A Crack in the Conversation

Within a week, she had a routine, and the routine frightened her more than the ghosts.

Mornings belonged to Perrin, and to porridge, and to the long patient business of learning the house. She learned that the east tower had fifty-one steps and the west stair had sixty, and that a particular pane on the second landing showed the valley in summer if you looked at it from the left. She learned which corridors sang when she walked them. She learned to keep one hand on the wall in the long gallery where the floor was glass and the dark underneath went down for miles. Afternoons, she walked, and tested herself.

That was the part she kept from Perrin. Every day, in an empty room, she stood with her back to a window and recited what she had. Her name. Her father's. Her mother's. Elodie's birthday, the hill where they'd buried the old sheepdog, the whole sorry list of Calder's neighbors in order of their quarrels. She counted the plum trees in the orchard behind the shed. Eleven. She counted again. Eleven. She said the words aloud and watched her own mouth shape them in the glass.

By the sixth day, she had lost the color of her father's eyes.

She noticed it at the window, in the middle of the plum trees. She had been picturing his face, the pink spread of his forehead and the ginger-gray brush of his eyebrows, and she reached for the eyes and found, instead of brown or blue or green, a pleasant bright blur, like a lantern seen through rain. She stood for a long time with her hand against the cold pane, waiting for the color to come back.

It did not. She put it away with the dog's name, in the place where she was keeping things she couldn't bear to look at.

And in the evenings she sang for Casimir.

…

It had become, without anyone agreeing to it, a kind of dinner party. She would take herself to the great hall at dusk with a lamp and her borrowed gown, and she would warm a gallery or a stairwell or a long cold row of windows, and then, when the glass began to blush, he would come. A shape in the nearest mirror. A dry remark. They never agreed where to sit. She took a chair of her own, and he took, as far as she could tell, whichever pane was nearest, but one night she glanced up from her tea and saw the two of them side by side in a tall mirror opposite, a girl in a gown, and a long dark figure on a bench beside her. She had been sitting alone on a hard stool. She looked down at the empty space where the bench ought to be, and then back at the mirror, and he said, without being asked, "It is a courtesy. I find it difficult to converse with someone who sits alone."

She did not say that she'd been doing it for months.

They talked about everything but the thing she had come for. He asked her, with the courteous, voracious curiosity of a man reading a long-awaited book, about the village, and the harvest, and the way her father made his plum wine, and whether people really did get married in the snow. He wanted to know what bread smelled like. He wanted to know what it meant to say a person had "a good heart." He asked her what it felt like to be homesick, and she told him it was a stone in the stomach that you could never quite get your fingers around, and he was silent for so long that she thought he'd gone.

"Thank you," he said at last, as if she had given him something to carry.

And she began, very slowly, against all her better judgment, to notice the things that did not fit.

He had said that he felt nothing. He'd said it the first night, in the dark, in the cool bored voice of a man announcing the weather: I do not feel, Miss Elowen. It is rather a relief. But a man who felt nothing did not stop in the middle of a sentence when she mentioned the cold. A man who felt nothing did not notice when she was sad.

"You are grieving," he said on the fourth night, out of nowhere. "You hum lower when you grieve."

"I do not."

"You do. You were doing it on the stair. It goes to a different key, a sort of minor drag, as if you had decided it was too much trouble to finish the note." He paused. "It is not an observation I am proud of. I seem to have been listening rather hard."

"Is that what you do all day?" said Elowen. "Listen?"

"I have a great deal of time."

"You told me you couldn't feel anything."

"I said it was a relief." The shape in the glass did not move. "I did not say it was true."

…

On the seventh night, she asked him about the glass.

They were in the long gallery on the second floor, where every window was a mirror and every mirror a window and the dark sky and the lamplit room hung in the same pane, one laid on top of the other, so that the stars shone through her shoulders. She'd been warming for an hour. Her voice had gone husky. She sat on the floor with her back against the wall and her gown pooled around her, and he lay somewhere above her in the silvered ceiling like a man watching clouds.

"Why mirrors?" she said.

"Mm?"

"Why does everything here have to be a mirror? I understand the snow. I understand the cold. I don't understand why a house has to look at itself."

"It does not look at itself." A pause. "It looks at whoever is in it. It is a very old custom. The people who built it believed that a thing seen through glass cannot be taken. A reflection is only the memory of the light that struck it. It cannot be stolen. It cannot be eaten. When we looked at one another in the early days we always used a mirror, so that the Land could have nothing of us. And then—" He stopped.

"And then?"

"It became a habit," said Casimir. "Habits outlast their reasons."

We, she thought. In the early days.

She decided not to press. She put her head back against the wall and looked up at the star-spangled ceiling, and said, for no reason she could name, "Elodie used to do that."

"Do what?"

"Say a thing and then take it back. As if she'd opened a door by mistake." She smiled, a thin tired smile, and rubbed her eyes. "She was the one who talked, you know. The pretty one. Everyone said so. She'd walk into the baker's and come out with a free loaf and a proposal. I was the one who carried the basket."

"I cannot imagine you carrying a basket."

"I carried a lot of them."

"I meant," said Casimir, "that I cannot imagine you being carried."

She laughed. She had not meant to. It startled her out of her skin.

"She was always cold," she went on, when she could. "Even in summer. Mother used to say she'd been born in a snowdrift and nobody had told her. She'd sit by the fire in July with a shawl. She'd steal mine. She hated to be warm for herself, but she loved being warm in company. She said it was like a held hand." She stopped. Her voice had gone odd. "She had a fear of the dark, too. Never told anyone but me. She'd sit up on the landing with a candle till dawn, sewing."

"She stole the blue one," said Casimir.

"What?"

"The shawl. She..." He halted.

The whole gallery went still.

Elowen sat up very slowly, without taking her eyes from the ceiling. In the silver, the long shape of him had gone rigid. The star-lit pane held, in its pewter depth, a dark figure with its head thrown back and its arms at its sides, like a man who has just heard a dish break in the next room.

"I never told you it was blue," she said.

"I— It was a guess."

"Which one?"

"Blue is the warmest of the colors." The voice was brittle and rapid. "It is a well-known fact. In a house of this kind, there are only the cold shades, and the one that is closest to warm is blue. A girl who is always cold would naturally take the blue. It is merely deduction. I do not know why I—"

"The shawl on the stair," said Elowen, in a very quiet voice, "was a blue one. A dusty sort of blue. Periwinkle. Mother knitted it, and the left cuff always hung lower than the right, because Elodie kept pulling it down over her hand. She sat on the landing in it. With a candle. I never told anyone that."

"Elowen—"

"I found a scrap of that exact blue in the third passage, with her name worked into it in her knot." She was on her feet now. She did not remember getting up. "You've seen her. You've talked to her. You knew her. You told me you didn't know what became of a girl in the spring, and then you told me she stole the shawl. You know where she went. You know what happened to her."

"I do not—"

"Don't you dare lie to me again!" It cracked out of her like a whip. The mirror beside her shivered, a crack of light running across the star-field from edge to edge, and the fire under her ribs surged up so suddenly that she staggered. "I told you what I'd do. I told you the first night!"

"Elowen." His voice was very low. "Please. I am not lying."

"Then say it."

"I cannot."

"Say it!"

"I cannot," said Casimir, and there was such a raw, naked pain in it that she stopped dead, her fist half raised, and the heat in her chest guttered like a candle in a draft. "There are things I do not have the right to say yet. There are things I do not know how to say. If I tell you the half of it, you will walk through that door and you will not come back. And I—" He broke off. The voice that came afterward was ragged. "I find I would rather you were angry with me in this house than right about me on the other side of that Tunnel."

It was so unexpected, so purely and unguardedly true, that she had no weapon ready.

"That isn't fair," said Elowen.

"No. It is not."

"You can't say a thing like that and expect me to—"

"I do not expect anything." The shape in the glass had drawn itself up. The courteous, brittle coolness was sliding back into place, plate by plate, like a suit of armor being buckled on by a tired man. "I am sorry, Miss Elowen. I find I am unwell. I should like to end the evening."

"Casimir—"

"The hall will keep itself warm tonight. Perrin will see you to your room. Good night."

"Don't you dare go—"

The mirrors went out. Not all at once, this time, as they had done that first night, but one by one down the long gallery, with a quiet tick, tick, tick, like a man snuffing the lamps along a corridor while he walks away down it.

She stood in the middle of the dark with her fists clenched and her heart going like a hammer.

Then, because there was nothing else to do with it, she kicked the wall.

It hurt. It hurt a great deal. It was also, she thought, the first honest thing she'd done all week.

…

She did not sleep. She lay on the feather bed with her eyes open and listened to the glass tick and shift in the cold, and thought, for the first time, about the shape of the lie.

It was not an ordinary lie. An ordinary liar tells you a thing that is not true. This one had told her a hundred things that were true, and was hiding the one thing that mattered behind them, as a man hides a locked door by hanging pictures on every other wall. He knew her sister. He had liked her sister. He was sorry. He was afraid.

Of what? She turned it over and over. Of her? He had said that if she knew, she would walk out and never return. As though the worst thing she could do in this place was leave.

And she thought, with a coldness she would not have believed she possessed: Or the worst thing I could do is stay.

A line of pale light fell across the floor. It came from the mirror above the chest, the oval one in the silver leaves. She'd covered it with a shawl that first night, ashamed to be watched by a room she had no right to. Now the shawl had slipped. In the mirror, the green quilt and the lavender and the blossom in the window were gone, and the glass showed only the room she lay in, and a girl on a bed, staring.

She stared back. Then, with great care, she sat up and put her bare feet on the cold floor.

The west wing, thought Elowen. Perrin shook when I said it. Casimir broke his own voice. And the one place in the house nobody will say aloud is the only place in it where I haven't looked.

She found her boots by feel. She drew on the coat she had left behind in a heap, and the borrowed gloves with their cut-off fingers, and tucked the music box inside her shirt, flat against her heart, where it had been for the past six months.

She did not light a lamp. She did not need one. The fire under her skin was still bright enough to see by.

She opened the door and went out into the dark.