The Other End of the Thread

She set me down in the amber gallery, on the same crystal floor where I had once said too much, and for a while neither of us spoke.

I have pieced together what happened on her side from the things she told me later, in the way Ilyrisse tells anything, which is sideways, and slowly, and only when there is nothing left to hide behind. I will give it to you as she gave it to me, and if the order is wrong, the fault is mine.

She had been in this very gallery when it began. She was standing at the far arch, with her hands folded, thinking about nothing, when something in her chest went tight, the way a held breath goes tight, and she looked down. And there, running from the tip of her own finger out through the glass of the wall and into the world beyond it, was a thread.

It was red. It was very fine. It was drawn taut as a bowstring, and it was humming.

She told me that for the length of one breath she did not move at all. She only looked. It was not that she was frightened. It was that she had spent so long being gentle with a thing she did not believe, and here it was, lying against her palm like a fact.

Then she remembered what I had said, standing on this floor with my hands out. It runs from my hand to each of you. She remembered it's only yours. She remembered that she had said it, and that she had been kind, and that being kind had been the mistake.

She did not think after that. She followed the thread.

She said it was like being drawn along a wire through the dark: no path, no walls, only a bright line and the certainty that at the other end of it, something was falling. She came out over the sea of clouds and saw me, a small dark shape dropping through the pale, with my arms out and my eyes shut and my threads streaming up behind me. She saw that I was going to be too far below her by the time she reached me. She reached for me anyway.

And Vaelira was already there.

"She was always going to be faster," Ilyrisse said, the only time she spoke of it directly, and there was something in her voice that was not envy and not shame but a kind of rueful tenderness, as if she were describing weather she had long ago made peace with. "She's the one who doesn't stop to think. I always stop to think. It's my one great fault, and it's very nearly always the right one, and it was wrong that day by exactly one breath."

But that came later.

In the gallery, in the amber light, with my silhouette held loosely between her two hands, what she said was:

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"Eremos."

"Yes."

"Look at me."

I looked up. Her outline was very steady now. It had been broken over the sea, and she had mended it on the way, the way she mends everything, quietly and without remark. But there was something under the steadiness that I had never seen in her, and I understood, with a slow cold clarity, that she was angrier than Vaelira. She was just better at holding it.

"Did you think I would not believe you?"

"I..."

"Did you think," said Ilyrisse, and every word was set down with exquisite care, like a glass on a glass table, "that I needed you to fall from a cliff to prove a thing to me? Did you think that was the price? That it was going to be enough for you to say it, and for me to be gentle, and that it would only count once it had cost you your life?"

"That's not what..."

"You made me believe you," she said. "I do. I believe you. I believed you the moment I saw it. And I will tell you what I felt, Eremos, when I looked down and saw that thread, and understood what it was pulling on, and where."

I did not say anything. There was nothing to say.

"I have held a great many things in these hands," said Ilyrisse. "I have held glass that could cut a mountain in half. I have held silences that were older than this castle. And you weigh less than any of them. You weigh nothing. You are the lightest thing I have ever caught. And I have never in all my long existence been so afraid of dropping something."

I could not feel her hands. I want to be honest about that. I could see them, and I could see how they held me, tenderly, as though she were afraid that any pressure would leave a mark. But I could not feel them. And it came to me, in that quiet, crystal room, that it did not matter. That the holding was the whole of the message, and that the message had arrived.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I know."

"I didn't know what else to do."

"I know that, too." And then, more quietly, in the voice that made everything sound as though it had been forgiven before it was spoken: "I am not sorry that you were right. I am only sorry that it took this. And I think, Eremos, that you should sit with that for a little. Not with the fall. With the reason you thought you had to make it."

I opened my mouth.

"Not now," said Ilyrisse. "You are not going to answer me now. You are going to go somewhere else and be shouted at, and it will do you a great deal more good than anything I could say."

"Somewhere else?"

She almost smiled. It was the first time I had seen her come near it since the cliff. "There is only one room in this castle that is warm," she said. "She will not admit that she has been waiting for you. But she has. And she is not finished with you."

"Ilyrisse..."

"Don't argue."

And she touched two fingers to the middle of my chest, and the gallery came apart around me in a slow bright scattering of glass, and I heard her say, very softly, as it went:

"I'll see you when she lets you out."