This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE TOWER AT STONY WOOD
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Ace hardcover edition / May 2000
Ace trade paperback edition / May 2001
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2000 by Patricia A. McKillip.
Cover art and book design by Kinuko Y. Craft.
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Dave,
mi corazón,
who gave me Loreena McKennitt’s “The Visit”
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
ONE
She saw the knight in the mirror at sunset.
He rode alone down a road along a river. Where the black cloak he wore parted over his surcoat, she glimpsed towers of gold; the cloak fanned behind his back down the horse’s golden flanks. The knight’s head was bowed, his face in shadow. The jewel in the pommel of the sword hanging from his saddle flashed a bloody crimson in the last ray of light. His hair, swept back and gathered into a silver ring at his neck, was black as jet.
She mused over him, scratching absently at a fleabite. Her own long, woody hair, tangled and bunched as if small animals lived in it, fell over kelp-dark eyes that glittered now and then with uncertain color. She brushed at the hair in her face, then touched the mirror in its plain round frame lightly, as if to hold the image in place. The horse’s steady pace might have found its unchanging rhythm across miles, across countries. The knight followed the water’s slow path toward night. That much she could see from the way the light faded, faster than the water flowed, all down the river, leaving it mysterious with color. Beyond the tall trees growing along the river, she could see little; she had no idea where in the world he might be.
Melanthos, someone called far below. She shifted on her straw pallet, slapping the air as at a mosquito’s whine. At that moment, entranced by the mirror’s dreaming, she did not recognize her name. But the knight raised his head abruptly, as if he had heard.
A strong, sun-browned face looked out of the mirror at her. His eyes were unexpectedly light, the color of water, of the blade at his knee. She studied him, wondering curiously at the grim set of his mouth, the mingling of apprehension and resolve that honed the taut, clean lines of his face. Without taking her eyes from him, she reached beyond the mirror on the stone window ledge for an untidy pile of thread. The knight rode out of the mirror. The images in it faded until only her own face remained, her intent, curious eyes. But she remembered his colors. They remained reflected in her mind’s eye: gold, blood, silver, night.
She sorted through her threads with slender, bitten fingers, chose a needle and a square of linen. She threaded the needle and began with his face.
The story would come later.
TWO
When the Lady from Skye rode through the gates of Gloinmere to marry Regis Aurum, King of Yves, an old woman in her retinue caught the eye of Cyan Dag as he stood in welcome with the knights of Gloinmere. Eager, as they all were, for a glimpse of the stranger who would be queen, he found his attention snared by the crone who turned her head to look at him as she passed. Her dark, softly crumpled eyes held his gaze as if, he thought, she recognized him. But he knew Skye only as a nebulous, unpredictable land along the western sea. It had been overrun, a century before, by the restless armies of Yves, who had not realized, until they conquered it, what a strange country they had made their own. Poets came out of Skye, and rumors of magic, and the odd warrior seeking a place in Gloinmere, with a cloak smelling of sheepskin and a name older than Yves. High on a wall, trumpeters blew a fanfare to the king’s bride. The old woman loosed Cyan’s eyes and disappeared into the patchwork swirl of dismounting guests. Cyan searched through the confusion; the Lady from Skye had apparently added herself to it.
The knights around Cyan had not been so distracted.
“Is she beautiful?” one demanded. “Or isn’t she?”
“She has a face like a fish.”
“She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life.”
“She’s too tall, and colorless as cloud.”
“I would lay my body in the mud for her to walk across. Anyway, the king looks like a bear.”
“Which is she?” Cyan asked, wondering what he had missed, and how.
“You didn’t see her, Cyan? How could you not?” A gauntlet pointed. “Look there. The gawky one with the king. It’s a marriage made of money.”
“There is no money in Skye,” he argued absently, finding nothing gawky with or without the king.
“Then it is a matter of peace.”
“Skye is always peaceful,” Cyan said, for Skye had paid tribute without comment for a century to the Kings of Yves, in return for being left unnoticed.
“Then it’s a matter of sorcery,” a dark knight beside him muttered sourly. “She bewitched him, and will bring her monstrous ways into Yves.”
Cyan felt a sudden tension at his back, a breath sharply drawn, the shift of metal in a scabbard. The raw, impoverished knights from Skye, drawn to Gloinmere’s wealth and power, took suggestions of sorcery personally. Cyan turned. His eyes, clear and light as rain, fell on them and they shifted.
He turned his gaze on the knight beside him and said mildly, “In a hundred years, nothing without honor has come out of Skye, not a knight, not a promise. Why would the king find anything less to bring back to Gloinmere?”
The dour knight blinked, yielded.
“Then it must have been,” he amended dubiously, “a matter of love.”
The shadow lifted over Skye; there was a soft laugh behind them. Cyan brought his attention back to the yard.
“I still haven’t seen her.”
“There—on the steps.”
Cyan looked, but missed her again. The company of knights moved then to follow the king to the hall. Their silken surcoats were bright with the symbols of family and rank: birds and animals, suns and shooting stars, pyramid
s and lightning bolts and the phases of the moon. Cyan wore three gold towers on a field of midnight blue. Through centuries, the towers had lost their doors and windows, had become only the idea of towers. It was an ancient emblem, but beyond honor and a name older than the king’s, his family possessed little. He had been brought to court by his father when he was twelve to be raised and trained with the young prince. Cyan grew up in the sprawling shadow his father had cast, and then out of it, abruptly, when he saved the newly crowned Regis’s life during a border brawl with the North Islands. Younger than most of the knights of Gloinmere, he wore his formidable reputation lightly. A tall, sinewy man, he carried his strength lightly as well; most recognized it too late. His hair, long and black, he kept neatly tied at his neck. His eyes rarely lost their calm, even when he fought.
He walked with the knights across the yard. A pale-haired figure going up the steps caught his attention, but it seemed laden with baggage. The guests had gone inside. They were nowhere to be seen in the hall, where brilliantly dressed lords and ladies waited to welcome the king’s bride more formally. The king’s bard, in a tabard of cloth-of-gold, softly played a ballad from Skye on his harp. The trumpeters had joined the ranks of other musicians and singers, their purple tabards mingling with blue, silver, scarlet, green. Cyan set his shoulders against a carved column of oak near the musicians and absently watched for the ambiguous beauty of Skye.
Cria came to him, as he hoped.
“You look pensive,” she said. “My lord Dag.”
He looked down into her smile. She had skin as white as peeled almonds, hair as dark as winter solstice, eyes the color of wild violets. She wore the green, gold-scalloped tabard of a singer. Her voice was deep, sweet. Late at night it grew smoky; embers flared in it. He lifted a hand to touch her and did not, remembering where they were.
“I was looking for the king’s bride,” he answered. “My lady Greenwood. Tell me: is she beautiful?”
“Gwynne of Skye? You haven’t seen her?”
“I was distracted.”
Her smile widened, amused. “By what? Another woman?”
“Yes.”
“Was she beautiful?”
“I have no idea. She had cobweb hair and eyes like new moons. She rode past me, her eyes caught mine, and in that moment that’s all I knew.”
“And in that moment she bewitched you, and you missed the Lady from Skye entirely. Beware the sorcery out of Skye, my lord. Who was she?”
“Someone’s grandmother, most likely. Still.” He hesitated; Cria watched him curiously. “She looked at me as if she knew me.”
“Perhaps she only wanted to.” Her eyes fell away from him then; her smile began to fade. She glanced at the musicians; the clusters of color were growing, but as yet no one had called them to order.
Familiar with her expressions, he asked, “What’s wrong?”
Her shoulders moved, fidgeting as against a hold. “My father is here for the wedding. I will not dare come to you.”
Again his hand resisted its desire to fill itself with her soft, cloudy hair, to measure her eyelashes against his thumb. “I’m sorry,” he breathed.
“So am I.” She folded her arms tightly across her tabard, looked at him again, but without seeing him. “I don’t like what I think he is thinking, these days. He complains about the time I spend here among the king’s musicians; he complains about what I wear, about my hair—”
“Your hair?”
“As if he sees me suddenly as someone else. Someone who dresses more respectably and does not sing, who might bring him gold and meadows and more cows than anyone could milk.” He felt the blood leave his face; he linked his fingers behind his back, leaned against the oak, so that he would not reach out to her with both hands. She was seeing him now, a line as fine as thread across her brow. “I think he has someone in mind.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet. I do know that he will not ask me, he will tell me, after he has pledged me to whoever has enough of those things to buy me—”
“I will talk to him,” Cyan promised, wondering where, in a day, he could acquire meadows, hawks and hounds, gold to drink, if that would persuade her father. “I don’t,” he realized bleakly, “even have a roof of my own to offer you. I’ll talk to the king.”
She nodded. Her face was very calm, as if they had been discussing ancient ballads, and so pale it might have been carved of ice. “Soon,” she pleaded. There was a flurry of notes from flute and drum, then; the musicians began to sort themselves out. His hands clenched behind his back; he said softly as she turned, “I love you, my lady Greenwood. And I would let you sing.”
He saw the Lady from Skye then, entering the room amid a chattering entourage. She was quite tall, as tall as Regis, who moved to meet her. The braided coils of her hair were as white as gold could be and still be gold. Her eyes seemed to reflect a midsummer sky, an endless, timeless blue filled with light. The long, graceful slope of her profile might be considered fishlike, Cyan saw, but it seemed only to adjust the boundaries of beauty, so that what had been called beauty until then became too small a realm without her. Regis, with his brown, shaggy head, his massive shoulders, and all his teeth bared in a grin, looked more bearlike than ever. She laughed as he reached her, and lifted her left hand to his arm, shedding charm like sorcery throughout the hall.
The trumpeters blew a flourish. She smiled over the court, looking pleased by the noisy welcome, the music, the shouting, the applause. Regis’s voice, booming over the hall, fought the noise and took the field. Three days of feasting, he declared. Dancing, falconry, hunting, contests of strength and skill with weapons, and cups of gold awarded by the new queen as prizes. For three days, no words of anger or unkindness would be permitted, no quarrels addressed, all feuds must be held in abeyance. The king loved this pale woman from Skye, Cyan saw. His hands unclenched, fell to his sides. In that mood, Regis would be generous to other lovers; he would refuse to admit the possibility that love might be worth less than cows.
Gwynne of Skye spoke then. “My lords and ladies,” she said. “I am grateful for your welcome.” Her words had a crispness to them, like the bite of air in the west, that enchanted the court; it fell almost silent, listening for more. “I hope to know you and love you as Regis does. In Skye we are at the mercy of the weather, and we name the winds according to their fierceness. But, fierce or gentle, all the winds blow tales to us of the great court at Gloinmere, and I have been hearing them all my life. I never thought I would be standing here beside Regis Aurum on the day before our wedding, wondering what you all must think of this woman from the unpredictable west about to be called queen.”
She was interrupted then, with cheers and drums and an untidy chorus of horns. Someone pounded on Cyan’s shoulder, pushed a cup into his hand. He raised it with the king’s knights in salute to the Lady from Skye. Regis, his voice sending pigeons in the high windows flying, proclaimed the marriage of Lady Gwynne of Skye to the House of Aurum and the land of Yves in that hall, at that hour the next day, and let no one be a moment later.
And now let the feast of welcome begin.
“Watch her dance,” said a woman next to Cyan. He almost did not hear her, for the music had begun, and as always he listened for Cria among the singers. Then the strange urgency in the words struck him and he turned.
The old woman who had caught his eyes in the yard and stolen his attention from the beauty of Skye, captured it again. She was taller and straighter than he would have guessed; she looked as old as the world. Her white, rippling hair swept away from her seamed face down her back, almost to her knees. She wore a long, scarlet robe of fine linen, and a peculiar mantle, a crisscross of faded colors, draped over one shoulder and pinned with gold. One hand flashed gold at every knuckle, the other only a single, silver ring. She carried a harp so pale and plain it might have been made of bone.
Again her eyes held him, black as new moons and as secret.
“Watch—” h
e repeated, mystified.
“Watch her when she dances. She forgets herself in music and lets her true self show. You have ancient eyes. You will see it.”
The music and the chatter grew distant. Something glided over him: the chilly intimation of trouble. “See what?”
“What she is. You’ll see it in the sixth fingers on her hands, in the scales on her feet, in her distorted shadow, in her terrible eyes. That is not Gwynne of Skye. There is a woman trapped in a tower in Skye, who cannot free herself, who dares not even look at the world for fear of death. Will you find her, Cyan Dag? Will you free her, for the sake of those who love and need her?”
He swallowed the sudden dryness in his throat. “The king’s true bride is imprisoned somewhere in a tower in Skye?”
“You saved your king’s life once before. Will you help him now?”
“But how do I—how do you know these things?”
“Watch the lady the king will marry. She will show you herself what she is.”
“Who are you?” His voice had gone.
“I am the Bard of Skye.” Her ancient eyes looked still as well water and as measureless. “I was trained, long ago, to see what exists and to say the word for it. The woman who calls herself Gwynne of Skye can hide nothing from me. But I can do nothing; your king would never believe me. In this land, a bard speaks only through music; words may be as fickle for them as for anyone. In Skye, it is said that the bard can change the world with a word. You see with your heart, Cyan Dag. You recognized me, in the yard.”
“I don’t know you,” he whispered.
“You saw me instead of that false queen. You recognized what is true. We need you.” The dark in her eyes trembled slightly, well water disturbed by the first drop of rain. “All of us in Skye. And all in Yves. Your seeing eyes, your steadfast heart. Help us.”
It was the second longest night of Cyan’s life.
Perversely, the lady did not dance. She moved among Regis’s court after the feast, learning names and faces. Her eyes, always smiling, quickened when she met Cyan.
“The king has spoken of you, my lord,” she said as he bent stiffly over her hand, counting fingers. “Of your courage, and great skill, and of your very long friendship. So I must conclude that your three towers had their origins in Skye, since I think that everything extraordinary must have come somehow from my country. Even the king.”
The Tower at Stony Wood Page 1
