"Miss Hardbroom? What is it?"
Mildred's voice sounded very young and very frightened, but Constance had no reassurance to offer. Gripping the edge of the square opening, she pulled herself up another two steps, until her head and shoulders were outside, but still protected by the angle of the partially open trapdoor. The tower walkway had been one of her favourite places in the castle for years; she had come here often alone, late at night, to look out over wood and field and village and enjoy the quiet of a sleeping world. It upset her to see the view that she thought of as her own wiped away, replaced with this ugly blank expanse of something she did not understand.
"Miss Hardbroom!" Mildred clutched the hem of Constance's dressing gown, and galvanised into anger that was more than half fear, Constance ducked back through the opening to tell her off for it.
"Don't pull at me like that, girl, unless you want us both to fall to our deaths. It's a long way to the bottom of the stairs, in case you've forgotten."
"I'm sorry, Miss. I thought something had happened to you." Mildred's stricken expression said she was telling the truth, and Constance unbent a bit. Down there on her own, it was no wonder the girl's imagination was running away with her.
"Never mind, Mildred. Come and look for yourself. We shan't be able to see much, but we can get out of this hole, at least." She sent another shove of magic at the heavy trapdoor, and with a creak and a bang, it fell back flat, allowing her to climb out. "Pass the lanterns up first—we'll still need them—and then give me your hands." Mildred obeyed, and Constance clasped her wrists to steady her while she scrambled up the last few stairs, until they were kneeling face to face on the stones of the walkway.
"Oh no," Mildred said as she saw what Constance had seen. "It's everywhere—just everywhere."
"It certainly appears to be," Constance said grimly.
Mildred tipped her head back, and Constance watched her gaze in mingled terror and fascination at the grey barrier that arced over their heads. It skimmed just above the spire of the square east tower—the tallest of the three—and came down close along the castle's sides, blotting out everything as far as either of them could see. They might have been completely alone in the universe, marooned on an island that was the last vestige of anything real, if not for the voices that still swirled around them.
...this...
...to help
hush...
...don't...
"Is it safe to stand up, do you think?" Mildred asked timidly. "The stones are awfully hard on my knees. And wet."
Constance frowned at Mildred's grey school-issue nightgown, clearly sized for the much shorter first-year Mildred, and then at her own purple pyjamas, which were cold and sodden where she had crawled through a puddle on her way out of the trapdoor. It offended her sense of order and reason to think that an hour or two ago, a perfectly ordinary rain had been falling here, and now the sky from which it had fallen was gone. She felt a sharp prick of guilt, too, that this colossal event had happened entirely without her noticing. If she had been on guard, instead of lolling about in bed, might she have been able to stop it?
No, she thought. That way lay madness. She would just have to put it out of her mind for now.
"Yes, of course," she said to Mildred's questioning look. "It's high enough above us; we can't possibly stumble into it by accident as long as we keep clear of the parapet."
Mildred bounced up and busied herself collecting the lanterns while Constance got to her feet a bit more slowly. She would not choose to be fifteen again for any amount of money, but she could have used some of that youthful, elastic agility at the moment. The stair-climbing had taken more of a toll on her than she liked to admit, and she was fairly certain it wouldn't be the last challenge they faced before this was over, one way or the other.
"Here you are, Miss Hardbroom." Mildred handed her a lantern, and she took it with a gesture of thanks and held it up, scanning that maddening greyness for any sign of...well, anything. Unlike Mildred, she did not have much natural imagination and she knew it; even as a child she had preferred history books to fairy tales and struggled when asked to play games that began with "let's pretend." But all the same, she had a strong sensation that there were other eyes inside the greyness, or beyond it, that were looking back at her and her feeble pinpoint of light. It was not a pleasant thought.
"It seems as if you could rip it apart," Mildred said thoughtfully beside her. "If you could find a seam, or make a tear that was big enough. I mean, it is a thing, isn't it? Something you can touch, not just nothingness."
Constance turned and looked at the girl, surprised. "Yes, well, Mildred, that would all be very well until you were pulled through your tear and disappeared forever." She paused. "But I understand what you mean. It does have that sort of feeling."
"Do you suppose that's what happened to everyone else?" Mildred asked. "Were they pulled into it somehow?"
"Well, perhaps we should consider that possibility," Constance returned. "Could they have been?"
Mildred bit her lip and fiddled with the chain on her lantern. "I don't see how. It's outside the castle and everyone was inside when they disappeared. Maud and Enid would have come to fetch me if they were going out—er, not that we would have gone out after bedtime, of course—"
"Oh no, of course not," said Constance with heavy irony. "Forget about that for the moment. Keep thinking it through."
"If it's only outside, then that means they couldn't have been caught in it unless it came into their rooms, and I don't think it did. It doesn't move about; it's fixed in one place."
"Thank goodness for that," Constance said. "What else? You've left a few things out of your analysis, haven't you?"
"Have I?" Mildred thought for a moment. "Well, I suppose whether it has anything to do with their disappearance or not, but it must, mustn't it? I mean, it's too weird to be a coincidence."
"You have a gift for understatement, Mildred. Go on. Think of the obvious questions."
"Is it a—a natural phenomenon, or something created by magic?"
"Yes, and?"
"And if it was created by magic, who created it, and why?" She looked at Constance for confirmation and got a nod. "And...there's something else, isn't there?"
"And," Constance said, "if everyone else is gone, why are you and I still here?"
...here, whispered a voice in the chorus, as if echoing her.
