A Bargain Made Tighter

The storm came out of a clear sky, which was the first thing wrong with it.

Elowen had spent the afternoon in the chart room, a long cold chamber at the top of the north tower where a man named Anselm Hargreave had once drawn the valley. She had gone there on a hunch. If a cartographer had come to the Dim Snow Land and stayed, he would have left papers, and where there were papers there might be names, and where there were names there might be hers. The room was a treasure house of dust. There were rolled maps in leather tubes, and brass instruments gone green, and a long table whose surface was a frozen sheet of ink, where a bottle had spilled and set in the middle of a stroke. She went through the drawers one at a time, with her gloves off and her sleeves pushed up, reading by the thin white light that fell through the skylights.

She found no names. She found a tin of peppermints with the lid rusted shut, and a letter to a sister in a town she'd never heard of, begun in a clear confident hand and abandoned halfway down the page, and nine unfinished sketches of a woman's laughing face, no two the same.

She was holding the last of these when the light went out of the room.

It didn't dim. It went, like a lamp pinched out. Elowen looked up and saw that the skylights over the table, which had been a pale bright gray when she came in, were now the color of slate. A second later something struck the glass with a tick, sharp as a fingernail. Then another. Then, in the space of three breaths, the whole ceiling was roaring.

It was snow. It was glass snow, and it was coming down as if somebody had upended a granary of broken windows on the roof. It beat on the skylights in a long hissing drumroll. It rattled the casements. It sprayed in through a gap in the corner, and she felt it sting her cheek, and put up a hand and found blood on her fingers.

She was already running.

…

The north tower stood alone at the end of a glass bridge.

She had crossed it without thinking that morning, a long, slender skyway of clear panes strung between the tower and the main keep, with a rail of silver wire and nothing whatever beneath. In summer, she supposed, it was a pretty walk. Now it was a throat full of whirling white. The snow came at her from both sides, and from below, in crackling sheets, and where it struck her sleeves it stuck, and where it stuck it ate.

She put her head down and ran.

One. Two. Three. She was counting her steps again, as she had in the fog, because it was the only way to stay in her body. The glass floor rang under her boots. The storm shrieked in her ears. Four. Five. Six. She was halfway across the span when she lost the number.

It wasn't the snow that did it. It was a sharp, sudden, soundless absence, as if someone had reached into her head and plucked out a stitch. She stopped dead in the middle of the bridge with her hair whipping across her face and found that she did not know why she was there.

She looked down at her hands. They were red with cold and slick with melted blood. She looked at the tower behind her and the keep ahead, and the white nothing on either side, and she felt a vast, calm, curious puzzlement, as of someone woken in a strange bed.

Where was I going?

The question was almost pleasant. It had no urgency in it at all. She tipped back her head and let the snow fall on her face. It was very soft, now. It no longer hurt. It was like being kissed by a thousand tiny cold mouths, and each one said, so kindly, rest.

You can sit down, said the snow. Sit here. Nobody will mind.

She was going to. She had actually begun to kneel.

"Elowen."

It came from her left. She turned her head and looked at the nearest pane, a small panel set into the bridge rail, no bigger than a hand mirror, scoured white with ice. There was a figure in it. A dark outline, with one hand extended.

She stared at it with polite interest.

"Elowen," said the voice again, urgent, rough. "Elowen. Do you know me?"

Do I? She tried to think. She had the strangest feeling that she ought to, and that if she only reached for it, it would be there. The voice was low and clear. It made her feel as though she were sitting by a fire, with something warm in a cup. "I know your voice."

"What is my name?"

"I— you—"

Cas, said some small rebellious stubborn creature at the back of her skull. Casi. Casimir. The word came up through the snow like a bubble through water.

"Casimir," said Elowen.

He made a sound she would not forget as long as she lived. It was the sound of a man who has been holding his breath for a very long time.

"Good," he said. "That is good. Now stand up."

"I'm tired."

"I know. I know you are. Stand up anyway." The voice was steady as a hand. "There is a pane at the end of the span. Do you see it? Past the post, to your right. I am going to be in every pane between here and the keep. You are going to walk toward the next one, and the next, and the next. You need not think about it. You need only look at me. Can you do that?"

"Why?"

"Because I will not have you stay."

The snow murmured. She looked at the outline, and the extended hand, and the blur of lamp-colored light behind it, and she said, slowly, because it seemed to matter, "You're not very good at asking."

A pause. Then a dry, ragged breath that was almost a laugh. "No," said Casimir. "I never have been. Walk, Elowen."

She walked.

…

It was the strangest road she had ever traveled.

The storm swallowed everything. She could see six feet of bridge, and nothing else. But wherever she turned her eyes, there was a flicker in the white, a small bright rectangle floating at the edge of the blizzard like a lamp in a window. A pane in the rail. A pane in a pillar. A square of silver let into the floor at a corner, shining up through the ice like a coin in a pond. Each of them held the tall dark figure, one hand lifted. And each time she reached one, the next was already lit, a little way ahead and to the left, beckoning.

He did not speak after the first. He didn't need to. He simply went on being there. A hand in a looking-glass, and another, and another, drawing her through the dark one pane at a time.

She stumbled. The next mirror had a hand in it, steadying. She dropped to her knees. The next showed him crouched, down at her level, his face in shadow, and she found she could get up.

"You are doing very well," he said once, so low that it might have been the wind.

She was not doing well. She was freezing. She had lost the feeling in her fingers, and her lashes were stiff with ice, and her mind kept sliding away to a green field with a single bright figure in it, and a name she could not quite remember. But she walked. She had the odd, distant sense that she was holding on to something. She thought it was a song.

Ember, ember, keep the night.

She was singing it. She hadn't known. It came out of her mouth in a thin, cracked, whistling thread, between breaths, as she lurched from pane to pane. Hold it small and hold it bright. And in the glass, the dark figure had turned its head, and lowered its hand, and was listening.

Hush the wind, sang Elowen, and hush the snow.

And from somewhere in the whirl, very low, so low she might have dreamed it, a second voice joined in. It sang one note, a single sustained tone, under hers, a warm dark floor to stand on. It sang the last line with her. And then, when she faltered, one note short of the end, it sang the note she'd missed.

She stopped dead.

The wind howled. The next pane glowed, small and silver, a yard from her hand.

What was that?

"Walk," said Casimir hoarsely. "Please. Do not ask me. Walk."

She walked.

…

The keep door was a tall arch of frosted glass, and by the time she reached it she was no longer sure that her legs belonged to her. She hit it with her shoulder. It swung open. She fell through, and the warm dim air of the main hall closed around her like a hand, and the door slammed behind her with a boom she felt in her teeth.

The roar of the storm dropped away to a distant hiss.

She lay on the floor with her cheek against the polished crystal and her breath going in and out in big sobbing gasps. Her skin was burning. She was unbearably, impossibly alive. Little streams of melted snow were running off her sleeves, and in each of them, as it trickled toward the drain, she saw a tiny glint of silver, a fleck of her own wits being carried off into the earth.

She lay and counted her things. Elowen. Thomas. Martha. Elodie. She did not have the dog's name or the color of her father's eyes, but the four people who mattered most were still there, in a row, and she wept with relief.

A rug unfolded beside her with a soft chime. It was the white one, the warm one, the one from the first night, and it laid itself over her shoulders like a mother's arm.

She pulled it to her chin. "Thank you," she said into it.

No answer. She hadn't expected one. She sat up, clumsily, and looked about.

The hall was deserted, and almost dark. The storm had put out the lamps in the east windows, and only one light was burning: a long tall mirror on the far wall, directly opposite, between two pillars. It was the only pane in the hall that had been left unclouded and uncracked. In it she could see herself, small and bedraggled and wrapped in white, and across the floor behind her image, a long way back, a dark figure sitting on the lowest step of a staircase that did not exist.

She got to her feet and went toward him.

It took a long time. The hall was very large. When she reached the glass, she stopped at arm's length, and he stopped, too, a pace back on the other side, with his hands hanging at his sides. The light between them was mild and steady, the color of candle-wax. It showed her the damp ruin of her own face, and a shadow of his: the line of a shoulder, the curve of a jaw, the dark of an eye that might have been looking at her or through her.

They stood like that for what felt like a long time.

"You didn't have to come out," said Elowen at last.

"Of course I did."

"You told me once you never interfere."

"I have since reconsidered." A hoarse breath. "I have reconsidered a great many things."

He was shaking, she saw. It was in the outline of his hands, a fine tremor, as of a leaf in still air. He was holding himself rigid against it. She had the strong impression that if she had touched him, she would have felt it all the way up her arm.

"I'm all right," she said.

"You are the second person in two days to tell me so, and you are visibly lying."

"A bit."

"You forgot my name."

"For a second."

"It was nine minutes," said Casimir, in a voice scraped raw. "I counted."

She stared at him. Her throat closed. She took a step forward, and another, and put her hand up flat against the glass, at the level of his heart. She didn't plan it. It seemed the only thing to do with her hand.

The cold bit her palm. And through the cold, so faintly she might have imagined it, there was something else. Not heat. A kind of presence. The sense of weight at the other side of a closed door, with someone breathing on the other side.

On the other side of the glass, his reflected hand rose slowly and settled against hers.

They didn't touch. The mirror lay between them, a quarter-inch of cold silvered crystal. But in the glass, hers and his were pressed palm to palm, and she watched his fingers curl against her fingers, careful, reverent, like a man handling a bird's egg. A faint warmth spread out from the place where the two images joined. She felt it travel up her wrist, and into her chest, and down the long ache of her spine, and she shut her eyes, because it was too much.

"I am not afraid of you," she whispered.

She had not meant to say it. It came out of her like a thing she had been carrying a long way.

"I was. A little. At the beginning. I thought you were some sort of devil, and I was going to have to outwit you. And now I think..." She swallowed. "I think I've been very stupid. I think you're the least frightening thing in this whole place."

The hand against hers did not move.

"Elowen," said Casimir.

His voice did not sound cold at all. It shook like a candle flame in the draft of a door, and it was a long time before he could finish.

"I am very much afraid," he said, "that you have been right all along, and that I am in a great deal of trouble."