The Laws of Glass

She woke because something was ticking against her ear.

It was a small, precise sound, like a pocket watch held to a pillow, and for a muddled moment Elowen believed she was ten years old and in her own bed, with Elodie's cold feet jammed against her shins. Then she opened her eyes and saw a ceiling of pale blue crystal arching away overhead, and every cobweb of that bright comfortable lie came apart at once.

The ticking stopped. A figure straightened beside the bed with a faint, high chime, like a spoon laid down on a china saucer.

"Good morning," it said. "I did not like to wake you, but you have slept through the whole of the night and most of the gray that passes for a dawn, and the porridge is going to be a tragedy."

Elowen sat up so fast the room swung.

He was tall and thin, and he was made of glass. That was the only way to say it. His long limbs were clear as a winter pond, tinted faintly blue where they thickened at the joints, and under the surface of him ran fine threads of silver, like frost veining a windowpane. His hair was spun glass, a pale fall of it that stirred when he moved and sang. His coat was a steward's coat of old black cut, but it was glass too, folded into soft dark pleats, and the buttons were small drops of amber. He had a long, grave, courteous face, the sort of face that belongs on a butler in a very good house.

He was looking at her. Or rather, he was looking carefully to the left of her.

"I am Perrin," he said. "I keep the house."

"You're made of glass."

"A common failing in the district." He bowed, and the amber buttons clicked. "I would be grateful, miss, if you would not look at me directly. Look at the mirror, if you would be so kind. It is easier for us both."

She looked. Beside the bed stood a tall panel of silvered crystal in a frame of white metal, and in it was her own bed, a ruffled hump of white quilts, with her own pinched face on the pillow. And beside the bed stood Perrin, reflected, just as clear as before. He met her eyes in the glass, and she thought he looked relieved.

"Why?" she said.

"Because it is the custom. Here we look at the world in reflection, and at each other likewise. A direct look in the open Land, miss, takes something from the person who gives it. A fingernail's worth of memory, no more. Nothing you would miss at first. But it adds. In glass, it only borrows." He cleared a throat that did not seem to need clearing. "The master has a rule that guests follow the custom. The master has a rule for most things. I should not wish you to think it is for the sake of rudeness. It is, I assure you, for the sake of your mother's face."

It was said so mildly that it took a heartbeat to land. Her hands, which had been smoothing the quilt, went still.

My mother's face. She tried to see it, and it was there, brown and tired and creased about the eyes, and she was almost sure the creases had been in a different place.

"Right," said Elowen. She breathed out. "Mirrors, then."

"Capital." Perrin inclined his head. "The porridge, miss. And then the laws."

…

The porridge was not a tragedy. It was thick and plain and sweet with honey, served in a bowl of heavy white china at a table that unfolded itself from the wall, and she ate every spoonful with the guilty speed of someone who had not eaten a hot thing in four days. Perrin stood at her elbow with his hands behind his back and watched her in the mirror with an expression of mild, professional pride.

"The kitchens are the one department in the house that functions as it ought," he said. "It is a great relief to me. The roofs are a nightmare."

"Who bakes the bread?"

"I do."

She stopped with the spoon halfway up. "You bake."

"Badly, I am told, but with conviction." A silver glint of humor crossed the long glass face. "Eat. The laws are three in number and I should hate to be interrupted halfway through the second by a fainting guest."

She put the spoon down.

"First law." He held up a finger as thin and clear as an icicle. "You are not to touch the master."

"I haven't even seen him."

"You will see him, miss, in due course, and in a manner of speaking. The law is not a request. I wish to emphasize that. We do not say should not, in this house. We say cannot. The consequences are not moral. They are arithmetic." He paused. The long face grew a shade more still. "Any person who lays hands upon him, in earnest, will do him a grave hurt. I will not say more. It is not mine to say. But I have watched it once, and I do not propose to watch it again."

Once. She did not ask. She kept that one behind her teeth, with the three hundred years.

"Second law. You are not to break a mirror."

"Even by accident?"

"Particularly by accident. It is not the glass that matters." He lowered his voice slightly, as though the panels might overhear, which, Elowen thought, they very likely would. "Every pane in this house is, in its small way, somebody's attention. You will not understand that yet. I should be obliged if you would simply take it on faith, as one takes on faith that a stove is hot."

"Whose attention?"

"The third law, miss." He raised a third finger, with a little too much briskness. "You are not to be out of doors after dusk."

"I was out of doors after dusk. That's how I arrived."

"And that is how you arrived," said Perrin, "alive. Which does not constitute a policy. The Land comes close when the light goes. It likes to learn a thing by standing near it. In the dark, a sleeping guest in a room with a window ajar will wake in the morning rather lighter than she went to bed." He ticked the three fingers down one at a time. "I am sorry to be grim over a bowl of porridge. They are the laws. Do you have questions?"

She had forty. She chose the safest.

"What happens if I break one?"

Perrin looked at her in the mirror for rather a long time.

"Then I shall be obliged to tell you," he said gently, "and I should so much prefer not to."

…

The room she'd been given was in the east tower, up a spiral stair of clear glass treads that rang like struck crystal under her boots, so that she felt as if she were climbing the inside of a bell. There was a bed with an actual feather mattress, a basin on a stand, a chest, a narrow window thick with frost-ferns, and a hearth where a fire of pale golden light burned with no wood and no smoke.

"A courtesy of the master's," said Perrin.

"The fire?"

"The rug, last night, if I recall."

"He said he never interferes."

"He says a great many things." Perrin went to the window and drew a curtain of heavy white wool that did not appear to be glass at all. "I will fetch your pack and your boots. Rest. The house will wait."

She stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly on her heel, taking it in. Then her gaze caught on the mirror over the chest, and held.

It was an ordinary mirror, oval, in a frame of curling silver leaves. It showed the room as it should: bed, basin, window, fire. And yet it did not. She stared at it for some time before she was certain.

The bed in the mirror was the same bed. But the quilt on it was green. A patchwork quilt, small squares of sage and olive and moss, stitched with a pattern of interlocking rings. The basin was the same basin, and beside it, on the chest, stood a little jar of dried lavender and a hairbrush with a worn wooden handle. A coat hung on the back of the door, and the coat was dun-colored, not gray.

And the window in the mirror was open. Warm yellow light lay across the sill, as if it were late spring, and a branch with white blossom nodded in the frame.

"Perrin," she said, quite steadily.

He had paused at the door. "Miss?"

"Whose room is this?"

"Yours."

"Whose room was it?"

The glass steward stood absolutely still. The faint blue shimmer in his hair seemed, for an instant, to stop moving.

"The glass likes to show what it misses, miss," he said at last. "It is a sentimental material. I would not read into it."

"That's my mother's quilt pattern."

"Is it?"

"It's called Wedding Rings. Every girl in Scenery Chalk is given one when she marries. My sister was given one." She had her hand flat against her throat, as if to hold something in. "Edmund's mother made it. She was still sewing it when he died. She finished the last row afterwards, and gave it to Elodie anyway, and Elodie said she'd never sleep under it, because she couldn't, and she took it with her, in the spring. I watched her pack it."

Perrin looked at her in the glass. He opened his mouth. And what came out was careful and kind and almost entirely empty.

"There have been many guests in this room," he said, "and I have a poor head for them. I should not like to say."

"You're lying."

"I am a servant, miss. It is a different thing." Something that might have been shame passed across the glass of his face and was gone. "If you will excuse me, I have the roofs."

He went out. The door shut behind him with a small, discreet chime.

…

She did not rest.

She went over the room inch by inch, with the thorough, patient fury of a girl taking apart a lock. She lifted the mattress. She opened the chest and found it empty, and ran her fingers along its seams, and found nothing. She knelt and looked beneath the bed and found a single thread of green wool caught in a crack, which she wound very carefully round her finger, and put in her pocket with the music box. She searched the hearth, the window, the underside of the basin.

At last, when she was ready to throw the whole thing at the mirror and be damned to the second law, she stood still and made herself look at it, hard.

The quilt was still green. The blossom still nodded.

It's not a trick, she thought slowly. It's a memory. Somebody's. A room does not keep a picture of itself the way a girl keeps a pressed flower, but a mirror that is also an eye might. If every pane was somebody's attention, then this one had been watching this room for a long time, and she had walked into the tail end of what it had seen.

"Show me," she whispered, to the glass. "Please. Show me who slept there."

The mirror gave her back her own face, tired and pale, with the first stir of an idea behind its eyes.

Nothing else.

…

It was evening, or what passed for it, when Perrin returned with her pack and boots and a plate of cold chicken. He found her in the corridor outside.

She had gone out to find the tower stairs again, and she had come down the wrong flight. The passage she'd wandered into was long and low, and the walls were not mirrors but panes of clear unsilvered glass, through which she could see the gray drifts of the valley and the cold smear of the sky. A line of oil lamps flickered along it, each in a bracket of twisted crystal. And in the third bracket from the end, caught on a sharp little edge of glass, hung a scrap of cloth.

It was no larger than her hand. It was blue, a clear dusty periwinkle, and along one torn edge ran a line of tiny stitches in white silk. Not a pattern. A word, worked in thread so fine it might have been drawn with a hair. She stooped to read it.

Ember.

The E had a flourish. There was a small crooked knot at the tail of the last letter, a double loop pulled slightly too tight, with the end snipped off on the left. Nobody in Scenery Chalk made a knot like that, because nobody in Scenery Chalk was left-handed except for one stubborn girl who had been taught by her mother to sew with her right, and had learned instead to secretly sew with her left, and who had hidden it for years.

She had worn a frock the color of this scrap. She had sat up at the kitchen table in it, the night before she vanished, with a needle and a candle, and Elowen, passing, had paused in the door and asked what she was making.

Nothing, Elodie had said. Just a bit of practice. And smiled.

That smile.

Elowen closed her fist around the cloth. It was warm. That was impossible. It had hung in that cold corridor for months in the dark, and it was as warm as a hand.

"Miss," said Perrin quietly from the end of the passage. He was standing in the reflection of the farthest window, so that she saw him only in the glass. "You are on the wrong floor. The west stair is behind you."

"Is that the way to the west wing?"

His reflection flinched. It was the faintest movement, a bending of his long clear shoulders, but it was enough.

"We do not speak of that, miss."

"Because of the first law?"

"Because of," said Perrin, and for the first time his voice failed him a little, "all of them."

She put the cloth in her pocket beside the thread and the box. She thought about the green quilt, and the lavender, and the branch of white blossom in the window of a room that had never had one.

She was here. It was a plain, enormous, unarguable fact, and for the first time it let her breathe properly. She stood here. She was alive. Whatever had happened afterwards, whatever strange tale the mirrors were afraid to tell, her sister had walked down this corridor in a blue dress and sewn her own name into the air.

"Thank you for the chicken," said Elowen, and took the plate.

She ate it on the stairs, in the dark, listening to the glass tick and shift all around her like a vast clock. And when the last of the gray light drained from the sky, and the lamps all down the tower caught and grew warm one by one, she wiped her fingers on her coat and stood.

The master wanted her to warm his house.

Very well. She would warm it. She would walk every hall of it, from cellar to spire, and she would sing until his mirrors steamed. But he had said she might go anywhere but one place, and she had learned, long ago, in a kitchen full of fine dust and hidden needles, that the thing a person forbids you is the thing they most want you to find.

Tonight, thought Elowen, I'm not only going to sing for my supper.

I'm going to look.