The Tower at Stony Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  But he joined his father anyway, just as his father ignored Thayne’s words. He gripped Thayne’s sleeve, pulled him to the book on the table. The table was a magpie’s nest of odd objects: papers, stones, bowls, candles, bones, jars, lenses, mirrors, dried herbs, feathers, a small, mummified bat. His father turned pages of the book awkwardly, shakily, with his bulging, painful hands. He had grown old long before his time, Thayne knew. He should have been still pepper-bearded and powerful, trimming Thayne’s hair with a broadsword in the training yard, and dreaming up ways to annoy Regis Aurum. He tapped at a drawing of someone blowing sails with his breath, and said to Thayne, “You could do this, Ferle. You summoned a fog on a cloudless day over the sea and hid the North Islands from an army from the south.”

  “I am not Ferle. I am Thayne.”

  “You understood the language of seals.”

  “I am Thayne, Father.”

  “I know that,” his father said querulously. “Why do you think I called you here? You are my heir and you will be King of the North Islands.”

  Thayne started to answer, then didn’t bother. He glanced at the open book, brushed a mouse dropping off a page. “What did you want to show me?”

  “This.”

  “This” was a tower without a door or a window, ringed by a monstrous dragon breathing flame at a rider whose face had been blurred away by centuries of fingers turning pages. “Yes,” Thayne said patiently.

  “I want you to go there, Thayne.”

  Thayne looked at his father, oddly moved by the unexpected recognition. But who knew, he reminded himself, what “Thayne” meant anymore to his father, who might as easily consider him as real or unreal as Bowan and Ferle, just another ghost. “You want me to get charred into cinders by this dragon. Then who would remember that you are up here, to send you meals and firewood, and take you down to bed at night?”

  “You don’t always remember that,” his father complained lucidly.

  Thayne touched a glass jar of what looked like old moldering oysters without their shells. “I try,” he answered mildly. “What is this?”

  “Pearls.”

  “Ah.”

  “You will find a way.”

  “A way to do what?”

  “To fight the dragon. I taught you myself to fight. You were better than anyone but me.”

  “I still am.”

  His father blinked at him silently, confused, it seemed, by Thayne’s assumption that he was still alive. “You are,” he said politely, and Thayne leaned wearily over the book, his elbows on the table, fingers rubbing his eyes.

  “And so,” he said, quelling impulses to laugh, or weep, or crack the jar of pearls against the wall to reveal the true nature of the world to his father’s frayed mind. He gazed down at the dragon, which was drawn with surprising detail in faint red ink. It wound a double loop of its body around the tower; its open lizard’s maw revealed a great many even triangles of teeth. “And so what do I gain by disturbing this dragon?”

  “Gold.”

  Thayne grunted. Dragons grew gold, apparently, as oysters grew pearls; one meant the other interchangeably, without the threat of fire or death or the reek of decayed sea life.

  “I kill the dragon—”

  “Slay. It says here to slay.”

  “Slay the dragon and take its gold. And then—”

  “You free the North Islands from Regis Aurum.” His father’s voice was suddenly so level and cold that Thayne stared at him in wonder. His eyes were rimmed with yellow like a hunting cat’s. “Thayne Ysse. My son. You rule.”

  Thayne felt the small hairs prick on his neck. He watched his father, hungry for the strong, familiar, unyielding expression that even now faded, became uncertain, fretful. His father laid a hand on his shoulder, patted it awkwardly, trying to remember, Thayne saw, the name he had just spoken.

  There is no door, Thayne thought, gazing numbly down at the drawing. There is no door in the tower. No way in. No way out.

  He straightened. The thin archer’s windows framed slits of twilight purple and gray, the faint memory of gold. He said, “I’ll send Hael up with your supper. I’ll come back later and take you down. Don’t go by yourself; the steps are dangerous.”

  “Thank you, Bowan.”

  He walked down in the dark himself, feeling his way from step to crumbled, broken step in the spiraling staircase. At the bottom, he found his younger brother sitting on a step, reading by torchlight. At twelve, Craiche had fought their father to convince him that his rightful place was in a fishing coracle sailing to the mainland to stop Regis Aurum’s knights before they crossed the water. The battle had raged down the yard into the cow barn, where their father had left Craiche sprawling in a stall. But Craiche had followed anyway, which was why now, at nineteen, he dragged one withered leg behind him. He still had their father’s dauntless, reckless courage, all his love of the wind and the sea, the precarious life on the islands.

  He closed his book over a finger and looked up at Thayne. He was dark, like their father, with the same challenging, teasing smile in the face of the raw night wind. He asked, “How is he?”

  “Maundering,” Thayne said. “He keeps calling me Bowan.”

  “Which Bowan?”

  “His brother, I think. He died years before I was born. Did the sheep get penned?”

  “Sheep are penned, cows milked, boats are in, everyone accounted for and at supper, including the stranger who climbed into Dirdre’s boat while she was digging for mussels across the channel.”

  “What stranger?”

  “A woman with a harp.”

  Thayne grunted. “Good. I’ll send her up to play for our father.” He saw Craiche shiver. “Get inside and eat. You’re far too thin.”

  Craiche rose, balancing against the stones a moment, then pulling himself forward on his own. Sometimes, when his leg ached, he used a sword for a crutch; waving it at straying cows, with his sweet, rakish smile, he could make even Thayne laugh.

  They crossed the yard together. It was small, with thick stone walls and outhouses to slow the wind. The tower and the old castle loomed over it, both dark, sagging, ancient. Parts of the castle had been rebuilt with mortared stone, but not in Thayne’s lifetime. Possibly in Bowan’s, he thought sardonically, keeping an eye on Craiche as they went up the steps. At the top, Thayne set the torch in a sconce, then wheeled abruptly, not wanting more stone, more walls, wanting to clear his head in the night and wind, not listen to his household chew.

  “Go in,” he said shortly to Craiche. “Send the harper to our father after supper. I’ll bring them both down later.”

  Craiche lingered, looking at him curiously. “You’re eaten,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Something’s eating you inside.”

  “You would think,” Thayne said harshly, “that after all these years I would have learned not to want my father to remember my name.”

  Craiche was silent a moment; his smile flashed, edged but without bitterness. “I’d give my other leg for that,” he said simply. “I’d give my life to have Regis Aurum doddering in a tower instead of our father.”

  Thayne dropped a hand on his shoulder, jarring him off balance. He caught himself on Thayne’s arm, laughing a little. Thayne touched his hair. “Don’t say such things out loud. I’m the will and the sword of Ysse. You are our heart.”

  He was halfway across the yard when Craiche’s voice caught up with him. “Bowan was also Ferle Ysse’s grandfather. He spoke magic. He taught it to Ferle.”

  Thayne turned. In the dark, he could barely see Craiche’s face, a pale profile beneath the fire. “What?”

  “Something I read. You’re right about words. Bowan said they are full of wonder and danger, and they can change into themselves.”

  Thayne shook his head, trying to untangle that. “Poetry,” he decided, but Craiche did not laugh. He adjusted his stance on the steps, ratcheting himself around to face Thayne, his face entirely dark now, his hair bec
ome flame.

  “So that when you say cloud, the word itself becomes cloud. That’s how Ferle Ysse raised the fog that blinded an army on the sea.” He paused, letting Thayne contemplate that; Thayne, contemplating his windblown brother, wished he would go inside. Craiche added, “Or when you say, ‘I am the sword of Ysse,’ that’s what you become. Not just a dream. Not just something rusting in the scabbard.”

  Thayne drew a breath and loosed it. He said tersely, “You only have me to lose. I have you. And there’s our father and this house and this island—”

  “And sheep and boats—”

  “All,” Thayne said with sudden intensity. “Our lives. We need far more than rusty, pocked metal to wave at Regis Aurum. We have no arms, no money, and no power.”

  He could not see it, but he felt his brother’s smile flash across the night between them. “We have words.”

  Thayne watched him turn again, lift himself jerkily, limb by limb, puppet fashion, up the steps. He got himself inside, and Thayne went out the gates, which had not been closed since the North islands swore fealty to Yves seven years before.

  He went down a short path to the sea, which he found by starlight and memory, and sat down on a stone to watch the waves. Behind him, the tower on the cliff threw its weak, narrow oblongs of candlelight onto the incoming tide. He thought of his father, shut away from the world, nattering over his books, walking a labyrinth of past and present without a center, veering from one blocked path into another. He thought of Craiche, who went to battle smelling of cow dung and whom Thayne carried home in his arms. Where is the magic word, he thought, that will make him walk again? The tide, dark and silver, coaxed at his attention; he heard it from a distance, ebbing and circling, the birds crying above the deep over something that had died.

  He heard the harping woven into the sounds of the sea, inseparable as moonlight is inseparable from water. He listened thoughtlessly to the light, tender rills and phrases, until it seemed he breathed them out of the air, drew them deep into his bones, until his thoughts no longer coiled in endless tight circles around themselves, but flowed everywhere, as shapeless as water, touching everything. He could see the stars then, not just the night. He smelled the peculiar mix of sheep pasture and brine, Ysse and sea, and then, overwhelming them all on a wind from the mainland, the scent of Yves: its harrowed fields and rich forests, its mountains, its bloody earth.

  The harping drifted through his thoughts again, luring, coaxing, charming his attention. He rose finally, wanting to meet the harper, for he had not heard anything so lovely in a long time. She might look like her music, some part of him hoped foolishly, as if she were something conjured out of the old tales Craiche was always reading. Her song stopped before he got halfway up the steps. He quickened his pace a little, before she vanished back into the tale. But the harper stood talking quietly to his father. As Thayne entered, she looked across the room at him and smiled thinly, as if she had read his thoughts.

  Her face was seamed like a dried pool. Her eyes looked as though they had seen what existed before the world began, and taken their blackness from that. Her loose, white hair swept down past her knees. She was surprisingly tall and straight, for a woman so old; her arms, under the rolled sleeves of the long, gray tunic she wore, looked muscular from wielding the harp. Even that seemed ancient, unadorned, and the color of bone, as if she made her music out of something that had died.

  “Bowan,” his father said eagerly. “She knows the dragon.”

  “What?” Thayne, distracted, pulled his eyes from the secret black gaze and saw the tower in the open book his father still pored over.

  “It’s a tale out of Skye,” the harper said. Her voice had grown a trifle hollow, reedy with age, but it was still pleasing, tuned from all the songs she sang. Thayne sighed noiselessly. His father’s hand lay on the page as if his touch claimed dragon and tower and all that lay within.

  “So it’s a tale,” Thayne said, summoning patience.

  “No.” His father tapped the drawing with his forefinger. “The tower is in Skye, she said. And it is full of gold. You must be careful of the dragon, she said.”

  Thayne looked at her. “There are no dragons.”

  “There are dragons in Skye,” she answered.

  “And there is gold.” His father tapped the page again, where the faceless, armed figure rode toward the fire. “And there you are. My son.”

  Thayne gazed at the dragon, wondering which son his father saw: the one who stood before him, or the paper knight endlessly riding toward the tower. He turned to the harper again,

  “How do you know—”

  “I know,” she said, and he saw the memory of dragon in her eyes. “I am the Bard of Skye.” She raised her harp again, released a handful of sweet and haunting notes. “It’s a tale,” she said, “and it is true. Real and dream.”

  “Which?” he asked harshly, and knew her answer before she spoke.

  “Both.”

  “It’s gold I need for the North Islands. To eat, to wear, to build our boats—we’re already rich in dreams.” He did not say the word for war; it hovered in the air between them like an unplayed note.

  “I know some tales of the North Islands,” she said thoughtfully, and plucked a single string, as if to begin one. It ended there, on a dying note. “There was magic here, in Ferle Ysse’s time.”

  “A tale.”

  “Or true?” She raised her eyes; they held the expression she must have carried in her since she had watched the world begin. Behind her, his father was smiling, too, the familiar, wolfish, invincible smile that Thayne had not seen in seven years.

  “Thayne,” he said. “Go and bring that dragon’s gold to Ysse.”

  Thayne started to speak, stopped. Wonder swept like a wave through his heart at the name his father had given him. It seemed no longer the man he was, but the Lord of Ysse he might become. He turned, before he had to watch the smile fray apart into bewilderment, and went back down the tower steps, feeling his way in the dark. Crossing the yard, he smelled the mainland again, saw it crouched in the night across the narrow channel like some vast beast, its eye turned sleeplessly to the scattering of islands beyond its shore, its breath waiting to flame, its upraised claw to strike at any movement from the North Islands.

  He heard himself whisper, “A dragon to fight a dragon.”

  He felt something fierce, dangerous, as magical as hope rouse within him at the word, and he walked out of the gates to the sea.

  FIVE

  Melanthos saw the woman in the tower. She sat in light on an ornate chair covered with carved lions’ heads and roses. Melanthos could not see her face, only the white-gold hair that rippled down her back. She worked at a picture in thread on a broad round frame on a stand in front of her. From one side of the frame hung folds and swathes of unworked linen; from the other, transformed on its journey across the frame, bright images painted in thread poured down and piled on the stones.

  Melanthos, kneeling in her own tower among her swirls of threads, stared, transfixed, at the vision.

  The room seemed large; the window, its casement of colored glass open, was broad enough to sit in and look out. But the woman did not look at the world. She looked instead at the great round mirror angled across the window ledge to catch the scenes below. As she watched, her needle flashed ceaselessly, quickly. She paused only to replace one needle with another from a long row of them pinned to one side of the frame, trailing different colors down the unworked linen.

  Melanthos’s eyes slid warily to the mirror. But she did not find herself there, watching the woman in another mirror within another tower. She saw lilies massed against the tower wall, a shallow river flowing past them, a road beyond the trees along the riverbank, and on the other side of the trees, furrowed fields beginning to flush green. A man rode through the mirror, too vague, translated between mirrors, for Melanthos to see clearly. Silver flared like the glance of light off armor. The woman’s hand rested briefly on the
linen; her head turned very slightly toward the open casement.

  She bent over her work again, her long hair trailing over her shoulder, shielding her eyes from the world.

  Melanthos, her breath stopped as if the woman in the mirror might hear her, reached soundlessly for threads.

  SIX

  Cyan Dag lost count of days and nights as he traveled west. He rode through sun and moon, wind and rain, and snow-white flurries of apple blossom without noticing them, as if, intent on Skye, he had already left the world he knew. Skye could be found as far west as one could ride without falling into the sea. How far that was, no one seemed certain. Seven days, he was told. Weeks. It depended, he was told, but on what it depended varied: the direction of the wind, perhaps, or the phase of the moon. He set his face to the path of the falling sun and continued his journey as methodically and relentlessly as he fought. If the sun set before he found a bed, then he slept where he stopped. If a road west took him across a mountain pass as narrow as a blade and so high he felt the cold starlight in his hair, he crossed it. Having left Gloinmere so quickly, he had taken little of anything with him, clothes, money, or arms. Sometimes innkeepers recognized the towers on his surcoat and gave him a bed for the sake of his name. Other times they bound him with a deed: a demand for justice, a rescue, a plea for mercy, or, when that failed, a battle. He did all that he was asked in the king’s name, and directed all gratitude and tributes back to Gloinmere. Sometimes, late at night, the lady’s eyes cut through his dreams, small and pupilless and ancient as stone. He would wake to find himself on his feet, sword in hand, searching for her shadow in the dark, while disturbed animals or other travelers edged nervously away from him. She haunted his dreams as if she searched for him, the knight who had seen her secret face, to snare him before he dragged her into light.

  He thought she had found him one day. He stopped to seek a bed at a crazed inn beside the road he followed. The road ran west into a deep forest not far from the inn, and disappeared from view. The inn was a hunched, soot-blackened place with sagging floors and crooked lintels. He barely noticed such details; his journey west left him sleeping under a tree as often as not. But, he did notice the silence. Only one man sat at the hearth, making his way stolidly through what smelled like a bowl of scorched stew. At the sight of the armed knight walking in the door, he rose hastily, and Cyan saw the greasy, beer-stained apron he wore.