The Tower at Stony Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He murmured something, and cast a glance at her shadow as she withdrew her hand. Five fingers, her shadow said. Her shod feet told him nothing at all. The only magic he could see lay in her charms.

  Later, he sat in the king’s chamber with Regis and a dozen of his most trusted lords and knights. Regis, flushed with wine and happiness, assured them that he had found the perfect, the most beautiful, the wisest—for all that her father was an eccentric, absentminded old nodder, peering through lenses in search of dragons and trying to walk on water. Cyan, with three women on his mind, drank little and said less. She did not dance, his perturbed thoughts ran again and again. I saw nothing. I cannot accuse her of nothing. They will marry. The bard is mistaken. Or else the lady is a lie. But if that is true, and I am forced to tell Regis that all he loves is a lie, then all love will become a lie to him, and even my love for Cria will be worth less to him than cows…

  Late at night, out of a mist of wine and goodwill, Regis fixed him with a disconcertingly probing eye. “Cyan. You aren’t smiling. Everyone else is smiling but you. You don’t like her.”

  Cyan opened his mouth; nothing came out. Smiles grew thin around him, curious. He rubbed his eyes, evading the king’s, and found words finally. “I’m as bewitched as everyone else. Too bewitched to speak.”

  The king threw an arm around his shoulders. “Maybe you have fallen a little in love with her yourself. You should marry. Everyone should marry.” He poured more wine into Cyan’s cup. “Drink with me. To Skye and all the magic that has come out of it.”

  Cyan coughed on his wine. The king’s eye rolled toward him again. But someone else raised his cup to the king’s happiness, and that Cyan could swallow. The knights reeled to their beds as the stars began to fade. Cyan, walking along a battlement wall, saw the softly lit tower window framed with roses behind which the lady slept. Did she dream? he wondered. Or did she watch the flickering shadows and wait for dawn, having no need for human sleep?

  A shadow melted over the candlelight in the window. He froze on the wall. Jeweled colors flashed in the casement as it opened. He saw her hair, rippling loose and limned with fire. He could not see her face. But he felt her eyes on him, the man on the wall, alone and sleepless, gazing at her across the well of night between them.

  She closed the casement; the room grew dark. He went inside, woke a page dozing beside a door, and sent him to find the Bard of Skye. He waited in the great hall while servants moved around him, laden with garlands to hide doorposts, transform the throne, spiral up the oak columns to make a wedding bower. The page came back to him finally. The Bard of Skye was not in her chambers, nor with the lady, nor with the lady’s retinue, nor with the king’s bard, nor with the musicians, nor, it seemed, anywhere at all.

  And that, Cyan thought, baffled, seemed to be that.

  He took his place the next day among the men escorting the king through the hall to the flower-strewn dais. Caged doves, released at the entrance of the new queen, flew upward into shafts of light. Her escort of women held her to earth with ribbons of pearl they let fall when she reached Regis. She seemed to be wearing every pearl in the western sea. Like everyone’s, her eyes burned with sleeplessness, but with nothing more sinister that Cyan could see. The Bard of Skye had reappeared to play gentle ballads from Skye and Yves with the king’s bard, as Regis Aurum and the Lady from Skye pledged their lives to one another. The bard’s eyes caught at Cyan once, above the bone harp. Why, they demanded, are you still here? He heard Cria’s voice then, raised alone, sweet and pure, singing verses to the harping. Her gaze had drawn inward; she saw no one, not even Cyan. Chilled, he wondered if her father had already promised her to one of the smiling courtiers watching her. Her voice soared toward the circling doves. The king and queen kissed. Trumpets sounded; bells pealed in answer, passing the message from bell mouth to mouth across the realm. Still, he picked out Cria’s voice, like a thread of gold in a tapestry, fine and true, yet fading into the growing tumult until he lost the thread and heard only the memory in his heart.

  He had little chance, that day or the next, to speak to her. She seemed always hurrying somewhere with her father, or in her green tabard about to sing. The Bard of Skye was always elsewhere, when he found a scant moment free to question her. Constantly at Regis’s side, among an escort of knights, he watched the queen as she rode with falcons, or judged the offerings of a dozen ardent poets, or awarded prizes at the knights’ contests. On the field, he found himself battering with his sword at the web of uncertainties that entangled him. Someone pleaded breathlessly, again and again, “Cyan.” He blinked sweat out of his eyes and found a knight kneeling on the grass, trying desperately to yield to him. He stood before the queen to take that cup of gold. His head bent; he watched her shadow burning stark black lines across the pavilion carpet. Again, it told him nothing.

  Cria, passing him unexpectedly on the field afterward, said bewilderedly, “You are always looking at her. Are you in love with her, now?”

  “No,” he answered, horrified. “I love you.”

  She said nothing; her eyes remained perplexed. She seemed weighed down in the hot spring afternoon, by satin and brocade; her hair was drawn tightly away from her face and captured in a gold net. It would take no longer than a breath, he thought, no longer than the thought of it, to slide a finger into the net and pull it down and let her dark, rippling hair fly free again across her shoulders.

  “Cria,” her father said behind him, and Cyan turned to meet a hard, suspicious stare like a slap, before her father inclined his head the inch or so he accorded landless knights. “My lord Cyan Dag,” he added with perfunctory courtesy. “The king is fortunate in your prowess, and in your friendship. No wonder he keeps you close to him. I would not like to make an enemy of you. But prowess passes, prowess passes, in the end, and when you’re aging and balding, as I am, it’s important to have more tangible possessions. Come, Cria.”

  “My lord,” Cyan said desperately, understanding, very clearly, the final word on the unspoken subject.

  “My lord,” a page interrupted. “The king asks for your presence in the queen’s escort.”

  “Come, Cria.”

  Cria closed her eyes briefly. She pulled the net loose abruptly as she turned to follow her father, and flung it onto the grass. Cyan watched her shake her hair loose. He heard her father’s rumbling question; she answered shortly, “It fell off.”

  Cyan looked down, to retrieve the little net of gold, but it had vanished. The page, moving quickly across the grass, was struggling with a button on his tunic above his heart. Cyan was left staring in exasperation at his own shadow. It told him nothing, either.

  Finally, the Lady from Skye danced.

  She could not resist the enchantments of harp and drum and flute after supper the second night. She danced with everyone, while the king watched from the dais table, entranced and smiling. Cyan, beside him, watched unsmiling, but equally entranced. Her shadow whirled everywhere, candles casting a ghostly second shadow after it. The shadows blurred together at odd angles of light, formed a third that, to Cyan’s riveted eyes, seemed not quite human. As she lifted her hands, new fingers formed, then disappeared. Her feet left their shoes behind, in one moment, danced naked and flashing oddly. In another shift of light, her eyes darkened, grew small, and retreated into hollows of bone and shadow. Cyan’s breath stopped. Then she moved into torchlight and he saw her smiling, midsummer eyes. He breathed again, reached for his wine. A hand came down over his wrist, brawny and newly ringed with gold.

  He looked at Regis, startled. The king asked bluntly, “What is it? You’ve barely spoken in two days. This is my wedding! In the fifteen years you and I have known each other, I have never seen you like this. What is it you are not telling me?”

  Cyan gazed at him mutely. His brain, misty with wine and worry, refused to show him either an answer or a clear path around the question. It was late; the dais was all but empty; the last guests left awake were dancing. A bell
tolled some brief hour. The Bard from Skye had vanished again. Cyan’s hair hung loosely around his face; the tie had vanished hours or days before. His eyes felt charred. He had worn the same clothes for a month. They had been celebrating the king’s wedding for a year… I see, he answered silently, helplessly. But I do not know exactly what I see, and I cannot say without accusing your wife or the Bard of Skye, and at this moment I know which of us you would toss out of Gloinmere if I spoke.

  The king was still waiting. His eyes, oddly light for a bear, had begun to narrow; his grip on Cyan’s arm tightened.

  “You have not danced with me, my lord,” said the woman from Skye. She stood behind Regis, still panting slightly from her last dance. Her shadow cut across the cloth between king and knight. Regis’s eyes flickered at her voice, but refused to loose Cyan. He raised his face to her finally, still unable to answer. But he could smile, and he felt Regis’s hand ease at that.

  “My lady.”

  That was all he could think to say to her. She spoke to him as they danced; he heard himself make brief, polite sounds. He tried to keep his hands from speaking suspicions to hers; he tried to keep their shadows from crossing. When he returned her to the king, she had also fallen silent. The king gestured to the musicians; they began putting their instruments away. The king’s bard began a harp song that sounded as old as night.

  Regis took his wife’s hand. “You must be tired,” he said. “One more day.”

  She smiled sweetly at him, while Cyan refrained wearily from counting the fingers the king held. She laid her other hand on Cyan’s shoulder, and he started. “One more day,” she said to Regis.

  But not, the Lady from Skye decided, for Cyan Dag.

  She sent for Cyan in the morning, while those who had found their way out of bed were breakfasting with the king. A hunt had been called. The new queen, dressed in raspberry and gold, her hair bound in a net of pearl and gold, seemed to Cyan something out of fable. He found her gazing out the open window as he entered.

  She touched one of the tiny roses on the vine, and said at his step, “Close the door.”

  He did so, and heard the silence throughout her chambers. She turned, then. He caught a glimpse of her eyes, small, deep, without pupils, like something dangerous staring out of a cleft of stone. He backed against the door, his heart pounding, knowing then that she had watched him in the night, and every hour since then: the dark, unsmiling figure at her wedding.

  “My lord Cyan Dag,” she said briskly, while her shadow crawled like a living thing across the stone toward him, “you are disturbing your friend the king. You are disturbing me. I am Regis’s wife and the Queen of Yves; you are his faithful knight who has never failed in any test of strength or honor. Until now. You cannot fight me and win. You cannot tell Regis what you see. What would he say?” She held out her six-fingered hands; their shadows splayed across the wall on either side of him. “When you tell him this? Or this?” She lifted her gown to reveal her naked feet; they glittered silver, scaled like a fish or a snake. “Or this?”

  She looked at him again out of the ancient, inhuman eyes of creatures that crept close to earth and had no language. He felt the shadows of her hands grip his arms, and he closed his eyes, trembling, his face drained in the warm morning light.

  “What are you?” he whispered.

  “Look at me. Brave knight. Open your eyes. This is what I am.” He looked, and found the king’s wife, with her tall, bewitching grace, her enchanting smile. She laughed a little, a sound as light as water flowing over pebbles. “I am Gwynne of Skye, Regis Aurum’s wife. I will be the mother of his heirs.”

  He had to find breath before he could find words. “I will fight you,” he promised, feeling the icy touch of her shadow seeping like death along his bones.

  “You cannot. What will you tell Regis? That I have eyes like a snake and feet made of fish scales? He will think you have gone mad. I mean no harm; there is no reason why we all should not be friends.”

  “You are a lie—some kind of monster. Where is the true Lady of Skye?”

  “Her.” She smiled again. “In a tower somewhere in Skye. If she leaves it, she will die. If she even looks at the world, she will die. I gave her a mirror in which to watch the world go by, and some threads to busy herself with. Or, if she prefers, she can watch herself stay young forever in the mirror. So you see, you cannot rescue her. You will only kill her.”

  “I will find her,” he said, and saw her eyes grow shriveled, bleak. There is a way, he realized then. She fears it. Her gaze bored into him; he closed his eyes again and saw them, small and dark and merciless, behind his eyelids, and then within his thoughts.

  He swallowed a cry of terror at the sorcery, pushing hard against the door to keep himself upright. She only laughed, and turned away from him to smell the roses on the vines. “Please, Cyan Dag, stay with us. The king loves you, your place is here, and I mean only to give Regis what he most wants. So should you. Forget Gwynne of Skye. She has her mirror, and—as long as she does nothing—her life.”

  He turned without answering, his hands rattling at the door latch until they remembered how to open it. He left her, went to his own chamber, where he threw he knew not what into a leather pack, and carried that and his sword into the yard. As he waited at the stables for his horse, he heard a horn sound the gathering of the hunt.

  He rode out of Gloinmere alone, only dragging once at the golden gelding’s reins, as a thorn snagged the breath in his throat.

  He whispered, “Cria.”

  He swallowed the thorn, felt it lodge in his heart, and found a road that led beyond the land he knew.

  THREE

  Melanthos saw the tower in the mirror at sunrise. Sun struck it, rising over the ring of hills enclosing the plain on which the tower stood. Nothing grew on the plain, possibly because of the monster that had wound itself around the tower. It appeared to be sleeping. But as the hills released the sun, it turned them red, and flooded the wasteland with light. The beast’s visible eye opened then, round and golden as the sun.

  It yawned, showing sharp crystal teeth through which light blazed and separated into colors. For a moment rainbows trembled over the parched ground. Then fire rolled out of the beast’s maw, licking at the dust. Its teeth snapped shut; its flat, triangular head lowered again, both eyes visible now, and watching.

  Dragon, she thought, chilled and fascinated.

  Its scales seemed luminous, sparkling green, gold, bronze, copper, outlining paler diamonds of pearl, ash, bone. It lay with its tail beneath its head, its body circling the round tower. She watched a wing shift, open slightly to the air. The other wing was pressed against the tower. In the new light, the tower, as red as the barren hills, burned brightly as a flame within the dragon’s ring.

  She could see no door. The tower showed its back to her, she thought; it must show its face to the rising sun. Yet its blindness teased at her, presented an image to her mind’s eye: the tower with no way in, no way out.

  What lay inside? she wondered as the image faded. What did the dragon guard? Who did it watch for, in the dead, fiery waste?

  She chose her threads with difficulty, wanting more colors than she had, wondering that such a deadly place could be kindled to such astonishing beauty.

  She began with the tiny, moving reflection in the dragon’s eye.

  FOUR

  In a broken tower on the crescent island of Ysse, Thayne Ysse splayed his hands on the crumbling stone along the narrow sides of a lancet window and stared south across the sea. Behind him, his father played with fire and water, mumbling words to himself out of some rotting, mouse-chewed book. Sometimes he spoke to Thayne, though that was rare; more often he spoke to his own brother, who had died thirty years before. Thayne answered to either or not, depending on his patience.

  He was a fair, muscular man with a face like a yellow-eyed hawk. The hawk’s stare was trained toward Yves. He had been to Gloinmere once, years earlier, to see Regis Aurum crowne
d King of Yves and the North Islands and the peculiar land of Skye. Thayne had gone with several of the islanders, very young men, watching out of still, unsmiling eyes as Regis paraded through the streets of Gloinmere flanked by his proud knights in their fine leather and silk and glittering mail. The islanders had not traveled so far to swear fealty, but to take a measure of Regis’s strength. They had no need to disguise themselves; they stood in the sweaty, screaming crush in their drab mantles and worn boots and looked like what they mostly were: farmers and fishers with the smell of brine blown into their skin and one coin among them to flip for their fortunes.

  They tossed what they had and lost, when Regis came with his knights some months later to find out why no one of the North Islands had knelt before him and sworn faith and peace and a portion of their livelihood to him. The war was brief and bloody. Regis himself had nearly lost his life. Thayne had lost cousins barely old enough to fight, and his remaining uncle; his father had been badly wounded. He recovered his strength, but his wits had wandered away into some misty past when Ferle Ysse ruled the North Islands and there was magic in the world.

  With the thin blades of wind scoring his palms through the ancient, unmortared stone, and his father muttering and blowing on water behind him, Thayne thought dispassionately: I am descended from kings.

  He dropped his hands and turned. His father, gnarled and boled like an old tree with swollen joints, his hair the silvery white of ash bark, blinked as if Thayne had, in the act of turning, changed into someone else entirely.

  “Bowan,” he said, waving Thayne to his side. “Look at this.”

  “I am not Bowan,” Thayne said in his leashed, even voice. “Bowan is dead. I am Thayne.”