The Tower at Stony Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  It was a small thing compared with the sorceries he had met in Skye: a splinter of silver that caught briefly in his eyes. But it brought him to a halt.

  He stood staring at her, his sword poised to strike, his body trembling with the effort that stopped the blow. She did nothing else: her upraised hand, long-boned and slender, with the plain band of silver on the longest finger, was the only magic he recognized. He saw her clearly then, the face that had terrified him, that he had worn like a talisman over his heart, that he had hated, that for an instant and forever he had loved.

  He could not move.

  When, or how, she disappeared, he did not know; she had already blurred behind his tears before she left him. Still he did not move for a long time after that, feeling the pain of his failure, his helplessness, like a weight over his thoughts and body, as if he had been cast in iron and left like a statue in the abandoned courtyard. Finally, wearily, he sheathed his sword, remembering the long road between Skye and Yves, and the dangers still converging on Gloinmere. He swallowed the rust and charred, cold ash of bitterness, and walked out of the dark archway through the tower walls to find his horse.

  Three Sisters rose around him, flooded with light from the setting sun. He stared at them, at the meadow grass under his feet, at the little stream where the gelding was drinking, at the squat black tower he had just left. The confusion welled through him again; he wanted to beat answers out of the tower with his fists, but it would not answer, he knew; it never did.

  “How do I find my way out of you?” he shouted at the blank, dreaming faces of the hills. “When will you let me go?”

  They did not answer, either. He called the gelding, and mounted slowly, wondering if all the paths to come in his life would loop forever back to those three hills, that tower. He turned the gelding away from the sun, toward what he hoped with all his heart was Yves.

  Someone cried, “Wait!”

  He reined, recognizing Melanthos’s voice. She rode up beside him, barefoot and tangle-haired, her horse whuffing nervously at the stolid gelding. Cyan did not look at her; she had to wheel her mount close to his to see his face.

  She whispered after a moment, “What is it? Was she dead?”

  His head rose abruptly; he found her eyes. “What do you—how do you—”

  “I found this,” she said, her voice small, shaken. “In the tower in the stone wood. It’s not one of mine. I came looking for you. I wanted to know.”

  He gazed wordlessly at the embroidery she opened. The dark-haired knight with the three gold towers on his surcoat walked out of the dark tower onto a swath of light from the setting sun. He was alone, except for the face in the silver disk over his heart, barely visible, a stitch or two of blue and gold beneath the jagged lines of power worked across the silver.

  Cyan raised a hand to the disk, pulled it out of his shirt. She was still with him, harrowing his life. His hand closed over it, to snap the chain, fling the disk into the grass. But he kept it; it had saved him, he remembered starkly, from water, from fire, from Thayne Ysse’s blade, from the dragon.

  Melanthos was still watching him, her strange eyes questioning, disturbed. He said painfully, “She is free. But I think—there is a reason that she was trapped in the tower, and I might have set someone very dangerous to Yves loose in the world. I must get back to Gloinmere to warn the king. Also—” He sighed, shook his head, one hand splayed over his eyes. “There is the matter of Thayne Ysse and the dragon. He took it, to help him war with Yves. While I stayed here to free—” He stopped again. Melanthos’s hand closed around his wrist.

  “My mother,” she finished. He dropped his hand, oddly surprised. “I’m sorry. We kept you here. No one—no one would have guessed that the tale would end like this. We never thought the woman in the tower might be dangerous.”

  He was silent, gazing at Melanthos, remembering how her face had changed, when he had last seen it, beneath the changing colors of her mother’s power. He whispered, words transforming an image in his mind, “The woman in the tower.”

  “Which?” Melanthos asked, perplexed. “My mother? Or the woman in your disk?”

  “Your mother. She has grown very powerful. I saw Thayne Ysse take the same fires from the dragon that your mother drew out of herself.”

  “Because of you.”

  He shook his head quickly, remembering the strange, masked face of the selkie. “No. She sewed my towers back together, and then she freed herself. I did nothing.”

  “You went with her into the sea. You wouldn’t let her go alone. She had to return to the human world to rescue you.”

  “I didn’t dare let go of her.” He smiled a little, brushed her tangled, smoky hair with his fingers. “It was you who called her back. Thank you for finding me again.”

  “I had to, when I saw this. You, walking out of the dark tower alone—she must have embroidered it.”

  “She saw me coming,” he said bitterly.

  “Then she was here in this tower all the time?”

  “She must have been. Sidera said that this tower is best at seeming.” He gathered his reins, an eye to the setting sun. “I must go. I want to find my way out of these hills before nightfall.”

  “Come back to Stony Wood,” she begged. “Tell my mother about the woman, about Thayne Ysse’s dragon and the danger to Gloinmere. I don’t know anything about war, or the world outside of Skye. But if Gloinmere is in danger because of sorcery from Skye, then how long can Skye itself stay peaceful?”

  “I don’t know. But at least you have Sel to fight for you. I can’t stay any longer in Skye; I have been away far too long.” He urged the gelding again toward Yves, and raised a hand in farewell to the selkie’s strange-eyed daughter, whose eyes, as they watched him, seemed to have lost their glinting lights and become as dark and secret as the stones behind her. He took her fey smile with him out of the hills.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Thayne Ysse sat in the dragon tower arguing with Craiche. Behind them, their father searched his books for a spell that would, he said, turn the dragon invisible over Yves, so that no one would see the path it took toward Gloinmere, only the mysterious devastation that charred the earth as the army from the North Islands marched through Yves.

  “You can’t go alone to Gloinmere,” Craiche insisted. “If you get killed, the dragon will escape, or be taken by someone in Gloinmere. Then who will protect the North Islanders? We’ll be slaughtered. By the same king, in one lifetime—”

  “There’s not enough magic in Yves to string a bow with, let alone capture a dragon,” Thayne said tersely. “And nothing will happen to me. You stay here with our father. Someone has to.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “So am I, of course,” their father said, glancing up from a book. “I’ll take the dragon if you fall, Bowan. Leave Regis Aurum to me. I have a score to settle.”

  “Of course,” Thayne said, reining in his temper. He dropped his head in one hand, drew his fingers back through his hair, and straightened again. Craiche watched him with an obdurate, maddening calm. “If I die in Gloinmere, so will you. And then who will rule the North Islands?”

  “It won’t matter,” Craiche said softly. “You know that. If you fail in Gloinmere, Regis Aurum will send his army here and the only thing left alive when they finish with the North Islands will be the sand crabs.”

  Thayne was silent, knowing that Craiche was probably right. He said harshly, “Then what? Should I stop this war?”

  “It will be inevitable, when Regis Aurum finds out about the gold. And the dragon. And you.”

  Thayne shifted restively, stilled himself. Craiche had changed in the past weeks. Thayne himself had changed his brother from a clear-eyed, reckless boy who laughed at fate to a young man driven, more deeply even than Thayne, to extract justice out of Yves, and the ancient powers of Ysse out of Thayne. Craiche had sat through every war council Thayne had called; he had an answer for every argument Thayne could raise. Even his smil
e had changed; it flashed out then, deceptively sweet, edged with danger.

  “Besides, I want to see Regis Aurum’s face when he finds a dragon in his yard.”

  Thayne rubbed his eyes. He slept badly, those days, still disturbed by dreams. “I can force you to stay,” he heard himself say. “I could seal the walls around this house so that you could not find the gates, or see out any window, or find your way to the top of any wall.”

  “I know that spell,” their father said.

  Craiche only looked at Thayne patiently. “But you won’t, or you wouldn’t have told me that.”

  “Craiche. Please.”

  “Please what? You don’t have to ask. You just told me so.” He paused, no longer smiling, his eyes quizzical, curious. A thread of uncertainty worked itself across his brow, as if he had seen too far into Thayne. He reached out impulsively, let his hand drop between them on the table. “What are you afraid of?”

  A woman in a dream, Thayne thought. A feeling in my bones.

  “Something,” he admitted finally to Craiche. “Something feels wrong. I’m not seeing something I should see. I’m doing everything we planned, but I’m missing what’s standing under my nose and shouting—”

  “I found it!” Their father spun across the floor behind Thayne, dropped a tome, weighty with gold leaf and pearls, in front of Thayne. “Here. Do what this says, Bowan, and the dragon will become invisible even in the noonday sky.”

  Thayne slumped wearily over the book. Despite himself, the words, in a precise and graceful script, charmed their way into his thoughts.

  He looked at Craiche, who said, “It’s not a bad idea. If you keep the dragon quiet, no one will know we’re coming until we’re already there, disrupting the king’s dinner in Gloinmere. He won’t have a chance to prepare for us.”

  “Cyan Dag will prepare him.”

  “Only if he gets there before we do.”

  “There must be rumors of dragons in Yves by now. Anyone dropping a hook off a boat on the north side of the channel would see it.”

  “Maybe,” Craiche said. “But who would believe it?” He bent down, looking under the table for his crutch, neatly avoiding Thayne’s eyes. “We should leave soon. The men are armed, the horses are shod, the dragon lord of Ysse has nothing left to learn—”

  “That,” Thayne said soberly, “is what I’m afraid of: what I will not learn until we face the king in Gloinmere.”

  He spent his dreams, as always during those nights, in the company of the harper from Skye. Sometimes she played her harp, a single deep note over and over again, measured to his heartbeat. Sometimes she spoke in a language he did not know, the words urgent, compelling, so that he twisted his thoughts into knots trying to understand. And then she would speak the one word that would wake him like a cold slap of water from a bucket.

  Craiche.

  He interrupted her that night, in the midst of her dire, incomprehensible chattering. “All right!” he shouted at her. “Then tell me what to do. You tell me. Tell me. You sent me to find the dragon! What did you expect me to do with it?”

  She was silent, so silent he wondered if he had died in the middle of his dream. Then she smiled, and he knew he must be dead, because he was more afraid than he had ever been in his life.

  She told him.

  A morning later, before the sun rose, he cast a spell over the dragon, a web of words and air that wound around it strand by strand, and hid all its glittering scales, its massive claws, the slitted, golden pools of its eyes. He finished finally at sunrise, and found the dragon’s shadow still underfoot, with the bulky shadows of packs and arms, and Craiche’s crutch dangling from behind one wing. Thayne opened the eye in the bole of the staff Craiche tossed him, and let the shadow flow into it. He found his father beside him, gazing at the empty sand where the dragon had lain outside the tower. It had melted, here and there, into hard, shimmering pools of glass.

  “You are Ferle’s heir, Thayne,” his father said with wonder. “You were born with all the magic of Ysse. But what have you done with Craiche?”

  “I can still see him,” Thayne said. He embraced his father tightly, moved as always by the briefest recognition. “Stay well and safe.”

  “My greetings to Regis Aurum.” His father gave the absent king his tight, wolfish smile. “I would bring them myself, but someone must guard the secrets in this tower.”

  “No one could do it but you.”

  “Bring his crown back with you, Bowan.”

  “I will.”

  The dragon lowered its neck. To his father’s eyes, and the eyes of men watching over the wall, Thayne knew he must be mounting air. But his father only raised a fist in salute and farewell, before Thayne turned himself invisible.

  “I can’t see you,” Craiche breathed as Thayne coaxed the dragon above the sea. “Or the dragon. I can’t see anything but air beneath me.”

  Thayne put a hand over Craiche’s eyes. “See out of mine, then,” he said. He lifted his hand, aware of Craiche in his mind, a thread of quicksilver thought, restless, unpredictable. He added, as Craiche blinked at him, “For a change.”

  Craiche turned to look back at Ysse, a quarter moon of land hanging above the mainland in a sea of silver fire. “Where are the boats?” he asked after a moment. “They should be starting across the channel by now. We’ll have to wait for them.”

  “They’re not coming.”

  He felt the quicksilver flash of astonishment behind his eyes before Craiche swung around to stare at him. “What do you mean they’re not coming?”

  “I—”

  “You bought half the horses in north Yves, and arms from every trader beyond Yves—”

  “So we’re armed,” Thayne said evenly. “I gave orders last night for the army to stay on the islands unless I send for them.”

  “You mean until—”

  “No.” He felt the dragon fire in his eyes then, a wash of gold that blurred the sea and stopped Craiche’s breath.

  “It’s you and me and this dragon against the king in Gloinmere.”

  “Why?” Craiche whispered.

  “It’s a promise I made to someone.”

  “What promise?”

  Thayne didn’t answer that. He smiled thinly, and dropped a hand on Craiche’s shoulder. “The dragon alone could destroy Gloinmere. So could I. There’s no one in all of Yves who could fight me.”

  “But they wanted war—they wanted another chance at Regis Aurum and his knights! With you and the dragon protecting them, they could have taken Gloinmere, and crowned you King of Yves with Regis Aurum’s crown!”

  “I know.”

  “Then why?”

  Thayne looked at him silently, feeling himself, with all his power, balanced on the thin edge of a blade, halfway between all he wanted and what he most feared. He said, “Don’t fight me over this. You’re with me now because you are the measure of what I win or lose in Gloinmere.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want you to understand.” His fingers dug fiercely into Craiche’s shoulder. “I never want you to understand. All I want you to do is stay alive.”

  He saw himself suddenly out of Craiche’s eyes, in an odd merging of their sight: a honed, powerful figure, the dragon fire flaring and ebbing in his eyes, and all the ancient forces of Ysse in his mind, the first Lord of Ysse in a thousand years who could take all he wanted from the world, but for something even more powerful that restrained him.

  “Who,” Craiche whispered, “made you promise?” They had left the sea behind by then; land, green with summer, flowed in its own frozen waves and hollows beneath them. Thayne’s hand loosened, hovered for an instant near Craiche’s face, which was turning hourly, it seemed, into the feral, graceful, impetuous ghost of their father’s. He shook his head, again without answering. “Just stop warring with me. I am the Lord of Ysse and you are my crippled younger brother who would be walking on two legs instead of three now if you had listened instead of fight
ing seven years ago. Let me do what I will.”

  They reached Gloinmere near dusk, a day later. Thayne stripped the cocoon of invisibility from the dragon as it settled in the yard. The whole of the castle on Ysse could have fit in the yard at Gloinmere, but not even the high walls and towers could dwarf the dragon, who peered into window and turret at whim. It snorted at the astonished guards running along the walls; they tumbled back into one another, arrows and crossbows flying like straw in a storm. Thayne heard an uproar from within as the dragon laid its smoldering eye against a window in the hall. The doors flew open; guards and knights, brandishing sword and pike and bow, started down the steps. Thayne raised the staff in his hand, sent a tidal wave of cold fire that swept into them, battered them off their feet, and sent them sliding helplessly back into the hall. The fire died; Thayne waited. A few unarmed men came out, quickly pulled those fallen and washed against the walls back into the hall. The doors slammed shut again. The dragon, raising its long neck higher than the highest tower, opened its jaws and loosed a butterfly of flame that turned the pennants flying there into cinders.

  The guards at the gates had vanished into their turrets. Along the walls, a helmed head appeared briefly here and there, then ducked back down again. Someone, not thinking too clearly, shot a burning arrow over the wall. The dragon, moving so quickly it startled even Thayne, picked the arrow out of the air like a frog snatching a fly, and swallowed it. A little flame drifted out of its teeth. It dropped its head over the high wall, and what was left of the guard fled into the towers.

  Thayne raised his voice. “Regis Aurum!” The bells in the high tower hummed. Craiche, his face puckered, dropped to his knees and put his hands over his ears. From within the hall came an answering volley of exploding crockery. “The North Islands have come to Gloinmere with their tribute to the King of Yves.”

  The doors swung open again. The King of Yves strode out furiously, alone, his broadsword in one hand. He stopped abruptly, the expression on his face changing as he raised his head and kept raising it, until he finally found the dragon’s eyes, each one as broad as an open door, staring down at him. Thayne saw him swallow. He looked at Thayne then, seeing him instead of the vague, pinched, impoverished face that every man from the North Islands wore in his eyes.