Broken Glass

The letter sat stiff under the mantle against his chest. Caledfwlch hung at his hip. Somewhere on the far side of that arch, a long way up, Laura was holding on, and the bond between them was wider than it had been in days.

He turned to Herman. Herman hadn’t moved since the nod. The lantern hung at his side, the caduceus lay in the crook of his arm, and the small wings at his sandals had gone still, as if they were waiting too.

There was a great deal of it, when Andy went to say it. It ran from a voting panel with every wire labeled to two coins he still didn’t understand, from a plain door in the service corridors to Sam and Liesa married at the bonfire by the ancient power vested in him by common sense, and it ended here, at the foot of a bridge nobody had crossed since the last of the twelve was made. He couldn’t find the end of it to start from.

“Thank you,” he said. “For all of it. The panel. The katabasis. Sam’s wedding. This.” He stopped, because his voice had done something on the last word. “I don’t think I’d have— Thank you. For everything.”

Herman looked at him for a second as if deciding which of himself to answer with. Then the corner of his mouth went up.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Most of the ones I walked over never thought to say it. They were busy.”

Walked over. At the fire after the katabasis, Herman had given him a coin, and one sentence with it: Keep it. You’ll know when to use it. Andy had put it in his Inventory that night and carried it through the wedding and the Hall and every mile of the wasteland without being sure what it was for.

He was sure now. He opened his hand and called it, and the coin came up into his palm, and he held it out.

“I think this is yours,” he said.

Herman looked down at it. Then he patted the front of his chiton, once on each side, like a man checking for his keys.

“Huh,” he said. “I wondered where that went. I’d misplaced mine.” He took the coin between two fingers and turned it over once in the lantern light, and then it was gone, into a fold of the chiton or into nothing at all; Andy didn’t see which. “Fare’s paid. Not that the bridge cares. I do. It’s tradition, and I’m very old.” He tipped the lantern toward the glass. “After you. I’ll keep up.”

Andy faced the bridge and set his boot on it. The hum came up through the sole, faint and steady, as it had before. This time he didn’t take the foot back. He put his weight on it, and the black glass took the weight without a sound. It didn’t give and it didn’t ring. It held him as if it had been expecting him for a long time. Then the other foot, and he was on it.

He climbed. The arch was steeper than it had looked from the bottom, and then, a few steps on, it wasn’t, the slope settling itself to whoever walked it. Under his shoes the river of stars went sliding by, and from up here he could see down into it through the glass: stars turning over as they went, some so near he could make out the sharp small fire of each one, some so deep they were only a shine. The gold that ran through the glass caught the light of the nebulae and carried it along beside him, rose and blue and that pale wave-green, so that he walked up the arch inside his own reflected colors. Herman came half a step behind him at his left. The lantern’s light lay on the glass ahead of Andy’s boots and moved when he moved. Deep inside himself, the vast thing that had shifted and responded when he had wished for Marissa to see her parents, or for JJ to be back, stirred into wakefulness.

He was higher than he had thought. When he let his eyes go to the edge of the glass, the arch fell away on either side to nothing at all, only the stars going by a long way down, and he brought his eyes back to the glass. The hum had climbed with him. It was in his shins now, and in the bones of his hands where they swung at his sides, steady and low, like a pulse that wasn’t his.

He didn’t look back, and it had nothing to do with the rule Herman had given them in the dark under the Hotel. Everything he wanted was the other way.

He thought about Laura. What the crossing would cost, and who would pay it, he had set down at the bottom of the bridge, and he left it there. He thought of her on the dance floor at the reception with his arms around her, saying she was scared; of her at five years old on a concrete step he had never seen until tonight, her bare feet on the cold and a woman at the far end of the step whom she had never mentioned to him; of where she was now, which he couldn’t see. He walked toward that.

Near the top, the light began to change. It came up out of the glass first. The black began to glow from inside, not brighter so much as deeper, as if the dark in it had been lit all the way down. Then the stars under him brightened and ran at their edges, every hard point of them going soft, until the river below was one long blur of white and gold. The bands in the glass lost their lines. The nebulae came closer overhead, or he went up toward them, and he couldn’t have said which; he couldn’t have said how far he had come, either. It might have been a hundred steps or ten times that. Herman’s footsteps were still beside him and then they were a little behind, and then he couldn’t tell whether he heard them or only remembered hearing them a moment ago. The whole bridge had gone strange and soft, as a dream does just before waking, when you still know where you are but can’t feel the bed under you yet.

Andy kept walking.

He came over the top, and felt it in his knees before he saw it, the ground under him tipping the other way and starting down. On the far side, the light grew.

It came up out of the glass and down out of the sky, and it met around him. The lantern’s gold went into it and didn’t come out. He could see his hands, and then he could see them only as a shape against the brightness, and then he couldn’t see them.

He walked into it. There was nothing but white.

No bridge. No stars. No sound of his own boots. He was moving, or he thought he was. He was breathing, or he thought that too.

White.

---

Then it thinned. It went like fog goes off a field in the morning, not all at once but in patches, and through the patches came grass. Andy was standing in it. Long grass, cool against his ankles, wet down at the roots where his shoes pressed it, and the smell of it reached him a moment after the sight did. Earth. Night. Something green crushed under his heel. He breathed in, all the way to the bottom, and only then understood how long it had been since he had. Down there the air had smelled of nothing at all, of a dust that had never been in it.

Overhead it was dark. Off to his left, up a long slope, a line of lanterns climbed toward the trees and went in among them—the lantern path. Around him the land lay open and low, running off into the dark in soft swells, and somewhere out in it an insect was making the one small sound it had, over and over. It was the Hollow Garden. He had heard Dinah name this stretch of it the first time he came down here—the Amber Pastures.

Herman was beside him, exactly where he had been at the foot of the bridge, the wings at his sandals stirring once and settling. Out here the lantern looked almost ordinary, a lamp someone had carried into a field at night.

“What happened?” Andy said. His voice came out too close, too much his own. Nothing took any of it away.

“You crossed,” Herman said.

Andy looked behind him. There was grass, and more grass, and the dark at the edge of the pasture, and the arch was gone and the glass with it. Nothing was left to show he had ever been anywhere else except the white mantle on his shoulders and the sword at his hip, and the grass seed already caught in the hem.

“And you’re holding it back,” Herman said. He said it carefully, the way he had told him the rest at the foot of the bridge. “What the crossing put in you. All of it. You’re holding it at bay, for now. I don’t think you know you’re doing it.”

Andy put his hand flat over his breastbone without meaning to. “Oh,” he said. It was all he had.

Because there it was. Now that Herman had said it, he could feel it, and once he could feel it he couldn’t stop—something vast behind his ribs, pressing at the inside of them like a held breath. It didn’t hurt. It was patient. It was bigger than he was, bigger than anything he had a picture for, and it was waiting for him to let it out, and he wasn’t going to. He couldn’t have said how he was holding it, only that he was, and that he would go on holding it. Whatever it was, whatever it made him, it could wait until he had seen Laura again. He wasn’t letting go of anything before that.

He reached for her. The bond was there before he had finished reaching, and it was wide. It didn’t stop at where she was and how afraid. It gave him her pain first, the same pain he had felt for one moment at the bottom of the bridge, all through her at once and done again and again by something that didn’t tire. It came down the line into him. He stood still in the grass and let it, because it was hers and she was carrying it, and the least he could do was feel what she was carrying.

Under the pain there was something else, and it took him a moment to find what to call it. She was holding. The pain went over her and went over her, and every time it had passed she was still there, still Laura, with her teeth set. Not hoping, exactly. Not just that, at least. Refusing. It was the oldest thing about her, and it had been true since they were small enough to cry through a wall for each other—she did not let go of anything she had decided to keep.

And she was up there. For what had felt like an eternity, since he had been cast into the wasteland, the bond had put her right here and impossibly far at once. Now it put her up. Above the Garden, beyond the Hotel, in the hollow where the Verdant Arches were, and he could have walked to the exact place she knelt with his eyes shut, as he always could have, since before either of them could walk.

His eyes stung. He let them.

He turned for the lantern path. He had gone two steps up the slope, the wet grass dragging at the mantle, when he stopped.

He had no doubts left to stop him. What stopped him was the letter, the folded edge of it against his chest as he moved, and with it the night he had stood outside her bedroom door and reached for her and found almost nothing there. Laura believed her mother’s Wish had made him love her. She had read it in Sarah’s last letter, in Sarah’s own hand, and nothing he had said since had moved it an inch, because he was the one it was about. When he told her it wasn’t true, she heard the Wish talking. Whatever he carried up that path to her, she would hold it up against that letter, and he couldn’t tell what would be left. And she needed to know that before she could even remember, someone had chosen her. Freely.

There was one person she would believe about it. Only one, and it had never been him.

And Sarah was here. Across the pasture, a few minutes’ walk, in a cottage with a rocking chair by the window, where she had sat the whole of this night while her daughter was up at the Arches.

He looked up the path toward Laura one more time. The line between them carried her pain down to him, and under it the holding, and the trust, and it didn’t ask him for anything. It never would.

Dinah had once told him that time in the Hollow Garden was dilated compared to the island. What he spent here would come out smaller up there. He took hold of that and found it thin—smaller wasn’t none, and every minute in that cottage was still a few moments of this going over her while he knelt on a rug. His weight was already on the next step up the slope. He made himself take it off.

Then he turned around.

“I have to make one stop first,” he said.

Herman didn’t ask where. He lifted the lantern a little toward the far side of the pasture, where the dark was thickest and the ground ran down toward the cottages, though Andy didn’t need it shown to him.

“I thought you might,” he said.

Andy didn’t move. “Dinah told me once that time runs different down here,” he said. “I don’t know how different. I don’t know if it’s different tonight.” His hands had closed at his sides. “I need to know what this costs her. Please. Don’t make it sound smaller.”

“I wouldn’t,” Herman said. He lowered the lantern a little, so that it lit the grass and not his face. “Dinah told you true. The Garden runs long against the island. A minute spent in here is a good deal less than a minute up there, and I can give some help there, too.” His eyes went up the slope, to the line of lights climbing into the trees. “A good deal less isn’t none, though. She hurts for every bit of what you spend. I won't tell you otherwise.”

“No,” Andy said. “Don’t.” He let out a breath. “Then I take the least it needs. Not a minute more.”

Herman inclined his head and said nothing more.

Andy set off across the grass. Herman fell in beside him, and the lantern’s light went ahead of them over the pasture, a moving circle of gold with nothing in it but grass. The ground ran down in long, easy swells. After a while the first of the cottages came up out of the dark ahead of them, low and small, with a light in one window.

He had no words ready for her. People who loved her had been talking to her for years, Laura every morning, Marie for longer than that, and none of it had gone in. He had a letter in his pocket, and her own Wish, word for word, as he had heard her make it in a nursery tonight.

He walked faster.

Herman stopped at the gate. It was a low wooden gate in a low fence, and he stopped at it as if it were the edge of a room where something private was going on, with the lantern at his side and his free hand resting on the top rail. He didn’t come any farther and he didn’t say anything. When Andy looked back at him, he only tipped his head toward the door.

Andy went up the path alone. The door stood half open, and lamplight lay out across the step. He reached under the mantle as he went and took the letter out of his breast pocket. He hadn’t decided to. His hand did it, and by the time he reached the step the letter was in his fingers, folded in four, the yellow-ruled paper gone soft at the creases.

He stopped in the doorway. The smell reached him first. Violets, and wood polish.

Then the room—small and dim, with a worn rug and two armchairs and the long table with its low stools pushed in around it, and a lamp burning low at the near end. By the window, in the rocking chair, Sarah was rocking. Slow and even, her hands in her lap turning over each other, her face to the glass and the dark garden beyond it, the old chair creaking on every forward swing. Her lips were moving.

Mildred, who sat with her every day, wasn’t there. Marie was. She stood at the end of the table with one hand on the back of a chair, still in her sneakers, as if she hadn’t been back long enough to sit down. And on the rug at Sarah’s feet, close enough to lean on her, Sandra lay along the boards with her head up and her ears forward, the lamplight on her short russet hair and on the plain leather collar at her throat.

He had stood here before. It had been in a vision, in the Suite, with a string of override codes on his smartwatch and Erin beside him to keep him anchored. This room, this chair by this window, Sarah rocking with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the garden, and himself on this threshold with a folded piece of paper in his hand. He had told all of them about it at the lunch. She never said a word, just kept waiting for me to deliver the news. I knew it was something she’d never want to hear. In the vision his clothes had been dusty and his face worn out, and the way he held the paper had said everything.

He looked down at the letter in his hand. His clothes were not dusty tonight but white, with grass seed caught in the hem of the mantle.

“It isn’t bad,” he said under his breath, to nobody. “It isn’t.”

“Andy?” Marie had taken a step toward him and stopped. Her voice was cracked down the middle and hoarse from hours of keeping it low. “What’s going on? They went up the path. All of them. Nobody’s come back down.” Her hand had found the chair back again. “Where’s Myra? Where’s Riley? Where’s Laura?”

“Nergal has Laura,” Andy said. “Up at the Arches, above the Hotel. The rest of them went up after her to hold him there, I think. Myra and Riley too.” He made himself say the last of it plainly. “I’m going to them now.”

“Myra,” Marie said. Only the name. Her knuckles stood out white on the back of the chair. On the rug, Sandra’s ears went flat against her skull.

“They came here first.” It was Sandra, low and flat, with the old Chicago edge in it. “Those things. To the Hearth.”

“Seven of them.” Marie was looking at Andy, but she was seeing something else. “Dinah called them the Howling Ones. They came in through the walls. Harper put them down, Harper and her wives. You should have seen her, Andy. You should have—” She stopped, and started again. “But they went through Mona’s people. Before anyone could get between. Harper’s boy, Winter. Kevin. The girl who’s a tree, Jenny. They went right through them, and they—” Her mouth worked. “They nearly died. All three of them. They’re all right now. They’re all right. They nearly died.”

“Mildred was here, protecting Sarah. We came to see to her,” Sandra said. “Soon as it was quiet.”

Andy had seen them in the Hall. Women in rags with their hair moving in a wind that wasn’t there, coming in through the doors with the whispering all around them, and Nergal’s voice telling them unhurriedly what to do. Let none of them be ended. The Gentle Hearth was where everyone in the Garden who couldn’t fight had gone to wait it out. Nergal had sent seven of those things into it anyway, through the walls, into a room full of people who couldn’t fight back, some of whom had come to this island for his wedding.

The anger came up in him hot and simple, and the thing behind his ribs came up with it. It pushed, all at once, so hard that his breath stopped. For one second it was very near the surface, and very large.

He held it. He didn’t know how, any better than he had in the pasture. He held it until it settled, and then he let the breath out. Later. All of that was for later.

His eyes had already gone back to Sarah. She hadn’t turned her head. Nothing anyone had said had reached her.

He crossed the room, the floor creaking once under him, and went down on his knees in front of her chair, on the rug beside Sandra, so that his face was nearly level with hers. Up close he could hear what her lips were doing. “My baby girl, my baby girl, I love you, sweet girl.” Over and over, soft as breathing. Her eyes were very blue and they had the window in them and nothing else.

Laura had knelt like this in front of her more times than he could count. It didn’t help.

“Sarah,” he said. The chair went forward and back.

“I need to tell you something true. You don’t have to do anything. Just let it in, if you can.” He swallowed. “I understand, now. I understand why you are hiding. But Laura never hated you. She never pitied you. She never once thought you were a bad mother. Not when she was little, and not at the end, and not now. She loved you. She loves you. She—” He pressed his lips together until he could go on. “She does, Sarah. She still does.”

“My baby girl,” Sarah murmured to the window. “My baby girl.”

“Five days before she died,” Andy said, “she wrote you a letter. She never gave it to you.”

He unfolded it. The paper was soft from being carried, and halfway down the page one line was a little smudged to shadow where a thumb had rested on it while Laura had read it over. He laid it in Sarah’s lap, across her turning hands, with the top of the page toward her, so that the first two words were the first thing there to see.

Dear Mom,

Behind him Marie made a sound, very small. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Laura.”

Sarah’s hands went on turning under the paper. The loop went on.

“I was inside Arabella’s memories tonight,” Andy said. “All the way down, as far as they go. I was in the nursery, Sarah. The night you made your Wish. Laura was three weeks old and she had your finger in her fist. I heard every word of it.” He kept his eyes on hers, on the window in them. “I heard you make your Wish.”

At the word, something in her caught. Her lips stopped, and started again, and the words that came out were different ones. Older ones. “I’m sorry, sweet girl,” Sarah said. “My baby girl. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sweet girl.”

Andy heard Marie draw in her breath. “She hasn’t said that in weeks.” Marie’s voice had gone thin. “Not since Laura started coming every morning. It was always sorry, before. All those years, it was sorry.”

“I’m sorry, sweet girl,” Sarah said again, to no one in the room.

Andy had heard it the first time he came into this room, with Laura on her knees in front of this same chair. He had heard it as everything: sorry for Greg, and for the house, and for being where she couldn’t be reached, and for all the years before that. It had never occurred to him to ask what it was sorry for. Nobody had. And it had gone soft under Laura’s visits and turned into love, and now it had come back at a single word, like a hand going back to a burn.

The Wish.

She thought she had killed her daughter with it. It was all there in the turn of the loop, as plain as if she had said it aloud. Without the Wish there would have been no bond, and without the bond Laura might never have been out on that footbridge in November, and so it came back to her, every road of it. She had asked for one thing for her baby, and her baby had died of it at thirteen, and for sixteen years she had been saying sorry to her for it.

The shape of it wasn’t new to him. He had carried his own version of it over the same bridge for sixteen years, the one where it was his fault, where he had been too slow or too far or simply the reason she was there at all. He had put it down, in the end, because he had been shown the truth.

Nobody had told her.

So Andy told her. He didn’t know if any of it would get in. The first time he had stood in this room, Marie had said it to Laura afterward, low, pitched for her ears alone, though he had been near enough to hear: She’s not gone. She’s just somewhere harder to reach. It had been as much for Marie herself as for Laura. He chose to believe it now, because he had nothing better, and because it cost him nothing to talk to her as if she could hear every word.

He put one hand on the arm of the rocker, not on her, and the chair came forward against his palm and went back, and he let it go where it wanted.

“It wasn’t your Wish that made me love her,” he said. “I want you to hear that first. It didn’t make me do anything. I loved her before it ever had the chance. The first time I saw her, we were a little over a month old, and my mom laid the two of us down on a yellow blanket in our house, and we looked at each other.” His voice wanted to go, and he didn’t let it yet. “That was it. I don’t remember it. I don’t need to. It was me. I saw her and she was mine, and she looked at me and I was hers, and our hands found each other. The bond came after that. It only took because we—” He waited. “Because we let it.”

“I’m sorry, sweet girl,” Sarah said to the window.

“You made sure of that. I heard you.” He had every word of it, and he gave her the words back exactly, because they were hers. “Find him—don’t build him. You said if he doesn’t love her, don’t you dare make him. You said, I would rather she grow up lonely than grow up loved by somebody who never got to choose it. Sarah, you wished for her to have a chance. That’s all you asked for. And I took it. I took it with both hands, before I could even hold a spoon.”

The chair went forward and back under his hand. Her lips moved. Her eyes were on the window.

He went more carefully now, because the next part was the one that could cut her.

“And I need you to hear this part right,” he said, voice breaking. “She might still have died. Without your Wish. I’ve thought about it more than I’ve ever thought about anything, and she would have. He already had you when you wished, Sarah. He’d had you for a year, you said it yourself, back then. Without the Wish it’s a different house, that’s all, the same man in it. And whatever he did to her in that house, he’d have done in the other one.” He held her eyes, though they did not hold his. “She told me once that she was drowning long before she ever hit that river. She didn’t mean you. She never meant you. She meant him. She meant the house he kept the two of you in, and you were under that water with her. Everything you could do from down there—Sarah, everything—you did. You left her with my parents whenever you could. You gave my mother as her emergency contact so someone could take care of her if you could not. You wrote her a whole book, and she’s read every page of it. You begged Arabella to look after her. And when you had one Wish in the whole world, and he wanted money, you spent it on her. And Arabella knew where I was, and she ensured he would live in that house on Twin Yews Road, so that Laura would be right next to me.”

The rocking hitched. Only once, and then it went on.

“Without your Wish, Sarah, I’m not next door,” Andy said. “I’m not anywhere near her. My parents aren't there to keep her safe when Greg hurt you. She doesn't spend time with me and Emi where she can avoid thinking about what's happening in that house. But she still sees everything, hurts for everything. Someday Greg goes too far, or she is too hurt. She goes under anyway, one way or another, somewhere I never even see it, and when she does there’s nothing to hold her. No bond. Nothing for me to follow her down with. She just goes on, wherever people go.” He had to stop. He made himself start again. “The Wish didn’t change whether she died. It changed one thing. When she died, there was something there to hold her back from going on, and that’s the only reason I could go and get her. It’s the only reason she’s alive.”

Something moved at the back of his mind as he said it—Thoth saying a farmer’s name as he wrote it, and a low hall of clay tablets standing on their edges along the walls, and Horun beside him in the corridor. He let it go. It wasn’t for now.

“You aren’t the reason your daughter died,” he said. “You aren’t, Sarah. You’re the reason she could have moments of happiness as a child. You're the reason she’s alive today.”

On the rug beside him Sandra had lifted her head off her paws. “You hear him, Sarah?” Her voice had gone rough all the way through. “You hear that?”

“Sweet girl,” Sarah murmured. The words still came, but they had changed again while he talked. The sorry had gone out of them, not all at once but a word at a time, and he hadn’t caught it going. Under the letter her hands had stopped turning over each other and lay still, one on top of the other, the paper across both. Marie hadn’t moved from the end of the table. Through the open door behind him the lantern at the gate made a small steady light, and Herman’s shape stood beside it, waiting.

Andy leaned in. He didn’t raise his voice. Nobody else in the room was making a sound.

“She needs you now,” he said. “Laura needs you. More than she’s ever needed you, Sarah. More than when she was little. She needs to believe in her future. She read your last letter, the one you wrote her when you were out of time, and she believes your Wish made me. She believes I never had a choice about her. I’ve told her it isn’t true, and she hears the Wish talking. I’ve tried— God, I’ve tried. She won’t believe it from me. She’ll believe it from you. You’re the only one in the world she’ll hear it from.”

The loop went on, softer.

“And she’s—” Andy’s mouth wouldn’t finish it, and then it did. “She’s carrying my daughter. Your granddaughter. She wouldn't exist without the Wish, either.”

The rocking stopped.

It didn’t slow first. The chair came forward one more time and stayed there, tipped toward him, and the creak of it went on for a moment in the quiet after it had stopped.

Sarah’s hands closed on the letter.

They were slow about it. The fingers came together over the paper one at a time, as they hadn’t closed on anything in sixteen years, and then they held on, hard enough to crease it. She looked down. Her eyes went to the paper in her lap, to the two words at the top of it in a thirteen-year-old’s pencil, and Andy watched them stop there. Her lips moved on the words. No sound came.

Then she looked up, at him. At him, and not at the window. Her eyes were very blue and brimming and there was someone behind them.

“Is that true?”

Her voice was thin and cracked from disuse, almost nothing. It was hers, not the thin, apologetic voice he remembered from his childhood. It was the voice he had heard in the nursery tonight, saying Okay. Okay, before she made her Wish.

“Yes,” Andy said. “Yes, Sarah. All of it.”

Sarah came back. He watched it happen. It went through her all at once. Her shoulders came up out of the chair. Her breath went in, deep and ragged, a breath that lifted her whole body. Her mouth opened and her face broke, every part of it at the same time, and her hands came up off her lap with the letter still in them and pressed it flat against her chest, over her heart, both hands, as hard as she could.

Her daughter had loved her. Andy saw her know it. Her Wish had saved her daughter, and he saw her know that too.

“Sarah.” Marie was there, beside the chair, though Andy hadn’t heard her cross the room. She was laughing and crying at once, in the same breath. “Sarah. There you are. Oh, there you are. There you are.”

On the rug Sandra made a sound that wasn’t a word, low in her chest, and then it was. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Okay, okay, okay.” Andy had heard her say it once before tonight, in a memory, beside a bed nearly thirty years ago, with Sarah’s hand white-knuckled in hers.

Marie went down on her knees and pulled her sister into her arms.

Sarah came to her. She bent forward out of the rocking chair into Marie’s arms with the letter crushed between them, and her arms went around her sister and held on, and the two of them held each other and cried, the old chair rocking a little under Sarah and Marie rocking with it. Sandra pushed in close against them. She laid her head against Sarah’s knee and pressed it there and shut her eyes, and her tail swept once across the boards and was still.

Andy sat back on his heels and let them. His face was wet. He hadn’t felt it start. He put the back of his wrist to his eyes and left it there a moment, and under his ribs the vast thing he was holding had gone quiet, almost gentle, as if it too were willing to wait for this. The line to Laura was still open. Her pain was still coming down it, steady, and under the pain the holding, and he didn’t take his attention off it for a second. But he let them have this. Sixteen years. He could give them a minute of the night.

The lamp burned on the table. The smell of violets and wood polish was all around them, the same as in the vision, and nothing else in the room was the same at all.

He let them have it for as long as he could bear to, and it wasn’t long.

The line to Laura didn’t let him forget. Her pain kept coming down it, steady as a tide that wouldn’t turn, and every few breaths it went over her again and he felt it go, and under it the holding, still holding. He watched Marie’s hand move up and down Sarah’s back. He watched Sarah’s fingers knot in the back of Marie’s blouse and let go and knot again, as if she were checking her sister was still there. “I’ve got you,” Marie kept saying into her hair, not much louder than breathing. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” Sandra hadn’t lifted her head from Sarah’s knee, and her eyes were shut.

His breast pocket was empty for the first time all night. He kept putting his hand to it and finding nothing there, and taking the hand away. He waited as long as he could stand it. Then he put his hand back on the arm of the chair.

“Sarah,” he said. “I’m sorry.” She lifted her face off Marie’s shoulder. It was wet and blotched and entirely hers. “I’m sorry to cut this short. I wish I didn’t have to. I’d give you the whole night if I could.” He kept his voice low, and he didn’t look away from her. “I need you to come with me. Now. To Laura.”

Sarah looked at him. It was the first time she had. In the chair she had looked through him, and when she woke she had looked at him only long enough to ask him for the truth. Now she looked at him properly, taking all the time in the world over it—at his face, and at the circlet on his brow with the blue rose cool against it, and down at the white mantle with Myra’s foxfire green showing at the lining where it fell open, and Dawn’s sash, and the sword on its plain belt at his hip. A man kneeling on her rug in his wedding clothes, with grass seed in his hem.

Her mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile. It was the start of one, the shape of it, as if she remembered how it went and wasn’t sure she was allowed yet. “You grew up,” she said.

It came out cracked and soft, and almost wondering. The last time Sarah Williams had been able to see him, he had been thirteen, all elbows, a boy forever coming through the gap in the back fence after her daughter. Then sixteen years of a window. Now this.

Andy found he was smiling back at her, and he couldn’t have stopped it if he’d tried. “I had to be ready for her,” he said.

Something came out of Sarah that was nearly a laugh. Marie heard it and made a sound of her own and pressed her face into her sister’s hair. Then Sarah’s eyes went past him, to the open door and the dark beyond it and the small light at the gate, and the near-laugh went out of her face. Her hands tightened on the letter.

“Is she hurt?”

“Yes,” Andy said. He wasn’t going to lie to her. Not tonight, and not about this. “She’s hurt, and she’s holding on. I can feel her doing it. She hasn’t let go of anything yet.”

Sarah took that as she had taken everything else in the last few minutes, all the way in, without looking away from him. Then she put one hand on the arm of the rocker and began to push herself up out of it, and Marie, without a word, got an arm under her elbow.

Andy stood. He turned to the other two. “Marie. Sandra.” He looked from one to the other. “I want you both to come too. Myra’s up there, Marie. Riley’s up there, Sandra. They went up with Laura.” He didn’t try to make it sound like less than it was. “I don’t know what it’s going to be like when we get there. I’d still rather you were with me than down here wondering.”

“Yes,” Marie said at once. She had Sarah on her feet, one arm still around her, and her chin had come up as it did when she had decided something and wasn’t going to discuss it. “Yes. Of course.” Then, lower, the caretaker cracking for a second: “Is Myra—”

“I don’t know.” He hated saying it. “I can feel Laura. I can’t feel the others like that. I’m sorry.”

Marie nodded once, short and hard. “Then we go and see,” she said. “Give me one minute to find her shoes.”

“There’s one thing I need to do in the meantime,” Andy said.

He had thought about this in the corridor, after the nursery, with Horun waiting a few steps on. He had called the bead out then and looked at it and thought of a woman lying on her back in the grass in the sun, with Riley’s face, and he had sent it back to wait. It had waited.

He hadn’t been able to feel her then. He could now, and he knew whose minutes these were.

He opened his right hand and called it. The Moongem came up out of his Inventory and lay in his palm, weighing nothing. A bead of blue glass, no longer than the top joint of his finger, wrapped in a cage of gold filigree so fine it looked like frost on a pane, and lit from somewhere inside, a soft clear blue that filled the cup of his hand and spilled a little over the edges onto his fingers. It was the kind of light that made the lamp on the table look tired.

Marie had turned at his voice with her arm still around her sister, and the blue found both their faces at once. Sarah went very still against her. Through the open door, out at the gate, Andy saw Herman’s lantern lift an inch—the man holding it straightening to see better—and then settle again.

Sandra’s ears came up. Andy went down on one knee in front of her, on the rug, so that they were level. She had come up off the floor when Sarah stood, and was sitting back on her haunches, as she had sat up out of the grass the day he met her, and her yellow eyes went from his face to his hand and stayed there.

“This is the Moongem,” he said. “I found it down there, in the place I got sent. I know what it does. I saw a copy in a case in the museum, before any of this.” He turned his hand a little, so the light moved. “It takes a transformation away. Takes it, the whole thing, all at once. And it doesn’t come back. Ever. Any transformation.”

Sandra didn’t move. Her tail had gone still on the boards behind her.

The first time Andy met her, in the grass with the sun on her, she had looked down at herself while she said it: the paws, the tail, the four legs she stood on. This isn’t how a daughter should see her mother. Especially not her. Her voice had shaken on it, once, and she had mastered it before the sentence was out. He had carried that line around ever since without knowing what to do with it. Now he did.

He set it down on the floor in front of her paws, on the bare wood just past the edge of the rug, and took his hand away. It lay there on its side and glowed, and the grain of the floorboards stood out blue around it.

“It’s yours,” he said. “If you want it. Crush it, and let it take your change away.” He looked at her and nowhere else.

“San,” Marie said, very quietly, behind him. Sarah came the one step closer that Marie’s arm allowed her. She had her shoes on now. She bent, and her hand went down and found Sandra’s shoulder, and closed on it.

“Sandra,” Sarah said. Just the name—tried out loud again after a long time.

Sandra looked down at the bead. Then she looked at Andy, a long, flat, measuring look. Thirty-one years ago, in this Hotel, a Master had decided what her body was going to be, and nobody had asked her. She was looking at this for the catch.

“That’s it?” she said. Her voice came out low and clipped and very careful. “I step on it, and that’s it. Thirty-one years. It’s that simple?”

“It’s that simple,” Andy said. “That’s all it is. It doesn’t want anything from you. Nobody does.” He didn’t look away. “Now, or later, or never. It’s yours either way. And if you’d rather nobody watched, I’ll turn around.”

Sarah’s hand stayed where it was on her shoulder. Marie’s hands stayed over her mouth. The bead lay on the floorboards between them and glowed, and waited, the way it had waited in the dark for him to find it.

Sandra did not answer him. She looked at the bead a moment longer. Then she looked up, past Andy, at Marie with her hands over her mouth and Sarah bent beside her with a hand on her shoulder, at the two of them standing there in the lamplight as they had stood behind her once before. Something passed across her face that Andy couldn’t read, and didn’t try to.

She didn’t ask him to turn around. Her ears came forward, and then back. She took one breath, deep, all the way down into the barrel of her chest, and let it out through her nose, as he had seen her do in the grass the day they met, before she let herself believe anything.

She lifted one paw off the boards and brought it down on the Moongem with all her weight.

It broke with a small, clean sound, like a chip of ice under a boot. The filigree folded flat. And the light came up out of the floor.

It didn’t spread so much as rise. It came up out of the broken glass in a sheet of that clear soft blue. It ran up her foreleg and over her shoulder and down the long barrel of her back, as if it were falling the wrong way, and in a breath it had covered all of her. She didn’t make a sound. Her ears went flat. Her eyes stayed open, yellow in the blue, fixed on nothing.

Behind Andy, Sarah made a small sound and Marie caught her arm. The lamp on the table went pale beside the blue. Every board in the floor stood out blue, and every face in the room, and his own hands where they rested on his knee.

The tail went first. It drew in and in and was gone, as if it had only ever been borrowed, and the light closed over the place where it had been. Her hind legs straightened under her, slowly and stiffly, the joints unbending one after another until she was kneeling on two knees. The long back drew in, and her shoulders came up and squared. Her ears drew up the sides of her head, smaller and smaller, folding in on themselves, until they were only ears, a woman’s ears, half hidden in short russet hair. And the paws she had come down on opened.

They spread on the floorboards like a fist coming open after a very long time. The pads went, and the blunt black nails, and there were fingers under the light, long ones, spread on the wood. The light thinned and went out.

Sandra knelt on the floor of Sarah’s cottage—a woman like any other. She had Riley’s face. She had a bob of russet hair, mussed and standing up at the crown. She was naked except for the old leather collar at her throat, and she was breathing hard, like someone who has run a long way.

Andy kept his eyes on her face.

She didn’t look at the room. She lifted her hands off the floor and held them up in front of her and looked at them. She turned them over, palms, backs, palms again. She moved the fingers one at a time, checking each one was hers before she trusted it, and then she closed both hands into fists and opened them, and closed them again, and her breath shook.

Then she reached up with her own fingers to her own throat and found the buckle of the collar.

It took her a few moments. The buckle was stiff with years, and her fingers didn’t remember how to do anything, and they slipped off it and found it and slipped again. Nobody moved to help her. Andy didn’t, and Marie didn’t, and Sarah’s hand had fallen away from her and hung at her side. It was hers to do. At last the strap came back through the buckle. The tongue came out of the hole it had been in for thirty-one years, and she pulled the collar off her neck.

She held it a moment, plain and dark in her new hand. Then she opened the hand and let it drop.

It hit the boards beside the flattened twist of gold that had been the Moongem, and lay there, and was only a strip of old leather.

Then she looked down at herself, at all of it at once, and Andy saw it reach her that she was kneeling naked on a floor in front of a man. One arm came across her body. Her shoulders went up toward her ears, and she looked at the floor.

Marie moved first. She let go of Sarah carefully, a hand at a time. She crossed to the old chest of drawers against the far wall and pulled a drawer so hard it stuck. She came back with one of Sarah’s dresses over her arm, a plain faded one the color of an old rose, and went down on her knees in front of Sandra and shook it out. It smelled faintly of the drawer, and of violets.

Andy turned and looked out through the open door while she did it. The lantern was still at the gate. Herman had turned his back to the cottage, at some point, and stood looking out at the dark pasture with the light at his side. He didn’t look around when Andy looked at him. He seemed to know to the minute how long a thing like this took, and to have decided it could have every one of them.

Behind him he heard the cloth, and Marie’s voice, low and practical. “Arms. Come on. Up. There you go.” The rustle of it going over Sandra’s head. “It’s Sarah’s. It’ll be short on you. Nobody’s going to care.”

Then he heard Sandra start to cry.

He turned back. She was sitting on her heels with the dress pulled down over her, too short in the sleeves and loose at the shoulders, and she was crying as people cry when they don’t believe yet what they’re crying about, with her mouth open and her eyes wide and dry for a second and then not dry at all. She held both hands up between herself and Marie, as if she were showing her something Marie hadn’t seen.

“Look,” Sandra said. It came out of her wet and cracked, and she didn’t master it. “Marie. Look. I’ve got— Look at them. I’ve got hands.” She laughed, and it broke in the middle and turned back into crying. “I’ve got hands, Marie.”

“I see them,” Marie said. Her face was running with tears and she was grinning. “I see them, San.”

Sandra brought her hands up to her own face. She touched it with her fingertips, very lightly, her cheekbones and her mouth and her jaw, and then her ears, small and flat to her head under the russet hair, and she held them there with both hands, to keep them from going anywhere. Riley’s face, under Sandra’s fingers. She had not touched it with fingers in thirty-one years.

Sarah came down onto the rug beside them. She did it slowly, holding Marie’s shoulder on the way, but she did it. And then the two of them, the two sisters who had known Sandra in that other body for thirty-one years, put their arms around her and held on. Sandra’s new hands came up and took hold of the backs of their clothes and fisted there. Laura’s letter was caught between Sarah and Sandra, creased in new places, and Sarah didn’t let go of it. The three of them knelt on the worn rug in the lamplight with their heads together, and nobody said anything for a while. It was the kind of quiet in which you could hear the lamp wick burning.

Andy stood by the door and let it be. He found he had put his hand to his breast pocket again, to the place the letter had been, and he left it there.

The line to Laura was still open in him, still carrying her pain down, still carrying the holding under it. The vast thing behind his ribs was still waiting. Outside, up the slope, the lanterns went up the path into the trees in a long, patient row.

Somewhere up there was Riley, with Laura. Andy thought of that, and of the woman on the rug in a borrowed dress, and didn’t let himself think any further. That was for the top of the path.

Then the three women turned, together, toward Andy.

Sarah was in the middle, with the letter still crushed against her chest in one hand. Marie was on her left, wiping her face with the heel of her hand, already looking past him at the door. Sandra was on her right, with Riley’s face and her own hands.

Sandra wiped her eyes with the back of one wrist and looked at him, and the old Chicago edge was back in her voice. “Well?” she said. “You said now.”

Andy held out his hand to Sarah, and she took it.