The Light of Three Hundred Casements

Twelve days were left before the sleet, and there was no cobalt left.

Brianda spent the first night sitting on the floor of the hall in front of the charcoal cartoon of the rose window, without touching it. Bruno said nothing to her. He left a bowl of broth beside her and went to the forge to make a new frame, because it was the only thing he knew how to do and because iron, at least, didn't fall out of anyone's hands.

The next morning, Ciro came into the forge with a sack over his shoulder.

He dropped it on Brianda's bench without looking at her. It sounded like glass. She opened it slowly: inside were hundreds of fragments, small, dirty with mud and moss. Nearly all of them blue. Some still kept the curve of the lead.

"From the bottom of the gorge," said Ciro, looking at the floor. "I went down yesterday by the goatherds' path. The river didn't take it all." He scratched his singed head. "My brother used to say Master Bruno wouldn't give his hand even to the prince. Yesterday he let go of the sun for a southern woman."

No one answered. Brianda's eyes were full of tears and she didn't want the boy to see them.

"You owe me a bellows," Ciro said at last, and went to fetch his apron.

The new rose window looked nothing like the first. It couldn't. The fragments from the bottom of the gorge were broken into pieces too small for the original design, so Brianda changed the design. The boreal sun stayed, but its center was no longer one large piece of cobalt but a mosaic of a hundred blue fragments, each held by its own line of lead, like a net. The apprentices' ugly blue remained the sky. And on one edge, low down, where only someone who knew to look would see it, Brianda set the fragment from the chapel that Bruno had carried in his apron since the first day.

Ciro worked the bellows twelve days straight. He spoke to Brianda only when he had to. On the eleventh, when she burned her hand with a drop of lead, he passed her the bowl of vinegar without being asked.

They raised it on the eve of the sleet, with no wind, the scaffold guys doubled. This time the cotter went in on the first try.

Half of Oakhaven came out into the courtyard to watch. Ciro held the tackle rope with the other five and didn't let go until Bruno, up on the scaffold, raised his thumb. When the frame was fast in the bracket, someone on the walls began to clap, and the applause came down like an avalanche into the courtyard. Up on the scaffold, Brianda covered her face with her putty-stained hands.

Prince Fadrique came to see it the next day, with Irene de la Torre beside him. They stood in the center of the hall saying nothing, heads raised, while the morning light passed through the rose and filled the flagstones with reflections: red, green, gold, and in the center that blue made of a hundred pieces that trembled like water.

"They told me it had fallen," said the prince.

"It fell," said Bruno. "This is another one."

Fadrique took from his sleeve a document sealed in vermilion wax and held it out to Brianda.

"Safe-conduct and escort to Toledo, Doña Brianda. With a chest of silver. Oakhaven does not forget what you have done for it."

Brianda took the parchment. She looked at the seal. She looked at Bruno, who didn't look away, though his jaw showed what it was costing him not to. Then she looked at Ciro, who stood in the doorway of the hall in his apron, pretending not to listen.

She folded the document and handed it back to the prince with a curtsy.

"I thank you, Highness. But in Toledo there's nothing left that hasn't already burned. And here there are still two hundred and forty windows."

Irene de la Torre laughed softly, and from the way she looked at Fadrique, Brianda knew that woman had also once turned down a safe-conduct.

That night they lit the new candelabra Bruno had forged in the hall, and from the valley, from the high sheepfolds of the Gorge of Souls, the shepherds saw the eastern rose burning in the darkness like a sun that refused to set.

Bruno and Brianda watched it from the wall walk, one blanket over both their shoulders. She rested her head on his arm and counted the lit windows under her breath, the way the queen in the legends had counted the tercios' fires. Sixty. Two hundred and forty to go. Bruno told her there was no hurry, and for the first time in forty days it was true.

In the forge, Ciro was teaching a new apprentice how to heat the lead. Three degrees less and it cools before it fills the channel, he told him. Three more and it burns the edge. And don't stop to think about it.