The First Warming

The great hall was the coldest room in the castle, so she began there.

She had dressed for it. Perrin had found her a gown of heavy gray wool, gone soft with age and smelling faintly of cedar and old lavender, and a pair of knitted gloves with the fingertips cut out. She had left the coat behind. If the glass was to be warmed, she thought, it ought to be done as she would do it at home, by the hearth, in her shirtsleeves, with nothing between herself and what she meant to say.

Now she stood alone in the middle of that vast bright floor, in a hall that did not look anything like the one she had stumbled into the night before. In the dark it had been a pit. In the thin light of the lamps Perrin had left burning along the walls it was a ballroom, long and high, with arched windows on one side that showed a black sky and a scatter of glass snow whirling in the lamplight, and on the other a gallery of mirrors set in frames of curling silver vine. They went on and on. They held a hundred small yellow flames and a hundred gray-gowned girls, standing very straight, with their hands clasped in front of them like children about to recite.

She had never sung to an audience before. Not a real one. At home she sang to the cows, and over the washing, and now and again at a funeral, because Elodie had a voice like a bird and Elowen had been made to stand beside her and fill in the lower line.

It isn't a performance, she told herself. It's a job. You came to warm a house.

She flexed her fingers.

The fire woke slowly. It always did when she asked it for something gentle. It rose in her chest as a kettle does, with a low, patient hum, and spread outward in a long, slow tide through her arms and her throat. She did not fight it, as she had in the fog. She let it come up as it wanted, and put her mouth around it.

She did not choose the song. It came on its own, the way it always had, from a place behind her breastbone where she kept things that were older than she was.

Ember, ember, keep the night,

Hold it small and hold it bright,

Hush the wind and hush the snow,

Warm the dark where you must go.

Her voice was lower than Elodie's, and rougher at the edge, and it cracked on the third line. She went on. She sang the second verse, and the third, with her eyes closed and her palms open at her sides, and the heat poured out of her and into the room with every breath, a pale, honey-colored shimmer that crept along the floor like warm water finding its level.

She smelled it before she saw it. Ice and old metal and cold stone, and then, quite suddenly, a clean wet scent like wet slate after rain.

She opened her eyes.

The nearest mirror had begun to fog.

It was not frost. It was the soft pearl-gray bloom that comes on a window when someone breathes on it from the inside. It spread from the corners of the pane toward the middle, and where it touched the silvering, the glass grew faintly, impossibly, warm; she could feel it from where she stood. A second mirror clouded. Then a third. They went down the gallery one after another, like candles being lit by a patient hand, and the whole long wall of them began, very slowly, to rise and fall.

Rise and fall. She stopped singing for half a line out of pure astonishment.

They were breathing.

It was not much. A breath at a time, long and slow, from a pane the size of a door, a quiet exhale of pearl that bloomed and shrank again. But all of them in time with one another, and in time, she realized with a prickle on the back of her neck, with her.

She breathed in. The glass drew in its fog.

She breathed out. The glass sighed.

Elowen swallowed hard, and went on singing, and the hall breathed with her.

…

She sang for what felt like an hour and was probably three-quarters of one, and when she stopped, she was shaking with a sort of pleasant weariness, as though she'd carried a bucket up a hill. The fire inside her had gone down to embers. The hall had stopped breathing. But the mirrors still glowed, each of them rimmed with a faint blush of warmth, and when she put out a hand and touched the one beside her, it was no colder than a cup of tea.

"I did not say you might stop."

She did not jump. She was rather proud of that. She turned her head, slowly, toward the sound, and found the shape in the mirror at her left shoulder.

He was nearer than he had been last night. It was a distinct improvement, she supposed, and it also made things worse. Yesterday he'd been a smudge in a dark pane. Tonight, in the pearl-gray bloom of the warmed glass, she could see the lines of him: a long figure in a dark close-buttoned coat, one shoulder a little lower than the other, the outline of a hand resting on something she could not see. His face was still lost in a bright blur, like a thumbprint on a lens. But the voice had changed. It had lost the polish. It sounded like someone who had been up all night and had not noticed the sun.

"Good evening, Casimir," said Elowen.

"Oh, is it?" He seemed to consider the idea. "I should not have said so. You have been wandering my halls for the better part of the day, you have broken into my kitchen—"

"Your steward gave me chicken."

"—and you have, as I take it, run a good three hundred yards in your stocking feet on my floor." The shape turned its head, a little way, toward the gallery. "My mirrors are warm."

"That was the idea."

"They are not meant to be this warm."

"Is that a complaint?"

"It is an observation," said Casimir, with dignity. "You have rather overdone it."

"I was told to warm them."

"I said warm, not cook."

She felt her face go hot. "It's the first time. I'm learning."

"Yes. Evidently." But the voice had gentled, and he spoke after a moment in a lower tone, almost to himself. "No. That is unjust. It is very well done. It is only that I have not... I did not think it would feel like that."

"Like what?"

The shape in the glass did not answer. It had turned its face to the long line of fogged mirrors, as a man looks at a field after rain, and its shoulders had gone strangely still.

When he spoke at last, it was in the voice of someone describing a thing he did not trust himself to describe.

"I can feel them," he said. "The panes. All of them. Not, you understand, as one feels a hand on the sleeve. More the way one feels a draft in a house, or the weather in an old wound. For a long, long time, the whole house has been..." He paused. "Numb is the word. Not cold. I am used to cold. Just a very still, very careful absence of anything at all. And now there is..." Another pause. "...you would say comfort. I am not certain I have the vocabulary."

It was such a plain admission, and so unexpectedly bare, that her throat tightened.

"It's only warmth," she said. "It's not magic. It's what you'd give a sick animal."

"Is that what you think I am?"

"I think you're a man who's lived in an empty house for three hundred years and has forgotten what a fire is for."

She heard her own words only after they left her. In the glass, the shadow went absolutely still.

"I shall remember that," said Casimir, with enormous coolness, "the next time I need to be insulted before breakfast."

"It's night."

"Is it?"

"You asked me that already."

"I did, did I not." A pause. And then, to her genuine shock, a short, helpless sound that was very nearly a laugh, high and startled, cut off almost at once. "Forgive me. I find that I have run out of conversation."

She laughed too. She couldn't help it. It came out cracked and tired and a little hysterical, and the nearest mirror warmed a shade in response, and the shadow's hand lifted toward the glass, and stopped.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

…

"May I ask you something?" said Elowen.

"You may ask." The coolness was back, but it was a thin coat, and she could see the cracks in it now.

"My sister."

"Ah."

"You told me last night that you knew every soul who'd come through your door. You said if you told me what became of one traveler in spring, it'd be a story, not a fact." She kept her voice level. "I'm not asking for a story. I'm asking if you've seen her."

The shape in the mirror did not move. The pearl bloom on the glass pulsed once, softly, like a heartbeat.

"I will not lie to you," said Casimir.

"That's a funny way to begin."

"It is the only way I know." His voice was very quiet. "I will tell you that I cannot, at this moment, tell you. There are things in this house that I do not understand myself, and others that I understand too well, and I am not able yet to say which of them concerns your sister. If I told you what I know before I know it, I might be wrong. And I do not think you would forgive me for that."

"You're avoiding the question."

"I am."

"Then why are you apologizing?"

"Because," said Casimir, "I am."

It was so unlike last night that she took a step toward the glass without thinking. The hem of her borrowed gown whispered on the floor. She looked at the blur where his face should be, and the whole length of the hall seemed to hold its breath.

"You're sorry," she said slowly. "Aren't you? Not the way you were sorry about the dog. Not just sorry for me. You're sorry about something you did."

For a moment she thought she'd gone too far. The pane beside her gave a faint, glassy shudder, like a harp string brushed in passing.

Then, from every direction at once, he said, "I should like to hear the song again."

"That's not an answer."

"It is a request."

"I asked you—"

"And I am asking you." There was something under the voice now that she had never heard in it, and it took her a moment to place it. It was not command. It was not even mockery. It was simply need, very old, very tired, hidden under a great deal of well-bred indifference, and it reached her harder than anything yet. "From the beginning, if you please. Not the whole of it. I would not ask so much. Only the first verse. I should like to listen to it properly this time. I was not attending, before. I was too startled."

She weighed it. She wanted to be furious. She had come here for a sister, not to sing lullabies to a smudge in a looking-glass.

But he had said please. And he'd said it as though the word were a coin he had not spent in a very long time.

"Once," said Elowen.

"Once."

She stood a little straighter. She cleared her throat. And she sang it again, the first verse, slow and low, and this time she did not close her eyes. She kept them on the dark outline in the glass, and she watched it listen.

Ember, ember, keep the night,

Hold it small and hold it bright,

Hush the wind and hush the snow,

Warm the dark where you must go.

He listened as if every word were a stone being laid in a wall. His head dropped. His shoulders came down. By the second line the hand that had been pressed to the glass was pressing flat, fingers splayed, and she could see them shake. At the last line she faltered, and it was only the half-second of her voice dropping, one note short of where the tune should end, as she had always sung it, as Elodie had always sung it, as the little box stopped.

She stopped.

The hall rang with the silence of it.

"You stop there," said Casimir.

"It stops there."

"Does it?" His voice was strange. "Does it, indeed."

"It's how we've always sung it." She frowned. "What do you mean, does it?"

"Nothing." He had lowered his hand. The pane was bare. The long, dark shape in it was no longer looking at her, but at something very far away indeed. "I am afraid I must ask you to forgive me. I am not accustomed to company, and I find it more fatiguing than I had been led to expect."

"Casimir—"

"It has been a long time," he said, "since I heard anything true."

She did not know what he meant, and she did not think he did either.

The pearl-gray bloom on the glass was already shrinking, ebbing from the edges of the panes toward the center, as a tide goes out. The shadow dimmed with it. She had the strangest wish to reach out, to put her hand on that cooling silver and keep it there. She did not. She stood very straight, with her fists closed against her ribs.

"Goodnight, Elowen," he said, from a long way off.

"Goodnight."

The mirror went dark.

Elowen stood alone in the huge quiet room, with the gallery of fogged glass fading around her and her own pale face looking back from every pane. She was tired to her bones. She was also, she realized with a small cold shock, no longer angry about the door.

She had been angry about the door all day. She had carried that anger into the hall like a coal, to keep herself brave, and somewhere in the course of the song it had gone, burned up for fuel. She went looking for it, the way one pats a pocket for a missing key, and found only a smooth, empty place, where it had been.

So that's the price, she thought. A bit of temper, for a bit of warmth.

It was a good bargain. It was a very good bargain.

She did not like how little she minded.

She picked up the hem of her borrowed gown and walked out into the dark, thinking not about her sister, or the west wing, or the quilt, but about a hand pressed flat against a cooling pane, with the fingers spread wide, and shaking.