“They aren’t mine. Mine were stolen.”
Verlain rolled a dubious eye as blue, Cyan realized, as his daughter’s. “No one would dare steal the boots off such a formidable knight.”
“They didn’t know it was me.”
“Oh. Why didn’t you stop them?”
“They threw rocks at me.” Cyan sighed. “It is not a pretty tale.”
The old man snorted in amusement. Then he patted the gelding’s neck, as if in apology. “In the name of Regis Aurum, who seems to have made himself my son by marriage, let me offer you a few things to help you on your way. Which, by the way, is where?”
Cyan hesitated. The woman in the tower might be anyone, he decided, and so might the woman who sent him on his bewildering path. “I am looking for a woman in a tower,” he said, watching Verlain’s face. The hoary brows lifted again, in surprise.
“You rode that hard, from Gloinmere to Skye, to look for a woman in a tower?”
“She is in very great danger. I was sent to rescue her. I was told only that she is in Skye, but not where… You have a tower,” he added suddenly, remembering the dark stones rising above the sea.
“Yes, but I don’t keep women in it,” Verlain said reasonably. “I go there sometimes to watch for dragons from the roof. Who is this woman?”
“A lady of Yves, who is trapped in Skye. Regis,” he added, inspired, “was so moved by the tale that he sent me without delay. So I went alone. So moved, myself, that I forgot a few things.”
“I never travel without a small village,” Verlain mused. “Attendants, guards, pots, dogs, spare horses, pavilions in case there are no suitable lodgings…” He summoned a stabler for the gelding. A liveried servant came down the steps to take the dragon tube so that Cyan could dismount. He cradled it in his arms as carefully as a baby.
Verlain said to him, “This is Cyan Dag, from the court of Regis Aurum, a knight of great renown. Treat him so.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Find him suitable clothes, a proper pair of boots, and—”
“A bath,” Cyan pleaded.
“Yes, my lords.”
“Bring him to the hall to eat with me. You can tell me about the wedding,” he added eagerly to Cyan. “The feasts, the celebrations, the games. And have the tube set on its stand on the roof of the tower for us to view the skies after supper. Tonight there might be dragons.”
The servant bowed. Cyan blinked, suddenly remembering Thayne Ysse’s dragon. But that was another tale, he decided tiredly, another tower. After he freed Gwynne of Skye from her prison, he would search for Thayne. He might have entered Skye, but Cyan guessed that even the smoldering Lord of Ysse, with all his dangerous intentions, would have trouble riding onto a plain made out of thread.
Washed, dressed in light wool and linen that did not have dirt and sweat ground into their seams, and in fine, supple boots that did not try to walk away without him, the towers on his surcoat golden again instead of dust, he presented himself to Verlain of Skye. Supper in the great hall seemed a haphazard affair, with dogs wandering loose among children eating on the floor, lovers feeding each other in corners, musicians with harp and flute and lute snatching bites between songs, and long gaps of empty, sky-blue cloth between courtiers.
“Everyone left me to go to the wedding,” Verlain explained, patting the cloth beside him for Cyan to sit. “And when they all return, my Gwynne will not be with them…” He brooded a moment, then added more cheerfully, “But my bard will. I miss her almost as much. Did you see her there?”
Cyan pulled the seamed, secret-eyed face out of memory. “A tall woman with long white hair and a very odd harp? Oh, yes. How could I not have noticed her?”
“The harp is quite old, made of swan and dragon bone, she says. She can pick songs out of the wind that have lingered there forgotten for centuries. She can hear the moon sing. Did you listen to her?”
“Yes.”
“She might know something about a tower… But she is not here.”
Of course not, Cyan thought. Like your dragons, she vanishes every time I look for her. He said cautiously, feeling his way into his questioning so not to appall the innocent Lord of Skye, “Your daughter is very beautiful. She charmed the court at Gloinmere with her grace and courtesy.”
Verlain clapped his hands, delighted. “Her mother was like that,” he said, signaling servants to heap salmon and lamb to overflowing on Cyan’s plate. “She knew everyone’s name, down to the boy in the cow barn who forked out the stalls.”
“She did everything equally well—she hunted, she judged poetry, she danced—”
“She loves to dance.” He picked a fish bone out of a bite, still beaming. “My bard taught her. We are so far from Gloinmere that dances change, she said, between there and here, passing from court to court.”
Cyan ate fish he did not taste, watching, in a flicker of candlelight, shadows appearing and vanishing on the cloth. “How did your bard know the court dances of Yves?”
“How do bards know anything? Will the king be kind to my daughter?”
Cyan looked into the sagging, sky-blue eyes, in which the hope of dragons flew. “Will she be kind to him?” he asked softly. “He has given her his heart.”
Verlain drew breath, loosed it in a long, surfeited sigh. “Then I can live without her. Thank you. Now. Tell me everything you remember of the wedding. Every tiny detail.”
Cyan sighed, too, soundlessly, and did his best to pick a harmless path around the nightmare wedding.
After supper, Verlain took him to the tower on the cliff. Servants followed them to the roof with torches and wine, dried fruit and cakes, and left them there alone at the boundary of two vast plains of darkness. One sang with the voice of water, the other with the voices of trees. Dragons flying at night could best be seen against the moon, Verlain explained, aiming his tube on its stand at a cluster of stars as thick as bees around their waning queen. Cyan searched the night, saw mists sharpen into stars, and stars bloom into impossible fires. He saw the dark and pitted hollows in the moon. But he saw no dragons. Verlain watched one distant, glowing eye shoot past the moon; he swore that night wings had opened, their bones patterned with stars, to catch the wild currents above the sea so effortlessly that they did not seem to move as they flew. Cyan, giving up on dragons, swung the tube toward land and found, among the windswept trees, stars that burned and moved but did not fly.
He raised his head after a moment. “You have company.” The Lord of Skye applied his eye to the tube while beyond him the slow tide of stars flowed raggedly toward his gate.
Verlain gave a cry. “They’re back! My house is back from Gloinmere.” He leaned precariously over the edge and shouted down into the yard. Then he snatched a torch from its sconce and spiraled back down the tower steps. Cyan, smiling, watched the torch fire tumble across the yard below to stop beside the gate.
He turned to go down himself, and saw the eye of the dragon tube flash suddenly, a molten, heart-stopping gold. He stepped toward it, his lips parted in wonder. The lens flashed again, this time with darker fires. Breathless, not daring to touch it, he looked into the opposite lens.
He saw the dragon.
The broad plain it lay on was ringed with barren hills. The ground was so parched it seemed to shed flakes of gold.
The tower of flame-red stone the dragon protected had no windows, no visible door. Both the dragon’s eyes had opened. One burned gold; the other, in shadow, fumed iridescent blazes of blue, green, black. The arch of one folded wing rose as high as the middle of the tower.
Cyan stared at it, stunned. A single claw looked longer than his body; he might have ducked into the glowing fires of its eyes. That was the deadly, gorgeous monster Thayne Ysse dreamed of unleashing at Regis Aurum. It looked impossible. The dragon could kill Thayne like an insect with a flick of a claw. If he could even find it. There were legends, Cyan remembered, of magic in the North Islands. But they were as threadbare as an islander’s cloak.
And there had been nothing at all magical in their desperate, ill-fated battle with Regis Aurum. Thayne, eaten by passion and delusion, could do nothing more than add his bones to the dead on the plain. So Yves could hope. But if, in seven years since that battle, he had learned to harness and unleash such power, the dragon would rend Yves like a tattered banner on its flight to Gloinmere.
Someone spoke behind him. He whirled, his muscles locking, his hand trying to shape the air at his side into the sword he had left below. The Bard of Skye waited patiently until he remembered his own name, and wondered, for the first time, about hers.
“Verlain told me you were here. You are a brave man, Cyan Dag, and true to your king.” Her face was in shadow, but her hair gleamed white as the moon behind her. “I’m sorry I cannot help you. I must go back soon to Gloinmere. The queen asked me to return. I think she does not trust me out of her sight.”
“Did you—” He stopped to swallow, still shaken by his vision, and the fierce, overwhelming urge to battle. “Have you seen that?”
“What?”
“Thayne Ysse’s dragon.”
She was silent; he felt her gaze, intense and unyielding as the night. “What dragon?”
“The dragon guarding its tower full of treasure. He wants it to—”
She shook her head quickly, impatiently. “Cyan, that is not the tower you are looking for.”
“But—”
“You must keep your mind on the Lady of Skye. You have no time for dragon hunting.”
“I’m not. It’s Thayne Ysse who wants—”
“Never mind Thayne Ysse. I know you’ve had a hard journey, and you don’t know where to go, that’s why I came up here in secret. I must go down again. Verlain will be looking for me.”
“Please—”
“Listen to me. You’ve said nothing about this to frighten Verlain. I can tell: he is still smiling. You must leave soon. At dawn and ride south—”
“I’ve just ridden north.”
“South,” she said firmly. “Until you see three hills to the west exactly even with each other, so that they seem reflections of one another. They are called the Three Sisters. Ride west into them. They may be farther than they look. Skye is sometimes imprecise. But you’ll find it.”
“What—”
“The tower you need to find. Be very careful there. It will be dangerous for you, and for Gwynne of Skye. I must go. I don’t,” she added, moving toward the stairs, “exactly know how you can rescue her. Only that there will be a way. Farewell, Cyan Dag.”
He felt her cool, strong hand on his cheek. Then she took the torch and left him in the dark.
NINE
Thayne Ysse, following the wind, rode west to the edge of the world and watched the sun burn out like a candle flame in the sea.
The sound of the waves was different in Skye. They boomed down a long, endless boundary of land, broke against high cliffs and broad stretches of white sand longer than some of the North Islands. A village in the crook of a bluff to the south had begun to burn its evening lights; the tiny fires looked frail as insect wings against the vastness of sea and the night flowing toward it with the tide. He would find shelter there. But he lingered on the cliff, watching waves below curl and burst into butterflies, feathers, fingers beckoning from the deep. He wondered where Skye hid its dragons. Crossing it, he had scented for sulfur on the wind, for charred earth and bone, for gold. Words, Craiche had said. They could change into themselves. If he said the word for dragon, the word would become dragon. He whispered it slowly, let the wind drag it out of him like flame. Nothing happened. His mouth crooked. In what world could he bring words to life? Not even in Skye, apparently, where the wind, insistent, chilly, everywhere, in his ear, up his sleeve, down his throat, seemed to want to knead him out of the shape he knew into something other. He let it blow him off the cliff, finally, toward the distant lights. Words were what people gave even strangers for nothing. If there was a tower full of gold in Skye that no one had managed to plunder, then truth would have turned into many tales, by now, and tales cost nothing either, especially in a tavern.
But the tavern he found had few travelers and they spoke of fish and families and the weather instead of dragons. He turned inland again, for the image in his father’s book had been precise: a plain, ringed by what looked like craggy hills blasted treeless by the dragon’s breath. Both tale and true, the bard had said; it was up to him, he knew, to recognize the difference. But where to find such barrenness, such danger and magic, in that green, misty, peaceful country, he had no idea.
He caught a glimpse of direction a day or two later, when his drifting path crossed the trail the knight of Gloinmere had left across Skye.
“You’re the second man from beyond Skye staying here in three days,” the innkeeper told him as she set ale and lamb stew in front of him. She had a slanting smile, a rook’s nest of straw-colored hair, and shrewd blue eyes. She lingered as he began to eat. “It’s rare for a knight of Yves to come this far west. And I don’t remember anyone at all of the North Islands finding his way here before.”
Thayne, chewing a tender bite of spring lamb, and watching the innkeeper’s charming, quirky smile, blinked. The stew grew suddenly tasteless in his mouth. He swallowed, asked calmly, “Who was he, this knight of Yves?”
She told him. “I didn’t believe him at first,” she added. “Anyone can wear a sword and call himself a knight. But he spoke to me so courteously, and he wore those towers.”
Thayne took a sip of bitter ale. “He is one of the most powerful and honored knights of Gloinmere.”
“I always thought knights looked less—well, bedraggled. I cobbled one of his boots back together.”
“Where was he going? Did he say?”
“He was trying to find a tower…” She held his eyes then, in an open, disconcerting gaze. “Why? Do you know him?”
“We met, in Yves.” He stirred up a piece of leek, added briefly, “He was fighting some thieves, when I came across him. They had already stolen his boots.”
“Which explains his boots. So you stopped to help him?”
“I did what I could,” he answered evenly. “He was wounded. I didn’t think he would make it into Skye.”
“He did. But I don’t know where he went from here, to look for his tower. It sounded like something out of a tale, to me. A dream.” She wiped a corner of apron across a spill on the table, slowly enough for him to see the pearl on her finger, and the milky underside of her wrist. She said without looking at him, “My husband is out on his boat; he’ll be gone for days. The salmon are running, up north. Travelers are scarce yet, which is why I can remember one from the next.” She gave him a sidelong flash of her smile. “You’ll let me know if you want anything else.” She turned away briskly, left him to consider what else he might need.
He considered the knight. If a man of Yves who knew no more of magic than what he could do with a sword were searching for that tower, then it existed. The thought of the dragon slain according to the ruthless, efficient, unquestioning methods of Gloinmere, its magic destroyed and its treasure snatched away from the desperate North Islands, fed the fury and desperation that had impelled him on his improbable journey. The image of the stranger in the forest, standing his ground barefoot against armed riders, blood running through his hair, his broadsword leaving patterns of light in the air, faded from memory. Only his eyes, the color of cold, tempered metal and the gold towers that linked him to Regis Aurum remained. Thayne, his own eyes on the split, seared logs on the hearth, heard himself whisper, “You should have gone back to Gloinmere.”
The dragon possessed his dreams that night: a bright, sinuous, deadly thing that tore out his heart with the flick of one claw and swallowed it. He saw out of the dragon’s eyes, then, felt the fire pulsing through him. He coiled himself around the gold in the tower, and watched the knight riding toward him across the wasteland. Fire the color of gold billowed out of him, ate everything living in its path.
Only the knight’s surcoat remained, lying like a fallen banner on the scorched ground. He spread his wings then, and uncoiled his body in a spiraling flight toward the sun, smelling more gold, more death, in the towers of Gloinmere.
He rose early the next morning, still feeling the dragon fire smoldering behind his eyes, in his heart. He lost himself in Skye, drifting away from roads, for no road he had ever heard of led to dragons. The land turned lonely, unpredictable. A lake might appear out of nowhere, stretching flat, still, and cold as a blade on the horizon. Rivers he followed seemed to change the direction of their flow. A ridge of stones on a high peak slowly turned into an intricate lacework of wall and window, ruins older than Yves, and with no name anyone could remember. He met few people in the woods and marshlands. Those he chanced across seemed to see the dragon he looked for coiled in his eyes, and answered his questions uneasily. No, they had never heard of a plain where nothing grew, and there were old towers of various origin scattered all over Skye. There was one in the birch wood; he couldn’t miss it, heading that direction. There was nothing in the tower, though, but bats.
He rode among the pale, slender trees, with their new leaves of green whispering around him, the dead leaves that had turned to gold luminous beneath shafts of light. He missed the tower; it had fallen, or moved itself, or it was hidden within a blur of brightness falling through the trees. Coming out of the wood, he crossed a meadow and followed the shallow, silvery stream flowing through it. As dusk fell, he startled a hare in the grass and shot it. He made a fire beside the stream, skinned the hare, and spitted it above the flames. He ate it with bread the innkeeper had given him. When the makeshift spit and the bones collapsed into the fire, he lay back to watch the moon rise. It dropped its reflection among the stones in the stream. Water tried to drag the moon away; it rippled, wavered, but clung stubbornly to the bottom of the stream. Thayne’s eyes closed. The water chattered at him, like some old crone trying to tell him a story he couldn’t understand. He saw her finally, wading in the water, trying to rescue the horned moon. Fishlike, it eluded her; she kept catching at it, still talking breathlessly. He could not see her face clearly, but he thought he might recognize her. The ring on her left hand sparked silver white now and then, catching at moonlight. He interrupted her finally.
The Tower at Stony Wood Page 6