The Tower at Stony Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “What was it?” Sidera asked. She was invisible within the black fall of her hair; he could see only a triangle of her face, one hand resting on her knee, her amber eyes, so bright in the sunlight they seemed to reflect it.

  He frowned, perplexed. The incident did not seem significant: he had carried a wounded boy down a hill after a battle. It had happened years ago. That the event had appalled him enough to block it from his mind seemed the result of sitting in the rain and worrying for dark, endless hours. He shook his head.

  “Nothing important,” he answered; so it seemed now. “Why would I go into a tower in Skye to remember a minor detail from a battle in Yves?”

  “For a reason.” She did not suggest what. She rose; he watched her hair slide around her, then shift like silk as she parted it with her hands, shook it over her shoulders. He swallowed suddenly, caught in a memory of such soft darkness he had lost himself in. She took a step; the light in her eyes faded a little, making them human again. “What is it?”

  He whispered, “Cria.”

  “Who is Cria?”

  “Cria Greenwood. She has such dark hair…” He closed his eyes briefly, tightly. “I left her to come here. I did not even tell her why I left her. She might be pledged by now to a loveless marriage. And I am so far away from her in Skye, and as far as ever from doing what I came to do.” He glanced around, saw his horse. “I must find that tower.”

  “The one with the lady in it.”

  “Yes. I thought she might be in this one after all. But all I found there was Regis Aurum, whom I already rescued.”

  He looked bewilderedly at the shrunken, silent tower, then turned abruptly, strode toward the gelding.

  Sidera said suddenly, “Wait.”

  He stopped, and felt the cloth in his fingers, the silken threads. He opened it, turned it so that the seated man was upright. For a moment it made no sense. A man sat on a mound of gold within the bright, massive walls of a tower; behind him an enormous golden slitted eye gazed at him through the stones. Then the image solved its riddle: he recognized the man with the golden hair. He said, stunned, “Thayne Ysse found his dragon.”

  “And my sister,” Sidera said softly, “has found Thayne Ysse.”

  “How do you know?”

  She touched the cloth. “Someone embroidered that, and a wayward wind blew it to you.”

  He caught a breath. “The woman I’m searching for.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Weaving and weeping in a tower in Skye.”

  “This is embroidery.”

  He brushed the finer point away. “Thread is thread—”

  “It is indeed. And it’s my sister who is weaving. I think Thayne is in trouble, by the look of this.”

  He said, tucking the embroidery in his belt, “I’ll come back later to help him. I must find the lady first.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s Thayne Ysse who crossed your path this morning.”

  “You could rescue him,” he suggested, pulling himself up onto the gelding’s back. “Far better than I could, with your magic. You talk to wild things.”

  “I do. But this didn’t blow a spell across my steps. I told you: Idra weaves.”

  “It’s embroidery,” he answered absently. “Not hers.” He reached down impulsively to take the witch’s hand. “Thank you for helping me again.”

  “I think I only confused you more.”

  “You were there waiting for me when I came back.” He bent low and kissed her hand, catching a cold kiss back from the worn silver on her finger.

  “But you don’t know where you’re going,” she reminded him inarguably, “looking for that tower.”

  “I never have,” he answered, and rode out of the clearing.

  He reached the second tower at sunset.

  It happened as subtly as in a dream: the landscape changing imperceptibly through the afternoon as he rode upstream along the river to find his way out of the three hills. On the other side of the hill a red sun blazed with terrible fury across a parched wasteland. The river melted away into mud there, and then into dry, cracked earth. The hills around the plain were barren, brown, runneled with crevices and caves. The huge, blind tower rising out of the center of the plain was dwarfed by the dragon coiled around it. The dragon’s head, resting on its tail, was angled toward the tower so that one huge, golden eye stared at the stones as if it looked through them. Its other eye rolled lizardlike toward the rider at the edge of the plain.

  Cyan reined the gelding, which was snorting at the sudden dust and the charred, sulfurous smell. Cyan wiped sweat from his face, and studied the dragon wearily. Sidera had warned him fairly, he thought, that this was where his path would lead. He could turn and leave. But the dragon was no longer an innocent piece of embroidery. Thayne Ysse would die in that tower. At worst, left to his own devices, he might find a way to free the dragon from the plain and set it raging against Yves. It would be cruel to leave Thayne there to die, and very dangerous to leave him there alive. Cyan, contemplating his choices, realized that he had none. He gave himself one glimpse of Cria’s midnight smile, and urged the gelding onto the plain.

  The gelding balked. A second later, the dragon swung its head toward them and hissed a shimmering roil of flame across the plain. The fire did not reach them, but Cyan felt a wave of heat slam into him and roll past. It burned metal on the gelding’s harness, and the disk beneath Cyan’s shirt. The gelding tried to rear; he calmed it, and rode it back to where the river still flowed, shallow and brown, and where a few sparse blades of grass grew on the muddy banks. He left it there.

  He drew his sword and walked across the waste. The sun flung a crimson ray between two hills, kindled an answering flare of silver down his blade. The dragon watched him, both eyes on him now, wide and unblinking. Unaccountably, it did not scorch him to a cinder in midstep. Perhaps it did not want to miss again. Cyan stopped, when he came to the edge of the shadow the dying sun, sinking into one wing, flung across half the plain. The dragon’s head reared then, its long, sinuous neck arching upward nearly the height of the tower. It did not bother again with fire. It simply flicked one claw through the air and ripped Cyan’s surcoat and shirt open with scythelike precision from throat to hem. Cyan stumbled backward, startled; as he fell out of the dragon’s shadow, the sun found him again, burned a moon of fire in the disk at his breast.

  The dragon lowered its head and snorted, enveloping Cyan in a sudden dust storm. It asked, as Cyan wiped grit out of his eyes and coughed, “What is your name?”

  Another storm rattled around Cyan at the rush of its hollow voice. The dragon waited as Cyan got to his feet. He stared incredulously up at the great, looming wedge of its head, a crystal tooth or two turning bloody from the sun’s last rays. He said dazedly, “My name is Cyan Dag. I have come to kill you and rescue the man in your tower.”

  The slits in the dragon’s eyes opened wider. It shifted a foreleg and the earth shook beneath Cyan, throwing him down again. Then it dropped its head with a bone-jarring thud and blew Cyan like a feather across the harsh ground. Cyan, trying to cling with his fingers as he slid, clenched his teeth and bore through the storm. It ended finally; he gathered himself, feeling as if a few of his bones were farther away and heavier than he remembered. He stood up again, his skin flecked with blood and dirt, the disk flashing a colder light now from the wake of the faded sun.

  He said, catching his breath, “I have come to rescue the man in your tower. I doubt that I can kill you. I doubt that I could do anything more than annoy you, perhaps only with my bad manners, before you kill me. If you let the man go free, I can promise you gold.”

  A nostril flared, loosed a smell of ash. “How much gold?”

  “As much as I have.”

  “That would be not much.”

  “No,” Cyan conceded. “I will speak to the King of Yves; he has more than I do, and he would pay for possession of that man.”

  “I have more gold than a dozen kings; if I want it I will ta
ke it. That is truly why you came here: not for the man but for the treasure.”

  “I truly came to find a tower with a woman in it, not Thayne Ysse sitting on a pile of gold.”

  “That woman.”

  He blinked. Then he drew breath soundlessly, realizing what had saved his life. He drew the disk up and looked into it. Now, recognized by the dragon, it revealed the face of the woman within it. She was more beautiful than Cyan remembered, with her rippling white-gold hair falling loosely around her face, and her sky-blue eyes troubled, helpless. He said softly, “Yes. This woman.” He let the disk fall, gazed blindly up at the dragon, still seeing her. “Do you know her?”

  “Yes.” The word was more wind than sound, a reverberation Cyan felt in his bones.

  “Where is she?” he pleaded. “I must find her.”

  “You want this man, that woman, your life… You do not offer me as much as a token in return.”

  Cyan thought. “All I have,” he said finally, and drew the needlework out of his belt: the picture of Thayne within the tower watched by the dragon’s eye. “The token of the man. You can put this one in your tower instead.”

  The dragon’s head came down so quickly that Cyan thought he would be crushed or eaten. It took all his will and experience not to thrust his sword up into one descending golden eye and pierce the dragon’s brain. He stood still, his mouth tight, one hand gripping the sword, forcing its point against the earth as if it might move of its own accord. One eye and its closed jaws settled at the level of the embroidery. Cyan loosed his fingers, let the sword fall. He held the picture open with both hands.

  The dragon rumbled like a small hillside sliding. Then it snorted sharply, turning its nostrils away, and spent a moment hissing noisily. A skull grinning upside down on the plain rolled upright. Cyan wondered if they were both laughing.

  “Leave it in the tower,” the dragon said. “Tell the man to take nothing but his life with him out of the tower, or he will not even have that.”

  “And the woman?” Cyan asked desperately. “How do I find her?”

  The dragon regarded him silently, its eyes flooded suddenly with pools of dark as its slitted irises opened wide. “You could have killed me, Cyan Dag.”

  “I know.”

  “You see with your heart. You will find a way to her.” Its head swung away from Cyan, settled, with a small earthquake, near its tail. Cyan heard its voice again as he walked toward the tower. “The way into the tower looks difficult but is far easier.”

  “Easier?”

  “Than the way out. Death is one way out. There are other words. The man knows them. Tell him that if he takes my gold I will eat him.”

  “Truly?”

  “I eat hearts. On this plain, they all taste of gold.” Cyan reached the tower. He touched the solid wall tentatively; it gave like water beneath his hand. Holding his sword loosely in one hand, the picture of Thayne Ysse in the other, and not knowing which he might need first, he walked blindly through the stones into the dragon’s heart.

  SEVENTEEN

  In the tower at Stony Wood, Sel drew brown threads back and forth across a patch of linen. She barely thought about what she was making. Her hands made it, she told herself, and anyway, it was nothing at all but a pile of bits and pieces of muted colors, all jumbled together, nothing fitting anything. Melanthos had brought up pockets stuffed full of thread Anyon had given her, the grays and creams and browns of his father’s sheep. She had asked more than once what Sel was making. Nothing, Sel said, in particular, or: I don’t know yet. Her hands seemed to know; Sel did not question them.

  Melanthos brought her food, too, when Sel forgot to come down from the tower. She had become engrossed, watching the woman in the tower, waiting for her tale to end, to see how the woman would finally become free. Melanthos warned her now and then that the old mirror might not remember, that the tale might not have an end. But Sel, watching the woman become little by little more restless, more desperate, thought that even if the mirror forgot, the woman herself might give some hint of how the tale began and ended.

  So she sewed and waited for the brief, random moments when the mirror turned its memory toward the tower beside the river. The mirror showed her the harbor seals as often as not, which was as close as it ever got to looking at the village. She loved seeing them peering curiously above the waves, diving sleekly after fish without leaving a ripple behind. She wished, occasionally, that the mirror would find the bakery and open an eye into that. But it never did. So Sel, remembering Gentian and the baby, would heave herself stiffly off the pallet and circle down the stairs into the light of day. Gentian, her placid Gentian, had burst into tears in the middle of the bakery the last time Sel appeared.

  The baby, starting out of sleep, wailed in sympathy. Sel picked her up and patted Gentian’s shoulder awkwardly, amazed.

  “What is it?” she asked anxiously. “Don’t tell me it’s Rawl. I’ll put holes in his boat.”

  “It’s you!” Gentian cried. She even wept tidily, Sel saw: one tear out of each eye, traveling to mid-cheekbone and hanging on the fine, flushed skin like pearls. “Rawl goes out in the mornings to fish and comes back to me at night and never complains when I leave him before it’s light to bake. But you—you don’t even know where your home is now. You’ve taken to living in that tower. I see Melanthos in here far more often than I see you!”

  Sel was silent, shifting her patting hand to the baby now, while two pearls dissolved on Gentian’s cheeks, and two more fell. “I’m sorry,” she said vaguely, distressed and mystified at having made Gentian cry. The baby was more easily placated. “I’m just—”

  “You’re what? Just what?”

  “Just—if you’ll just be patient.”

  “Patient!” Gentian stared at her, bewildered. “Patient over what? What are you expecting to happen? Is the tower going to fall down or something?”

  “It could be,” Sel said, struck, wondering if that was how the tale in the mirror ended. Gentian pulled a clean, hemmed square of an old flour bag out of her pocket and blew her nose once, daintily, as if a flower scent had tickled it.

  “Well,” she asked, “are you planning to be in it when it does?”

  Sel blinked at her. “Oh,” she said, illumined. “That old tower in the stone wood. No. That might melt into the earth with age, but it’ll never fall.” She passed the baby over to Gentian, which soothed her a little. “Just give me some time.”

  “For what?”

  Sel’s eyes slid away from her toward the stony streets, the line of houses and shops hiding the sea. “I know it’s not fair,” she said softly. “And not easy. But I need this time. If you’ll just be patient. Get someone to help you in here. One of Lude’s older girls could do it. Just for a little.”

  “But I miss you,” Gentian said simply, her eyes filling again with luminous pools that shone but did not spill. “And I’m afraid.”

  Sel’s dark, flickering kelpie eyes came back to Gentian. She patted her daughter’s shoulder again, silently a moment. “Don’t be,” she said at last. “Things will come to an end of themselves.”

  She sent Gentian home then, and worked, baking and selling and chatting, until she found herself drifting out of the door, through the village, into the stone wood to see if the woman was still in her tower. She was, and so was Melanthos. Sel took a seat beside her on the pallet, and picked up the thread where she had left off.

  The mirror showed them the woman in the tower that evening. She sat very still, gazing at what must have been the feverish sky in her mirror: the streaks and washes of rose, purple, gold above the fields where the sun had set. Her hands, invisible in her lap, seemed motionless. The colors in the mirror intensified, grew lustrous; still her hands made no move toward her tidy line of threads. The sun glanced through the cloud as it set, a brilliant, baleful golden eye staring back at the woman through her mirror. Transfixed, it seemed, within her spellbound state, like a bird under a serpent’s eye, she might hav
e been a memory of herself; Sel could not even see her breathe. After the sun had set and the colors faded in the sky, she moved, so abruptly that Sel blinked: it was as if a statue had come to life.

  She chose odd threads: yellow-green and orange and a bruised red like a black cherry, colors rarely seen in the sky. Maybe there was something coming down the road of such disturbing hues, that Sel could not yet see. The woman bent over her work. Night misted into her mirror, and then spilled out of it across the other mirror, until the woman vanished in a pool of black.

  Melanthos grunted. “That was strange.” Her fingers hovered over choices: the colors in the woman’s mirror, the colors in the woman’s hand.

  “She’s making something of her own,” Sel guessed. “She’s tired of being told.”

  “But who tells her, in the first place? And what will happen if she refuses?”

  Sel shrugged. What will happen if you do? she wanted to ask Melanthos. But she understood too well, now, what lured her daughter: there seemed nothing more compelling in the world than the images spun out of the mind’s eye into thread.

  Sel worked late, that night, even later than Melanthos. She did not notice when Melanthos left the tower. In her own mind, Sel walked along the harbor cliffs, a tall, slender, barefoot woman with long black windblown hair. Seals swam through the waves pleating and breaking along the stones. The seals had different faces, so long ago, different names. She could not remember those older names now, except that they were odd: a mix of sounds that glided under and twisted back around a human tongue. Wind collided with her, poured around her, gathered and broke like the sea. She did not watch where her feet took her, through tide pools, over barnacles, across narrow shelves of rock slippery with streamers of moss coiling and uncoiling like mermaids’ hair. She shouted, names, in memory, but Sel, remembering, could no longer hear the sound of them.

  She found herself trying to say one, her tongue trying to lick a name into shape. A sound with too many ls, maybe, and beginning with a growl in the back of her throat. What was I thinking? she wondered, amazed. What was that young I thinking?