The Tower at Stony Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

The fireplace was an enormous piece of marble into which a graceful lily opening a bell-shaped mouth had been carved on either side. The woman’s gown, blue gray, embroidered with lilies and white birds, showed no sign of having been worn beyond the moment she had risen: not a crease, a strained seam, a stain.

  She stood quietly in front of the fire, her head still bowed. Light shifted in a fluid sheen along her tight sleeves, as if her unseen hands moved, Sel thought, tightening and turning around themselves.

  Her head lifted suddenly; she turned, as if she felt eyes on her beyond her tower, beyond her night. Sel saw her face.

  She heard herself breathe after a long silence; she heard the sea again. “Once,” she whispered, as if she were telling the woman’s story to herself, “I swam out of the sea and stood on new feet on the shore of the world…”

  The mirror blinked like an eye, and shone with all the colors of the sea.

  ELEVEN

  Cyan Dag came to the dark tower at sunset. It stood, as the bard had told him, in the small valley between three hills. A grove of oak surrounded it; beyond the trees stretched meadows of long sweet grasses and wildflowers. Across one meadow, near another wood, he saw a stag crowned with hoary tiers of antlers raise its head at the unexpected scent and look at him.

  The tower was nothing like what he had envisioned. Something loftier, more elegant, more dangerous than this, he thought he would come to, in the end. This one was squat, sagging, its rough stones tossed onto one another and mortared together with nothing but age. Anyone could have walked in and out of its door, which was a crooked lintel balanced on a couple of slabs. Beyond the dusty threshold, black so profound it seemed to have texture and weight like a stone filled the entry. He could see no windows.

  He dismounted slowly, perplexed by the darkness, the silence within it. But the bard had told him to find the tower within these hills and so he had. Nothing left but to enter it, he thought. He could see nothing to stop him; whatever danger there was to be faced must lie within.

  He left his horse cropping among the wildflowers and walked to the door, unsheathing his sword out of habit, though he doubted that any traps within the tower for unwary knights would be that unsubtle. The utter blackness made him hesitate. But he could not do what he needed to do standing around in the tranquil light of day. He put one hand on a worn doorpost, bowing his head a little, for the lintel was not high. He had taken the first step across the stark line between light and night, when he felt something rouse in the blackness so close to him he thought they shared the same breath of dusty air. Startled, he swung the broadsword awkwardly; the blade sparked against the lintel and froze there, as if it had driven into stone.

  Someone pushed past him out of the shadow, gathering form and color as it moved, dark slipping away from it like a cloak. He let go of the sword, which had been rendered useless, and stepped into the tower to make himself invisible while he watched whatever had come out. It did not let him get far; a hand caught his wrist as inexorably as the stone had caught his sword. A woman cried, “Stop!”

  He felt an immensity open around him in the blackness. He did not know anymore what there was to fear, since anything within that strange tower seemed possible. He could barely see his own hand, all that was left of him in the light, and the other hand, long and brown, with a silver ring on one finger, locked around his.

  “Come back!”

  He could not move. More than an absence of light held him still. There were voices just beyond his hearing, words of immense and complex power and meaning. There were visions beyond the black: colors that had never existed before, places reached by endless, intricate paths, so beautiful he could search for them in one lifetime, then linger in them for another. There were promises of unimaginable rewards for impossible dangers overcome, for precious things found, for those in dire distress and mortal need rescued and made safe. They pulled at him with a hundred whispering voices, a hundred gentle touches. Come, Cyan Dag. Go there. Do this. Learn that. Take this path, find, fight, save, kill, kneel, swear, love. If he could only free himself and turn, he would serve the perfect king, do the impossible deed, achieve his heart’s desire, transform his world.

  “Come back.”

  The voice sounded very far away. He heard his breath suddenly, quick and sharp, as if he had been running. He had pushed his free hand hard against a post stone, using all his strength as leverage against the hand pulling him back into the light of day. He wrenched at it; it tugged as fiercely at him. Somehow, despite his formidable strength and longing, he was jerked across the threshold into light. He stumbled, caught his balance and his breath, his face slick with sweat or tears. He stared bewilderedly at the woman who had forced him back into the world. Behind him, his sword dropped to earth with a clang.

  He cried at her, “Why did you stop me?”

  Then he recognized her.

  She had lost the eerie, frightening beauty he had glimpsed the night she had rescued him in the forest. She had taken it off like a mask, or hidden it somewhere within what he saw now. She could do such things, he sensed. She was tall, long-boned and lean, brown as earth; her astonishing hair, night black and straight as straw, still seemed something she could vanish into. By daylight, he could see her eyes clearly: amber flecked with gold. She smiled at the recognition; fine lines fanned away from her eyes, framed her smile.

  “Sidera,” she said, before he could speak. “You asked me my name,” she reminded him gently, and he remembered.

  “You saved my life. You left me at that inn and I couldn’t thank you.”

  “I told your horse to take you there,” she answered. “I don’t care for such places. I’m not like my sister. I’m more comfortable with the foxes and deer than king’s courts.”

  “Your sister—” He stopped, confused, as three faces imposed themselves over one another in his mind: the one he had glimpsed across her fire, the face he saw now, the face of the woman who had sent him to that tower.

  “The Bard of Skye.”

  He stared at her. The bard intruded between them, in his thoughts, tall and sinewy, with her black, sunken eyes, her long, rippling hair, her strong veined hands caressing the strings of her harp. He saw her in Sidera, then, in her height, her straight shoulders, her compelling eyes. But Sidera’s eyes held light, and they seemed kind.

  “Does your sister have a name?” he asked finally. “I only know her as the Bard of Skye.”

  “Her name is Idra. She didn’t tell you?”

  “I never asked,” he said tautly. “I just seem to do what she tells me to do. She sent me here; she told me to find this tower, and rescue the woman trapped in it—”

  Her brows went up; her eyes lost their smile at his distress. “But that’s another tower entirely.” Her hand emerged from her hair quickly as he felt the blood flare into his face. “What is your name? She didn’t tell me.”

  “My name is Cyan Dag.” His voice shook with leashed anger. “I thought that bards in Skye never lie.”

  “Did she? Did she lie to you?”

  “She said—” He stopped, running a hand over his face, trying to remember exactly what she had said, that night on Verlain’s dragon tower. “She said that finding the tower would be dangerous. And that this is the tower I needed to find.”

  “What you need,” Sidera said, “is not always what you are looking for.”

  His mouth tightened. He turned, before he shouted, and picked up his sword. He said tersely, as he sheathed it, “She tells me what to look for. I didn’t need this tower.” It pulled at his heart then, as he faced it; he saw again the hundred tantalizing paths, the nameless kingdoms. “But I wanted it,” he whispered.

  “Cyan Dag,” she said softly, before he took a step toward the dreaming darkness. He turned away from it to look at her, the woman who had come out of nowhere to thwart him. Then it struck him: she had not come out of nowhere, she had come from within. As if, he thought, she had been waiting for him.

  He said a word f
inally; it did not come easily. “Sorcery.”

  She nodded. Her brows were crooked; she stood very still, watching him, as if she were luring a wary animal with her stillness and her calm. “Magic,” she said. “Witch, I suppose you could call me. I am adept in the ancient ways of Skye. Which is why I am more often found in wild places instead of the civilized world. Some of the things I know are older than the coming of humans into Skye. The language of horses, for instance. The healing powers of plants.”

  He felt the tension in his body ease; the confusion in his thoughts yielded, like cloud, to a ray of certainty. She had saved his life; she meant him no harm.

  “I’m grateful for that magic,” he said simply. “But I don’t understand why the bard sent me to this place.”

  “I’m not sure what she is doing, either.” She folded her arms within her cloak of hair, paced a step, musing. Light was fading around them, leaving the air silvery with dusk. “Bards do speak truth, but sometimes in riddling ways.”

  “Nor do I understand,” he added steadily, “what you were doing in the tower.”

  Something in her eyes warned him that he would not like the answer. “She sent me here to stop the knight who would enter.”

  He drew breath sharply, wanting to blaze at them both, the bard for sending him to the wrong tower, the witch for rescuing him from it. His hands clenched; he said tightly, “I have never wanted anything more than the worlds I glimpsed in that tower.”

  “Well, you must be content with this one,” she sighed, “with all its ambiguities and magic.” She paced another step or two, trying to riddle from the passing breeze what the bard was thinking. Her steps, Cyan noticed, made no more sound in the grass than air. “She wanted me in there, you there, both of us lost to the world for a while. If you had pulled free of me, I would have had to search for you…”

  He watched her, calmer now, trying to think in unaccustomed ways, as bards or witches thought. “She didn’t expect you to stop me?”

  “I don’t think so. You think with your heart, Cyan Dag. It’s an unusual and risky magic. She expected you to enter, me to follow… So there we are, lost in the dark, while she—does what?”

  “Maybe the path to the lady in the tower is somewhere in there. It seemed the beginning place for many paths.”

  “It seems.”

  “What?”

  “That tower. It’s best at seeming.”

  He gazed at it, bewildered again, tempted simply to walk into it and let it answer their questions. She turned, as if she felt his impulse, and added, “I know my sister well, and I trust her as I trust the wind when it tells me what I smell, or the rain to go down instead of up. She does not lie. But she does not state the obvious, or take the shortest path, or do anything that might make life simpler if for her own reasons she prefers it complicated.”

  He shook his head, baffled, murmuring, “There are too many towers… She sent me to Skye to find one, not three—”

  “Three?” She turned so quickly that her hair clung to the spare, graceful lines of her body. A small bird flew out of it; he blinked. “What three?”

  “This dark tower. Thayne’s dragon tower. And the one with the woman trapped in it.”

  Her eyes glimmered oddly in the dusk. “The dragon tower… Someone is searching for it?”

  “Thayne Ysse. The man who left me to die in the forest. He wants the dragon and its gold for the North Islands. I saw the dragon,” he added, “on a piece of embroidery. I took the embroidery from the dead it watched.”

  She did not comment on the embroidery; such things, he guessed, happened daily in Skye. Her head was bent; he could not see her face. But he knew from her quick, certain steps that her thoughts were circling just as quickly, homing toward a point. “That is the way Idra thinks,” she said. “At a tangent, like a weaver connecting threads beginning so far away that you don’t even see them.”

  “I saw the dragon Thayne Ysse is looking for through Verlain of Skye’s dragon lens.”

  She grunted, surprised. “I didn’t know it worked. Nobody has ever seen a dragon in it before.”

  “Do you know that plain? That dragon?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Would it be easy for Thayne to find?”

  “If he wants it badly enough… Why? Do you want this dragon, too?”

  “Only to stop Thayne from destroying Yves with it.”

  “So you want to kill it first?”

  “No,” he said starkly. “I’ve seen it. I’d rather just forget about it. But I am sworn to guard Regis Aurum and protect Yves. I must stop Thayne Ysse any way I can. The bard refused to listen to me when I told her about Thayne. She sent me here to rescue a woman. So here I am. The only woman I found was you. I have no idea where to go now, except back into this tower where I was sent in the first place.”

  The witch looked as if she were trying to hear a voice beneath the chatter of birds settling for the night. Her hair fell like a hood around her face. Cloaked in such darkness she looked, he thought uneasily, something other than human. She shook her hair back, frowning. “Bards listen to everything. They hear everything. They hear stones age. I can find Thayne Ysse for you, if he is in Skye. It’s a very simple kind of magic, done with water. You’ll know then if he has found the dragon.”

  “Yes,” he said recklessly, too relieved to fear her sorcery. “Thank you.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  She smiled. “Not far at all. A slight adjustment to the heart.” She raised her hand. The gelding, pulling grass idly until then, crossed the clearing to her. She took its reins, held the stirrup for Cyan to mount.

  “Now,” she said. “We will follow the stream a little, watch what might flow down it. Don’t move, don’t speak, whatever you see, do not make a sound…”

  He started to pull himself up. Then he heard harp notes as delicate as bird bone spiral around him. Sidera said something; she seemed suddenly too far away for him to hear her. The gelding vanished under his hands. The dense night inside the tower filled his eyes again; he wondered, astonished, if he had ever really left it. He heard a thin, bitter wind weave into the harping, pick it apart and scatter it, until nothing was left but wind roaring through the darkness now, revealing the shapes of harried trees, torch fire stretched thin as thread.

  “Cyan Dag,” someone said from very far away: Sidera, perhaps, or the bard, or someone else entirely.

  He tasted rain and recognized that dark.

  TWELVE

  Thayne Ysse saw himself reflected in the dragon’s eye. The eye itself was enormous, a pool of liquid gold circled by dry, rough ridges of scale and skin. A very thin, pointed oval of dark slit the gold from top to bottom; paler streaks of gold rayed away from it. Thayne was a splinter of something human within the dark.

  He did not dare move. His horse had thrown him and bolted, halfway across the plain, when the dragon had opened its maw and a tongue of fire uncoiled out of it, licking the ground into a frozen shimmer of glass. Thayne, desperately picking himself up as the dust and scorched air roiled over him, stood in the full glare of the dragon’s eyes when the fire died away. It had not reached him, though he felt scoured and drained in the aftermath. The sun, a second watching eye, wended a leisurely path down a slope and paused, forever it seemed, wedged in the cleft between two hills. Thayne, motionless and sweating, waited for night.

  The sun shifted slightly, after what seemed hours, and loosed a scarlet ray across the wasteland. On the plain, long shadows stretched away from odd things littering the ground. Some of them he recognized. A horned skull. A dead horse, its skin dried to parchment and sagging between its ribs. The wheel of a cart. A shield stripped of its emblem. What looked like a wooden rake, which seemed wildly improbable in that wasteland. A complex mingling of bones, human and horse, pieces of armor, swords, shields, shredded silk, and jewels, lying on earth too parched to give them any kind of burial. A human skull, which had somehow rolled itself a
way from the confusion, gazed, upside down, at Thayne. The sun slid another fraction of an inch. The dragon, with Thayne trapped in its eye, did not move. Neither did Thayne.

  Finally, the cracked, barren ground grew less raw. The shadows faded. A little smoke trickled out of the dragon’s nostrils, which were as broad and black as cauldrons. A translucent eyelid rolled down over its staring eye. Thayne stayed still. A moment later, the eyelid slid back up; the dark slit of its pupil widened so abruptly that Thayne nearly jumped. He swallowed, his body rigid, his throat so dry that he might have kindled his own flame out of it. The dragon sighed languidly, blowing dust all over Thayne. It swung its head, coiled its neck more securely about itself. Its baleful eye closed. Thayne, gritting his teeth, his hands and face clenched, imploded with a sneeze.

  He took a step sometime later, then another. Above him, a beast with a million eyes opened them one by one, stared down at him. He tried to walk on air. The dragon rumbled, and he melted breathlessly into the motionless night. But it only shifted a little, turning its head more tightly into itself. Thayne waited, watching the humps and hillocks of dragon around the tower. The stars and the risen moon, hanging like a scythe blade above the hills, gave the ground a faint, silvery sheen. Thayne, moving silently around the tower, away from the dragon’s eyes, could see no door anywhere.

  There had been none in the drawing, either, unless it was hidden behind the dragon. It seemed to be sleeping deeply now, its rumbling soft and regular, as if it were snoring. The tower, with its thick red rings of stones glowing faintly in the moonlight, looked formidable, forbidding and impregnable. It seemed to have no opening anywhere; he could not find even a single window. Baffled, he wondered if the dragon dropped its gold down the open top of the tower like rain dropping down a chimney.

  He felt a sudden, intense impatience with himself and this mysterious tower. He had journeyed so far, found the plain that seemed to exist only on a page in a book; he had outfaced the dragon. Here in front of him was treasure to save the North Islands. And he could not claw his way into the tower, nor climb its steep walls, nor burrow under it: the foundation stones, visible under an arch of dragon’s tail, looked as if they ran down into the center of the earth. Weary, at last, of ringing the tower with footprints for the knight to find, he slipped recklessly under the dragon’s tail to reach the tower wall. If the massive loop of tail shifted, he could be crushed between stone and dragon; he was too frayed with tension and exasperation to care. He slumped a moment against the wall, rested. The stones were still warm from the merciless light of day, or maybe from the dragon’s seething inner fires. He felt a heartbeat of utter astonishment as the stones closed about him like water and drew him in.