Chương 72: “Heart Of All”

And so, the dragon had bought them time, and the time had been enough, and the door was closed behind them and the floor was sealed, and the Ledger pressed against it and held there, and for a moment it was just Vorrath and June in the thirty-first floor with the hearth burning and the warmth that stayed without being asked. They stood together in the room, the last room, which had been reproduced with the terrible precision of something that had watched it every night for a year from the windowsill.

The desk against the wall, which had drawings pinned above it. The window, which should have shown stone and showed instead a night sky with the moon in exactly the right place. The bed with the foxes on the blanket, faded, a fade that comes from being washed many times. June walked to the desk and touched it with one hand, lightly. She was very still.

"This is my room," came the words, quiet. She turned then, and through the fall of her dark hair he could see the question waiting in her eyes. Vorrath should have answered. He should have brightened at once, a small pulse of violet in the heart of him, because she had understood. Because this was the room, where Lauren had tucked the blanket under her chin and Cecile had stood in the doorway pretending not to worry. It was the beating heart of everything he had come to care for. He should have been proud of it.

He should have shone with the small, foolish satisfaction of being understood. Yet he did not glow. Yes, he would have said. I made it so. But the words never came. Because he was looking past her now, past the desk and the bed and the window and the moon he had placed with such terrible care. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. There was something else there. On the wall. For a moment he did not understand what he was seeing.

He had reproduced the room from memory and observation, from every night he had spent on the windowsill while June slept with one hand tucked under her cheek and the blanket pulled too high over her shoulder. He had made the desk and the drawings. He had even made the foxes on the blanket faded in exactly the right places. But there was one thing in the room he had not made, and that thing made him stop, and for a moment it only made him wonder at it, and then it made him come closer. Cecile's mirror was there.

He did not know how it had come down. The mirror had not belonged to the nights on the windowsill, or to the shape of June sleeping. It had no place at all in the room he had remembered. Which mattered, because Cecile's mirror, of all things, showed not what stood before it, but what stood behind it, and he had understood this as a ward, a tool for finding what approached unseen. He looked into it now. The dark-backed glass showed him something he had not seen in a very long time. A young man. Thin coat.

Brown eyes set too carefully in a face still narrow with hunger. He looked at this for a long time. He thought: I know you. The brown eyes had been his to look out from. He understood that slowly. They had been his all along, and he had not noticed, because there had always been something more important to look at. But now he looked down, and there were hands. Human hands. He held them in front of himself as if they had been given to him by mistake, and for a moment he did not know what to do with them.

He opened them. Closed them. Opened them again. He thought: I thought I had been dormant for three thousand years. He thought: this is not what three thousand years feels like. He looked at the young man in the mirror. The young man looked back. Behind him, in the glass, June yawned. He turned.

She had gone to the bed and sat on the edge of it, looking around with the expression she used when something was too large for an immediate response, and then she lay down, the way she lay down every night, turned toward the windowsill, and closed her eyes.

"June, what are you doing?" For a moment he did not understand where the voice had come from. It was low and rough, and it broke in the middle of her name, and then he understood that it had come from him. He had a voice now, and that was the first thing he had said. But June did not answer. He watched her for a while. Then he crossed the room and sat beside her on the bed, the way Lauren sat, the way you sit beside a child when there is nothing left to do but be near.

"June," he said again, softer. She did not answer. She was already gone from the waking world, one hand curled loose against the pillow, her face soft in sleep with all the small carefulness of the day gone out of it, her breathing slowed and evened, in and out, quiet as the room. He reached out, and drew the blanket up over her shoulder. He listened to her breathe. He sat there and did not examine the mirror again.