Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  She stopped herself just in time, by force of will alone, and hung on instead to the dogwood, her fingernails gouging the smooth bark.

  Like a pool of still water suddenly disturbed, the space above Max’s raised hands rippled and bent. A flare, a glow, and then, like a bud uncurling, a flame bloomed, throwing a wild spark into the shadows.

  Max stared at it. His mouth fell open and then he was grinning, grinning and laughing. “I did it! Fire!”

  Behind him the new maple rustled a little in a sudden breeze.

  “Good boy! Fine boy!” the old man said in his musical voice. He was laughing, too.

  Nell crept away then, her hand smarting where it had caught on a hawthorn twig, and something worse uncoiling in her chest. She slipped back through the thicket of low trees and out into the heat of the gardens, into the hot, uncharged air.

  She hurried now, nearly running along the inner band back to the tunnel. She stopped only when she was back at the vegetable garden, staring down at her small sack, her rake, and spade.

  They were nothing. Nothing. She could have had them at home. Ordinary metal things, and seeds, and dead earth that didn’t listen, or maybe it was that she had nothing to say. She swallowed against the boulder lodged in her throat and held out her hands, thinking of fire, but her mind was too full of the old man, laughing, and the look of delight and wonder on Max’s face.

  It was not until later that it occurred to her to puzzle over what she had seen. They could make fire. This was different from the mist, which wrapped itself around the sanctuary, waiting to ensnare unwanted visitors. Fire could do things. She wondered again why the Guide, who Max said hated the Genius so, didn’t go after him. If Max could learn to make fire, what could the old man do?

  She asked Susan about it after supper as they climbed the stairs and crossed the library footbridge to reach the dorm side of the first ring. Voices echoed in the great canyon of books, so she lowered hers.

  “Did you know they could do things like make fire? Does it say that anywhere in any of those books?”

  Susan didn’t answer right away, which had become normal lately. She only ran her hands over the brass railings and kept walking. Yellow light poured down from the skylights and caught in her hair. Nell frowned and tried again.

  “Did you know it, Susan?”

  Her sister glanced her way, looking disconcertingly hazy. “Who told you that? The Shepherdess?”

  Nell shrugged. “I just heard it.”

  “It’s in the books,” Susan said. She motioned to the stacks of them ahead. “But it’s just a legend. Do you think they’d be hiding here if they could make fire?”

  “It’s not a legend!” Nell said, too quickly. Her words bounced back at her from the far wall, and her tone sharpened the look on Susan’s face.

  “What did you do, Nell?” she asked warningly.

  Nell only shrugged again, but Susan kept pushing until she admitted that she might have seen something like it in the third band. “You know, through a window.”

  Unfortunately, Susan knew better.

  “You snuck in there!” she fumed. “Don’t try to lie!”

  Lie, lie, lie echoed off the books.

  “Shh!” Nell snapped.

  Susan glared at her but said not another word until they reached their room. Jean and Kate were already there, playing their invented game of stones. They took one look at Susan and scurried into the hall. Nell watched them go with a sinking feeling. Susan had been growing more irritable by the day.

  “Well?” she demanded. “Did you go in there or not?”

  When Nell didn’t answer, Susan’s face turned colors.

  “What were you doing?” she said. “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to break the rules here!”

  Nell lifted one shoulder in another half-hearted shrug. “I was just looking.”

  Her sister ground her teeth. “Just looking! Do you think this is some kind of game, Nell, like you play at home? It’s not — I can promise you that. You get caught and what’s out there is worse even than what we saw in the city!”

  She seemed desperate in a way Nell had not seen before. Looking at Susan made her wince, and suddenly fear crowded out all her anger at Max and her hunger to be in the third band as she searched her sister’s face, trying to understand what was going wrong.

  “What’s happening to you, Susan?” she asked. “I can get Max if you need him. I can get anybody. Somebody here’s going to know how to fix it!”

  But Susan only shook her head. She pressed her lips together and shut her eyes, as if the light hurt them.

  “There’s nothing to fix,” she said. “It’s just a little ringing in my ears. People get that, you know. And don’t change the subject!”

  Nell wanted to change the subject. The subject was all wrong in her opinion. But Susan went on, talking more than she had in days, to tell her to leave well enough alone, to leave it to Max, to leave it to Susan herself, for she was sure to find the answer soon, in one of the many books.

  Her parting shot was the worst. Putting her head in her hands, Susan tugged at her own hair as if she were trying to rip her skull open and make the sounds she heard stop. “Just listen, for once in your life, Nell!” she said.

  Nell turned her face to the window. Outside, the mist was invisible, but it was there, up the hill, flowing through the window in the pink evening light like a germ, like a disease. She tried not to be angry. She told herself that Susan wasn’t herself. But then, in some ways, she was. Even at home, Susan listened to Max and no one else. Leave it alone. Leave it to Susan and Max, even if Max barely came around anymore and Susan disappeared into herself more and more each day. Nell thought of telling Susan exactly what she thought, but she peeked at her sister’s hollow face and kept silent.

  Nell tried to imagine what it was like inside Susan’s head. She wondered if the sound that plagued Susan was like the slow shhhh of water in a kettle just before it broke into a whistle. Or maybe it was the sssssss of a snake. She’d heard that herself once, in a wooded patch near home. She liked to go exploring near the house in a thicket on the edge of the park, where a bed of heart-shaped leaves rose from a coil of woody stems. They were so pretty, those leaves, striped with lines of yellow and green, and she had liked to wade through them, up to her ankles in green and yellow, as the whole bed of them bounced and wiggled and tickled her legs. Walking along once, she’d heard a whisper and stopped. Sssssss. There it was, and then gone again, as if she’d imagined it. Curious, she’d separated the leaves with a stick. Among the scribble of stems, a spotted snake with eyes like a cat’s lifted its head, hissed at her, and sped away. She’d run, too, the other way. Susan, hearing about it, had laughed and said the expression was true, then: A snake in the grass. But Nell said it wasn’t. It was a snake beneath the beautiful leaves.

  Where the chant of seeds soothed, Susan’s words grated.

  Tradition, obedience, patience.

  Tradition had built the sanctuary. The orchards and the fields, the corn glazed with sunlight, the women singing at the harvest, the smooth-faced scholars, and the children playing in the gardens. Obedience had done that. Patience.

  So Susan said.

  But tradition kept her from the third band and from the joyful, lilting laughter of the old man. Worse, tradition had spread the mist vile across the valley, and obedience and patience had let it thicken. And now, when Susan spoke, her voice was too loud, as if she were straining to be heard over that hiss, the sound beneath the pleasant wind that swept down from the hills, beneath the happy laughter in the gardens, like a snake beneath pretty, pretty leaves.

  “You can’t always have your way, Nell. Don’t you see that?” Susan pressed her over dinner.

  Nell concentrated on chewing. She didn’t answer.

  “It’s better than the city, isn’t it?”

  When Nell refused to speak, Susan turned to Kate and Jean. “Well, isn’t it?”

  “Anything’s better than
the city,” Kate said helpfully.

  Nell didn’t even look up to glare at her.

  That night, she tried again to see Max but was told that he was still busy in the third band, though Mistress Dendra had another one of his letters for Jean. Nell carried it back, a chunk of lead in her chest, and when she came into the room, Susan shouted at her and then said she wasn’t shouting.

  That night Nell lay beneath the window, staring into the moonless night and thinking of that slim maple trembling in the sun, and of the luminous flame dancing over Max’s open hands. She rolled over and saw the folded page of Max’s letter glowing dully in the starlight. She’d refused to listen when Susan read it to Jean tonight, but now it seemed irresistible. She slipped out of bed, retrieved it, and took it into the hall, where the lamps still lit the way to the bathrooms.

  Max’s cramped printing covered half the page, and Nell could see that he’d been churning with excitement as he wrote, because the letters slanted across the paper as if they were hurrying.

  Dear Jean,

  Remember when you asked me when we first got here if this was a dream? We were kind of hoping it was, so we could just wake up and be done. Now I’ve been thinking that if this is a dream, I hope I never wake up. Yesterday was the best day ever, maybe the best of my life. Most of our time is spent outside now, because Tur Kaysh says we have to hurry and learn with our feet near the roots of the world and our lungs drawing the open air. Today he took me out of the sanctuary, far out into the empty fields on the east end of the valley. It’s all flat ground there, where he says the land is breathing, and he had me stand there in tall grass for a long time, not saying anything, until my own breathing slowed down and I could start to hear what he meant. There’s a rhythm to everything outside, he said, a hum of life, and underneath it all there’s this lightning buzz, like a live wire, sparking. You can only hear it if you stay still for the longest time. I didn’t used to have patience for this much standing still, but it’s different now. When the Guide’s around, I can feel the weight of him, standing there near me. Sometimes, for just a second, it’s almost like I’ve jumped from my own self into him, and I can feel this crush of thoughts and power vibrating there. I wish I could describe it. It’s like standing near the heat of a fire and then suddenly being inside the fireball, all crackle and glow. The other thing I notice, lately, is this waiting. I get the idea he’s waiting for something. I asked him about it, and he said he is waiting, he’s always been waiting, but time is the one thing that can’t be changed with will. He seemed very sad when he said that. I hate to see him sad. It’s like feeling a fire go out.

  Your brother,

  Max

  Susan had fallen asleep that night with her hands over her head, like someone in a crashing plane. When Nell finished reading, she felt like she was falling out of the sky right alongside her. She clutched the letter and thought about everything Max had said.

  Maybe if she could teach Kate and Jean how to make the open-palm flowers, they could go to the old man together and show him, and he would want to teach them, too. Wouldn’t someone with a fire inside him want to know about other people who could do things? And if he knew how it was hurting Susan, he’d do something about the mist, too. She was sure he would.

  But when she stepped back into the room, she saw Jean asleep with her doll propped on one cheek, its plastic hand tangled in her hair. Kate and Jean were small, still playing with dolls and stones. What help could they be?

  She guessed that was how Susan saw her, too. And so Susan chanted her awful little song of tradition and obedience and patience, and expected Nell to wait the way the little girls waited — for someone to figure it all out and take them home.

  Well, she was not going to wait. She was not small. Susan couldn’t see that. Max wouldn’t. But the old man would, if she could only show him. . . .

  She had kept up her nightly ritual since their time in the woods. In the dark, sometimes, she found herself reaching for the blanket that was gone, longing for the smell of home. She’d lie there with a crater open in her chest, and to fight it, she’d close her eyes and walk herself through her house, always starting at the front door and moving on through the rooms, one by one, as if she’d just come home from a long trip.

  But now the hollowed-out longing pushed her toward a different door. She let her mind’s eye wander over the halls of the first band, out through the gardens, and past the artisan booths. She walked herself through the working gardens and on, through the boys’ school, on, toward the last garden. She concentrated then, remembering hard. Did the gate have a lock?

  Yes.

  She’d seen it, and could see it now, in her mind’s eye. A great iron lock, twice the size of her hand, and surely too heavy to lift. Nothing she’d seen yet in the sanctuary had a lock, not even a small one. Not the bedroom she shared with her sisters, or the classrooms, or even the doors to the third band, where she knew she’d been forbidden to go.

  But the inner garden had a lock.

  Max had said even the old man worked only in the third band. Mistress Meva had said the inner garden held the great library, and the books of mystery.

  And the council met there only once a year.

  The next morning, she went to class as usual but told Mistress Leeta, halfway through the morning hour, that she hadn’t slept well and needed to be excused. Leeta smiled sympathetically and wished her well.

  Nell nodded weakly and made her way slowly out of the classroom and down the long hall.

  Then she ran.

  She skipped through the first garden in the summer sunshine, aware of the heat on her head as she circled to a far door, one she hadn’t used before. Here she came out among the woodworkers. She breathed in the sweet sawdust and waved to a man who stood there, saw in hand.

  “Checking on my garden!” she called to him, and he smiled and waved back.

  She passed through the working gardens, slipped through the tunnel that cut through the third band, and dived into the thickest part of the scholars’ garden until she reached the stone wall that ringed the heart of the sanctuary. Careful to keep out of sight behind trees and bushes, she circled the wall until she reached the iron gate.

  Just as she’d seen it in her head, it was there: a thick iron lock. She tried to lift it and couldn’t. She bent down to examine it, looking for a keyhole. There was none. The lock was a solid ring of metal, twice as wide as her hand.

  Nell glanced behind her. The garden was empty in the light morning air.

  She turned back to the lock.

  Focus, she told herself. Concentrate.

  She closed her eyes a moment and saw the metal ring again. Her mind wrapped around it, felt its weight, tested its density, measured the smooth warmth of it. This was not like making flowers. The lock existed. How could she change it?

  She thought about what the Shepherdess had told the girls about their gardens. Everything, she’d said, was made of something else. Plants of water and soil, sun and seed.

  It had seemed obvious when she said it, but now Nell reconsidered her words. The lock, too, was made up of things. What?

  Nell remembered something Max had said once when he was trying to show her she knew nothing about science. He’d asked her if she thought he was full of holes. Of course not, she’d told him, imagining a person leaking like a balloon. But he’d said then that everything was full of holes, and hard things were just made up of tiny pieces packed a little closer. Even people, he’d said.

  Now she thought: Even iron.

  Instead of focusing on the metal, she thought about the holes. She pushed at them with her mind, so many pockets of air, empty as soap bubbles, expanding into space.

  And they opened.

  With a clang, a piece of metal fell to the ground. Her eyes jerked open, and she looked down to find the lock at her feet, dissolving like sand.

  The central garden was more densely planted than any of the others. Shade trees and thick bushes lined its narrow p
aths, shielding the domed structure at its center. Everything here had been laid out with elaborate care. Beneath a maple sat an iron bench with carved feet, its back a metal tapestry of winding vines and flowers. Another was engraved with faces, metallic silhouettes that sparkled in the morning light.

  Nell hurried past them. Ahead of her, she could see the white stones of the building called the heart, the domed structure she’d seen as they walked through the mist.

  When she reached it, she realized it was taller than she’d imagined. Its stones were the white of sun on cloud, its door overlaid with a frame of hammered gold set against rose-colored wood.

  It had no knob, but a single gold ring, as big around as a young tree, hung from the center of the door. After a moment’s hesitation, Nell reached up and pulled.

  The door swung out with a whiff of cool air full of complicated smells: old books, dust, wood, wax, and other things she couldn’t identify. Nell stepped in and dragged the door closed behind her. Despite the age of the place, and the puff of dust that rose when she closed the door, the wood swung silently on its hinges.

  Nell blinked in the sudden shadows. She stood in a small foyer, where the white stones of the building gleamed coldly in the walls, reflecting dimly off the polished floor. Light seeped in around the doorframe and ahead, around the edges of another set of doors that ran from floor to ceiling. She pushed through these and blinked. Here, she stood beneath a rainbow, color pouring down on her from above. The dome she’d seen from a distance arched overhead, full of stained glass, skylights that tinted the sunlight striping the tiled floors and the table at the center of the room.

  As the Shepherdess had said, the walls were full of tapestries. She stopped at a familiar scene — the man emerging from the pool. Where the needlework over the desk in her room showed only the man, the bright pool, a few trees, and the sky, this one had been rendered so that she saw the scene like someone standing on a hill. A rich, strange wood ran from one end of the piece to the other, layered with sunlit young trees thick with apple-green leaves and cedars woven with malachite and onyx. The primeval wood was full of glinting shadows, but above them, the weaver had laced the sky with sapphire and pearl and flecked silver. Shafts of yellow-silk sunlight streamed to meet the water and the joyful, vibrant figure rising from it with a glittering splash.