Chapter 4 #2
In the tub, I let myself float for a minute, buoyed by the density of the water and the afterglow of what we’d made together.
The sigils along my arm pulsed, slow and even, the way a body does after fever breaks.
I watched the mirror-girl run both hands through her hair, watched her legs slide together, watched her lips twist in a slow, skeptical smile.
I did not hate her. I even pitied her, a little.
She looked so lost up there, so alone in the aftermath.
I climbed out of the tub and wrapped myself in the thick white towel that hung on a silver hook by the bed.
My skin was humming, alive, but the air in the room felt clean and new.
I ran my hands over the ruined tights and the gray hoodie on the floor, considered putting them back on, and decided against it.
Instead I sat cross-legged on the bed, towel bunched around my hips, and waited for the next message from the man in the mirror.
It came, as I knew it wold, in the flash of the sigils: a single word, spiked with longing and a level of sincerity that startled me even now.
Please.
I pressed my palm to the inside of my wrist and sent back a wordless pulse of permission.
Through the bond, I felt his relief. Not a sexual thing, not even a hunger—just a grateful settling, a peace I had not expected to find in either of us.
We were, for this moment, equal. Not demon and human, not master and ghostwriter, but two people stripped of the distance that had always kept us safe.
I lay back on the bed and let the towel fall open. In the mirror above me, the woman stared back, flushed and naked, but no longer ashamed. She looked like someone who could survive this place, even if it was only for one more night.
I closed my eyes, and the world folded in around me, silver and warm and quiet.
There was no morning in any honest sense.
The mirrored chamber was the same temperature it had been when I had finally, by some small unconscious hand of my body, come up out of the mercury water and across the cool stone to the bed.
The light was the same sourceless light.
The columns of steam still rose, slow and unhurried, off the surface of the tub.
There was no window to lighten. There was, on the far side of the silver door, no morning either; I knew this in some bone-deep way before I had even tested it.
But I woke.
I lay on my back in the cream linens and listened to my own breath go in and out for a long count, and I felt, at the inside of my left wrist, the slow private gold of the sigils still lit, and I felt, at the far end of the wire that ran out of the chamber and through the palace, a stillness that meant he was not, just at this moment, looking at me.
He was giving me the room.
I sat up.
The grey-green silk robe, which had been folded across the low bench when he had brought me in last night, was gone.
In its place: a pair of soft dark trousers, the fabric some old quiet blend that drank the light instead of giving it back; a long charcoal shirt cut between linen and silk, the cuffs deep, the collar standing of its own accord; a pair of leather slippers the color of old wine.
They had been laid out by a hand I had not heard come and go.
The trousers were folded to the precise crease of a thing made for a body that had been measured.
I held the shirt up against the front of me and the cuff fell to the exact bone of my wrist.
He had measured me.
I dressed without looking up. I did not want to meet the woman in the mirrored ceiling—not in the daylight there was no daylight of, not in the sober administrative hour after—and so I dressed by feel, sliding the trousers up the long length of my legs, drawing the shirt over my head and feeling the fabric settle along the small of my back the way his hand had settled there on the steps.
The slippers took my feet. They fit. They fit the way a thing fits when somebody who has been watching you for a long time has at last gotten you a pair of shoes.
I could not face him.
That was the small honest sentence that arrived at the front of my mind once the dressing was done.
I could not, in any of the small administrative postures the day was asking me to take up, walk out of this chamber and along the gallery and through the silver-leaved door into the warm gold of the study and sit opposite him in a leather chair while he poured something from a small carafe and asked me how I had slept.
He knew how I had slept. He had been there for the part that had not, by any decent measure, been sleeping.
The thought of meeting his eyes across a low table sent a small private heat into the back of my neck and I turned my face from the very idea.
I went to the door instead.
I half-expected it not to open. I had braced for it.
I had, while pulling the cuff of the charcoal shirt straight, run a small interior rehearsal of the scene in which I tugged at the silver and the silver did not give and I had to sit back down on the bed and wait.
The rehearsal was a small uncharitable thing and I knew it as I rehearsed.
The door opened.
I turned right.
The gallery on the right ran shorter than the one on the left and gave, after some twenty paces, onto a low arch I had not noticed last night.
The arch went down. There were stairs. The stairs were not the wide shallow stairs of the great gallery—they were narrow, the treads steep, the risers deep, and they went down in a long unbroken flight into a corridor that was not mirrored at all.
The walls there were bare black stone. The same polished obsidian of the floors above, but cut rougher, left more honest, the marks of the tool that had made it still visible along the seams.
The corridor was cooler. The light was lower.
There were small mirrors set into the stone at intervals—narrow ovals the height of my torso, framed in the same dark wood as the study walls—and between every two mirrors an alcove.
Each alcove held one object. Each object stood on a plinth of dark wood.
Each plinth was the height of a man’s hand resting on it.
I walked.
The first alcove held a pair of reading glasses with one arm bent slightly out of true.
The lenses were small and round. I did not, for a half-second, recognize them.
Then I did. They were the glasses my Aunt Liesl had worn on the day she had taught me to read, sitting on the screened porch of the rented house in Sag Harbor with her finger under the words of a Beatrix Potter book, and they had been buried with her in 2007.
The second alcove held a cassette tape with a hand-lettered label. The label said, in my mother’s handwriting, Rachel — driving songs, July ’01. I had not seen the cassette in twenty years. I had not, until this second, been able to remember the precise loop of my mother’s capital R.
The third held a stub of pencil with teeth marks along the unsharpened end.
The fourth held a paperback copy of Wuthering Heights with my mother’s margin notes still in it.
The fifth held a single small white scallop shell, the kind I had picked up off the beach at Ditch Plains the summer I was eleven and kept in a drawer and lost.
He had collected my life.
I want to be careful with the word collected, because the word collected is the word of his brother and not his.
He had not collected these things. He had—I felt it as I walked, in the slow private way the corridor was offering its alcoves—coveted them.
He had coveted them and not, until last night, been allowed to have them in his halls.
They were here now because I was here. They had arrived sometime in the small unaccounted hours.
I came around a long bend.
The next alcove held a hardback book.
I knew the book before my eyes had finished arriving on it. The binding was a deep blue, the color of a sky going through one of its later colors, a color I had imagined many times. The title was in a thin cream serif along the spine. Salt and Stay. The author’s name underneath. Rachel Booker.
The book was finished.
The book had a flap. The book had a back cover. The book had the small heavy weight in the air around it of a thing that had been bound and trimmed and slipcased and held by other hands than mine.
I did not pick it up.
I could not.
If I picked it up I would have to open it.
If I opened it I would have to read the first line.
If I read the first line and the first line was the line I had written on the L train going the other direction in October of last year, then the book was mine and I was, for the first time in nine years, on the front of one of my own pages.
I was not, this morning, ready to be on the front of one of my own pages.
Instead, I walked on. I understood, though, that I was not choosing the corridor.
The corridor was choosing me. Or rather—the wire at the inside of my wrist was choosing, with the soft unhurried hand of a thing pulling slack out of a line, and the corridor was the path the slack was running along.
I had felt it, at the door of the chamber, as a length of give.
I felt it now as a direction. When I took a step that the wire had not asked for, the air went a fraction less bright.
When I took a step the wire approved of, the gold along my forearm warmed by the smallest possible degree.
It had been pulling at me, I realized, since I had opened my eyes.
I had not, until this minute, given it a name.
I had given it the name of restlessness, the name of being unable to face him, the name of needing to walk somewhere that was not a study with a fire in it.
The bond had let me give it those names.
The bond had been patient about them. The bond was, just at this moment, done being patient.
The corridor turned.