Blinded by Daylight

It was daylight, and it slowed Andy a few steps short. After so long under the rusted sky and the cool torches it was almost too much to look at—a hard, high sun, white at the top of the sky—and it spilled out of the opening and lay across the corridor floor in a long pale square that nothing in the corridor could have made. He watched the edge of it as he came closer. It didn’t move, and it didn’t warm the stone it lay on.

Through the opening he could see into it, like a lit room seen through an open door at night. There was sand, close and bright. There was water past the sand, too bright to hold his eyes on for long, and the low dark shapes of islands out on it. And there were two people sitting near the edge of the wet sand with their knees drawn up, side by side, not quite touching. The sound of the sea came out with the light, from a long way off and from close at hand at once, as if the wall were a shell somebody had put to his ear.

He didn’t need to count the islands. Just above the waterline, a little apart from each other, lay two small pebbles, and the tide was working in toward the nearer one.

One of the two people was Arabella. The other one was him.

Andy stood at the sill with his hands at his sides and found himself studying the back of his own head. This was the day she had told him how she came to become Arabella. He hadn’t thought he would ever see it from anywhere but the place where he’d sat.

“How does this work?” Andy asked. He kept his voice low, as if the two on the sand might hear him.

Horun had stopped beside him. He watched the room for a while before he answered, unhurried, his hands loose at his sides.

“By season,” Horun said. “Every season she has run is kept in here, threaded by her memories, including those between seasons. The older ones are deeper down. Inside a season, there is no fixed order. A morning can sit beside a night from much later, or one from much earlier, and memories shift around as she makes connections and re.”

Andy turned his head and followed the corridor down. The breaks in the walls went on ahead, a long way, each holding its own small light, and from here they were no more than lamps left burning in windows along a street.

Andy looked back into the room. “So we’re still in mine. All of this is still mine.”

“For a little way yet,” said Horun.

Andy wet his lips. “And if I go in?”

“Then you’ll stand where she stood,” Horun said. “You’ll see what she saw, and hear what she heard, and you’ll feel what her body felt. At the most, you’ll know what she meant to do. What she thought stays hers. You can’t change anything in there, and nobody in it will see you. When it ends, you’ll be back out here.”

He explained it the same way he’d explained the corridors in the hall, simply and all at once, as though a thing that worked like this had never needed hiding.

Andy’s eyes went back to the woman on the sand. She sat straight, even sitting down, with her hands folded on her knees.

Andy glanced at him. “Are you coming in with me?”

“I’ll wait here,” Horun said.

The sill was a step of plain pale stone, no higher than a curb. Andy considered it, and the square of light lying across the floor, and Horun once more, who had not moved. Then he stepped over.

He was sitting down.

He didn’t sitting. There was no step between the corridor and the sand, no crossing at all—only the sun suddenly on his face and on his forearms, hot, and the sand damp and packed under him, and the sea right there, loud now and nowhere near a shell. The body he was in was lighter than his own and held itself differently. Her breath went in high, under the collarbones. Her hands were folded together on her knees so tightly that the knuckles ached with it, and he tried to ease them and nothing happened. They weren’t his to ease.

Beside her, a man sat in the sand with a piece of shell in his palm, squinting out at the horizon. Andy had seen his own face in mirrors all his life, always the wrong way round. Here it was the right way round, and from the side, and it was strange enough that for a moment he forgot to listen. The man was tired. He looked a good deal younger than Andy felt now, and he was turning the shell over and over with his thumb.

Then her voice came up through him. “Do you think I have a soul?”

It started low in her chest and rose, so that the sound came from inside the ribs he was sitting in. It was nearer than he’d ever heard her voice, and lower, and it shook in a place the air would never have carried to anyone listening from outside.

The man with the shell didn’t answer at once. Andy ed that. He ed deciding to give the question the time it deserved, and trying to hold still while he did it, and from here he watched himself try. It took longer than he would have guessed.

“Yes,” past-Andy said. “I do.”

It was his own voice, from outside his own head. It was strange, to hear himself like this. And it landed in her. Her breath didn’t catch; it simply stopped, held somewhere high in her chest, and did not go on. Her eyes stung. The bright water in front of her doubled and ran, and she did not blink—Andy could tell she wouldn’t, because the lids were being held open on purpose against the sting, and the whole of her face was kept perfectly still around her eyes while the water swam in them. He’d been sitting right beside her. He’d seen a softening at the corners of her eyes, and nothing else at all.

“Why?” her voice asked, quite even.

“You’re asking me, specifically?” said past-Andy.

“I have never asked anyone else. Not once.”

He ed his reply, but the memory did not give him all of it. His own voice went on for a while from beside her, and the sound of it ran together with the sea, and the sun moved on the water. Only the end of it came through clear.

“You could have been anything, and you made yourself a person. If that doesn’t count, nothing does.”

Then the morning went thin. The light went from bright to white between one breath and the next, and the long middle of the morning was simply not there: her fear of disappearing, and the promise he’d made her, and every minute of the sun climbing. Nothing marked the place where they had been. The wet sand around them had turned almost silver, and her voice was already speaking, softer than before, and the first of it went by him like the end of a dream he had already woken out of. Then it slowed.

“There is one more,” she said. “It’s the name I was given when I was made, the name of my baseline. It’s what the twelve of us called each other, and Horun gave me mine, because he was the oldest and that was his to give. Nobody alive re it.”

The man beside her swallowed, and nodded, and she leaned toward him. Andy leaned with her, because there was no not leaning, and his own ear came close, and his own hair, and through her breath he smelled sun and salt on his own skin. She put her mouth almost against his ear.

“Ama-Bila.”

It was nearly no sound. The shape of it reached him more than the sound did—her lips meeting twice, soft, and the breath that carried it barely moving. What she meant by it came through to him as far as it could and no farther. She meant him to keep it.

“I’ll your real name, too,” his own voice said, close and far at once. “I promise.”

The lines around her eyes eased. Andy felt them go.

“It helps,” Arabella murmured.

Then they were sitting a long time, and the long time went by like no time at all, and she was standing up. Her knees took her weight. The sand came away from her palms as she brushed them together, grain by grain, and she looked down at the man in the sand, who was looking up at her, and she said one word.

“Andy.”

His own name, in her mouth. It was the last thing.

He was standing in the corridor. There had been no step back, any more than there had been a step in. The torches burned white on either side, and Horun stood at his elbow where he had been, and behind them in the wall the beach lay in its own light—still bright, and very small.

Andy turned his hands over and studied them. There was no sand on them, none in the creases of the knuckles. They were his own again, broad and heavy, and Caledfwlch sat at his hip with its full weight, as if it had been somewhere else for a minute and had come back.

“She didn’t blink,” Andy said.

Horun said nothing.

Andy rubbed a hand down over his face. “I was right there. I was sitting right next to her, and I thought she— I thought she took it pretty well.” He let out a breath. “She couldn’t breathe.”

He stood with that a while. How many times has she acted untouched, while her heart pounded within her chest and emotions threatened to overwhelm her? He turned to the man beside him, to the black and the white of him in the torchlight.

“You gave her that name.”

“I did,” Horun said. “It’s what we called her. I gave each of them their names. They were the only things we could truly call our own.”

Andy nodded slowly. His mouth had gone dry. He thought of a road through gray ruin, and a man stepping up out of nothing beside it, and the first thing that man had ever said about him, half to himself, before Andy had understood anything at all.

“On the road,” Andy said. “Before I had any idea who you were. You called me Ama-Bila’s boy.”

“Yes,” said Horun.

“The first thing you ever called me was her name.” Andy heard his own voice go unsteady and let it. “I heard it and I knew it was hers. I just never thought about who’d have given it to her.”

Horun inclined his head. “They were my siblings,” he said softly, “and I loved them, as I love her. That is the meaning of her name. 'Worthy of Love.'”

Nobody alive re it, she’d said, with the sand going silver around her. Andy studied the man who had given it to her, standing quiet in the white light with nothing on his face to say what he was, and wondered whether she knew someone still did. Whether Horun was real or not, Andy could hear the truth in his voice.

Horun turned and went on down the corridor, and after a moment Andy went with him.

The beach fell behind them. They ed many openings, but Horun stopped at none of them. The beach’s light stayed on the floor for a few steps and then it was only torchlight again, white and even, and the sound of the sea went on a little longer than the light did before it stopped, all at once, as if a door had been shut on it somewhere. Andy didn’t look back. His feet made no echo on the stone. It was the kind of thing a dream lets you notice without minding, and he noticed it, and let it go.

The next opening Horun stopped at, was on the same side, and it was darker. It was a house at night—lamps low, a window black with winter, a blue and green flicker moving on one wall from a television left on with the sound turned down. Cold came out of it. It smelled faintly of coffee, and of a heater that had been running all evening, and under that of snow.

He had placed the room before he reached the sill. The big blue chair. The mantel, with his father beside it. The faded University of Illinois throw slumped over the end of the couch. His parents’ living room in Warrenville, on the night Arabella had come to take him and Laura back.

Andy stood at the sill a moment longer than he meant to. In the room, his mother was perched on the arm of the blue chair with her fingers tight on the upholstery. On the couch, Laura, in one body, sat beside a man who was Andy, her hair flattened on one side where she’d been sleeping against his shoulder. Neither of them was looking toward the sill. Nobody in there was.

He stepped in, and he was standing on carpet, in soft shoes. The wool of a sweater lay against the insides of her wrists. Her hands were clasped in front of her—not resting there, as they appeared, but held, the fingers working against one another—and her heart was going faster than he would have believed.

“My name is Arabella.” Her voice came up out of her, quiet. “I’m… Well. I’m responsible for Andy and Laura. For what’s happened to them. I’m here to collect them and bring them back.”

He’d heard her say it from the couch. From here he could feel what it cost her to get to the end of it. Her throat closed a little on the word responsible and she made it open again, and she kept her eyes on his mother the whole way through, as if his mother were the one who would decide whether she could stay. His mother’s knuckles had gone pale on the arm of the chair.

Over by the fireplace his father sat forward, elbows on his knees, and studied her for a second, as he would have studied a stranger on the porch. “Can you stay for coffee?”

“I’d love to,” Arabella said, “if it’s no trouble.” Something twisted in her chest, and Andy felt a profound loneliness within her, a longing, he had never seen on her face before.

The room did not move on from there. It skipped. One moment her hands were empty and held in front of her, and the next she was sitting in the chair nearest the side window with a mug of coffee in both of them, and Andy hadn’t seen it handed to her or seen her sit down. The heat came through the mug into both palms at once, and she held it with her fingers not quite closed around it and her thumbs perfectly still, as if it might be taken back.

For a while nobody said anything. The heater burbled in the wall. Laura was picking at a sugar cookie, a crumb at a time. The television painted the far wall green, then blue.

Andy tried to look at his own past self, and couldn’t. He could only look where Arabella looked. Her eyes went to his mother first, to her hands and her face, then to his father and the hand he’d put out behind him onto the mantel and left there, then to Laura. They stayed on Laura longer than on anyone, and went away to the cup, and came back to Laura again. A strange mixture of relief, wonder, affection and guilt roiled in her chest. Everything she wasn’t looking at went soft at the edges of the room, the corners of the ceiling and the far end of the couch, as if the house only kept whatever she happened to be watching and let go of the rest.

He had never seen his parents like this, from a chair across their own living room, the way a guest would see them. His mother was a small woman sitting up straight on the arm of a chair and holding on to it. His father was a man with one hand on a mantel, holding on to that. They were older than he let himself see them when he was home, and kinder-looking, and plainly afraid, and they had poured her coffee anyway. Her chest drew tight around her breath, and Andy felt it.

Then her eyes went past all of them, once, to the side window. It was black outside, and the glass held a faint copy of the lamp. Beyond the copy, past the snow heaped along the fence, lay the garden next door—the place where Laura’s house had stood until Andy bought it and had it torn down to the ground. In the dark it was only shapes. Low beds under snow. A path going in. At the center of it stood the pedestal, a pale stub in the dark, and the bronze plaque on it was much too far off to read from here.

Andy didn’t need to read it. He’d chosen every word on it. Her eyes stayed on it a moment, and nothing in her face or her hands changed, but the guilt and the sorrow grew, and then she came back to the room.

“Are you taking them away forever,” his mother said, gentle but unyielding, “or is this just… for now?”

The smile came up into her face on its own. Andy felt it happen. The Host’s smile was set in place and held there; this one simply arrived, from somewhere he couldn’t follow, and her eyes stung with it.

“Just for now,” she said. “There’s more for them to do. More for both of them to heal from. But if I’ve learned anything from this year, it’s that nothing is forever.” Her eyes went to Laura, and to the man beside Laura. “Except love.”

“Good,” said his father, and his hand closed on the mantel.

His mother reached over without seeming to know she was doing it and smoothed a stray piece of Laura’s hair back behind her ear, and left her hand there a second longer than she needed to. Arabella watched the hand. Her own two hands tightened on the mug, a little.

The coffee was still warm in her hands. That was where it ended—on the warmth, and on her fingers not quite closed around it.

Andy was standing in the corridor with his hands at his sides.

He stayed like that for a while. The living room sat in the wall behind him in its own dim light, the television still flickering in it, and he didn’t turn around to it. She had looked at Laura more than at anyone in that room. She had watched his mother’s hand on Laura’s hair, and held on to a cup of coffee with both hands. And once, with all of them sitting right there, she had looked out of the window at the garden.

Without deciding to, he reached for Laura down the bond, as he had been reaching all night. Nothing had changed. She was right here and impossibly far, both at the same time, and so terribly afraid. He let it go, slowly.

“This is hers,” Andy said. His voice came out rough, and he cleared his throat. “All of it. Some of what’s in these walls, she’s never shown anybody. Not once. And I’m just— walking through it.”

“This corridor is the only way down,” Horun said. “To where the Gate is kept.”

Andy shut his eyes. “I know,” he said. “I know it is.” He’d understood that since the hall; it didn’t make his hands feel any less like they’d been somewhere they had no business being. He opened his eyes again and made himself look at Horun. “Would she want me in here?”

Horun was quiet for a time. He didn’t look away. “I can’t answer that for her,” he said. “But if it were me, I would want to be known for who I really was, at the end of my life.”

Andy nodded. It was a fair answer, and the only honest one there was. “Okay,” he murmured. “Okay.” He drew a breath and let it out. “Then I’ll be careful in here.”

He started walking again, and Horun walked beside him. Past the living room, the openings in the walls held more of his season, and then rooms Andy had never stood in, and the faces in them were faces he didn’t know. Nobody in them looked toward the corridor. The light in each one was a little older than the light in the last.

These were the seasons before his own, and Horun led him on among them.

The corridor ran on, and the rooms in its walls began to look like places Andy half knew.

There was the lobby, with a different desk in it and different flowers on the desk. There was the Banquet Hall at lunch, set for a crowd, with tablecloths a shade of yellow he had never seen in there and nobody at the tables he could name. There was the pool under a hot white afternoon, the water exactly the right blue and the loungers all wrong. He ed a stretch of the beach with a bonfire on it, and three women laughing with their heads together, and a man standing a little apart from them with his hands in his pockets, watching the fire. A little farther on, a hallway he’d walked a hundred times went by with all its doors on the wrong side, and he turned his head to keep it and it was already behind him.

The people in the rooms were strangers. Men he’d never seen sat where he had sat and stood where he’d stood, and women he had never met laughed and leaned on them, and sometimes didn’t. Some of them were changed in ways he recognized the shape of—a tail, a strange color of skin, a body made over into another shape entirely—and on none of them did he know whose doing it was, or what it had cost, or how it had come out in the end. Nobody in any of the rooms looked toward the corridor. They went on with their mornings and their nights as he ed, and when he looked back, each one had already gone still again in its frame of light, as if it had only been moving for him.

Arabella was in none of them. It took him a while to understand why. She was the one looking.

The torches went by, pair after pair. “So these are the people who had it before me. All of them. They ate in that room. Slept in that bed.” He shook his head slowly. “I used to wonder who’d been in the Suite before me. I never really wanted to know.”

Horun let that go by without an answer, and Andy didn’t need one.

The light in the rooms got a little older as they went, and the clothes did too, by a year and then by a few. He’d given up trying to read the faces when one of them looked out of the wall at him, and he stopped walking.

It was Katherine.

She stood in a room with no frame around her. There was no canvas and no gilt and no painted background, only a room he couldn’t make out behind her and Katherine in the middle of it on her own two feet: tall and slender and naked, her huge breasts bare, her black hair falling down, her green eyes open and looking out. She looked frightened.

“Katherine,” Andy breathed. It came out of him half aloud, as it did at home when he walked into a room and found her there. Nobody in the memory turned.

His voice had gone strange in his own ears. “She’s out. She’s not in the—she’s standing up.”

He took a step toward the sill and then didn’t take another. His mind had gone on ahead of him without asking, and now he stood still and let it get where it was going.

A season fourteen years ago. She’d told him that early on, as well as she could tell anybody anything, with her hands and her face and the long patience of someone who had been waiting years to say it. Her Master had been a man called Flint. Andy had seen the name himself, on her STATUS, and changed it to his own. That was all he had ever had of it: a number of years, and a name. And here she stood in her own body, outside any frame, in a room in the seasons before his, with her eyes on whoever was standing in front of her.

“This is Flint’s season,” Andy said.

Horun had stopped beside him at the sill. He was watching Katherine too, and he didn’t say anything.

Andy swallowed. “Is this the day she went into the painting?”

“Yes,” Horun said.

Andy stood with his hands open at his sides. He wanted to say no to it. He wanted to walk past this one with his eyes on the floor, as he’d walked past half the rooms behind them, and he wasn’t going to. His right hand had found the hilt of the sword without his telling it to. He took it off again.

Andy wiped his palms down the front of the mantle. “I only ever heard about it. She couldn’t tell me most of it. Nobody ever showed me.” He let out a breath. “Okay.”

He stepped in, and he was standing close to her—close enough to touch, close enough that there was nothing between Arabella and Katherine but a little air—and Arabella’s eyes were on Katherine’s face and nowhere else. They didn’t move. Andy tried to make them move, to see the room, to find whoever else might be in it, and they would not go. Everything past Katherine’s face stayed at the edges, where he couldn’t make it out: a wall that might have been pale, a light that might have come from a window, a shape that might have been a door. The room was there like in a dream, as a feeling of corners. Somewhere past the edge of it, a long way off, a clock was ticking, or a tap was dripping. He couldn’t have said which.

Katherine looked back at her. She didn’t speak. She stood with her arms at her sides and her chin up, and her green eyes held Arabella’s and didn’t leave them once. Her breathing was quick and shallow, high in her chest. Andy could see it. He could see the pulse going in her throat, and a strand of the long black hair caught on her shoulder, and a fine line between her brows he had never once seen on her face at home. He could see every eyelash, because Arabella was watching all of them.

Arabella’s own body was still. Her breath went in slow and came out slow. Her hands hung loose at her sides and her heart kept an even time that he could hear in her ears as if it were in his. She did not lift a hand. Nothing in her moved toward Katherine at all. Once, Katherine’s fingers opened a little at her side and closed again, and nothing else in the room moved. Andy strained against that stillness with everything he had—to step back, to say Katherine’s name, to put himself in the little space of air between them—and the body he was in stood where it stood and watched, and he could not so much as make it blink.

Then Arabella spoke, and the voice came up through him from low in her ribs. “Katherine Summers.”

It came out level. Andy could feel how that was done: the breath let out a little at a time, the jaw set so that nothing in the voice could shake.

“By the rules of this Hotel, you are eliminated from this season. Whatever you earned in it is forfeit, and whatever it has done to you stays done. An Elimination Transformation is set against every elimination, and I am required to tell you what yours is before it is carried out.”

At the word eliminated the water came up in Katherine’s eyes. Andy watched it gather along the lower lids and hold, bright, and then spill, both sides together, and run down past the corners of her mouth and off her chin. She didn’t lift a hand to it. Her breath went in ragged through her teeth and came out the same way, with no sound in it, and the shaking started in her shoulders at the edge of his sight and climbed into her jaw. She set her jaw against it.

“You will be kept in a painting,” Arabella said, and Andy could feel the grief in her chest that she wouldn’t let her voice show, “and you will not age. You will face forward, forever. You will see and hear everything that is done in front of you, and you will feel nothing, and have no part in any of it.” Katherine’s face dropped. It fell a hand’s breadth, and for one beat it was still falling, and somewhere below the edge of his sight her knees must have gone. Then it came back up, chin first, her eyes open and running and her mouth pressed shut over whatever her throat was doing. She stood in the shaking with all of it showing.

In Arabella’s arms the muscles had gathered to reach for her. They held there, tight, and did not reach. As the chin came up, Arabella’s throat closed. “I’m so sorry. You will not be going home.” On the last word her voice thinned, only a little, and she took the next breath in through her nose and let it out slowly.

At the edge of his sight, low on the right, Katherine’s hand had come away from her side. He couldn’t turn to it. It was a pale shape held out low with the fingers curled around nothing, and it was shaking. It stayed there.

“I know,” Arabella said. The even time her heart had kept since the start of this broke. Andy heard it in her ears: two beats close together, a long gap, two more. On the next breath nothing went in at all. Under the breastbone there was a hard flat ache that hadn’t been there a minute ago, and every shake of that low hand made it worse. Her eyes stung. She held the lids open against it, and Katherine’s face doubled and ran and stayed that way.

Her hands had closed at some point. Her nails were in her palms, and she pressed them in harder. “You have a daughter,” Arabella said. It wasn’t level now, and she left it that way. “I wish I could spare you this, but I cannot. There is nothing in the rules that undoes this. The season’s Wish cannot reach it, and I cannot.”

The low hand went back to Katherine’s side. She drew one breath, all the way down, and breathed out, and stood as she had stood when it began: straight, arms at her sides, chin up. She was still crying, and she held that wet face up to Arabella’s eyes, all of it. “You have not asked me for anything for yourself,” Arabella said. “Not once. I will that you stood.” Her eyes stayed on Katherine’s face and didn’t close.

It went on for a long time, and there was nothing he could do but be there for all of it.

Then it went out of her.

It started in the middle of her chest. It went outward—not in a rush, not all at once, but steadily—through her ribs and her shoulders and out past her skin. Andy felt it leave. The place in her where it had been went cool and light. It didn’t hurt her, and it didn’t stop.

Katherine was gone from in front of her.

The air where she had been was empty. Arabella’s eyes went to the side. It was the first time they had moved. On the wall beside her hung the painting, and Katherine was in it, facing forward, her black hair falling past her knees, her green eyes open and looking out.

It was the same painting. Andy had stopped in front of it on his first morning, with Arabella beside him. He’d talked to it in the dark. The memory ended there.

Andy was standing in the corridor with one hand flat against the wall. He didn’t putting it there. The stone was cool under his palm and perfectly smooth, and he pressed on it, hard, and it held. His knees had gone loose. He locked them.

“She didn’t beg.” Andy’s voice shook. “She stood there and she held her hand out, like this—” He put his free hand out low at his side with the fingers curled around nothing, and it shook, and he took it back. “I think that meant her daughter. I think she was holding her hand—”

He stopped. His breath was coming short and he let it, and he kept his hand where it was. “She wanted to go to her,” Andy said, to the wall. “I could feel it. All of it in her arms, and she stood there and said every word.”

Horun nodded somberly. “She could not. The rules forbade her.” He stood beside him and waited. He didn’t touch Andy’s arm or say his name or tell him to breathe. He only stood near enough to be there, his bare feet quiet on the stone, and let the corridor be as long as it needed to be.

Andy closed his eyes and saw her anyway—not in the room just now, but at home. Katherine at the Suite’s kitchen counter, eating as if food were a thing that had just been invented. Katherine running into the ocean at a dead sprint with her hair flying out behind her, and coming up out of the water laughing with no sound at all. Katherine with her hand in his at a fire on the beach, the night he heard how her freedom had held. She had stood in that room with her chin up and her face wet, and nobody had stepped into the little space of air in front of her. Fourteen years ago he had been a boy in Warrenville, still learning how to live without Laura, and he had never heard of any of this.

After a while Andy took his hand off the wall. He flexed the fingers once and studied the palm, as if the stone might have left a mark on it, and let the hand drop.

They went on. Flint’s season ran along both walls for a long stretch, and its rooms came in no order Andy could follow: a breakfast, then a night with rain on the windows, then the same breakfast again from a little farther down the table, or one so like it that he couldn’t tell them apart. A line of women stood on the sand in the sun, waiting to hear a name. A man Andy had never seen sat on a low wall in the gardens with his head down, and the light on him was the flat gray of an afternoon about to rain. A woman sat alone on a staircase with her face in her hands, and two openings later the same woman was dancing. Strangers laughed in some of the rooms. In others nobody did.

He kept his eyes ahead of him. He didn’t want to see Katherine again in one of them, standing in some room in her own body before that day, and he didn’t want not to.

Early on, in the first weeks, she’d tried once to tell him what that room had been like under the men before him. She had done it with her hands and her face, as she did everything, for a long time, and he’d understood just enough of it to stop asking. He had never asked her again. He’d thought, at the time, that he was sparing her.

Then, a little way down on the right, he saw his own room.

The windows came first. Tall, and full of morning, with the sea beyond them; he’d woken up to that light for a whole season. The rest came after: the long room, the doors standing open to the terrace, the bed. Nothing in it was quite where he kept it. The covers on the bed were a different color and the chairs had been moved, and there were bags standing packed by the door. In the middle of the floor, with people all around him, stood another man.

Andy stopped at the sill. “That’s the Suite.” His voice sounded flat to him. “That’s my room.”

Horun didn’t answer. He stood beside the opening and waited, as he had waited at every one of them, and the morning light from inside lay along the white half of him.

Andy stepped in.

He was standing just inside the door, with the edge of it almost at his shoulder, and the room was loud. He could feel how she stood: shoulders back, chin level, her weight even on both feet—the Host’s way of standing at the front of a room, held without any effort he could find. There were women all around the man in the middle of the floor—four of them, five, it was hard to count when Arabella’s eyes wouldn’t stay on any one of them long enough—hanging on his arms and pressed against his sides, all of them talking at once. The air was thick with perfume, more than one kind, and it had the kind of warmth a room only gets when too many people have been breathing in it all morning.

“—can’t believe it’s really over—” “—you were so good, you were so good to us—” “—are we going right now? Are we going home?” “—baby, look at me, look—”

The voices ran together into one bright noise that never stopped long enough to let a word through clean. The women’s faces went soft at the edges whenever Arabella’s eyes left them, so that Andy saw them as hair and hands and mouths moving and nothing he could have picked out again. The man—Flint; it couldn’t be anyone but Flint—laughed at something one of them said, and put his arm around another one’s waist, and turned his head toward the door.

Andy never did get a good look at his face. Arabella’s eyes didn’t stay on it long enough. There was a man, and his voice, and his arms full.

“I’m leaving the painting,” Flint said to her, easily, over the noise. He didn’t look at it. “Keep it, hang it somewhere else, whatever you want. She can’t do much for me anyway.”

One of the women laughed, as if he had said something clever. Another one was still saying his name.

Andy wanted to make her answer him, but he could not so much as part her lips. Her breath went out once through her nose and came back in. Her hands stayed at her sides.

Arabella’s eyes went to the painting on the wall. Katherine looked out of it into the room. She was facing forward, as she always faced forward, her green eyes open, and the noise went on in front of her, and the man stood in the middle of it with his back half turned to her. Arabella didn’t look away. The room around the painting went soft—the man, the women, the bags by the door, all of it running at the edges like a picture left out in the rain—and the painting stayed sharp in the middle of it, every brushstroke of it, every strand of the long black hair, every tear flowing on her painted cheeks, how she lifted her arms and banged soundlessly on the painting from the inside, begging to be taken back. The memory ended there.

Andy came out of it angry. It came up in him before he was all the way back in the corridor, before he’d felt the sword’s weight settle at his hip again, and it wasn’t the ache he’d carried out of the beach or the living room, but something hot and simple. It was the same anger he had felt at Nin-Imma’s fate. He let it be.

“He left her on a wall,” Andy said. “He left her hanging on a wall in that room, and he didn’t even look at her, because she ‘couldn’t do much for him.’” He heard his own voice going up and didn’t stop it. “She watched all of that. She had to stand there and watch all of that, facing forward, and he walked out with his arms full and he didn’t even—”

He turned away from the opening and took three steps down the corridor and stopped, because there was nowhere to go. His hand had gone to the hilt again. He made it let go. Flint was out there somewhere, fourteen years older, or he wasn’t. Andy found he didn’t care which. He only wanted, badly, for the man to be standing in one of these rooms where Andy could reach him, and none of these rooms could be reached.

Andy turned back to Horun. “I got her out. I put a Command on that painting. I told it not to take her back, and I told her not to go back, and I didn’t know if it would hold.” He drew a breath that shook, and let it go. “It held. She’s free. She eats breakfast with us. She goes in the ocean every chance she gets. She’s—”

He stopped there, because his throat had closed, and stood breathing in the white light with his hands open at his sides. She's free.

She had been hanging on the wall of the Suite the first morning he woke up in it. He had looked straight at her, groggy, a man in a strange place, exploring the Suite with Arabella, and thought she was a painting of a woman and nothing more. He had talked to her before he had any idea she could hear. He had been one more man in that room, for a while. He hadn’t known. He wasn’t sure that made it any better.

“I’ll help her find her daughter. She— she deserves all the happiness she can hold.”

Horun had not moved from beside the opening. He was looking at Andy, and not at the room in the wall.

“Her name is Katherine?” Horun asked.

For a second the question didn’t make any sense to Andy, and then it did. “Yes,” he said.

“Katherine,” Horun said. He said it once, carefully, and looked at Andy appraisingly. “You found a way to free her. My sister chose well indeed.”

Andy stood with that for a while. The anger hadn’t gone anywhere, but it had stopped climbing, and it sat lower in him now, somewhere he could carry it. Behind them the Suite had already gone still in its own light: the bags by the door, the women, the man with his back half turned, and the painting on the wall with Katherine in it, looking out.

“Thank you,” Andy said. Horun inclined his head. Then he turned and went on down the corridor, deeper, without looking back to see whether Andy was coming.

The light in the walls ahead of them was older again, and there was more of it, and it went down farther than Andy could see. Past Flint’s season the rooms went back toward years he’d only ever heard told. Some of it had been told to him in tears.

Andy reached once more for Laura, without meaning to, and found her where he always found her now: right here and impossibly far, and afraid, so afraid. Nothing about that had changed. He held on to it a moment anyway.

Then he went after Horun, down into the older light.