Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  Nell would have thought Susan couldn’t get any paler, but at that, she seemed to go white. “That’s something you did?” she whispered.

  “Not me,” he said. “The sanctuary elders set it that way. It’s to keep out the unwelcome. I was working on opening it. It takes patience.” Nell saw his glance flicker in her direction.

  Susan’s eyes widened. “But it’s not just a barrier. You — you lose yourself in that thing.”

  The man merely smiled. “Yes,” he said. “It acts as a deterrent that way, for those who would try to come without being invited.”

  Nell felt the heat rise in her face, but even as she did, she watched Susan grow angry. Few people knew her sister well enough to know when she was furious. Nell was one of them. In anger, Susan grew very quiet — too quiet — before the explosion came. Then she would swoop down on you like a storm. Nell knew enough to get out of the way when she saw Susan’s brows rise, her cheeks whiten.

  The Master Watcher didn’t.

  And so he was startled when Susan turned from him to the mist, narrowed her eyes, then closed them.

  He was stunned when a crack opened in it, and widened.

  “Who’s doing that?” he asked, breathless. “You?”

  He was looking at Max, but Max shook his head.

  “Of course not,” he said. “It’s Susan.”

  Anyone could tell it was. She stood, shoulders squared, facing the mist as if it were a living enemy, an opponent she had to wrestle to the ground. It shivered and fought, thickening at the edges and pushing out toward her in wispy defiance, but she glared back, and the crack widened until they could see a tunnel through the mist, a clear shot, straight into the valley.

  Nell looked past Susan and gasped. Beneath them, at the very center of the valley, lay a great white fortress.

  “A castle!” Kate breathed. “Is it a castle?”

  The Master Watcher had gone rigid. He was staring at Susan, eyes round, unable to respond. Nell smiled grimly. For once, someone had made him keep quiet.

  She looked gratefully at Susan, who still stood squinting into the valley. After another second, Susan relaxed and took a step backward.

  “Let’s go in now,” she said.

  Nell glanced at the Master Watcher, who was trying to collect himself. A sheen of sweat glistened on his smooth forehead.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, let’s go down.”

  He stepped into the path carved in the mist, and Nell saw him look back once at Susan, his face tense, before he turned and led them down into the valley.

  Like the rhythm of the distant sea, the dull undertone of the mist was ceaseless. It washed up the mountain and into the woods, ever present beneath the throb of crickets and the trill of birds. Even dreaming, the exile heard it.

  The mist, taking.

  The mist, erasing.

  Again a dream. This time, there were only footsteps lost to the roar. Like a tidal wave, unstoppable, unbreakable, ever coming, ever there, the mist flowed across the valley, up to the highlands and back again, a great unthinking beast, always hungry.

  And then the sound stuttered. For a moment, it broke.

  The exile woke and thought, Dreams are wishes. Put them away or you will be undone with longing; you will go mad with hope.

  But it was not the sound of the dream that echoed now through the dawn. It was a different sound.

  More felt than heard, like a pressure in the air, but there. The mist, retreating.

  On a shelf in her grandmother’s house back home sat a series of nesting boxes that Nell had loved to play with as a little girl. She would put one in the next and take them apart again, fascinated by boxes within boxes, space inside space.

  As the group made its way down toward the sanctuary now, the white stone fortress reminded her of those boxes. Three concentric squares of huge snow-colored stones lay below them, separated by vibrant strips of green. At the center of the smallest, the squares gave way to a circle, a single dome resting within a bull’s-eye.

  “Is that someone’s house?” she asked the Master Watcher.

  His expression told her clearly to be silent. But Nell had had enough of that.

  “Is it?”

  His voice tight, he answered, “No. It’s the heart of the sanctuary. The place our council meets.”

  “So where do people stay?”

  “In the first band.” He turned his face from her then, a door slamming shut.

  They descended through a wide grassy slope. On either side of it, crops and orchards crisscrossed the hill. Something about them struck Nell as odd, and after a second she realized what it was: she’d never seen so many different kinds of food growing together. Lines of green corn waved beneath trees studded with plums. Knobby peach trees gave way to rows of oranges, apples, and pears. Yellow wheat fanned behind braided grapevines.

  She saw Max looking, too.

  “How do you get all this to grow together?” he asked the Master Watcher. “I never saw anything like it back home.”

  The man turned his head briefly in Max’s direction.

  “Patience” was all he said, but in a tone that showed he was pleased with the question. Nell suppressed a sigh. Why was it that “Be quiet” to Max really meant “Ask me later”?

  She left the thought behind as they continued down into the valley. The sun rose behind the great fortress, and for a while it was black against the blazing light. But then they stepped into the building’s shadow, and it was as if a curtain had lifted. The stones glowed white again. This close, Nell could begin to make out the details of the structure, and she saw that what she’d taken for a solid wall — the outer band — was much more. The man had said people lived in the band, and now she saw how: They were deep and hollow and marked by windows. Rooms and halls were built into the wall that surrounded the sanctuary so that it was one continuous building, a face with a thousand eyes. Nell searched for the doors beneath the many windows and found great archways cut into the white stone. From this angle, she could make out two.

  The Master Watcher led them toward one of these, and walking into the clammy, shadowed tunnel, dim after the glare of the sunrise, Nell realized that she’d underestimated the size of the place. It must be nearly as thick as a city block back home, layer upon layer of stone that held the cold and the night and let them seep into the tunnel in bits of shadow and chilly breezes. Nell felt small, and suddenly lonely. She wondered how many rooms this wall held, as it wound around the first garden. Hundreds? More?

  Ahead of her, Kate clung to Susan’s hand, and Jean, usually tagging after Max like a puppy, seemed lost in the echo chamber of the tunnel.

  “Jean!” Nell whispered. Her voice sounded harsh bouncing off the walls.

  Jean looked back, and Nell offered her a hand. She was glad when her sister took it.

  They emerged, blinking in the sudden brightness, into an interior garden, where a few people — as smooth faced as anyone back home — moved quietly along the walkways past beds of flowers and beneath shade trees. Seeing the Master Watcher, they nodded and stood back. Nell watched the man bob his head at them, wordless. So stuck up, she thought as he walked swiftly across the garden. She looked at Susan, wondering if she thought so, too, but her sister’s head was down, her brow creased. Every so often, Susan would swat at her ear, as if batting away a fly.

  “You okay, Susan?”

  Susan looked up with a vague expression, then seemed to wake to the worry on Nell’s face.

  “What? Oh, yeah. I’m fine.”

  But Nell wondered.

  She stole glances at Susan as they followed the Master Watcher across the first garden and toward the wall of the second band. Though smaller than the first, the second band towered over them as they approached it. Balconies hung over the lower half of the building, and here and there Nell could see an easel or a small table draped in colored cloth. Kate pointed to a woman several floors up embroidering a large hanging.

  Unlike the outer w
all of the first band, this one was full of doors, and Nell wondered what kinds of rooms lay behind them. But the Master Watcher didn’t wait for questions. He moved briskly beneath the balconies to a passageway that cut through the second band, and they followed him into another garden. Here, empty booths festooned with twinkling fabrics sat near the wall, and past another set of walking paths, vegetable gardens in their neat green rows spread out beneath the windows of the third band.

  “Why aren’t there any doors in that wall?” Nell asked, pointing.

  The Master Watcher squinted at her in the ruddy sunlight.

  “Entrance to the third band is restricted to the third garden,” he said. Ahead, another passageway, narrower than the first or second, cut through the third band. The man moved toward it, stepping over winding squash vines that spilled over the short fences around the vegetable gardens and pushing past a drooping tomato plant that had worked loose from its stake and swung into the path.

  “A regular old tour guide, isn’t he?” Nell grumbled to Susan. But if she heard, Susan gave no sign.

  The third band was smallest of all, and they spent only a minute in the tunnel that cut through it before emerging into the last of the three gardens. If possible, this one was even greener than the others, crammed with bushes and flowers and leafy, looping vines that trimmed the paths. Thickets of shade trees clustered tightly in a few spots, and a dark, long-winged bird with red shoulders burst shrieking from one of these as they passed, sailing out of sight across the garden. Nell glanced that way and caught sight of an ornate metal gate. Beyond it she spied the tip of the dome she’d seen from the mountain.

  The man quickened his pace along the path. On this side, there were many doors into the third band, but the Master Watcher moved past them, stopping finally at a narrow opening set off by a length of unbroken stones.

  He turned to the children.

  “Wait here,” he said to Susan. “You and the younger ones. We’ll be back soon.”

  He laid a hand on Max’s shoulder, and Nell didn’t like the way he stood there, as if suddenly he owned Max or had picked him for a team from which the rest of them were excluded. Luckily, Susan was paying attention at last. Her head came up, and she looked quickly at Nell, then Max.

  “Where are you taking him?” she asked the man.

  Max looked uncomfortable. He shifted his body so that the man released him, and took a step toward his sisters.

  “Not far. Just inside, where he’ll have the privilege of meeting our Guide. Few newcomers do.” The man glanced uneasily at Max, who had edged closer to Susan.

  “So you’re separating us,” Nell said, figuring it never hurt to make things crystal clear.

  The man’s eyebrows came down over his eyes. “For a moment, yes.”

  “No,” Susan said in the voice she’d used last night. Her certain voice, her you’d-better-not-cross-me voice. Max squirmed.

  “They can come, too, can’t they? It’s only for a minute, anyway. And they’re my sisters. We like to stick together.”

  At the word sisters, the man’s eyebrows shot back up.

  “You’ve grown attached to them, I see,” he said. He looked as if he were about to say more, but stopped himself.

  “Wait here, all of you.” He disappeared through the narrow door and left them standing in the sunlight.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Nell said. She kicked at the white pebbles that lined the path and smiled grimly at the small mess they made coming down in the grass.

  Jean had leaned into the wall, and now she slid to a seat in the dirt. “It’s better than other places we’ve been,” she said. “By a lot.”

  “Pretty isn’t always better,” Nell told her.

  “How about pretty and nobody’s trying to cut us up?” Jean said. “Is that better?”

  Nell glowered at her. Little kids were annoying.

  From behind, she felt Kate tap her soothingly. “It is pretty,” she said. Nell shrugged her hand away. She looked worriedly at Susan, and then at Max. Susan wore that distant expression that had been on her face since they’d come into the valley, and Nell could tell she was only half hearing what was said. Max looked pained and embarrassed. He caught her eye.

  “Just try not to make a fuss here, okay? They know things here. Don’t you want to get home?”

  She felt unreasonably angry at him. She knew it wasn’t his fault the man favored him so much, and yet, Nell decided, maybe she could still be mad about his enjoying it. Of course, he didn’t look like he was enjoying it at this exact moment.

  “Who’s making a fuss?” she snapped at him. “I’ve barely said a word yet!”

  He harrumphed and slouched beside Jean on the wall.

  “Yet,” he said. “I hate that word.”

  Another minute and the Master Watcher was back, looking drawn.

  “Come,” he said sourly. “All of you.”

  Nell grinned and followed Max, who had slumped a little in relief, into the building. Max had said they knew things here. They were about to find out if that was true.

  The Master Watcher led them into a marble hallway adorned with weavings and the framed pages of old books. It ended in a thick mahogany door carved with a likeness of the sanctuary. The man pushed this open and ushered them into a round room where cushioned benches lined the walls. On them sat several men wearing loose trousers and light tunics, reading and talking in hushed voices. They looked up, startled, at the newcomers.

  “Master Watcher!” one of them said.

  The man hunched his shoulders, and Nell thought that the first privilege of having come into this place was seeing him scolded like a small boy caught at mischief.

  But he only said, “I’ve just spoken with the Guide, and he’s called for them,” and waved the children on behind him.

  Nell looked back to see one of the men on his feet, frowning in their direction as they followed the Master Watcher through another door to the foot of a flight of wide marble steps with brass banisters brighter in the places where hands had run along them. They climbed without a word and reached a landing where a tall window looked out over the second garden. Nell could see a group of young women emerging from the tunnel in the second band with buckets and trowels, moving toward the vegetable patches. A bumblebee pinged against the window, bounced back, and dived toward the greenery, and Kate put a finger to the glass where it had been. The Master Watcher twitched a shoulder and gave a short click of impatience before mounting the next set of stairs. Nell saw now that the staircase they were climbing ran the width of the third band, and at each landing a window showed the gardens below — second and third, vegetables and shade trees, a group of girls Susan’s age harvesting tomatoes, boys not much older than Max emerging through the tunnel into the third garden and moving toward the doors, laden with books.

  The last set of stairs ended in a wide room with a floor the color of slate and tall bookshelves that stood between the windows, casting shadows. Several small round tables sat around it, and at one of these, a lone figure bent over an open book. He was old, and at first Nell thought him very old, given his white hair and the curve of his back. He sat amid great puddles of sunlight. Nell looked up. The roof was all glass, and, strangely, a breeze riffled the pages of the book on the table and lifted Nell’s hair off her neck.

  “Tur Kaysh,” the Master Watcher said. “This is the boy I mentioned.”

  The man had not raised his head at the sound of their entrance, but he did now. She had thought him very aged, but suddenly Nell wasn’t sure. He sat up, his back straight and his shoulders squared, and turned bright eyes their way. His face looked grave, and Nell tensed, but then he spoke, and his voice, unexpectedly rich, filled the room.

  “Welcome,” he said. “To all of you.”

  Nell warmed to him. She grinned at the sound of that beautiful, gracious voice and shot the Master Watcher a look. See? she thought at him. He’s glad we came.

  The Guide looked from one to the
next of them, and Nell was caught by those eyes. They were wide-awake eyes, searching eyes, understanding eyes. They made her want to talk to this man, stay near him. He smiled, and she felt happiness, feather light, floating inside her.

  “Just as you said, Lan.” The Guide nodded to the Master Watcher. “It’s wonderful.”

  He raised a hand and beckoned to Max.

  “Boy,” he said. “Come here.”

  Nell could feel the others lean forward, wanting to move closer, too. Max, reddening, stepped toward the old man. With a flush of jealousy, Nell looked to the Master Watcher. Despite the warmth in the Guide’s voice, the Master Watcher tensed, his shoulders rising.

  “What do they call you?” the old man asked.

  In a low voice, Max said his name.

  “And where do you come from, Max?”

  His voice was deep and musical, and Nell wished again that he was talking to her and looking her way.

  Max hesitated only a second. “It’s hard to explain,” he said.

  The Guide nodded as if Max had said something brilliant and wonderful. “The first step toward wisdom is admitting the difficulty,” he said approvingly. “And of course beginning the search. So you’ve begun, by coming here.” He grinned suddenly. “And what a mind you must have, to have helped your friends here.” He swept his arm out to include the girls. “We were anxious to meet you once we’d had news from the city.”

  Nell wondered who “we” were.

  “My sisters,” Max corrected.

  The Master Watcher flinched almost invisibly, but the Guide smiled widely at the word.

  “Your sisters. How beautiful.”

  “No, I meant —” Max started, but the Master Watcher cut him off.

  “There’s more, Guide. As we waited on the mountain, the boy opened the mist.”

  Nell opened her mouth to say something, but Susan’s hand closed on her wrist. Her sister gave a tiny shake of her head.

  The smile that had been on the old man’s face froze. It was as if a candle had been blown out behind his eyes. Nell watched him lose focus, regain it. He looked sharply at Max.