The Tower at Stony Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “So Cria should know I love her. Even if I never return. She shouldn’t think—she shouldn’t wonder if every word I ever spoke to her meant something else. She shouldn’t relive every moment we had together in her mind, wondering what she had done wrong, what she did that drove me away—”

  He saw the tide wash into her eyes; they glittered with underwater colors. “It wouldn’t be like that with them. And I need this. I need this more than they need me.”

  “Yes,” he said, and reached out to hold the broad, strong hands that had put his towers back together. “You need. But it can wait. Can’t it? The sea will be there all your life on land. Can’t you stay human awhile longer, to finish your loving on land? The sea will wait for you. Joed disappeared and left you grieving. You will pass that grief to all those who love you here, if you leave them like this.”

  “So you might have.”

  “So I might have,” he whispered. “That was the only time in my life that I have been terrified of someone. I might have lost what I love most, running like that out of Gloinmere because of a woman with eyes like a snake and silver scales on her feet, who routed me with a laugh…”

  She gazed at him, her eyes dry again, deep and mysterious as what sang ceaselessly beyond the tower. He searched for an answer in them, found neither yes nor no to his pleas, only the fathomless, color-flecked darkness. He looked deep, shifting slightly, his hands tightening on her hands, sensing the human pain they shared beneath the mystery. Then he remembered the inhuman figure she had become within the tower, something masked, powerful in its strangeness because he knew no word for it. Something that did not need to be rescued; it would free itself.

  Beyond her, the mirror changed.

  She felt him start, and turned. “There,” she whispered, as blues and birds shaped themselves, and the rippling hair, the familiar face, bent over needlework, the needle just drawn out of the cloth and pulled taut.

  Wonder caught his throat; he swallowed dryly, waiting for the needle to fall, her face to shift a little, perhaps lift a moment, so that he could see her more clearly.

  Nothing happened. Her hand held the needle in the air; her lowered face, with its pale crescents of lashes, its curved, unsmiling mouth, did not move. He bent toward the mirror, puzzled by the stillness. Then he realized what he was seeing, and the breath went out of him as if he had been struck.

  Sel saw it, too, then, coming up on her knees. “She’s thread—she’s made herself into thread!”

  He cried out in despair, “Where is she? Is she dead?”

  “No—she did this herself! We watched her sewing herself into cloth. She’s made a picture of herself for the mirror to see, something that will sit and embroider forever and never leave.”

  “But where—”

  “She freed herself. She left the tower.”

  He stared at Sel, his heart hammering. “Then she’s dead.”

  “Is she?”

  “If she leaves the tower—”

  “But she hasn’t left. Look. She’s still there.”

  He closed his eyes against the tears of terror and frustration, opened them again to see the motionless image, the lady in the tower, trapped forever with no way out but death, and no word to speak except in thread.

  He heard Sel move then, and the rustlings of her threads; he turned blindly, caught her wrist before he even saw the selkie face. “No—”

  “She made that,” the selkie said again, insistently. “She made that like I made this, to escape. She made her choice. Maybe she is dead, but she took her chance and she didn’t die trapped.”

  He did not answer, just tightened his grip. He heard the sea then, waves pounding against the cliff, pouring over it, into it, all around them, though he felt nothing but sunlight. Her breathing, he thought, dazed. She is turning the air she breathes into tide. He felt something slap at him then, like a wall of water trying to drag him away. The second time, it jarred him to the bone. He clung grimly to her wrist, trying to find breath. Wind smelling of brine moaned through the tower; spindrift fell like rain over them. He felt the tower tremble underfoot.

  Just before it fell he heard Melanthos’s voice. “Mother!” she cried in horror through wind and the wave that smashed through the tower. Cyan, swept off his feet, no longer knew what he held, human flesh and bone, or selkie sea bones and slick, silky skin. He only held fast with all his strength, and went with her into the sea.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The selkie, diving in and out of the waves, felt the land drag at her, no matter how fast, how frantically she swam toward the secret kingdoms. Even in the pale, freckled seal’s body plunging into the weltering, briny heart within each rising crest, she could not outswim her own name. It clung to her, tugged at her, like land, like love, not letting her go free. Voices cried at her, seal and human, dead and alive. The human voices tore at her selkie skin, caught at threads of her awareness of wind and water and scent, and unraveled them. They refused to let her be. They made their own demands, voices fighting with the wind, with gulls, with the sharp, imperative barking of the seals, trying to tell her something. Finally, fretted by these vague human disturbances, deep within the selkie skin, Sel opened an ear and listened.

  She heard Melanthos’s voice first, crying somewhere in the waves. Appalled, she stopped her wild surge toward open sea. Then she felt the odd pull on her body. The knight, still clinging to her with both hands now, weighted with sword and boots full of water, was racked like a fish out of water, trying to breathe. Melanthos could swim, but Sel didn’t like the sound of her voice: she had never before heard Melanthos afraid. She started to dive, then arched upward again at the bubbles that fled out of the knight when they went under. His fingers loosened.

  She felt a moment’s panic and became herself suddenly, treading water in the middle of the sea while her skirt wrapped around her like seaweed, and her hair plastered itself over her face. The knight began to slide away from her, go without her, like Joed had, into the country beneath the waves. She caught at something as he drifted down: the silver chain around his neck. Floating on her back like an otter, she dragged him up and into her arms, turning him to face the sky.

  Then she bellowed for the harbor seals.

  They came at the names she called, the old, secret names that leaped out of memory straight to her tongue. They flung themselves off stones, streaked from under the docks, cutting through the water beneath the breaking waves, invisible until they came close and she saw their swift, streaming bodies beneath the green, surfacing into light. She spoke to them, remembering words now. They nudged the knight away from her, rolling him over, balancing him among their bodies. He did not move. His face, pale and still as shell, dipping and rising above the restless swells, twisted her heart. But she had no more time for him; she had to see to Melanthos.

  How she got to her daughter, she was not sure. A wish brought her, it seemed, or the sheer edge of fear that cut through time and the bewildering tangle of wind and tide. She was just there, suddenly, beside Melanthos, who was at least barefoot in the water, and who had shed her clothes down to her shift. She was beating the sea with her fists, as if it were a locked door, and screaming Sel’s name. Her wet hair blinded her; when Sel caught her arm, she swung a mole’s face at Sel and gulped in a passing wave. While she choked, more seals caught up with them. Sel draped her over one and sent her, still coughing, toward land.

  She saw then what she had done to the tower. It had broken like a rotten tooth, sending a small avalanche of stone and grass and raw earth down the cliff to scatter into the waves. Sel stared at it, still moving to the break of waves like something half-sea, half-human, a mermaid without a tail, a seal with hands and feet and a woman’s face.

  She dove deep into the water, swam until she could hear, beneath the rushing, soughing waves, the faint, wild singing in her blood. Memories came more quickly now, things fallen deep into her mind, that had been fastened to coral or stone, and so overgrown with moss and weed t
hey had been unrecognizable for years. The tower falling into the sea had jarred them loose.

  She could do that, destroy something that old and magical with the force of her longing. She could become seal; she could become sea, or something so like it that sailors or fishers would see her only as a glint of light beneath the water. A realm existed within those glints, those half-caught glimpses that humans fashioned into tales or songs. Her father had taught her some of the songs. No doubt he wished he hadn’t, when she left him. But he had taught her to be curious, and so she was, drifting in the dusk among the seals, listening. And so she heard Joed, whistling as he spread his nets on the sand to check the knots and pick the barnacles off. She recognized the song.

  A wave spun her this way and that, dragged her on her hands and knees along the sand. She rose out of the waves, streaming water, as unsteady on her feet as if she had yet to learn to walk in the world. Joed was not there to greet her with that look, startled and enchanted, as if some sea tale had taken shape under his nose. That was many years ago, and she had learned to walk in shoes, and cry true tears, and to forget. As she waded ashore, seals passed her, still carrying the knight on the raft they had made of their backs. Lurching to dry sand, flippers struggling, they parted company at the knot of staring humans. The knight hit the sand hard, and came to life abruptly, retching brine. Sel heard the long, harsh draw of his breath as she stepped out of the tide.

  They all had Joed’s look in their eyes: stunned, transfixed. Gentian was there, dropping pearls out of her eyes, clinging to the baby like a spar. Anyon looked as if he had tumbled down the cliff after the tower, his clothes and skin grimy and torn. He was holding Melanthos, who was weeping endlessly, soundlessly, overflowing with water, but otherwise motionless. Someone else had come down: a stranger, who seemed to know the knight. She stood beside him as he learned how to breathe again, but her eyes were on Sel.

  Sel faced them, twisting water out of her hair and skirt, as mute as she had been when she walked out of the water to Joed. A wave, washing around her ankles, carried a shadow in, left it lying on the sand. She picked it up: her selkie skin, sodden and torn, but whole. She shook it out, held it up to the sky, looked at the blue through its eyes.

  Then she sighed. “I couldn’t leave you,” she said. She went to put her arms around Gentian first, because Melanthos was stronger. Gentian burst into noisy sobs; the baby wailed, startling the knight, who began coughing again.

  Melanthos spoke first through the din, her voice high and unsteady. “Where exactly were you going?”

  “Back home.”

  “Home.” She took a step out of Anyon’s arms, her face as white as spume. “Where?”

  “In the sea. Where do you think you got your eyes?”

  Melanthos swallowed. “I don’t—I didn’t—” She was still streaming tears, as if she were wringing herself dry. She put her hands over her mouth and whispered, “What is it like?”

  “Ancient,” Sel said slowly, remembering. “Strange, to human eyes, like the stone wood. Beautiful in ways you wouldn’t recognize at first. Like this world.” She drew a breath of its fishy, salty, mist-dank air, and was surprised how good it tasted, like Brenna’s bitter ale, or Joed’s skin.

  “You came out of the sea?” Anyon said, struggling. “You were born there? Like a fish?” He touched Melanthos tentatively. “What about her? And Gentian?”

  “Half-fish.” She went to Melanthos then, took her daughter’s face between her hands, and brushed at the tears with her thumbs. “Don’t cry. It unnerves me. I’m back now.”

  “I unnerve you,” Melanthos said, sniffing thickly. “I unnerve you.” Her voice rose suddenly. “You turned into a seal! And look what you did to the tower! You were running away from us to die, or to live at the bottom of the sea or something—what exactly are you?”

  Sel opened her mouth, closed it. They watched her, even the baby, their eyes wanting answers. The knight, quieter now, the color coming back into his face, had no suggestions; he looked as curious. “I don’t know,” Sel answered finally, helplessly. “I don’t know what I am in this world.”

  The stranger’s eyes drew at her suddenly, amber and full of light. She was quite tall, with long, heavy black hair, that fell straight as anchor line past her knees. Her face was brown as earth, young-old, still beautiful, but beginning to predict its future. She smiled as Sel looked at her, and Sel felt oddly as if the wind had glanced at her, or the grass. As if she had been recognized by something wild.

  “My name is Sidera,” the woman said before Sel could ask. She laid a long, graceful hand, ringed with a silver band, on the knight’s shoulder. “I have been looking for this man. I didn’t expect to find him carried out of the sea and dropped at my feet by seals.”

  “I never meant for him to come with me,” Sel said ruefully. “But he wouldn’t let go of me and I forgot about him when I changed. I nearly drowned him. Are you all right now?” she asked Cyan, “Other than soaked and shivering, like Melanthos?”

  He gazed at her, still stunned. “I came to find a woman in a tower,” he said, his voice worn ragged with brine. “I had no idea she would tear the tower apart and rescue both herself and me.”

  “I brought you to the wrong tower,” Melanthos said abruptly. She had ducked into Anyon’s dry hold, her wet shift clinging like skin, the goose bumps rising on her arms. She had, to Sel’s relief, finally stopped crying. “I was hoping you could say something to help my mother, do something. I thought that maybe she would talk to you, if you made it past the magic. You didn’t seem afraid of anything. Even dragons.”

  “There’s still a woman in a tower,” he said slowly. “In my mind if nowhere else. I must find out what happened to her. If she is alive or dead, or still trapped. There are others who also need to know.”

  Sel nodded. “Then you must.” She pushed the wet hair back from her face, and felt the sand caught in her clothes. “But not at this moment,” she added, feeling a little weary herself, suddenly. “You could use a rest, and a splash of something hot. Anyon, he left his horse next to the tower—it’s probably halfway across the plain by now. Could you—”

  “I’ll call him,” Sidera said, and frowned a moment at the sand, so still that Sel thought she had become invisible and left an image on the air. She raised her head, and all their watching faces lifted at a whinny above their heads. The gelding peered over the cliff at them. Sidera smiled.

  “We’ve met,” she explained, or thought she did.

  “It’s the way I called the seals!” Sel exclaimed. “You feel them in your mind. You think their thoughts.”

  Melanthos gazed openmouthed from Sidera to Sel and back again. “Teach me,” she begged. “Can you?”

  But it was Sel the woman looked at when she answered. “I will.”

  Sel took them all home with her, sent Anyon to Brenna’s for ale, and Gentian to her own home for more blankets and some of Rawl’s clothes for the knight. She went to the bakery for what was left of the loaves and tarts, disentangling herself from a crowd at the door wondering if she and Melanthos had fallen down the cliff along with the tower, and that was why no one was there to sell them bread.

  “It was old,” she said absently of the tower. “It just fell apart. No one was hurt.”

  Of the strangers glimpsed in the streets of Stony Wood, she said only, “A knight of Yves, passing through. And his friend.” Beyond that she would not say, not even when someone asked why her hair and boots were damp, and why the knight left a trail of water on the cobblestones, and where Melanthos had left the rest of her clothes. But her own children were not dissuaded. Even Gentian had left Rawl’s supper to his imagination and stayed with Sel. Her mermaid’s eyes had lost their torment; now they looked clearly at Sel, wanting to know. Melanthos, bundled in blankets and dropping crumbs of almond tart among them, watched Sel like a hawk watching a hare. The knight, dressed in fisher’s clothes and drinking ale, seemed still remote, a stranger, his own eyes haunted by his sear
ch, and by the face still visible beneath the scarred and blackened disk that hung on Rawl’s old shirt. Sidera wandered among them silently, sometimes watching Cyan, sometimes Sel; she waited, too. Even Anyon, who fluttered within walls like a firefly in a jar, sat beside Melanthos patiently, his eyes on Sel. Sel stopped finally, stopped pacing, patting the baby, straightening clothes drying beside the fire, checking the tide line in cups of ale. It was like being caught in a web, she thought, that their silence, their watching eyes had made; they left her, finally, with no room to move.

  She sat down on a stool beside the fire, looked at her daughters.

  “Once,” she said, awkward with the tale, for she had never told it before, “I lived in the country beneath the sea. I don’t know what I would have been to you if you had seen me then. Maybe there are no human words for it. I have to put human words on all my memories; that changes them. I had the best of all worlds, so I thought. I could swim with the whales, pick gold off the bottom of the sea, and push my face through the roof of that world to find the wind and sun, and watch the fishers and the folk who lived in air. Even in my world, with all the things that you might call magic, my father had great, strange powers. He could sing a sailing ship to sleep in a gale, slip it safely past the wind. He could build a palace out of a single pearl. He could heal a fish torn by the hook and tossed away, with the touch of his hand. He taught me things. I don’t know how much I can remember now, or if I can still do them, or what they might be worth to anyone in this world…

  “And so I lived between sea and land, not knowing that I wanted anything at all, until one day I heard your father whistle a song my father knew. I looked at him, all brown and hard and smooth, like a piece of driftwood, his eyes like a seal’s eyes, curious and kind, and I took shape out of whatever I had been at that moment, and walked out of the sea.