The Forbidden Wing

The west wing began at a door she had walked past six times without seeing.

It was a plain arch at the end of the second gallery, set a little back from the rest, with no mirror in it and no lamp beside it. A person could easily have mistaken it for a blank wall. But tonight, in the faint amber glow that clung to her wrists, Elowen could see the join where the glass thickened and the faint blue smoke of cold that curled out along the floor from under it, and when she laid her palm flat on the pane, it was colder than the night outside.

She drew a breath. Then she pushed, and the glass swung inward on a silence so complete she heard her own pulse.

The air beyond was a different country.

It wasn't only the cold, though that came at her like a blow, dry and clean and bitter with the smell of snow and iron. It was the quiet. In the rest of the castle the glass was never still. It ticked and sang and settled and murmured to itself in the dark, like a sleeping animal. Here there was nothing. The corridor ran away ahead of her, long and pale and perfectly silent, and the mirrors that lined it were frosted over thick and white, with a rime so deep that it furred their frames like moss.

She stepped over the threshold. Her boot-heel rang. Even that seemed muffled, as if the air were packed with wool.

All right, she thought. You wanted to look.

She went on.

…

The corridor opened after a hundred paces into a long vaulted hall, and the first thing she saw was a woman laughing.

She stood about ten yards from the door, a little to the left, in the pose of someone caught in the middle of a joke. Her head was thrown back and her mouth was open. One hand was pressed to her chest, and the other held up a glass that was not a real glass but a smaller, finer glass cast in the same piece as the hand. Every fold of her skirt had been caught as it swung. Every curl of her hair stood out from her head like a frozen fountain.

She was made entirely of glass, as clear as ice, tinted a faint, drowned blue. And she was, Elowen saw with a slow dreadful lurch of the heart, not a sculpture.

A sculpture is made to resemble a laughing woman. This was a laughing woman. The little lines at the corners of the eyes were the lines of someone who had laughed often. There was a tiny mole beneath the left ear, caught in the glass like a bubble. Nobody carved that. Nobody carved the faint chip in the front tooth. It had simply been there, once, in a living face, and had gone into the glass with the rest.

"Hello," whispered Elowen, absurdly.

The woman went on laughing at something that had happened a very long time ago.

She moved on, on tiptoe, with her hands tucked into her sleeves.

They were everywhere. They stood in rows along the hall, in the spaces between the pillars, in alcoves and doorways, hundreds of paces back into the dark. A boy with a kite string in his fist, his arm flung back to cast it into a wind that had died three hundred years ago. Two old men leaning together over a chessboard, their brows pinched, one hand lifted to move a piece and never moving it. A young man with one boot half off, hopping, mouth open in a yell. A mother with her face in a child's hair. A girl asleep on her feet with her head on a stranger's shoulder. Each of them wore the same blue-tinged glass, and each of them had stopped in the middle of something.

She walked through them as one walks through a church, with her shoulders hunched and her eyes down.

It was not the horror that got into her, at first. It was the ordinariness. If they had been screaming, she could have borne it. If they had been twisted into attitudes of agony, she would have known what to feel. But they were so busy. So deep in their small lives. A woman kneeling to tie a shoe. A man holding up a fish.

None of them knew, she thought. It didn't hurt. It just stopped.

And she thought of the snow outside, and of the dog's name, and of a smooth peaceful man sitting in a drift with a smile on his face, and a cold finger touched the back of her neck.

…

At the head of the hall stood a man holding a map.

It was bigger than the others, or seemed so, because he stood on a plinth of black glass with a bronze plate fixed to its face, and because the pose was so completely absorbed. He was thirty or forty, with a bony, stubbled, clever face and a lock of hair falling over his brow. His coat was cut for a traveler, with deep pockets and a wide collar, and he had a satchel slung at his hip, and in his hands he held a sheet of paper, spread flat between them on the air.

It was made of glass, too. But unlike the rest of him, it was not finished. The paper's upper two-thirds were etched with a delicate net of lines and tiny glass letters, mountains and rivers and a long jagged coast. The lower third was blank, a pale sheet of unmarked glass. And in his right hand, between thumb and forefinger, he held a pen no longer than her finger. The nib hung a hair above the page.

He had been about to write something.

She knelt and rubbed the frost from the plate with her sleeve. The letters were small and plain.

ANSELM HARGREAVE. Cartographer of the Northern Reach. Came to chart the valley in the thirty-ninth winter before this one. Remained.

Remained.

She sat back on her heels and read it three times. Then she put her palm on the cold black plinth, as one touches the side of a coffin, and said under her breath, "I'm sorry."

It seemed the only thing to say.

She rose and went along the row, rubbing frost from plates. A baker, a pair of sisters, a boy of sixteen, a woman nobody had named. Remained. Remained. Remained. The word was on every plate. It was the same word each time, in the same neat hand, and it began to look less like a verdict than a refrain, like the last line of a hymn.

She was looking, of course, for one face.

She went down the whole length of the north row, her breath puffing white, her heart beating a little harder with every figure. A girl with a basket. A girl with a flute. A girl her own age, with straight brown hair, turned half away. Elowen's stomach dropped through the floor. She went to her at a run.

It was not Elodie.

It was a stranger. She knew it as soon as she saw the jaw. But for one moment, in that cold light, with the plait of glass hair lying over the glass shoulder and the long neck bent just so, it had been so like that she stood with both hands over her mouth, shaking, for a full minute before she could breathe.

Not her. Not her. Not her yet.

She found, to her annoyance, that she was crying. She wiped her face roughly with her cuff and kept going.

…

It was sometime after the south row that she noticed her feet.

She had stopped by a fountain in the middle of the hall: a round pool of black glass, empty, in which three children stood with their hands joined as though playing at ring-around. She meant to look at their faces. She meant to read the plate. But she found she had been standing for a long while, and that the plate was very hard to read, and that for some reason she could not remember what she had been about to do.

Her feet were cold.

That was all. They were only cold. It had been a cold night, and the floor was glass, and she'd walked a great way. But she tried to lift her left foot and it wouldn't come. She looked down, puzzled, as at something that had been done to somebody else.

A fine pale rime, white as flour, had grown over the toe of her boot. It had crept up past the ankle while she stood. It was already working its way over her shin, in delicate fern-shapes, each tiny leaf of it shining.

Oh, she thought, very slowly. That's not good.

She tried to say it aloud. The words came out thick, as though she were speaking through wool.

The three children in the fountain watched her with their glass eyes. They looked pleased. It occurred to her, in a distant, dreamy way, that she might stay a moment and join them. There was room beside the little one. She had a free hand, and the little one's other hand was open. She could just reach...

It would be so quiet. It would be so easy. Nobody would ask her anything. Nobody would ask whether she was clever enough, or brave enough, or good enough to bring a sister home. She could stand here, and be warm in the cold, and have no name for the thing she'd lost.

Elodie, she thought, vaguely, and was surprised to find she was smiling.

And then every mirror in the hall lit up at once.

…

The light was so sudden and so fierce that she cried out. It came from all directions, ripping through the rime, tearing it down off the glass in white sheets, and every pane in the room, a thousand panes, blazed with a bright cold fire that turned the frozen hall to a cathedral of white noon. The statues threw long shadows. The black pool flashed. The three children in the fountain flung up their glass hands against the glare.

"ELOWEN!"

It was a roar. It was a sound she had never heard from any living throat, a bellow that seemed to shake the dust from the vaults. It came out of every wall.

"Move! Move your feet! Get out of there, get OUT—"

She tried. The ice had reached her knee. She couldn't feel the leg.

"Stop looking at them! Look at the light! Look at me, damn it all, look at me, Elowen—"

The shape in the great mirror at the end of the hall had come forward. It stood now at the glass, a man's whole figure, black and tall and sharp as an ink drawing on white, and both its hands were flat against the pane. He was shouting. She could see the tension in the dark outline of his shoulders. He looked like a man trying to break down a door.

"Think of your sister!" he cried. "Think of her face! Now! Not their faces, hers!"

Elodie, said something small in her chest.

She fixed on it as one clutches a rope. Elodie bent over a sewing frame. Elodie on the landing in her blue shawl. Elodie in the garden, laughing, with the sun in her hair. The fire in her chest leaped. It came up in a single raw column, so quickly that she gasped, and the rime around her leg cracked all at once like a window struck by a stone.

She stumbled. She fell on her hands and knees on the glass floor. The whole white hall rang with the sound of ice splitting, and she scrambled up and ran, half-lame, with her boots clattering, back through the shining aisles with the statues flashing past on either side like a thousand startled faces.

"That's it," said Casimir, nearer now, in a voice raw with something she had no name for. "That's it. Go on. Go on. Don't stop."

She did not stop.

…

She fetched up against the great door, panting, with both hands braced on the pane, and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor of the corridor outside, with her legs stretched out in front of her. They tingled painfully. Pins and needles ran from her toes to her knees. The ice had gone. She was shaking so hard her teeth knocked together.

The mirrors in the gallery were all lit. Every one of them, from end to end. They shone with the same fierce white light as the ones in the hall behind her, and in the nearest of them, at her elbow, was a tall dark figure with both hands against the glass.

It was not calm. It was not cool, or fastidious, or amused. It was breathing hard. The shadow of its chest rose and fell, and she could hear it, a ragged sound in the air.

"You went in," he said.

"I wanted to see."

"I told you, there was one wing. I told you." The voice cracked. "Do you have the faintest idea what that place is? Do you understand what you were doing, standing in the middle of it? Another minute. Another half of a minute, and Perrin would have found you in the morning with the rest of them, smiling, in the middle of the floor, and I would have been obliged to—" He stopped.

"Obliged to what?"

"To stand and watch it," said Casimir, very low. "Again."

She stared up at him.

She had spent a week wanting to catch him out. In her imagination he had been cold, and clever, and ironical, a calculating thing in a looking-glass, pulling strings behind a curtain. She had been ready for that man. She'd planned what she would say to him.

She had not been ready for the black outline in the pane trembling like a leaf.

It was fear. It was plain, human, helpless, ungovernable fear, and it was not for himself. She knew the sound of it. She had heard her own father make it when Elodie was nine and went through the ice on the millpond, and he had carried her up the bank with her blue lips and her hair frozen into a rope. It wasn't the anger of a man who guards a secret. It was the terror of a man who has nearly lost something he can't afford to lose.

It's me, she realized. He's afraid for me.

It was so sudden and so unexpected that she forgot what she meant to say.

"I'm all right," she said, rather stupidly.

"You are not all right. You are blue."

"Only my feet."

"Only—" He made a noise that was half a laugh and half a sob, and abruptly pulled his hands from the glass and turned his back. It was the first time she had ever seen him turn away from her. She could see the long line of his shoulders, hunched, as if against a wind. "Go to your room. Please. Go and lie down. Perrin will bring you something hot. I cannot... I do not think I can speak to you just now."

"Casimir."

"Go."

"I'm not—"

"Elowen. I am asking you. Please."

It was the second time he had said it. It was the second time she had heard what the word cost.

She got to her feet slowly. Her legs held. She stood in the corridor with the light of a thousand mirrors on her face, and looked at the tall black outline with its back to her, and said, because it was the only true thing she had, "Thank you."

He did not turn.

She turned to go. And as she did, a small sound made her glance back, a tiny, brittle, silvery tick, like a fingernail on a goblet.

In the mirror beside him, the one he'd braced both hands against, a single hairline had opened in the silvering. It ran from the top corner almost to the middle, thin as a spider's thread. It had not been there when she came out of the hall.

Casimir had seen it, too. He had lifted his head and was staring at it. And in the stillness, with his shoulders stiff and his voice shaken, he said quietly, to no one at all:

"Not again."

The light in the gallery guttered, and went out, and left her alone in the dark with her heart going like a drum.