Ilven knew Sere had arrived when the glass cooled unevenly.
She entered his workshop through the open shutters. The hot cup on his rod leaned toward her, its rim becoming oval. He turned it away from the draught.
“Every time,” he said.
“You keep making them round.”
Her voice came from the narrow gap between the shutters, where air rubbed across the wood. She had no mouth. In winter he could see her as a shifting outline of mist; in summer she was movement, the stirring of the hair beside his ears, the lift of a paper from his bench.
He was an elf of the low woods, long-lived and reluctant to change the arrangement of a room. She was an air spirit. She disliked repeating a route and returned by a different one whenever she could.
He put the spoiled cup down. When it was cool, she moved through its opening and made a low, uneven note.
“That one,” she said.
He had learned to recognize words in the air. At first they had needed a row of reeds beside the window, different lengths for different sounds. Now a shutter gap was enough. This made him proud, and she teased him whenever she noticed.
They had known each other through three summers. Sere spent the warm months following the river from the hills to the marsh. When the northern winds began, she went with them beyond the mountains. She could remain behind for a little while, moving with the small currents around the workshop, but not through a whole winter.
The first year Ilven had thought this was preference. The second, she had stayed so long that her speech became faint. He had watched her mist draw apart, unable to keep one outline. She left without finishing their conversation. In spring she told him she had nearly lost the strength to follow the others.
This year he had built her a room.
It stood behind the workshop: curved glass walls, a roof of pale blue panes, a door wide enough to move through without catching against an edge. He had fitted a small stove outside, with its warm flue passing beneath the floor. He thought warmth would make the air move enough to sustain her.
He did not close the door when she first entered. She traced the walls in mist. Her outline gathered more clearly than he had ever seen it. He could make out a shoulder, a hand, the tilt he thought of as her head.
“I can see you,” he said.
“You could see me before.”
“Like this.”
He held up his palm. The mist touched it, cool and damp. For a moment the outline rested against him. He had spent three winters imagining that contact.
Then she slipped away to examine the stove’s heat.
“You made all this?”
“For when the winds turn.”
Her outline thinned.
“Ilven.”
“Try it first. We can keep the door open.”
She remained until dusk. The warmth drew her upward; air came through the doorway to replace it. She spoke through a reed he had hung beside the flue. The room did make it easier for her to stay in one place. He sat on the floor and watched the reflections of their movements in the curved panes.
When he rose to fetch supper, a gust slammed the door shut.
Inside, Sere turned toward the latch. Ilven reached for it from the workshop side. It had caught under the frame; the curved door always needed lifting before it opened.
“Just a moment,” he said.
Her outline spread across the ceiling. The stove still warmed the floor, but the air circled inside instead of passing through. She gathered herself, failed, and struck the blue panes as a wash of droplets.
He lifted the door. It opened. Cold air entered, and she fled through it, moving so fast that the reed snapped against its string.
He followed her outside. The workshop shutters rattled. For a long time she could say nothing. He could see her only where the grass bent.
“The heat was there,” he said at last.
“Heat isn’t a way through.”
She had told him this before, describing how she followed air from place to place. He had listened to the part about warmth because he knew how to make it.
He took the door off its hinges that night.
Sere returned to the workshop two days later. He had not called for her; he had no way to do that. He had kept the shutters open, working badly, stopping whenever a cup cooled on one side.
“I’m going tomorrow,” she said.
He set the rod down.
“It’s too soon.”
“The winds aren’t waiting for me.”
“The door’s gone.”
“I know.”
“We could take the side panels out.”
“You could.”
He looked at her reed. It hung still because she was speaking through a crack in the wall behind him.
“Would that work?”
“For a place to visit.”
He wanted to ask whether she could visit longer. Instead he asked where she would be that winter.
She told him about the high pass, where snow blew upward before settling, and the long eastern plain beyond it. She did not describe it as a deprivation. There were other spirits there, currents she knew by the weight they carried, voices he would never learn to hear. He had been imagining her winters as empty time between his summers.
“Do you want to go?” he asked.
The reed moved.
“Yes.”
He waited.
“And I want to be here,” she said.
He had hoped one answer would cancel the other. Hearing both made him angry, then ashamed of his anger, then tired. Sere circled the room. The half-finished cups trembled on their shelf.
“Please don’t break those,” he said.
She stopped. “I’m sorry.”
It was the first ordinary thing either of them had said since she returned. He laughed once, without much pleasure. She moved beside him and cooled the back of his hand.
They worked until evening. Ilven removed the side panels from the glass room. Sere could not carry them, but she ran along their edges and made each loose fitting whistle until he found it. He used the roof and frame to make an open porch. The panels would become small greenhouse lights; he would not waste them merely because he had been wrong.
At the porch’s west side he hung the old row of reeds. The wind could enter from any direction and leave without circling against glass. Sere spoke from three reeds at once, trying it, and her voice sounded younger than he had imagined it.
“A terrible instrument,” he said.
“You chose the lengths.”
“For conversation.”
“Then don’t ask me to sing.”
At dawn she came to him in the cold, clearly outlined for the last time that year. He lifted both hands. She rested against them briefly. It was not an embrace he could hold.
“I won’t promise the same day,” she said.
“I know.”
“Or every summer.”
He wanted to take back his answer. He let his hands fall instead.
“Come when you want to,” he said. His voice was rough enough that she could not have mistaken it for ease.
She touched the reed beside his shoulder, making one quiet note, then went. In the trees beyond the river the leaves turned over together. He watched until they settled.
That winter he made cups that could bear a little uneven cooling. He sold some and kept some. He visited his sister, repaired her smoky flue, and did not tell her the porch was for waiting. She sat under it with him in spring, complaining that it was draughty.
Sere came in the second month of summer. Ilven was away at the market when she arrived. She followed him there, lifting the striped awning above his stall and spoiling the neat stack of wrapping paper.
He looked up. People were arguing over prices on either side of him.
“You’ll have to help with that,” he said, pointing at the scattered sheets.
She drove them against his feet, where he could pick them up. Then she made a note in the oval cup he had kept on the stall.
They had two days before she followed rain toward the marsh. On the second evening they sat under the open porch, Ilven on the bench, Sere moving through the reeds. She told him about the eastern plain. He told her about his sister’s children. When the reeds went quiet he looked toward the trees, but she had only moved behind him, turning a loose corner of his collar back against his neck.
“Still here,” she said.
“For tonight.”
“For tonight.”
He leaned back. The air moved through the porch, lifting the hair at his temples, and went on into the dark.
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