“Perhaps it’s not worth going back to find out. My last glimpse of life would be Thayne Ysse’s harrowed face blaming me for all the sorrow in the North Islands. I’d rather watch the night fall, here. Its face is calm and lovely, and full of mysteries.”
She picked up the harp lying beside her on the stones, flicked a few sweet notes into the air. “You should make up your mind.” She did not meet his eyes. “It’s a long way back and you’ll get lost trying to find your way in the night.”
He looked at her thoughtfully, the Bard of Skye sitting with him in the dark tower. “Why do you care?” he asked her. “What do you want from me?”
Her eyes flickered at him, then. “There’s still another tower.”
“There are many other knights.”
“But only one of you, Cyan Dag. I need you.”
He was silent again, with wonder; it sounded, for once, like truth. Still, her need was complex, bewildering, and extremely dangerous. He said indifferently, for there seemed nothing left to tempt him, “Make it worth my while.”
“Is the Lady from Skye not worth your while?”
“Not at this particular moment. You want me to choose between a tower of night and a tower of fire. You don’t offer me the tower with the lady in it. Not yet. Never yet. Always something else first. Do I go or do I stay? Which tower do I choose? You want me to choose fire. Make it worth my while.”
He saw the first flicker of expression in her ancient eyes, uncertainty, perhaps even the pain of some memory. He waited, watching the gentle evening darken, smelling the mysteries of bracken, fungus, rotting wood, flowers scattering their faded petals over the grass. The bard asked finally, pulling him back out of the night, “What do you want?”
Nothing, he thought. Nothing.
Then the answer washed over him, through him, in a color: the faint, young green still visible just beyond the door. “Cria,” he whispered. “Cria Greenwood.” And she was there between him and the night, with her violet eyes and smoky hair, her sweet, husky voice full of flaring embers and wine. Cyan, she said. Where are you? “Tell her,” he pleaded to the Bard of Skye, “that I will come back.”
The bard bowed her head above the harp. She seemed, as he watched her, to shape herself into it, until her bones formed its bones, her hair strung it; the harper became the harp. He heard her play.
He listened for a long time, it seemed, until the darkness dissolved around him. Gold burned behind his eyes. He struggled to find his way back into the tower of shadows, but he had left it and he could no longer find the door. The sun was rising. It spilled over him, stifling, blinding, merciless. He drew a sudden long, shuddering breath, as if he had been under water and had finally reached the surface. Then he felt the fire all through his bones.
He tried to roll away from himself. Hands closed on his arms, held him still. He cried out against the pain; his voice sounded cracked, frayed. His mouth burned like metal in the heat.
“Cyan,” someone kept saying insistently. “Cyan Dag.”
He dragged his burning eyes open. Thayne Ysse’s face loomed over him, blanched, haggard, his own eyes smoldering with gold, luminous and inhuman. Dragon’s eyes, Cyan saw. The fire licked through him again. He twisted in Thayne’s hold, his lips so tight between his teeth he swallowed blood.
“Don’t die,” Thayne begged. “Craiche would never forgive me.”
“I thought,” he whispered when he could speak, “you wanted me dead.”
“I changed my mind.”
Cyan closed his eyes again, remembering the dark hillside, the boy crawling through the grass, the rain. The rain. He opened his lips, searching for it blindly; it fell everywhere around him but not on him, not in his mouth, though he turned his head frantically to catch it.
“There is no rain,” he said, his throat tight with despair. “Only gold.”
Thayne loosed him and stood up. Cyan watched the gold around him blur to his movements, move with him like wings, cling to him like armor, turn his fingers to long shafts of light. He saw the dragon then, in every stone of the tower; the stones rippled to its breathing, bright, scaly shades of green, bronze, copper, flame. The jagged profile of its nostrils and jaw were clear now; its enormous eye, staring at them, opened its slitted iris wide, like a door opening. One of Thayne’s burning fingers illumined the dark within it.
“Freedom,” said the gold-shrouded figure that was once Thayne, “lies in the dragon’s eye.” Or the dragon spoke, giving them a riddle: truth or lie? Cyan tensed, torn between the two words. Fire that was not fire swept through him, hollowing his bones, until he felt he would become like the forgotten dead on the plain, flayed by the sun, pared down to what could outlast the burning day.
Thayne or the dragon spoke again. A great, curved scythelike claw moved from the dragon’s side through the circle of its body toward Cyan. He gasped, trying to pull himself away from it. Its shadow harvested his heart before it reached him. The shafts of light that were Thayne’s hands gripped him, raised his body to meet the dragon’s claw. It touched the blackened, melted disk on his chest, and a sudden flare of silver cracked through the air, so bright it blinded him. He fell back against Thayne, and then into a rattling pile of coin as the floor rumbled and jolted under them. Silver streaked the air again. He dropped his arms over his eyes; his bones seemed to scatter in all directions at the sound the air made as it split in two.
And then he felt the rain.
It was as if a river in the sky had sagged through its bed, torn it open, and emptied its water endlessly onto the plain. For a moment he let it pour into his throat; he tried to fill his bones with it. Then he turned his back to it so he could breathe, and saw the river of mud he lay in. He lifted his head, trying to find Thayne through the flickering sheets of rain.
He saw the dragon rising.
It burned like a sun on the other side of the rain. Its vast wings seemed to span the plain; it could have caught the lightning in its claws. Its back seemed made of gold. As Cyan watched, something spun away from it, flashing as it turned through light and mist, a falling tear of gold within the rain. It hit the mud near Cyan: a coin with Regis Aurum’s face on it.
Lightning, or the fire of the dragon’s farewell, seared the sky. Thunder bellowed and bounced, echoing from hill to hill. Cyan dropped his face against one arm and closed his eyes, while the rain pounded against him, seeped beneath his skin, searched out the smoldering embers of dragon fire within his bones.
He woke smelling grass and wood smoke, and a breath of chill dark air out of stone as old as the world.
He rolled wearily onto his back, knowing without opening his eyes where he must be. He felt the sun fall on his face, gentle now, dappled with shadow from the trees. The wood smoke, the soft rustlings of fire, were puzzling. He opened his eyes finally. The tower stood where he had left it, in the little glade ringed by trees. Something else caught his eye: a flash of gold in the grass.
He reached for it, turned the small circle until the king’s profile rolled upright between his finger and thumb. Thayne Ysse had flown away with the dragon and its magnificent treasure; in Ysse, he would hammer Regis Aurum’s profile into the mask of war and give it back to him. Cyan tasted a bitter breath of smoke in the back of his throat, the taste of this failure. He dropped the coin in his boot and began what seemed an arduous challenge to get up.
Someone touched him.
He started. At first, glimpsing the long dark hair, he thought: Sidera. But this young woman with her wild, tangled hair, her eyes flecked with unusual colors, was a stranger. He struggled to rise; she helped him sit. She was lean and long-limbed, with what looked like a dusting of flour in her hair. Her clothes were simple, linen and wool, crumpled from riding. She was barefoot. The wary-eyed horse snorting at Cyan’s gelding wore neither reins nor saddle.
It was her fire he smelled, and her fish roasting on it. As if, he realized, she had been waiting for him beside the tower.
“Are you all right?�
� she asked, her eyes widening at his torn surcoat, the brand the disk had left on his chest. “Did you find the dragon?” Then the tarnished disk caught her eye and she blinked.
“How do you know,” he whispered, “the dragon?”
“It was in the mirror. So were you. The mirror told me where to find you.” She raised a slender, callused hand, touched the disk very gently, as if she were touching a face.
Cyan raised it, looked into it. Even within the clouds and veins of charred silver, he could see the midsummer blue of the lady’s eyes, the long, fine, white-gold hair. She was still there, he thought wearily. Trapped, but still alive. Then, stunned, he saw the recognition in the young woman’s eyes.
His breath caught painfully. “You know her?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. Her voice sounded plain as stone, eager as flame. “I’ve seen her many times. Are you hurt anywhere? What did you tangle with?”
“The dragon,” he said after a moment, still staring at her. “And a furious lord from the North Islands.”
“The man with the golden hair.”
“Yes. How do you—how—”
“The mirror,” she repeated, and touched the disk again, lightly. “It looks a little like this. Did you kill the dragon?”
“No. Thayne Ysse took it.”
She gazed at him, astonished. “Then he must have enormous power. A dragon’s power.”
“What is your name?” he asked, wondering at the way her strange eyes could so clearly and unflinchingly contemplate such power.
“Melanthos. You are a knight of Yves.”
He nodded. “My name is Cyan Dag.”
“When I first saw you in the mirror, I thought you were part of a tale. Then I watched you ride beyond the mirror, into Skye. I came here to ask you for help.”
“Help.”
“Yes. Knights help people. People in distress. Don’t they?”
He closed his eyes, slid his hands over them. The smell of roasting salmon blew his way; he was trembling, he realized, with weariness and hunger. But the pain had gone; the rain had put the dragon fire out. He dropped his hands and nodded, wondering what good he had done anyone in or out of distress since he had left Yves. But he promised her, “I will do what I can for you.”
“I can help you find her,” Melanthos said, taking his arm. “Can you get up? Come closer to the fire.”
“You know where that tower is?” he asked, breathless again, with more than effort. Guiding him, she did not immediately answer. The dark tower called him then, a deepening of shadow beyond the sunlit, drowsing air across its doorway. Something he had left in there, it suggested to him. Or left undone. He left the young woman watching him and walked unsteadily into it.
He found the piece of embroidery spread on one of the fallen stones where he had sat peacefully considering staying forever. There was just enough sun left in the world to show him that the image had changed.
Thayne and the gold and the dragon had gone. There was only the beautiful, troubled face of the Lady from Skye, finely stitched in colors so close to true that truth lay in a change of light. He went to the fire, where Melanthos was taking the bones out of the fish.
She held out a broad leaf full of fish to him as he sat. Then she saw what was in his hands. She gave a small hiccup of astonishment.
“It’s one of my pictures. So this is where they go.”
Cyan sensed worlds within worlds merge around him; he could almost see the dragon tower within the dark tower. In another shift of perception, he thought dazedly, he might see within the dragon tower to the tower where the Lady of Skye waited, without time, without hope.
He said, his voice shaking, “I kept finding these pictures. So you brought me this far. You know all the towers.”
She nodded, her eyes, like dark stones or shells, glinting with unpredictable color, and as unreadable. “I know the tower with the woman in it,” she said softly. “Eat your fish, and I’ll take you there.”
TWENTY-ONE
Sel pieced her life together. To the eye, only the irregular shapes of the embroidered patches, and a preponderance of gray or brown in one or another, made them different. Sel’s eyes, as she sorted them at the top of the tower, saw the memories in them. There was the patch with Joed in his boat at the dock lifting an oar to her as he cast off into a dazzle of light at sunrise. Newly wed, she could not stop watching him even when he was a dark fleck on the burning sea, and she could not stop smiling. There was the patch full of harbor seals threading brown and gray stitches in and out of the waves. There was the patch where Gentian was born, and the one where Gentian’s child was born, and the one where Melanthos caught the wild pony among the tors and rode it down the cobbled streets of Stony Wood. There was the patch with the stone wood in it, long streaks of brown and gray and ivory; she looked at it and saw the mysterious shapes. Stone or trees? they asked as always. Were we once alive?
Mostly she saw the sea.
It unwound the long banners of its waves across her days, constantly across her thoughts. It showed her its secrets, the oysters making their pearls, the mermaids among its corals, the luminous, calm-eyed ghosts of those who had once walked on land, and who had their hearts stolen by the sea. Each wave spinning to the shore with its tumbling strands of kelp and mermaid’s hair called her name as it broke and foamed and hissed across the sand: Sel… Dark ancient eyes watched her, harbor seals and others, strangers from the deep. Sel, they cried in their rough, tumultuous voices. Come back.
She plied her thread, piecing past and future together, so that when she was done, one might become the other: she would be done with memory as well. There would only be the sea.
She put her needle down after hours of sewing. Something had disturbed her, she knew vaguely: something in the world. Besides, her eyes were tired and she needed to rest them on the stone trees or the distant tors. She made her way down and found Gentian sitting at the bottom of the steps in the middle of the morning.
She was alone. She had been crying again, not a sweet spring rain this time, but a full-blown cloudburst. Her nose was red; her eyes were red and green; her apron, already flecked with dough and flour, was patched with tears. Sel gazed at her remotely, puzzled, then sat down. She could fit on a step beside Gentian now; winding up and down the tower steps, living in the tower instead of the bakery, had whittled her smaller.
“What is it?” she asked as Gentian’s face disappeared into her apron. “Is it the baby?”
Gentian reappeared, powdery now, and a bit sticky. She shook her head, swallowed once or twice as she looked at Sel. “You’ve changed,” she whispered. “I don’t know where you’ve gone.”
“Nowhere,” Sel said surprisedly, while the sea spilled all around her, tugged at her, drawing back.
“You’ve been up there since yesterday!”
“Have I? I’m sorry.”
“You say that, and you come back into the world for an hour or a day, and then you vanish again when I turn my back!”
“I’m here now.” For some reason that did not comfort Gentian, whose eyes filled again, shiny with brine. Sel patted her hand. “Stop fretting,” she said, with a ghost of her old abrupt, booming voice that could halt a whale in its sounding. “You’re not a child. You’ve got one now. Leave me to my life.”
“I would,” Gentian said, “if I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“What—”
“If I thought you wanted life.”
Sel was silent. Oh yes, she thought, feeling the tide tangling in her hair, the seaweed winding its long fingers around her, guiding her into a realm beyond the wind. Oh, yes, life.
She heaved herself to her feet after a while, forgetting why Gentian was there. “I must get back to my work. I’m nearly finished.”
Gentian stared at her, pale now, her eyes so dry she must have already cried every tear. “With what?” she asked huskily.
“My cloak.”
“Will you come down to stay when it’s finishe
d?”
Sel nodded. “I won’t need the tower after that.”
Gentian’s face crumpled again. Sel dropped a hand on her head as she turned, having forgotten why she came down, and forgetting, as she settled again to her sewing, that she had ever left it.
The mirror caught her attention after a while, flashing as the mirror within the mirror within the other tower reflected a spark of light from something along the road. The woman in the tower paid no attention to the man riding down the road toward the tower. She was bent over her embroidery, her needle wheeling and diving like a gull. She had turned her loom sideways, Sel saw. The finished images fell to her feet now; she held the unworked linen in her lap. She was making an elongated figure of someone. She must have been working on it day and night, Sel thought, for the face hung invisibly past her knees, and she was busy with the hands now.
They were long and slender, jeweled, in motion against a complex background. A road, it seemed, wound through the fingers; trees were leafing out above the jewels. A small square of unworked linen lay like an empty field beneath one hand. Sel studied the image a moment, curiously. Then her eyes filled with tide; the threads in her hands flowed and tossed restlessly, flinging white stitches of spindrift against the gray.
She saw the riders in the mirror as she was shifting pieces around the floor to figure out the bottom line of her making. She envisioned it swimming, then unfolded, emptied, flattened now, stretched out to dry; this would go here, this maybe here… An unexpected color in the mirror caught her eye. She looked at it and saw the knight first, with his graceful, somber face, his long hair as black as mussel shell, his eyes like sea reflecting cloud. He rode a gold horse, with mane and tail of ivory. The dark red jewel on the hilt of his sword glinted at his knee.
After a while she took her eyes off him to study the second rider. She shifted forward, blinking, for a closer look. That lanky body, those bare feet, that wood-bark hair, knotted like vine… She whispered, astonished, “Melanthos?” She rode one of the wild, piebald horses from the plain, without a piece of harness on it. As Sel watched, Melanthos leaned forward bonelessly, whispered something in the horse’s ear, and it slowed its pace.
The Tower at Stony Wood Page 15