Why Would I Play?

While the oranges were still going, the second bell rang, and once we had finished them the corridor outside the study had emptied of every footstep. “Classes,” said Kathi-4, and she set her napkin on the cloth. “Now is the best time of day to be nowhere in particular.”

She led us out in a line. Kathi-4 first, in her small heeled boots, then Kathi-1 and me, with Kou on my shoulder and Ryu on hers, and Mori at the back, keeping to the wall. Twice on the stairs I saw him try to draw level with Kathi-1. Twice Kathi-4 stopped to adjust a button, and the line closed up around him.

The first door she opened was a dormitory room with the bed frames taken out. It was shoes. I counted forty pairs before I stopped, as a matter of self-respect. They stood in rows on the bare boards, pairs and pairs and pairs, boots and slippers and dancing shoes with their ribbons tied, heel to heel, and not a single one had a speck of mud on it. “Sixty-one pairs,” she said, and closed the door gently.

“Next door,” she murmured, going out. “Dust sheets next.” Low and quick, it was the voice from the forest, and not meant for us, and Kathi-1 and I had stopped hearing it by the first landing.

The classroom was dust sheets. Underneath them, when she lifted a corner, were chairs: armchairs, a chaise, a pair of carved dining chairs with a tapestry seat, a standing lamp with a fringed shade. “For a better afternoon,” she said. “Everything here is for a better afternoon.”

The storage cabinets at the end of the next corridor held the small things. Drawers lined in velvet, a watch in every slot. Music boxes, thumb-sized. She wound one, let it play three notes, and stopped it with her palm. Then the lecture hall’s back room, and a harp, and a cello, and a small piano, all of them tuned. “Do you play?” said Kathi-1.

“No.” Kathi-4 looked puzzled. “Why would I play?”

Kathi-1 looked at the harp for a long time, and I looked at the dust sheets, and neither of us asked where the things had come from. I had decided at about the shoes not to ask, and the harp did not change my mind.

Kou’s claws shifted on my shoulder. I did not ask what he thought either.

We were in the passage behind the lecture hall, going toward the east stair, when something rattled on the floor below. A bucket. Then wheels, and a man’s voice humming, and the hum came along the passage toward us in no great hurry. Kathi-4 stopped dead. She walked all of us back the way we had come, quickly, into the nearest cupboard, and pulled the door to behind her.

It was a broom cupboard, made for one broom and a mop. Now it held three girls, one dragon, and a bat on my shoulder, and Mori, who had flown in last and landed on the mop. I had Kathi-4 pressed against my side and her mouth by my ear. The cart went by. The humming went by. Kathi-4 was murmuring the whole time, no louder than before. “…on the stair, on the stair…”

I breathed through my mouth and counted, and the cart did not stop. The humming having faded, she opened the door a crack, looked both ways, and took us on, brisk as ever, her hair still perfectly smooth.

“Last one,” she said. “The best.”

***

It was a long room at the top of the east stair, with the shutters closed, and the light came from a lamp she lit on the sill, and then it came from everywhere.

There was no furniture, only mirrors. They hung from the picture rail to the floor, in gilt frames and wooden frames and no frames at all, oval ones and tall ones and one the size of my palm, and they were all of them very old and very clean. It was the first room that was not a thing for use. I stood in the door and watched a row of me stand in the door, and behind them another row, going back and back.

“Take your time,” said Kathi-4, and went to adjust a frame at the far end. Her murmur went with her. Mori had settled on the picture rail by the door, where he could see her back.

Once I glanced down the room. She was standing with her forehead against the frame of a very small mirror, and the murmur had stopped, and she was only standing there. Then she straightened, and the murmur began again. He did not come down.

Kathi-1 had gone over to a tall glass on the left, and Ryu, on her collar, had gone still with his chin tucked down. I took the chance, and went after her, and bent, and said into her ear, as quietly as I had ever said anything: “We’re not taking her, are we?”

Kathi-1 turned her head. “What?”

“Across. When we go. She creeps me out.”

“She is us.” Kathi-1 said it in a flat, low whisper. “She’s lonely, Kathi-0. She’s been alone with it for months, and she made us a breakfast. We should help her. If she wants to come, take her.”

“We can’t take her. I can carry Kou and Mori, and that’s the cap. You know that.”

“I’m not asking you to carry her.” She glanced down the room, and lowered her voice another notch. “I could teach her. Ryu and I worked it out with nobody and a forest, and I had the theory from you. She’s already pulling things through rifts. She’s halfway there.”

“You were a risk that paid off,” I said. “That’s all you were. I’m not putting a second one on the same table because the first one landed.”

Ryu lifted his chin off her ear and looked at me.

“I’m right here,” said Kathi-1.

“I know. I’m saying it to your face.”

Kou dropped from my shoulder onto the frame of the glass between us, and folded his wings. “I side with Kathi-1,” he said, barely above a thread of sound. “I’d like to find Kou-4, too. Before dawn I sent a long fine pulse through the washroom wall, no window. Nothing came back. He’s out of range, which is a sentence I don’t enjoy.”

“I’m not saying we don’t help her,” I began, “I’m saying—”

A heel struck the floor. It struck it once, hard. Kathi-4 was standing in the middle of the room with her hands at her sides, looking at us. The three of us, I mean: Kathi-1, and I, and Kou on his frame. She did not say a word. She stood there for long enough that I counted, to be doing something with my head, and by the count of six she had stamped again. It was not a loud stamp. I knew that stamp. I had made it myself, at nine, in front of a locked library.

“Those are lovely,” said Kathi-1, brightly, and pointed over my shoulder. “Where did you find the oval one?”

Kathi-4’s chin came up. She looked at the oval one, then at Kathi-1, and her whole face, to my astonishment, cleared. “Oh,” she said. “You noticed.”

She went round the room and told us, one frame at a time. This one was the best for early light. This one had a flaw in the glass, near the corner, that she had never been able to polish out, and she touched it with a fingertip as she said so. The small one she kept in her pocket on days when she had a test. She was happier, talking about mirrors, than I had seen her since the forest. I stood with my back to the shuttered window, and the room did not get any easier to be in.

At the end, Kathi-4 stood us all in front of the biggest one, side by side, to see what it made of us. There we were, three girls of a height in three dresses, in a row. Plum, green, and blue. All three of us stood with our hands folded, and I could not have said who started it.

I looked at the one in the middle, and I looked away first.

***

By the last bell of the day we were back in her room with the door shut and the three clocks ticking in agreement. The light had gone from the window by degrees. The plan was to wait for the Academy to go to sleep, and nobody had anything to add to that.

Kathi-4 had a spirit stove behind the hatboxes and a copper pot on it, and she made coffee. She poured it into cups so thin that the lamp showed through them, with a gold line at the rim and a small blue bird painted inside, and a saucer for each of us, with warm milk in the little ones for Kou and Mori. There was a jug of milk and a sugar bowl with tongs, and she asked who wanted what. “Milk, please,” said Kathi-1, “and one sugar,” and then, “Oh, this is good.”

I took milk, and sugar, and then more sugar. I do not like bitter things. Kathi-4 watched the third lump go in and said nothing, and set the bowl at my elbow, where it stayed. The day had been nothing but rooms, and I drank the coffee to keep my eyes open.

Ryu had gone to sleep in the crook of Kathi-1’s elbow with his tail hanging over her sleeve. Mori sat straight on his hatbox, and Kou had sat down on the one beside him, and the bells on the quarters rang one after another down the long corridor, and then there were no more bells. Kathi-4 set her cup down in its saucer. Outside, in the north wing, a single window went dark, and then another.

“Not long,” she said.

Mori looked at me. I looked at my cup.