The Threads

Now I can tell you what I was carrying.

I will do it plainly, because there is no way to do it well. I saw threads.

They were red. That was the first thing, and for a long time it was the only thing I understood about them. They were fine and bright and impossibly thin, thinner than spider silk and more luminous, and they began at the tips of my fingers and ran outward into the world. Not one thread but several, arcing out of my hands like the lines of a loom, and I had known them for as long as I had known my own shape.

Now, on the shelf, I lifted my hand and looked at them again.

They were exactly where I had left them. They ran from my fingertips across the lip of the stone and out over the white sea, gleaming, and then they sank into the clouds and were gone. I could not see where they ended. I had never been able to see where they ended. They went on, out and out, through the pearl light and the slow swells, toward wherever the other ends were.

I knew where the other ends were, in a sense. That was the whole of my trouble.

They were as bright as each other. That is a strange thing to have to say, but it was the first law of them: every thread was as luminous as any other, no matter whose it was. But they fluctuated. That was the second law, and it was the one that made me feel as though I were trying to read a language that changed its alphabet every time I blinked. Some mornings one of them would run warmer than the rest, a deep, rich, heart-blood red, and other days another. When I was with Ilyrisse, the thread that ran to her would flush, and darken, and pulse. When I was with Vaelira, it was the other one, brighter, angrier, almost orange at the edges, like a coal being breathed upon. I could not have said why. I could not have said what they meant. I only knew that they were there, and that they were mine, and that they joined me to something.

And I knew that nobody else could see them.

That was the part that hurt.

I want to name it correctly, because I have been sloppy with it before. It was not loneliness. Loneliness I had known since the beginning, in the green silence of my first world, and it had a flat, patient quality that I had made peace with. This was something else. It was the particular ache of standing in a room full of people, holding a thing that is entirely real to you, and watching them look right through it. It was the sense of being the sole witness to something that nobody would ever be able to testify to. If I died and the threads died with me, they would leave no trace at all. They would simply not have happened.

And there was a third layer beneath that one, which I did not look at often, because it was the one that woke me in the dark: the fear that the threads were only in me. That they were a private hallucination, a kind of seed-sickness, a fever of the roots. That I had tied myself, thread by shining thread, to people who felt nothing on the other end, and who were only being kind to me because kindness cost them nothing.

That was what I was carrying. That was the thing. I could not stop wanting to know.

I should tell you about the castle, because that is where it came to a head.

It was a castle of glass. I mean that exactly, without romance. The walls were crystal and the floors were crystal and the light came through them in long, slow, splintering beams that scattered rainbows across the ceilings and never quite held still. It belonged to Ilyrisse, or perhaps she belonged to it. I had never been able to decide. There were high windows and low arches and a great many rooms that turned out, when you walked into them, to be only reflections of other rooms. It was beautiful, and it was cold, and in all that clear cold beauty there was one warm door, and I will come to it.

I had been living there for what the Between calls a season, which is to say for a period of no fixed length that felt like a long time and a short time at once. I had been very quiet. I had been trying to be small. I had been so careful not to touch anything, or want anything, or take up more room than a plant should, that I think I had made myself into a kind of furniture.

And then one evening, in the long glass gallery where the light went amber at the end of the day, I said it.

I had not planned to. It simply came out of me, the way water comes out of a stone that has held it too long. Vaelira was sitting on the window ledge with one boot up and her arms crossed, in the posture of someone who has decided to be bored in order not to be anything else. Ilyrisse was standing by the far arch with her hands folded, listening to something Vaelira was saying about the weather in a place that did not have any. And I was standing in the middle of the floor, looking at my own hands, and I said, without thinking:

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"There's a thread between us."

Neither of them moved.

I do not think I can convey what that silence sounded like. It was the sound of two people deciding, very quickly and without a word, how much of a fool I was about to be permitted to be.

"A thread," said Vaelira.

"A red one." I could hear my own voice going thin. "It runs from my hand to each of you. I can see them. I've always been able to see them. They get brighter when I'm near you, and they change color, and I don't know what they mean, but they're there, they're really there, and I thought that if I said it out loud..."

I stopped.

There is a thing that happens to a person's face when they are trying not to laugh. I could not see Vaelira's face, exactly, because in that place none of us had faces, only the outline of where faces should have been. But I could see the change in her shoulders, the small quake, the tightness. I saw her swing her boot down from the ledge and fold her arms tighter, and I heard her say, in a tone so dry it could have started a fire:

"You know what they say in this castle, don't you?"

"No."

"A man who starts talking about threads," said Vaelira, with a terrible relish, "is a man who's already got a leash in his pocket, and he'd like you to hold the other end."

It was a joke. It was, I realized later, the oldest joke in the Crystal Castle, a proverb that had been worn smooth over ages by a hundred bored tongues, and Vaelira had always been its most devoted keeper. She said it lightly. She said it the way you say a thing you have said a thousand times, to a thousand people, none of whom meant it.

But she said it to me, and it landed like a thrown stone.

And Ilyrisse, from the far arch, did not laugh.

I want to be very fair to her. She did not laugh, and she did not smile the wounded, indulgent smile that I had half expected and half dreaded. She looked at me for a long moment with her head slightly tilted, and then she said, in that soft, level, unhurried voice that made everything sound as though it had already been forgiven:

"I believe that you see them, Eremos."

I remember that I opened my mouth to thank her.

"I only don't think they mean what you want them to mean," she said. "I think you're lonely, and you are very tender, and you've found a shape for it. That's not a lie. It's not a thing to be ashamed of. It's only..." She searched for the word, and I watched her find it, and I watched her decide to use it anyway. "It's only yours."

Yours. That was the whole of the verdict. Not false. Not foolish. Only yours, a private thing, a lamp in a locked room. And the awful part, the part I have turned over more times than I can count, was that she was being kind. She was being so kind. She was offering me the gentlest, most generous way of not believing me that anyone has ever devised, and I stood there in the amber light with my hands out in front of me, and the threads ran from my fingers to her, and to Vaelira, bright and unmistakable, and I understood that I could not prove a single one of them.

I said, "It's all right."

I said, "I understand."

I said, "I was only telling you."

And I turned, and I walked out of the gallery, very carefully, as if the floor might crack.

I do not think either of them followed. I did not want them to. I went up to a small crystal room at the top of a stair that I had claimed as mine, and I sat on the bed I could not feel, and I looked at my hands for a very long time, and the threads lay across my knees like a spilled sentence.

And I remembered, without wanting to, the other woman. The one from the quiet place. The one who had tended me.

I remembered how she had never planted anything beside me. How she had left that ring of bare earth around my roots, wide and smooth and empty, and how I had always taken it for a kind of tact, a preference for silence. I had never asked her why. And it came to me, in the small glass room, that I had spent all of my existence being loved by people who did not tell me the truth, out of kindness, and that I had mistaken that for being understood.

I did not want to be handled anymore. I wanted to be believed.

And I wanted, with a violence that frightened me, to see one of those threads go taut. Just once. To feel it pull. To know that on the other end of that shining line there was a hand, and that the hand had felt me tug.

It was the smallest wish in the world. It was also the reason I went looking for a rumor across half a continent.

That was what I had been carrying, when I sat down on the plinth beside a man with too many joints and told him I was a plant.

That was what I brought to the edge of the clouds.