The Tower at Stony Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “If he is real,” she whispered suddenly, her lean fingers digging into the grass roots, “then so might be everything in the mirror.”

  She rose impulsively, wanting to catch up with the knight and ask him. She was barefoot, but he was riding slowly. He must stop eventually to sleep; if she could keep him in sight, she would find his fire beside a stream, or his horse in an inn yard. One of the wild horses roaming the plain might be in the mood to let her ride it. She bounded a step after the knight and then a voice wound around her ankle and pulled her motionless.

  “Melanthos!”

  She turned, knowing that of all the many things she could not explain to Anyon, running barefoot after a knight of Gloinmere would be foremost among them. He was already upset with her. Anyon, she thought, was a horse turned human: wild and beautiful, black as night, prone to flaring its nostrils and rolling a wide, nervous eye at anything unpredictable. His father owned half the sheep around them. Anyon sheared the sheep, spun wool into yarn, and wove it into blankets. His intricate and beautiful designs had traveled beyond Stony Wood, up and down the coast. He would spend a night making dyes to match the colors in his head without feeling the need to tell Melanthos. Yet he stood in front of her now, tossing his black hair off his brow, his fingers dyed blue, his dark, liquid eyes wide with exasperation. The sight of his restless beauty against the sky and the wind-scrolled sea took her breath away. She wondered, amazed, what he saw in her tall, scant body, her unkempt hair, her fey, murky eyes full of marsh lights. Whatever it was struck him as mute as she a moment. He went to her, slid one strong blue hand beneath her hair, and kissed her as if he had not seen her for months. She caught her balance, blinking as he surfaced for air. So did he, staring at her as if she had cropped up out of the harsh, beautiful land he loved, like a tor or a twisted tree. Then he remembered that he was angry.

  “You vanished last night. All night. Without telling anyone—”

  She pushed against his hold, impatient and mystified now, by whatever it was he wanted from her. “You must have guessed where I was. You couldn’t have thought I was under a bush with the sail maker’s son.”

  “With him, no. Under a bush, maybe. Or in a wave, or on top of a mountain—I never know where to find you. You go where I can’t follow.”

  “I was in the tower. You can walk up a stairway.”

  “The tower won’t let me,” he said stonily. “It only wants you. What does it make you do up there?”

  “I embroider. I’ve told you. You make blankets; I make pictures. You work all night sometimes without explaining. Why can’t you give me the same freedom?”

  “You can come and go in my house when I work. I can’t. The tower keeps everyone away from you. And I can show you what I’ve done. You never show me anything.”

  “I can’t,” she answered tautly. “I’ve explained that, too. The wind takes my pictures.”

  “It does.” His arms were folded, as hers were; they glowered at one another, in squabblers’ stance, still close enough to kiss. “What picture did the wind take this time?”

  She opened her mouth, hesitated, then said baldly, “Another tower.”

  He tossed his hands, whuffing like a horse at a suspicious smell. “The wind. It’s magic that takes your pictures, magic that lured you to that tower and keeps you vanishing back into it.”

  She shrugged, bewildered, smelling magic on the wind, even there, in the ancient scent of stone, the tease of brine. “So it’s magic. That’s an art, too, like weaving. What—”

  “You never ask yourself who put the magic in the tower so that no one else can get up the steps. You don’t ask where the images in the mirror come from. Or if the magic is good or evil. You just do what you think it wants, and you want it more than you want me. Why?”

  She was silent, thinking of the knight riding out of the mirror onto the plain behind her. “The mirror isn’t evil,” she said slowly. “It’s more like an eye, watching something happening in Skye. Sometimes it lets me see what it watches. And I embroider a picture of that. And then I leave the picture on the window ledge beside the mirror and I never see it again. Wind takes it somewhere, I suppose.”

  “But what possesses you?” he demanded. “What compels you?”

  “They’re beautiful,” she answered helplessly. “Like fragments of stories that I have to piece together to learn where they begin, and how they will end. Why do you spend days and weeks on your weaving?”

  “To get it out of my head and into my hands, where I can see it and feel it. But the image in my head is mine, not in some mirror putting thoughts into my head—”

  “It’s not—it doesn’t—” She held her breath and loosed it, then unfolded her arms and touched him. “Come with me and see.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  His eyes widened; she saw a muscle jump along his jaw. She knew what he feared. She felt it herself when she entered the old tower in the stone wood. There was something disturbing in the density of shadow, in the age of the stones, that seemed to speak of a time before words, before the trees clustered near it on the cliff had even thought of turning to stone. The broken, spiral steps suggested other things: they led away from life; they led to loss and endings, to the places where time stopped moving and nothing would ever happen again. But she found them unpersuasive. The tower had simply woven spells as harmless as cobweb to guard itself from intruders. What it protected in its secret heart was the strange, mysterious images in its mirror.

  “If I come with you, you’ll see there’s nothing at all to fear.”

  He snorted at that, and shied uneasily, as if the tower walls had fallen suddenly around him out of the sky. But he met her gaze, held it, drawing from her fearlessness. He said tersely, “Let’s go.”

  As they crossed the plain, the sun began to sink behind a long line of billowing mist beginning to blow inland. At the broken edge of the plain, the village below revealed itself: a meandering network of cobbled roads and stone houses facing the sea. Its harbor was a deep, restless half-moon of water, its rounded sides enclosed by stone. Boats rolling into the harbor moored along its straight side. It was open to the sea at one end through a narrow channel in the rocks, tricky to navigate in good weather, impossible in bad. Half the villagers fished. The others raised sheep and goats on the wild land, which grew grass or rocks indiscriminately, but little else. Others, like the baker Melanthos saw walking to the seaward end of the harbor, tended to the daily needs of the village.

  She stopped, gazing down. The road they stood on began in the harbor, wound up the rocky cliff, and ran along the edge of it, until it frayed away in the stone wood. “There’s my mother.” She frowned absently, studying the tall, bulky, swaying figure. It was her private belief that her mother had once been a seal, who had swum too close to humans without her sealskin on and had been taken. She was shaped like one, she barked, and she knew some very strange things. “She’s on her way to the tavern again for her splash of something. She’ll be upset with me, too,” she added, remembering. “So will Gentian. I was supposed to be up before dawn to help with the morning baking.” Anyon, gazing down, looked as if he would rather be following the baker to the tavern instead of the baker’s incomprehensible daughter. Melanthos’s frown deepened; her fingers worked a knot into a long strand of hair. “She used to make magic, instead of bread.”

  “What?”

  “She did. When Gentian and I were young. She’s fey. Now she just turns flour into bread and sells it. I used to think she was as old as the stones on the cliff.”

  “She’s your mother,” Anyon said bewilderedly. “She was as young as you are, once.”

  “So were the stones,” Melanthos said pithily. She gave the strand in her hand a sharp tug, and turned down the road toward the tower. “I used to think I understood her.”

  Mist raced the wind across the sea toward land, swallowing sky and water, and chasing the last of the fishing boats into the harbor. Over the plain, a sing
le star hung beneath the moon’s averted face like a tear. Melanthos wondered where the knight was beneath that tear, if he had stopped at some inn, or if he pursued his mysterious, urgent quest into the night. Beside her, Anyon walked silently, apprehensive, she could tell, with what he might meet in the tower. In an odd blurring of their thoughts, she saw the stone wood suddenly out of his eyes: not trees at all, never anything alive, just stones raised for some ancient, obscure, and no longer important reason. The tower changed, too, through his eyes. Black against the twilight mists, sagging with age, its doorway webbed with the coming night, it looked oddly like the tower she had embroidered out of all her darkest threads.

  He hesitated at the threshold, then forced himself to take a step. She stopped him.

  “I’ll go first. Just watch me. Don’t look at anything else.”

  He nodded briefly, without meeting her eyes. She saw him swallow. She stepped through the doorway and began to climb the stairs.

  “You see,” she said as she reached the top and lit a taper from the little oil lamp she left burning on the floor, “it’s simple. You just go up one step and then another, and ignore all the arguments along the way.” She turned when he didn’t answer. The room was empty but for her.

  She heard him call her then, in frustration and fear, from somewhere down the stairs. But the mirror was speaking, too, filling itself with light, colors, movement, another piece of the fragmented tale.

  “In a moment,” she called to Anyon, and sat down among her threads.

  EIGHT

  Cyan Dag, following a river across Skye, found the dead at sunrise. The river had grown shallow, and spread into thin, silvery fingers across a wide marsh. New light spilled over him as he dismounted; bright, startled marsh birds flickered around him, calling to the sun. Clouds in the distance, bruised purple and tumbled together, told him of the storm he had missed. He could smell it, rain still clinging to the leaves of the low, flowering brush he stood in, rain in the wind from the sea. For a moment the scent of the tiny, sweet flowers overpowered the stench of death. He stared at them. Six men, he counted, and two horses. Even the horses were armed. Two of the warriors wore rich, embroidered silks over their mail; the others wore fine black leather trimmed with silver. He did not recognize the emblems embroidered on the silk: black roses, or perhaps black suns. They were not of Gloinmere, and looked too rich for Skye. They might have wandered into Skye from some strange land across the sea, though why they had fought there, in that lonely marsh beside the sea, he could not guess. Light sparked in the jeweled chains still hanging around their necks, in the jewels in their ears. Their faces, bloody and smeared with dirt, seemed imperious. They gazed unflinchingly back at the sun, at the flies beginning to swarm, at the weapons scattered on the roiled ground, and explained nothing. But he stood listening to their silence, as if, becoming as motionless, as breathless, he might hear the language they spoke now.

  A hawk cried above him, fierce, piercing, and he started. Something moved among the dead that was not windblown cloth or hair. A ring flashed; a hand shifted a spider’s step across the ground. He felt the cold, silken glide of horror over his skin. That warrior lay facedown, looking, Cyan had thought, into the black, rain-pocked shadow of his blood. He turned his head slightly, showing hair matted with blood, the bone sheared above his brow.

  Cyan swallowed dryly, motionless again, waiting for the man to realize that he was dead. But the searching eye found him, held him until he was recognized: human and alive. Then it closed. The ringed finger beckoned.

  Cyan stepped among the dead and knelt beside him. He bent low to catch whatever words the warrior thought he could still speak, and saw then how young he was. His lean jaw was smooth as a child’s, his eye golden and fearless, too young to believe in what it saw coming. He wore red and yellow silk; slashed ribbons of it swirled around Cyan as he listened.

  “Name,” he heard, and said it. The warrior’s eye closed, opened when Cyan thought he had finally died. His hand moved; one finger touched Cyan’s arm. Words as frail as cobweb catching light among the leaves wove together somehow, made a coherent pattern.

  “Who are you?” Cyan asked when he understood. Wind answered; a bird answered. He heard an indrawn breath, and then another. Then he realized that he listened to the sea. The warrior’s eye was still open. Cyan closed it gently and straightened, as stiff as if he had knelt there for hours.

  His jaw tightened. He turned the young warrior over, knowing then how scavengers felt, prying under mail and cloth for treasure, trying to free it from the weight of flesh and bone growing rigid, unfamiliar. But he found at last what he had been asked to take.

  He could make nothing of the plain silver disk. Round and polished to a mirrorlike clarity, it covered his palm. It refused to reflect anything, even his face, as he gazed into it. What it was, or meant, or did, it did not tell him. Magic, he decided finally. Incomprehensible. Still, he slid the heavy chain it hung on over his head, tucked the disk beneath his shirt. It would mean something to someone who knew the young man; perhaps that was why he had been asked to take it. Then he studied the cloth it had been wrapped in.

  He felt the blood drain from his face; his skin prickled again with shock. There they all were, the six dead warriors, the armored horses. But they were made of thread now, depicted in bright, precise stitches. He recognized the yellow hair and silk, the golden eye, against a different background. They lay on a brown plain instead of a flowering marsh. A tower stood in the distance. The dragon wrapped around it opened one slitted eye wide, as if it had watched the battle on the plain.

  Dragon, Thayne Ysse had said. Gold. Troubled, Cyan searched the picture for some hint of explanation. Neither dead nor dragon offered it. The dragon had killed them, he guessed. But nothing had been burned, and the dragon looked more curious than aroused. More likely, meeting by chance, they had killed one another, fighting over the gold they did not yet possess. But what were their bodies doing in the marsh?

  He lifted his head then, perhaps at the odd silence. The relentless buzzing behind him had ceased. He did not want to turn, but he turned finally, slowly, to find that the dead had all unraveled into the wind behind him. There was nothing left of them, except their images in thread on the cloth he held, and the silver disk beneath his shirt.

  He shivered, unsettled by the power that turned death into thread. He lingered, chilled in the bite of sea wind, but nothing else happened; nothing explained. He let the wind take the cloth, but did not watch to see if it, too, vanished. But he kept the disk, for a ghost had come out of nowhere in Skye and given it to him, like a portent. But of what, for what, why? Nothing said. He mounted finally and rode out of the marsh to the sea.

  The tower overlooked the sea. It rose seemingly out of solid stone on a dark wedge of cliff; graceful walls dipped and curved away from it to enclose the castle within. Cyan, putting as much of Skye as he could between himself and the eerie marsh, saw the tower near dusk as he rode along the coast. The castle itself looked worn and unthreatening, stones spilling out of the old wall here and there onto the meadow, one side of the massive gate open and sagging on its hinges. It flew the blue banner of Skye, with its three white doves in flight. Its chimneys looked hearteningly busy.

  He found an old man in the turret beside the gate, looking through a long, strange tube out over the fields. Cyan called to him. The man, his hair thin and cloudy white, his chin patched with white-and-gray stubble, removed one eye from the tube and leaned out of the turret.

  He ran a sky-blue eye over Cyan, from the dust in his hair down the towers on his surcoat and his sword to his cracked boots. “You look lost,” he commented. “Though I couldn’t say where from.”

  “From Gloinmere,” Cyan said. “My name is Cyan Dag.”

  Both brows, fat and furry as caterpillars, went up.

  “Cyan Dag is a knight in the court of Regis Aurum.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what are you doing at my gate in Skye? Y
ou’re a very long way from home.”

  Cyan nodded wearily, feeling the sands he had ridden across lodged in his hair, behind his eyes. “A very long way,” he agreed. “Do you think that, in the king’s name, the lord of this castle might give shelter to a knight of Gloinmere? I have slept on the ground as often as in a bed since I left Yves.”

  “Why—” The old man waved a hand vaguely at the word, and changed it. “Wait.” He took the tube from its stand, tucked it under his arm, and disappeared. He reappeared stepping out of an arch at the bottom of the turret. He wore a long black robe; its sleeves and hem and collar were of scalloped cloth-of-gold. Under his chin, Cyan noted, the gold carried a wine stain, a few morsels of old meals. He patted Cyan’s horse, then took the bridle gently.

  “I am Verlain,” he said, “the Lord of Skye.” He walked the gelding through the gate while Cyan gazed at him, dumbfounded. “If you came from Gloinmere, you must have seen my Gwynne married. She would not let me come; she said I am too old to cross the mountains. Did you see them marry?”

  Cyan closed his eyes, felt the grit in them. “Yes.”

  “You must have left Gloinmere shortly afterward. No one of my household or family is back yet. Is Gwynne happy? Tell me. Do you think the king will love her?”

  “From what I saw he loves her past doubt.”

  Her father heaved a sigh. “Thank you.” He stopped, lifted the tube he carried. “Would you hold this for me?”

  Cyan took it. It was broader than he expected, and heavy with circles of glass at both ends. He balanced it awkwardly against the pommel of his saddle, letting the Lord of Skye guide his horse. “What is it?”

  “It sees dragons. At least,” Verlain amended, “it does when there are any to see. Sometimes there are, but I always miss them… But why did you leave Gloinmere to come to Skye? You look as though you left in a hurry, without an escort, without armor except for that sword. And your boots—”