“You mean your father,” a man answered. “They found him earlier in the wood. He’s been hurt, but he’s safe, now—”
“No,” Thayne broke in, the word cutting sharp as an ax into wood. “Craiche.”
“Craiche!” someone repeated incredulously. “You left him home to milk the cows, surely—”
“He didn’t stay,” Thayne said tersely. “I saw him earlier. I told him where to wait, but he didn’t stay there, either.”
“I saw a boy running with us through the woods,” someone said. “I thought he was from these hills.”
“Which woods?”
The torch angled, pointed overhead. “Up there. Thayne, he can’t have come with us! He’s a twelve-year-old boy; someone would have spotted him in one of the boats when we crossed—”
“He knows how to row a boat.” Cyan heard the familiar, leashed fury in Thayne’s even voice. “He followed us.” He turned abruptly, a flame torn away from the circle of fire and heading uphill. Someone breathed a curse onto Regis Aurum’s head. The torches separated, lined across the field, still searching as they moved toward the wood.
“Cyan,” Regis whispered, when the light was gone. “Are you still alive? Did they find you?”
Cyan did not answer. No, he had said in memory. They did not find me. In memory, the North Islanders’ voices had been indistinguishable, barely comprehensible, as if they spoke another language. In memory, there had been no Thayne Ysse asking about a twelve-year-old brother, but a dozen armed strangers, their faces blurred by fire, saying things that Cyan, listening with all his attention on Regis’ silence, barely heard. Dead, they said. Safe. Up there. And then they followed the fire uphill, and Regis spoke, and Cyan, trembling with cold and relief, answered.
“No,” he said to Regis. “They did not find me.”
Yes, he said, to whoever was listening in the dark of the tower. They found me.
Regis fell asleep then, or what passed for sleep, leaving Cyan alone listening to his ragged, labored breaths. Cyan watched, motionless, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other hand resting on the king’s forehead. After a long time, during which the rain fell with monotonous steadiness, he saw the fires began to come back down the hill, a ragged line of them, the last a roving star just emerging out of the trees as the closest were halfway down the field. The last fire etched a jagged path to the underbrush, began probing into it. Cyan’s fingers locked on his sword. The king chose that moment to stir restively, tossing his head back and forth.
“Water,” he muttered. Whether it was a demand or a complaint, Cyan was uncertain. Uphill, the torch fire jabbed along the wall of brush, illumining roots, tangles; dry leaves sparked and burned out. Cyan, barely breathing, his attention riveted on the reckless fire, thought coldly: I will kill him when he reaches us. I will catch the torch as he falls, and carry it down the hill, follow until no one notices when I put it out, no one notices that he is missing… I will come back and hide his body in the underbrush…
“Cyan,” the king breathed abruptly, wakened, Cyan guessed, by the murmur of voices, the soft steps.
“You must be quiet again,” he whispered, “or they will find me.”
He could hear the brush crackling now, tiny explosions of flame that hissed to embers in the rain. The king, facing downhill, could not see it, but he heard; he moved his head fretfully but did not speak. Cyan looked uphill again, watching the fire come.
I did not know then, he thought, that the fire had a name.
“Thayne!” someone called, a sharp hiss across the face of the hill. The torch swung away from the brush. “Help me.”
The torch moved after a moment, to meet the still fire in the center of the field. The flames, mingling, revealed someone lying on the grass. The fires conferred; one torch fell to the ground. The twisted body sent a raven’s cry across the night as it was lifted. A man’s voice, Cyan thought, not a boy’s. But the other torches had reached the bottom of the hill. The searcher abandoned his search to carry the wounded, leaving his torch to gutter out in the grass.
Cyan unlocked his fingers from the sword hilt, felt his hand tremble. He leaned his brow against a crook of branches, breathing again, unsteadily. Regis’s voice, coming out of the dark with unexpected clarity, made him start.
“Will you die?” the king asked.
“No,” he whispered fiercely to the endless night. “No. I will not die.”
The field was silent for a while. He moved his hand to the king’s chest, kept it there lightly to feel him breathe. Cyan’s eyes closed. The branches supported his head; he breathed in small leaves, flowers. He dreamed of rain. He woke abruptly, listened for Regis’s breathing, to the changeless dark; his eyes closed again. He dreamed of someone crying in the rain.
He woke again, blinking water out of his eyes. He felt the king’s breathing under his hand, shallow and fitful; he muttered something, dreaming or feverish, then quieted. Cyan raised his head, scanned the night. He saw nothing but dark, heard nothing but rain. The night, he thought, was frozen in some terrible, enchanted hour; it would never change, dawn would never come, the rain would rain forever…
He heard someone crying in the rain.
It was a small, distant sound, a single, sharp sob. He had listened to such noises half the night. But this voice was high, light: a woman’s voice, a child’s. A boy’s. The sound came again, brief, taut. His muscles locked; he felt the sudden bone chill of horror, colder than any rain, as if the faint voice came from the dead already haunting the field.
“Thayne,” it pleaded. Then it was still for a long time while Cyan listened, his lips parted, his eyes straining against the dark.
I don’t remember this, he thought. I don’t remember. I heard the boy’s voice in my sleep, perhaps; I dreamed that I dreamed it…
“Thayne,” the voice said again, still faint in the constant rain. As if he heard it, Regis murmured, then stifled a groan. Cyan shifted his hand to Regis’s brow. The king drew a shuddering breath and quieted again. Cyan felt him trembling with cold.
“Thayne,” the boy said again. He seemed closer now, if only by a matter of raindrops, a few grass blades. Cyan swallowed drily, wondering if he were crawling down the hill.
I did nothing, he thought, in memory. There is nothing I can do. I cannot change memory.
“Thayne.”
I did not leave the king.
He heard nothing then but the rain, slipping among the leaves, drumming gently, persistently against the ground. He lifted his face to it, opened his mouth, swallowed what the leaves let fall. Then he listened again, as if he could hear the boy breathing across the field.
He fell asleep again. A whimper woke him. The king, he thought. But Regis lay still, so still that Cyan felt for his heartbeat, alarmed. He was clumsy; the king’s voice came in a sudden, anguished knot of pain. But he was still alive, and the voice in the dark, no longer alone, had been startled silent.
After a long time Cyan heard the breathing in the grass beside the brush. It shook with effort, dragging for air, keening, but so softly the boy probably did not even realize he made a sound. Cyan closed his eyes.
When he moved, it was as if he moved in a dream, because he would have died before he left the king alone and wounded under a hedge for this. He refused to listen to the brush crackling softly around him, or to the boy’s sudden, frightened gasp. He refused to hear Regis’s voice; maybe it was raised in a troubled, confused question, maybe not. He groped across the grass, found a slender, shivering body, and rolled it lightly into his arms. The boy hissed as Cyan straightened; one hand, surprisingly strong, dug into his forearm. The boy asked, his teeth chattering, “Who are you?”
Cyan did not answer.
He carried the boy down the hill, striding quickly, wanting to get back to the king before the dream of leaving the king ended. The boy, after a futile question or two, did not speak again; Cyan never spoke. At the bottom of the hill, he saw the fires through a small grove of trees; a
few dark figures still moved restlessly among them. The sentry he could see wore the Leviathan of the North Islands.
He set the boy down soundlessly among the trees, hoping the sentries he didn’t see would not notice him. Then he turned, as soundlessly, and went back uphill, feeling the dream wearing away at every step, until he was Cyan Dag, listening in the rain for the painful breathing, and terrified that he had misplaced the King of Yves to rescue an islander’s brat whimpering on his first battlefield.
So he told himself as he finally heard the broken, chattering breaths under the brush: It never happened. It was a dream. He crawled back in beside the king and waited, tense and sleepless, for dawn.
I never left him, he told the knights of Gloinmere when they resumed their search for the king, and Cyan emerged from the underbrush to greet them. That was how Regis, somehow still alive, remembered it as well. He stayed at my side all night, the king told his knights. He never left me.
So he became then and there, on the sodden field, and more formally later: Cyan Dag, Knight of Gloinmere.
It never happened, he thought as the dark around him grew thick, soundless, and the rain faded into memory. He smelled stone, dust, things that changed so slowly that they would be recognizable when the words for them were forgotten: bone, still water, ash.
He rose as the early light fell through the sagging doorposts of the tower. He stepped, blinking, into the dawn and remembered.
FOURTEEN
Sel climbed the spiral steps to the top of the tower. She paused at the last step, one hand to her heart, and panted awhile. Melanthos was not there, which suited Sel. So far, Melanthos did not know she had come there. Gentian knew, but thought only that Sel came to look for Melanthos. Time she had whiled away in the harbor tavern she spent now in the tower, without any noticeable change in her habits. Both daughters thought she was drinking bitter ale at Brenna’s; she had left them to sell the last of the cakes and pastries. Melanthos tended to come down near suppertime, which was when Sel went up. She liked looking into the mirror; she never knew what it was going to show her next.
This time, as she waited for her heart to quiet, it showed a roil of slick, dark brown that slid and twisted against itself, and finally revealed a deep-set eye above a row of long whiskers. She smiled, recognizing one of the seals in the harbor. She knew all their shades of brown, their dapples of black and gray, their scars, their ages, their children. She had watched them for years from Brenna’s windows, while she drank her ale. Sometimes one died and washed ashore on the rocks before it got eaten in the water. She would watch the fishers gut it and skin it, holding the skin wide, with the blank sky showing through its empty eye sockets, before they draped it across the high rocks to dry. That drew the children, and the screaming gulls thick as a snow squall above the butchering. The fishers tossed coins to see who would get a coat out of the skin, or a watertight pair of boots. The meat and fat they gave to the oldest villagers, to smoke for winter, to render into soap and lamp oil. The sea got back its bones.
Once, when she was much younger, Sel had left Joed’s side at night and gone to the rocks to take a sealskin. She could not remember why she wanted it, only that it drew her, beyond reason, to hold the stinking skin up to the stars and waves and let it see again through her eyes. But the skin was gone. Someone else had gotten there first. Or something. Or maybe the splashed shadows of blood on the rocks around her were old, dry, and that seal had died only in her dreams.
The seal in the mirror dove out of sight; the heaving water slowed, froze, faded. Sel stepped into the room, sat down on the pallet. Behind the mirror the sun was setting. Mist fanned toward land, trying to engulf the boats before they reached the harbor. The still air within the stones felt warm yet with afternoon light. She slipped her shoes off and settled comfortably into the pallet. She tried not to shift things, though she suspected that Melanthos was too untidy to notice a needle moved from floor to ledge, or pieces of linen separated from the jumble of bedclothes. She did refrain from tossing out old tea upon which floated a furry island of mold. Even Melanthos might notice a clean cup.
The mirror showed her scraps of images, as Melanthos had said: broken pieces of stories. One of the oddest, Sel thought, was the woman in the tower who embroidered, as Melanthos did, everything in her mirror. She had a strange, pale, underwater beauty, as if, in a different story, she might have been part fish. She could not seem to find a way out of her tower. Perhaps she did not want to leave. She never leaned out of the window and called for help, though armed and comely knights rode beneath her. Sometimes Sel saw her standing in front of her fire. Sometimes she ate a solitary meal. The building of the fire, the bringing of food, seemed beyond the mirror’s notice. Sel never saw anyone else in the room. The beginning and the ending of the woman’s tale seemed equally obscure. Sel wondered if the old mirror had forgotten them.
The mirror dreamed privately a little; so did Sel. Images and memories swirled to light, lingered, faded: Joed mending a sail, Gentian running across sand with her hands full of butterfly shells, herself raging and weeping a storm over some small broken thing just before Joed died. Or had it been just after? The mirror went suddenly black as if it had closed its eye. Sel blinked, waited. It gave her nothing. Her attention caught, she watched it. For a long time it remained mindless and dark as a fish’s eye; she wondered what tale it was trying to begin or end. Then she saw a frost of moonlight on black stone. Peering closer, she separated dark from dark: stone from night from shadow within the oblong of stone. The shadow widened, filled the mirror. Within the utter dark something moved.
An eye opened.
Sel stared into it, astonished. The light in the tower seemed to fade around her, so intense was the blackness in the eye. Like the new moon, Sel thought, in the thin, silvery ring of the old. Thoughts seemed to move across the eye like clouds over the sea. Sel shifted closer to the mirror, as if she might see the thoughts reflected in the eye. It gazed implacably at something. Death? Sel thought, chilled. But the old eye blinked at the word. Sel leaned closer.
Her hands moved, remembering something. Braiding hair, she thought. Or maybe it was waves, their silvery foam she caught just before the waves broke, peeling it away like lace from cloth, twining froth together so that the waves slowed, washed in before they crested, with a sigh rather than a shout. The fishers waiting out the rampaging sea in their boats far from the harbor, drifted in finally on a docile tide. Never saw that happen before, she heard them say as she went down the cliff to meet Joed: High tide riding to meet the full moon, and the moon letting go of the tide. And the strange tide became a tale added to the human faces seen watching in the water on a misty afternoon, and the fish with the unicorn’s horn.
Once, she thought. Once I did such things.
But that young woman seemed no more a part of her now than what swam so freely in the waves with their curious eyes. She shifted back a little, away from the memory, and the eye in the mirror turned silver.
Sel blinked. The lines around the eye flattened, and became an elaborate frame around the silver. The eye became a mirror, she saw, amazed again, and recognized the mirror.
“But where,” she wondered, “is the lady?”
She walked into view a moment later. She was no longer sitting quietly in her chair beside the window, looking at life passing through her mirror. She was doing what Sel, observing anyone in the context of her own life, would call pacing. The force and power of her magical stillness, her spellbound silence and habitual movements, had dissolved for the moment. She moved as restlessly as a fish in a bucket, back and forth across the circular chamber. She avoided the window, Sel noted. She walked with her head bent, her heavy skirts swaying, her hands opening and closing against her thighs. She did not lift her eyes from the strip of carpet on the floor, in which white lilies bloomed against a gold background. She seemed intent on wearing a path through the lilies.
She was very beautiful. Now and then, one hand lifted, uncurled
long enough to pull a strand of white-gold hair behind her ear. Sel could see her graceful fish’s profile then, her set mouth, an eyebrow of the palest gold slanting over a flash of sky-blue eye. Her lowered eyelids seemed as delicate and translucent as shells. Beyond her, the images in her ornate mirror changed constantly: a hawk plunging out of the sky straight down into water to drag a fish out of the current, the pepper-scatter of blackbirds against the bright sky, the rider just coming into view down the road.
What would happen, Sel wondered, if the woman did not see the rider in the mirror? If she let him pass without a comment among her threads?
What would happen if she leaned past the mirror and looked out the window to watch the rider come to her down the sun-dappled road?
What would happen if she called?
For a moment past and present and the timelessness of tales drew together in Sel’s mind. The woman walked out of story and paced, trapped, helpless, under terrible enchantment somewhere in time, somewhere, perhaps, in Skye.
She leaned forward, her lips parting. “I know,” she whispered to the woman. “I know.”
The woman saw the rider in the mirror. She stopped midstep, gazing at it, her eyes wide now, with despair and hope.
She sat down quickly, reached for threads. So did Sel, not knowing what she might make, but wanting suddenly to feel the magic of making in the movement of her hands.
A cry interrupted her sometime later. Melanthos, she thought, hiding her threads and linen in a cluttered pile on the floor. She went to a far window, looked out at a perplexing sight.
Anyon was moving back and forth below, near the tower door. She leaned farther out. He did not see her, or Melanthos, who was running toward him. He was busy at something nameless, bewildering, something involving a wagon full of huge old tangled vines as spiny as puffer fish with thorns. He wore heavy gauntlets up to his elbows, and had stuffed the tower doorway halfway to the top with thorns.
The Tower at Stony Wood Page 10