The Watchtower

trick of fate the one image preserved in the wreckage of the window was the black swan. Outlined now against the blue sky, it seemed to hover, as if ready to take flight. A sign, surely, that the time had arrived for Will to take flight as well.
    As his father climbed to his feet, still glaring at him and then shaking a fist impotently in the air as if that gesture might restore his dignity, Will said, “You cannot rule over me. I am going away to London, with the poet.”
    His father’s fist-shaking ceased with a shudder that always made Will think afterward, reflecting back, of someone cowering before eternity.
    Will went over the window ledge, careful not to disturb the glass swan, and down the hill, following the poet, carrying his father’s sword. Everything else at Swan Hall he left behind. There might have been a final faint cry behind him, a beseeching, cut-off wail—but whether it came from his father or issued miraculously from the glass swan as a clarion cry to adventure—Will wasn’t sure. He would not pause to listen more.

3
    Jean Robin
    I followed the pigeon through the arched opening in the tree, leaving the streetlights of the Square Viviani behind me. Their light was replaced by an incandescent glow from deep within the tree … too deep. The tree shouldn’t have gone back that far. It was as if I were looking through the tree and the stone walls of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre into the church itself, where a thousand panes of stained glass glittered in the dark. Only Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre didn’t have stained glass. Not like this anyway. The only place I had seen stained glass like this was at Sainte-Chapelle, that perfect jewel box created by Louis IX in 1248. But that was across the Seine on the Île de la Cité, and that chapel was reached by narrow stone steps that climbed up . This stained-glass sanctuary was below me at the bottom of a flight of spiral stairs that dropped into the earth like a well. The brown pigeon waited on the top step. When I moved forward, he cooed and hopped down to the next one. I followed, pulled as much by the glittering, multicolored light as by the steady chortling that came from the bird like the patter of a tour guide.
    “Watch your step, please, come this way, this is one of the most remarkable sights in all of Paris…,” I imagined him saying as we made our way down into the underground hall of stained glass. I recalled the first time I’d gone to Sainte-Chapelle with my mother; I’d been grouchy and tired from waiting on line, complaining to her that I didn’t need to see yet another church. They all looked alike after a while, I’d said, as I followed her up the tightly twisting stone steps. Then we emerged into the upper chapel and I was silenced. It was like popping your head out of a rabbit hole and finding yourself in the Emerald Palace of Oz. A blaze of light, distilled through innumerable panes of brightly colored glass, enveloped us. The room seemed to be floating like a hot-air balloon. I remember feeling as if we had come untethered from the earth.
    I had that same feeling now even though I was descending into the earth. At the bottom of the stairs I stepped into a high-ceilinged room, its arched roof supported by twisting columns and covered with an intricate pattern of stained glass in every color of the rainbow. One moment it seemed as if the predominant color was blue, then violet, and then crimson. The colors were changing, shifting as I watched them. It was like standing in a planetarium watching the dome of the heavens move above me. Then something else occurred to me: if I was below the ground, and it was night, where was the light coming from?
    As if in answer to my unvoiced question, a shard of colored glass fell from the ceiling, spinning through the air like a maple seedling. Others joined the crimson, blue, and emerald rain. I ducked, sure that the whole ceiling was about to crash down on my head, but when the first shard of glass hit me, it had all the force of a dandelion puff. I held out my hand to catch another. An amber droplet landed in my palm and looked up at me with the face of a Botticelli angel. I looked up again, gasping. The entire ceiling—of a room as large as Sainte-Chapelle—was made up of live fairies, each one glowing like a Christmas bulb.
    “Light sylphs!” I exclaimed, recalling the creatures I’d glimpsed the night I’d spent with Will Hughes in Fort Tryon Park.
    The little creature hissed and