The Loneliness of the Untouched

He watched her go up the stairs in forty-one panes at once.

It was the only way he had ever been able to watch anything. From the great mirror at the foot of the east tower she was a small straight figure with her hand trailing on the rail; from the long panels in the stairwell she came toward him in profile, and away, and sideways; from the narrow slit-windows she was a tall stripe of gray wool and a bright braid, flickering past one pane after another, as quick as a bird behind the bars of a cage. He saw the back of her neck. He saw the way she favored her left leg, where the ice had been. He saw her stop on the fourth landing, and rest her forehead against the wall, and shut her eyes.

He did not look away. He had no way of looking away. That was the whole of his misfortune.

I should not have shouted.

It was a thought he had had fourteen times already, in the span of a quarter of an hour. It was no more useful on the fifteenth. He had not meant to shout. Shouting was vulgar. It was a thing that happened to other people, to men with warmer blood and less control, and in three hundred years he had made it a point of pride not to have done it once.

Tonight, for the sum of nine seconds, he had roared like a farmer whose barn was on fire.

The girl reached her door. She went in. The latch clicked, and the tall, plain mirror over her chest showed her sitting down on the edge of the bed with her boots still on, rubbing her shins, with the music box in her lap.

He turned all his attention elsewhere. It was courtesy. It was also cowardice, and he knew it.

Somewhere on the second gallery, a mirror was cracked.

He did not go to look at it. He knew the line of it exactly, from the top left corner almost to the center, thin as hair. It had come when he put his hands to the glass and shouted for her to live. There had been four, now. One for the night of her arrival, when she had said sister and he had not been ready. One, long ago and small, in the days of the other girl. One, three nights back, when she laughed. And this.

He did not know why they came. He had a theory, which he disliked. It had to do with the way, each time, he had briefly forgotten to be careful.

…

She found him at midday.

Not that there was anything so definite as midday in the Dim Snow Land. The light merely grew, from the color of pewter to the color of a dirty pearl, and held there for some hours at a pitch that Perrin called brisk. He had decided to keep out of her way until it passed, and had in consequence spent the morning in the farthest and least frequented of his panes, the cracked little looking-glass on the landing of the old servants' stair, staring at the pattern of frost on his own side of it and not thinking about her. He had not succeeded. It was not a pane that made a good study.

And then she came up the stair with a candle in her hand, and sat down on the step in front of the glass, and said, "You've been avoiding me."

"I have been occupied."

"With what?"

"Contemplation."

"Of frost."

"It is a very interesting frost."

"I'm sure." She set the candle down. She looked tired, he saw, and pale, and there were shadows under her eyes the color of bruised plums. But she was looking at him. Not at the pane. At him. It was a trick of the angle, he supposed, but she was gazing straight into the place where his face would have been, and he felt it somewhere under his breastbone, a long small pull, like a fish on a line.

"I won't ask about the wing," said Elowen.

He had not expected that.

"I'm not going to ask what the statues are, or who put them there, or what you meant by again." She folded her hands round her knees. "I just want to say a thing. You saved my life last night, and I've been angry about it for twelve hours, and I think that's idiotic of me, so I'm going to stop. Thank you. That's all."

He said nothing for a moment.

"You are angry at being saved?"

"I'm angry that you knew better than me." She grimaced. "I hate that. I always have. Elodie used to say I'd rather drown than be pulled out by someone who'd told me to swim."

"She sounds wise."

"She sounds insufferable. I loved her to bits." Her mouth wobbled, and she firmed it. "I want to know one thing. Just one. And you can tell me to go to blazes."

"Ask."

"What happens," said Elowen, "if I touch you?"

The frost on the pane went still.

It was the question he had known she would ask, sooner or later, since the moment Perrin had told her the first law. He had had a hundred polished replies ready. He had rehearsed them in the night, in the long glass hours, as other men rehearse speeches to their wives. I am afraid it is not permitted. It would be improper. There is a condition.

He said none of them.

"I break," said Casimir.

She was very quiet.

"I am not a man in the sense that you are a woman," he said, and it was strange to hear his voice, flat and careful, say words he had never said aloud to another. "I am— made of the same material as the house. You have seen my hands. Or you have seen what I allow you to see of them. It is not an illusion, and it is not a metaphor. I am glass, in the manner of a man who has been glass so long that he has forgotten whether he is a man. I cannot be held. I cannot be struck. I certainly cannot be... well." He stopped. "A hand laid on me in earnest would be enough. The weight of it. The warmth. The glass cannot take it. It would crack from the place of the touch outward, in a star, and I should not like to say what would follow."

"You'd die?"

"I do not know. I have never wished to find out."

It was half a lie. It was the half that was safest. He felt it go out of him like a pebble thrown into a well, and waited for the splash.

"That's horrible," said Elowen.

"It is merely the way of things."

"No. It's horrible." She was looking at him with a strange fierce expression. "How long?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"How long have you been like this? How long since anyone held your hand? Not a kiss, not any of that, just a hand. A pat on the shoulder. A person leaning against you on a bench."

He opened his mouth to tell her it was of no consequence. He closed it. He found, to his absolute horror, that the true answer was rising in him like a tide.

"There was a woman," he heard himself say. "Very long ago. She would put her palm against my cheek when I was ill. I was a small boy. It was—" The words failed. He tried again. "It is the last warm thing I remember. A hand. A dry, rough hand, smelling of woodsmoke, and she hummed while she did it. I could not tell you the tune. And then it was winter, and then it was very cold, and after that—" He stopped. "After that I was alone with the house, and the house was very large."

The silence that followed was the longest of his life.

"And that was three hundred years ago," said Elowen, in a low voice.

"Give or take."

"And no one since."

"There was no one to take the chance." It came out thin. "I do not say it for pity. You asked how I live. I live as the house does. I look. I listen. I hold what I may of whatever walks in. And I do not touch, and I am not touched. It is not suffering. It is merely a very long silence. I had thought I was quite used to it."

"And now?"

"Now there is a girl in my hall who sings."

He had not meant to say it. He had not meant to say any of it. He had meant to be dry and fastidious and unreadable, like a lamp behind a curtain. It was a catastrophe.

She said nothing. She did not even look away. She sat on the cold stair with her candle guttering beside her and her light-brown eyes steady on the glass, and the longer she looked, the less he felt like a house with a ghost in it, and the more he felt like a man standing alone in the middle of an empty field, in the rain, with all his coat open.

…

He watched her face change.

It was the strangest thing he had ever seen. He'd observed a great many faces, in his time. He knew pity. He knew the dull sickened pity of those who had come to see the monster in the glass, and the bright, hungry, curious pity of the clever, and the pity of the gentle, which was a sort of blessing and almost the worst. This was none of those. There was no softening in it. It was more as though some small room in her had been lit.

"Casimir," said Elowen.

"Yes."

"I don't think you're a monster."

"I never said I was."

"You've been saying it for a week. In every sentence." She gave a short laugh. "You stand off, and you're clever, and you tell me I'm not forbidden anywhere except one place, and then you go white as a sheet when I go there. You said you can't feel. You've been feeling this whole time. It's the loudest thing in the house."

"You overstate."

"I'm a country girl. It's all I know how to do." She leaned a little closer. "I've got a question, and I want you to think before you answer. You said the glass can't take warmth. You said the weight of a hand would crack you."

"Yes."

"But I've been warming it for a week, and nothing's cracked."

He had known she'd notice.

"The mirrors have cracked," he said carefully.

"That's not the same."

"No," Casimir admitted. "It is not."

"So it's touch. It's weight, and skin to skin." She was working it out in front of him with the hard bright concentration he had begun to love. "What if it wasn't? What if it was a layer? A glove. A scrap of cloth, a bit of glass between your hand and mine, so thin you couldn't feel the weight. Would that crack you?"

"Elowen—"

"I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm not asking you to say yes. I'm asking what would happen. Honestly. Do you know?"

He found that he did not.

It was an astonishing discovery. In three centuries, it had never crossed his mind. He had taken the rule on trust, as one takes a family name; it had been there when he woke, a fact of the house, like the cold. He had never tested it. He had never been tempted to.

Warmth, he thought, with slow dread. What if it is not the warmth?

"I do not know," said Casimir.

"Then we could find out."

"It might be dangerous."

"Everything's dangerous." She sat back, her chin lifted, and he thought, with a pang of the purest panic and joy, that he had never seen anything so stubborn. "I'm not afraid of you. I told you. I'm not afraid of the glass, or the snow, or your temper. I'd like to try. If you want to."

If you want to.

He wanted to. He wanted it with a force that astonished him: a great swelling want that rose from the roots of the house and shook the walls. He felt it run through every pane in the castle, forty, four hundred, four thousand, a single long shudder like a bell struck deep in its throat.

He knew that the fault in the mirror on the second gallery had grown by a hair.

"I did not say no," said Casimir.

And that, heaven help him, was the whole of what he could say.

The girl gazed at the dark outline in the glass. She had a smear of candle-wax on her cheek, and a bit of cobweb in her hair, and a bruise coming up along her jaw where the ice had cracked, and he thought that she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He thought it quite calmly. It seemed to him a fact like any other.

"I'll take that," said Elowen, and smiled.

She picked up her candle. She went down the servants' stair, step by step, and the flame bobbed against the frost.

He watched her all the way to the bottom in sixteen panes. And in the seventeenth, the cracked one, a long way off on the second gallery, a small bright splinter fell out of the silver and rang on the floor.

Nobody heard it.

He did.