WINTER GALA (II)

Day 56 of 100

It began as a cold.

It began in the soles of her feet, a thread of ice that crept up through the bones of her legs, and by the time Vesper's voice rang out under the lanterns it had reached her heart and taken hold. She felt something give. She had been standing in Cal's arms with the waltz singing round her; she was suddenly standing alone, in the middle of the floor, under a hundred and fifty pairs of eyes, and she did not know how she had come there.

She looked down.

She was glowing.

It was not a figure of speech. It rose from her skin in a pale, steady, silver-blue radiance, as clear as moonlight: first at the wrists, then the throat, then pouring up along her arms and over her shoulders until her whole body was wrapped in it like a flame. It was the light she had seen in a hundred mirrors, in the dark, in the cellar, in her own bones. But she had never seen it with her eyes. It was a thing for Seers. It was a thing for the Captain, alone, in a locked room.

And now every soul in the Great Hall of Thornwick Academy could see it.

The stone, she thought. Oh. The stone.

She turned her head. Across the floor, among the stricken dancers, Vesper stood with her hand at her throat. The black drop between her fingers was alive. It pulsed, once, twice, with a slow dark beat, and where it beat, a long fine ribbon of blue-silver streamed away from Mara's body through the air and drained into it, like smoke into a flue.

The music had stopped. The violin died on a sour note.

In the silence, somebody screamed.

…

It spread like a stain.

She heard it go through the room: a gasp, a rustle, a long rising whisper. Look at her. What is she? Is it a trick? A girl in pink was crying. A boy had dropped his glass, and it burst on the wax with a ringing smash. The lantern-light flickered over a hundred stricken faces, and every one was turned the same way, in the same ugly, awful fascination, as faces turn toward a fire.

She saw them see.

She saw the moment when each one looked from her to the red-clad figure across the floor, and back. She saw the sums done. Two. Two of them. The same. She had cropped brown hair and a plain silver gown; the other had long chestnut curls and a scarlet rose. But the faces were the same. The mouths. The jaws. And now the light, rising off her in that cold silver blaze, was the very color that had lit the Chapel on Ascension night.

"Doppel," breathed someone.

"It's the clerk. The Captain's clerk."

"The one who— I thought she was—"

"There were two of them. At the Ascension. I saw."

"It's her."

"Doppel."

The word ran round the hall in a murmur of loathing. It took hold of her like a hand. She stood there in the middle of the shining floor, in the dress that Ruth Pellam had wept over, with her light streaming off her, and felt the whole weight of an entire world turn to a single point.

She had been afraid of this for fifty-six days. She had imagined it in her sleep. She'd had speeches. She had planned, in her cot in the loft, to be calm.

She was not calm. Her knees had turned to water. She could not draw breath.

Cal, she thought.

…

"Wardens!"

It came from the dais. It was a quiet voice, deep, courteous, and it carried like a bell.

The Director had risen. He stood at the edge of the platform, leaning on his stick, silver-haired in the amber light, with an expression of the profoundest sorrow. He had put up one white hand. And at the signal, from the pillars and the doorways and the shadows, a dozen gray-coated men detached themselves and began to move.

She had not seen them come in. She knew them: Rooke's own. Hartwell, and Tilden, and young Pip with his round frightened face, and the two porters in Bureau gray who had sat all month on the Mirror's crate. They came across the floor with their hands on their holsters, steadily, not hurrying, through a crowd that parted before them like water.

"Captain Rooke," called Halloran, "you will oblige me by standing aside. The Bureau is aware of the identity of this Doppel. We have the testimony of the Original. The Act is clear. She is to be taken into custody, and conveyed to the Faculty Hall for examination."

Nobody moved.

Rooke had not let go of her hand.

She felt it, hard and warm and unmoving in hers. She looked up, and saw his face. It was set. It was white. It had the fixed pale calm of a man at the top of a very high place. He looked down at her, and she saw him decide.

"Stay behind me," he said.

"Cal—"

"Behind me, Mara."

He let her go. He stepped in front of her, between her and the oncoming Wardens, and in a single smooth motion he drew the revolver from under the dress-gray coat and leveled it at the hearts of his own men.

…

The Hall gasped.

It was a sound she would remember all her life: a hundred and fifty people drawing breath at once. A woman fainted. A chair went over. Someone shouted, and someone else said Sit down, and for an instant the whole company seemed to sway, as a field sways in a gust.

"Captain," said Hartwell, in a hoarse voice. He had stopped ten feet off, with his hand frozen on his belt. He was a stolid, red-faced, middle-aged man, who had once shared a flask with Rooke on a night watch at Rutland. "Captain, for God's sake."

"Stand back, Hartwell."

"You can't."

"I am not asking."

"It's the Director's order!"

"I know whose order it is." Rooke's voice was perfectly level. It was the voice he used in the cells. "I'm not going to say it twice. This woman is under my protection. She is a clerk of my command and a citizen of the United States, and I have not issued a warrant. Under Section Nine, no Warden may lay hands on her without it. Take one more step, and I shall shoot the first man who does."

"You'd not."

"Try me."

He did not shout. He did not seem to need to. He stood in the lantern-light, a tall gray figure in the black-faced coat, with the revolver steady in his scarred hand, and every man in the Hall knew that he meant it. She saw it in their faces. She saw young Pip's lip begin to tremble.

"Rooke," said the Director gently. "You are throwing away a career."

"Yes."

"A reputation. A pension. Your father's name."

"Yes."

"For a Doppel."

"For a friend," said Callum Rooke.

The silence broke. It broke, not with a shout, but with a low and dreadful murmur from the benches, an animal sound, such as is made by a crowd that has seen a man step off a roof.

…

"Take them."

It was Calder. She had come forward at the Director's elbow, iron-gray, thin-lipped, her voice sharp as a slap. "Take them both. Bring the Mirror. If the Captain has gone over to the Doppel, he's a party to the crime. The Director's authority covers it."

"Doctor—" began the Dean, quavering.

"Bring the Mirror!"

Hartwell had not moved. He was looking at Rooke. His broad red face worked.

And then a heavy hand fell on his shoulder from behind.

"Easy, Tom," said Okafor.

He had come up through the crowd with a speed she'd not have credited in so large a man. He stood at Hartwell's side, immense, shaggy, with the flower in his lapel crushed, and his own revolver still holstered. His small blue eyes went to the Captain. They went to the woman in the glowing dress.

For a long moment she thought he would take it from the holster.

"Lieutenant Okafor," said Halloran. "I trust I may rely on you."

"You may, sir."

"Then arrest the Captain."

"Aye." Okafor drew a long breath. "Only there's a matter of the hinges."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The side door, sir. To the terrace. It's been sticking all evening. And I've a notion—" He cleared his throat. "I've a notion that if a person were to lean on it, from the inside, it might open all at once. And a man might be standing in the way. And a man might not see what was going out."

Halloran stared at him.

Okafor smiled, gently, with enormous innocence.

"I'm a slow man, sir," he said. "I never could move fast in a crowd."

He took a step. It was, to all appearances, an accident. He stumbled; he swayed; he fell, with the whole of his vast weight, against the two nearest Wardens, and all three went down in a heap among the chairs. A girl shrieked. Hartwell shouted. Tilden tripped over a boot. And through the confusion Josie Tull, who had come from nowhere with a punch-bowl in both hands, tipped it over the foremost porter's head.

"Run," said Cal.

…

She ran.

She did not know how. She had her skirts in her fist and his hand locked round her wrist, and the floor was a blur, and the faces fell away on either side. She heard the Director's voice behind her, raised for the first time, a thin high thread: After them! After them! She heard a shot, a single sharp crack that went over her head and broke a lantern, and a shower of rose-colored paper and burning oil came drifting down. Somebody was screaming that the Hall was on fire. The doors banged. A cold wind hit her face.

They were on the terrace.

It was a wide flagged walk along the south side of the Great Hall, with a stone balustrade, and a flight of steps going down into the dark. The air was bitter. Above them the stars burned in a great clean void, and below, spread out like a sheet of pewter at the foot of the hill, lay Lake Merrow.

"This way."

"Where—"

"The shore. They'll have the road." He was dragging her along the balustrade, down the steps, three at a time. Her silver slippers skidded on the stone. "There's a boathouse. A path."

"They've lanterns—"

"They've lanterns." He did not slow. "We haven't the time to be clever."

They came out at the foot of the steps onto a strip of frozen shingle. The cold struck up from the ground, a deep still iron cold, and her breath smoked. The lake lay before them. And she saw, with a sick drop of the heart, that it was not water.

It was ice.

Not the sound white ice of winter. It was gray, and old, and rotted: a great pale skin laid across the bay from shore to shore, mottled with black and pocked with open leads. It was the last of the winter's ice, trapped by the lie of the hill and the lateness of the year. The moon lay in it in broken pieces. At the far side, a half mile off, a few small dark shapes like beetles showed against the pale: the fishing huts of the village.

"We can't," she said.

"We must. It's a half mile across. They'll have to go round by the road, and that's two."

"It won't hold."

"It's held all week." He turned. His eyes in the moonlight were very bright. "Mara. Do you trust me?"

Behind them, on the terrace, the shouting rose. Lanterns bobbed. A man's voice said, quite near, "There!"

"Yes," she said.

"Then keep to my track."

He stepped onto the ice.

…

It sang.

That was the horror of it. It sang under their feet, a thin high ringing whine, like a wet finger on the rim of a glass, that ran away from them across the bay in long cracks and shivers. The surface was slick as glass. Black water showed in the seams. She put her feet where his had been, step after step, with her arms spread for balance and her skirts dragging, and the roar of her pulse in her ears drowned out the shouting from the shore.

A hundred yards. Two hundred.

Behind them the lanterns had reached the shingle. She heard a boot hit the ice, and a curse, and a long sullen crack, and a splash. She did not look round. She kept her eyes on his back.

The cold was inside her again.

She could feel it moving: a slow, steady, deadly tide, rising through her legs, through her belly, to the cage of her ribs. It was not the lake. It was the stone, the black drop at Vesper's throat, still drawing. The thread was still there, humming between them across the dark, and with every step it dragged at her like a hook. Her light was going. She could feel it go. She felt the edges of her thin, as a frayed sleeve thins.

Don't, she thought. Not now. Not here.

"Mara!"

"I'm coming."

"Don't stop—"

"I'm coming—"

She put her foot down, and the ice was not there.

…

There was no sound.

That was the thing she would remember. There was no crack, no splinter, no warning. The whole sheet beneath her foot simply folded, like wet paper, and let her through; and she went down into the black water with her hands out, and the lake closed over her head.

The cold hit her like a wall.

It was not cold as she had known it. It was a blow. It took the breath out of her in a single wrench, and the sight from her eyes, and the sense from her limbs; the silk dragged her under like a hand. She kicked, and her kick was nothing. She opened her mouth to scream and the lake poured in. Black. Black and silver and roaring, with a faint, thin, far-off light above, the moon through ice, getting smaller.

I'm drowning.

She had always known it. She had known since she was fourteen. My mother drowned in this lake. And all her life she had stood back from the edge of the water as one stands back from a dog that has bitten.

I'm going to die.

And something opened.

It opened in the back of her mind like a door, like a lid lifted off a well; and the memory came out of the dark all at once, whole and bright and unbearably clear, as though it had been waiting there ten years for this precise moment of cold.

…

A dock.

Gray boards, slimed with weed, slick underfoot. A September evening. The sky the color of lead. The lake lay flat and still, and across it blew a thin cold wind that smelled of dead leaves.

She was fourteen. She stood at the end of the dock in a black dress, a mourning dress, too big in the shoulders, with a hat in her hand. Her mother was dead. They had put her in the ground that morning, at the Falls, in the rain, and Aunt Cora had said "brave girl" and left her with the housekeeper; and she had walked out of the house at dusk without telling anyone, and come down the north road, and found this place, the lake-keeper's dock, with its half-fallen cottage, because it was the only place in Vermont where nobody would ask her how she was.

The pain had been beyond bearing.

It was not grief. Grief she could have borne. It was something worse, a fever of the soul, that had come on at the grave and had been rising ever since, so that every breath was a burning. She felt it in the marrow of her bones. She felt her light begin to go out of her, in long slow streamers, like the smoke of a candle. She knew, in some dim way, that it was the soul-sickness, the thing the old books talked about in children who had loved too hard. She knew that it killed.

She had meant to walk off the end of the dock.

She had been standing there for an hour. And then a voice behind her had said, "Don't," and she had turned.

A boy.

A tall gaunt boy of nineteen in a rough gray shirt, with a coil of rope over one shoulder, and a lock of black hair across his eyes. A stranger. The lake-keeper's son, she would learn, home for the autumn from the Warden school at Burlington. He had been mending a boat; at the landward end of the dock an old man in a patched coat sat on an upturned keg, staring at the water, and did not turn his head. He stood at the landward end of the dock with his hands out, quite slowly, as one approaches a wild thing, and his gray eyes were wide with horror.

"Don't," he said again. "Please. Look at me."

"Go away."

"I can see it. I'm a Seer. I can see your light. It's going out." His voice cracked. "Miss, you're dying. You'll be dead by morning. Please. Let me help."

"Nobody can."

"I can." He had come a step nearer. He held out his hands. And she saw, in them, as plainly as a lantern, a light of his own: a small, bright, trembling thing, the first raw flower of a gift too young to be controlled. "I've read of it. There's a way. You take the pain, the worst of it, the thing that's burning, and you lift it out. It's old magic. It's forbidden. But I can do it. I can take it from you."

She had looked at him. She had been fourteen and dying and entirely alone.

"Will it hurt?"

"No," said the boy. "I promise it won't."

He lied. She knew it afterward. She'd seen it in his face. He had no idea at all.

…

He put his hands on her.

One at her breast, one at her brow. They were warm. She felt the light go into her, a gentle bright flowing, like water into a dry bed; and the burning eased. For the space of a breath she was whole, and calm, and the sky was wide.

Then something caught.

She felt it before she understood it: a snag, a wrench, a deep tearing pull, as when a sleeve is caught in a door. She looked down. Between his hands, in the air, a light was rising. Her own. Blue and silver, in the shape of a three-armed star. It was being drawn out of her, slowly, like a thread from a cloth, and she saw, with a fascinated horror, that it was not coming away clean. It was splitting.

"Stop," she said.

"I can't—"

"It's tearing."

"I don't know how to stop it!"

The boy was weeping. The tears ran down his face and fell on her hands. He held her light between his palms, blazing, doubled, two shapes where there should be one; and she felt, in the center of herself, a thing go that she would not be able to name for ten years. A line severed. A cord cut. The whole wide inner country of her torn in two like a map.

"Mara," he said, and she realized with dim astonishment that she had never told him her name; he must have heard it from the housekeeper. "Mara, look at me. Look at me. Don't go. Look at me!"

"I'm sorry," sobbed the boy. "Oh God. I'm sorry. I didn't know it would do this."

And the dock tilted, and the lake rose up, and she fell into the dark.

…

She came up.

She did not know how. A hand had her by the collar, a great fierce hand, hauling; and the surface broke over her face like a shout. She choked. She coughed up half the lake. She was lying across a shelf of broken ice with the water streaming from her hair, and her gown a lump of lead, and her whole body wracked with shudders so violent that she could hardly see.

"Mara!"

He was on his knees beside her. He had flung himself flat on the ice, spreading his weight, with one arm round her waist and the other wrapped in a ring of her hair. His coat was gone. His face was inches from hers, white as paper, running with water, and his gray eyes were wide and wild.

"Mara, look at me. Look at me. Don't go."

She looked.

It was the same face.

It was older. It was thinner, harder, scored with ten years of weather. A scar ran through the left brow that had not been there, and there was gray at the temple, and the boy's soft mouth had set into a line. But the eyes were the same. The shape of the bones. The lock of black hair across the forehead. The two hands, one on her ribs, one on her face, with the long white scar on the back of the left.

Mara, look at me. Don't go.

I'm sorry. Oh God, I'm sorry. I didn't know it would do this.

The words fell into her like stones into a well, from ten years ago and from now, and met at the bottom.

She lay on the ice in the moonlight, with the lake lapping at her skirts and the lanterns bobbing far away on the shore, and stared up into the face of the man who held her.

It was you.

It was you on the dock.

You are the boy.