mist. Her sister's voice drifted from a long way off, talking to the cartographer. The old woman was laughing. A bird was singing somewhere, a single hoarse small note, like a hinge.

She could hear his heart.

It was against her ear, under the wool: a thudding, uneven, astonishing thing, quick as a rabbit's. It went on, and on, and on. She had never heard anything so beautiful. She thought she might lie here and listen to it until she was old.

"It is rather loud," said Casimir.

"It's perfect."

"I keep thinking it has stopped. And then it has not." He lifted his free hand and laid it over hers on his chest. "Does it do that always?"

"Every second of every day."

"How tiresome."

"You get used to it."

He was silent. When he spoke again, his voice was different. It was low and careful and hesitant, the voice of someone who is about to hand over a thing that might break.

"Elowen. I have something of yours."

She lifted her head.

He fumbled in the breast of his coat with an unsteady hand, and brought out the gray book. It was battered and damp and curling at the corners. She stared at it. She hadn't missed it. She had not thought of it once since she had set it on the music box, in the white room, and it came to her with a shock that she did not remember why she'd put it there.

"You left it on the floor," said Casimir. "I thought it ought not to be lost."

"What is it?"

"It is yours." He gave her a long, gentle, searching look. "I believe you used to write in it, when you lost a thing. So that you would know it had been."

She opened it.

The pages fell open in her hands. They were covered in her own writing, small and cramped and slanting, a long crabbed list that ran from the first leaf to the last. The dog's name. Papa's eyes. Mam's face. The smell of the kitchen. She read them through, one by one. Under each, in the margin, a new line had been added in a different ink: faint, silvery, written by no pen she'd held. Thimble. Hazel. Gap in the teeth. Bread and woodsmoke. They were crossed out, every one, with a single neat stroke.

She turned the last page.

It was blank.

She had not written on it. She remembered that, at least. She had left it clean, on purpose, as one leaves the last plate in a cupboard. And she sat holding it in the gray snow, with the mist on her lashes, and understood that there was one entry in her life that she could not write down, because she could not remember what it had been.

"Casimir," she said slowly. "What did I lose, in the Heart?"

…

He told her.

He did not do it quickly. He lay on his back with his eyes on the sky, and she lay beside him with her head on his shoulder, and he said it a piece at a time, as one gives water to someone who has been long without.

"You lost a song," said Casimir. "A very ordinary one. It was about an ember, and a night. Your mother sang it. Your sister sang it, after. It was the one you hummed when you were frightened, and the first thing you ever sang to a cow."

"That's... that's very small."

"It was not small. It was the whole of your evenings." His voice was gentle. "It was every night of your childhood, between the last of the daylight and the first of sleep. A fire. A quilt. Somebody's hand on your hair. A kitchen with the door barred against the snow." He took a breath. "It is gone from you, Elowen. I will not pretend otherwise. I am sorry. I cannot make it come back."

"I know."

"But it did not go out of the world."

She turned her head.

"I have it," he said. "I told you I would. I have every word. I took it from your throat while you were singing, and I have it still. It is in me now. It is here." He moved her hand against his ribs. "I cannot give you back what you remember. But I can give you what I remember of you. And I find that this is a thing a person can do for another. They can hold the part that has gone."

He drew a slow breath.

He began to sing.

It was not a good voice. She had never heard him sing a whole song, only the single note. It was a baritone, rough at the edges, cracked in the places where a man's voice cracks when it is new and doesn't know what it can do. He sang low, almost whispering, with his eyes closed and his chest rising under her cheek.

Ember, ember, keep the night,

Hold it small and hold it bright.

She did not know it.

That was what struck her, with a sudden, quiet, breathless pang. It was a stranger's song. She had never heard it in her life. And yet it went into her like a key into a lock. It made no memory. It made no picture. But it made a warmth, a long slow slackening in the middle of her chest, as if some very old muscle she had been clenching all her life had finally been told that it could stop.

Hush the wind and hush the snow,

Warm the dark where you must go.

"What is it?" she whispered.

"It's yours."

Ember, ember, leave the night,

Go where the morning is bright.

He sang the last verse in the old speech, as she had, the soft rolling hill-tongue that her sister had taught her; and she knew that one. She knew it in her bones. It had not been taken. It lay in her, bright and whole, a late small seed, and it rose to meet his voice, and for the space of four lines the two of them sang it together, in the gray rain, at the foot of a dead house, in the snow.

They finished it.

She lay with her face against his coat, and she was crying, quietly and thoroughly, as she had not cried since she was a child. It was not grief. She did not know what it was. It was something that grief became when you let it out of its cage.

"Thank you," she said.

"Every night."

"You said."

"I shall say it again." His hand moved in her hair. "Every night, for the rest of my life. I shall sing it at dusk, in whatever kitchen you like, and you shall hear it for the first time, over and over, and it will be new to you every time. I think it is not the worst way to be loved."

"It's the best way," said Elowen.

She lifted her head.

Their faces were very close. He had rain in his eyelashes. There was a drop on the tip of his enormous nose. His eyes were gray and wet and bright and entirely, shockingly human, and they were looking at her with a plain hungry tenderness that undid her.

"Now?" he said.

"Now."

…

She kissed him.

It was a clumsy, cold, damp, salt-smeared thing, with a great deal of nose. His mouth tasted of rain and blood and plums. His hand came up and cupped the back of her head, shaking, and held it as if it might fly away, and her fingers fisted in his collar. It went on. It went on far longer than she had meant. When she drew away at last, breathless, he stared at her with his lips parted and an expression of such dazed outrage that she began to laugh.

"That," said Casimir, "is extraordinary."

"Is it?"

"I believe I have been missing a great deal."

"I did warn you."

"You did not mention the knees." He put a hand to his chest. "My knees have gone. Both of them. Is that usual?"

"It happens."

"Does it always?"

"We'll find out," said Elowen.

They lay together, laughing in the rain. And Elodie, who had come up behind them with a blanket in her arms, and had stood politely at a distance for a very long time, said at last, in a tone of strong feeling, "I'd like it noted that I was patient."

"Noted," said Elowen, into his collar.

"I've been dead for four months. I was very patient. And now I'm freezing, and I'd like to go home, and there's a woman in a rose-colored gown who says she'll make tea out of snow if somebody finds her a pot."

"There's a kettle in the east cellar," said Casimir, without opening his eyes.

"Is the cellar still there?"

"I think it is."

"Well, then." Elodie dropped the blanket on top of the pair of them. "Get up. The both of you. You're ridiculous."

…

By noon the rain had stopped.

The sun came out, thin and white, and shone on the ruin of the Glass Snow Kingdom. It was a strange sight. The castle was gone. It had not fallen, quite; it had slumped, and settled, and melted down into a great shining hill of crystal and rubble that lay across the head of the valley, rainbow-bright, and ran with a thousand small streams. The snow had gone gray at its edges. The hills beyond were bare. For the first time in three hundred years, a wet black line of stone showed through the white, and from it rose a smell she had not smelled since she crossed the Fog Tunnel: mud, and wet grass, and cold green growing.

They sat in the cellar passage, which had survived by luck and stubbornness. Someone had found the kettle. Someone had found a heap of blankets, and a cake of hard bread, and a jar of plum preserves that Casimir had apparently put by, three hundred years ago, in case of guests. They ate it with their fingers. Nobody spoke much. The cartographer slept sitting up. The old lute player had found his instrument in a snowdrift, unbroken, and was plucking at it softly, one string at a time.

Elowen sat in the doorway with the gray book on her knee and a stub of pencil.

She had been looking at the last page for a long while. She had not written on it. She thought of the lines she'd put there before, in the cellar, in the cold: the dog. Papa. Mam. The long list of what she had lost. And she thought she might finally understand why the page was blank. It was not for what had been taken. It was for what would come after.

She wrote, in her small slanting hand:

Today I did not lose anything.

She looked at it. She added, underneath:

Today I was given a song.

Then she shut the book.

"Elowen."

He was standing in the shadow of the passage, leaning on the lute player's crutch, with his bandaged leg held stiffly out in front of him. He looked tired and gaunt and filthy. He looked about fifteen years old. There was a cut on his lip where she had bitten him, and a smudge of ash on his forehead, and the sun had caught in his hair.

"I have been thinking," said Casimir.

"Dangerous."

"I have been thinking that the Tunnel is a long walk. And that I have never been through the gate."

She went still.

"I was not able," he said. "Not as the house. It was not part of the wish. I could see as far as the first turning, on a clear day, and no farther." He was looking out at the hills. At the road. At the thin blue line of the mountains, a long way off, and the fog that lay in the gap between them. "I find that I do not know what is on the other side. I find, rather to my surprise, that I am afraid."

She got up. She crossed the floor, and took his free hand.

"Good," said Elowen. "It's about time."