The Tower at Stony Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The young woman in her memory seemed to turn on the cliff to look at her, then. What are you thinking now? she asked Sel, who gazed down at the making in her hands.

  But she could not even tell herself.

  She forced herself to put it down, go into the world to help Gentian again for a bit. She baked and sold and patted the baby and listened to Gentian talk about Rawl and storms, and what the baby had tried to say. Her own mouth made appropriate noises, she thought. But still she caught Gentian looking at her out of those wide, lovely, perplexed eyes, as if Sel herself had wandered into life out of some forgotten tale. Sel, half her mind still waiting in the tower for her body to come back to it, did as much as she could, absently, perfunctorily, to persuade Gentian that she still knew how to cope with life. When she could do no more, she took off her apron with relief and slipped away when Gentian’s back was turned.

  She found Melanthos in the tower among the broken ends of daylight, sitting on the pallet and staring at the mirror.

  “Look what she’s doing,” Melanthos breathed as Sel knelt down beside her. “Look at it.”

  The woman sat in her chair as usual, embroidering. But the side of the cloth that flowed with images down to the floor was oddly broken up with scatterings of thread on the pale background. Sel studied them, astonished. Tree, one group of threads said. Another, in an elongated strip of repetition said: Road road road road… Rider, said a third, at a tangent to Road, and in a different color. Above the Rider, in black, flew many tiny Crows.

  “She’s making everything into words,” Melanthos said, entranced and nibbling on a thumbnail. “I wonder why?”

  Sel gazed at the words, felt something stir in her, like some great, dark, amorphous sound on the verge of taking shape. “Magic,” she said suddenly, as close as she could get to the sound. “Magic put her in there, magic must get her out.”

  Melanthos dragged her eyes from the mirror, flicked her mother a glance. “They’re just words.”

  “So far.”

  “Well, how much farther can they go?”

  “I don’t know,” Sel mused, watching, while her hands reached for an unfinished patch of gray. “We don’t know her. But it must be magic trapping her there. Whether or not the story is true, it must be magic. She never changes, she never needs her hair combed, she never sees anyone that we can see, she never—”

  “She never speaks,” Melanthos said softly.

  “Until now.”

  “She never—so.” She stirred, her hands clasping, unclasping. “Magic keeps her there, in a timeless enchantment.”

  “She needs magic to fight magic.”

  Melanthos looked at Sel again, out of her sea-fay eyes. “She’d get rescued in the tale. That’s how they end.”

  “Maybe,” Sel murmured, drawing her needle out, “she’s gotten tired of waiting.”

  Melanthos studied the woman, until tors grew out of her words, and the reflection of rocky fields. The woman melted away. Melanthos puzzled over threads; Sel wondered if she were contemplating some variations of her own: Woman, perhaps, in blues and pale golds, instead of the woman’s immaculate image. But it seemed more that her thoughts could not settle yet on what it had been given.

  “How can she make magic out of nothing?” Melanthos asked finally. “How can she just sit there and make endless days of changing the world into threads into something powerful?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, think about it. If you’re caught in a web and can’t move—if every line trapping you is a magic not your own—how could you spin magic out of yourself?”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  Melanthos opened her mouth, closed it. She studied the mirror as though she could still see the woman in it. “She will die? But she’s safe enough in there now. She never seems to go hungry or be tired, she’s always tidy—she’ll die if she tries to leave,” she added, illumined. “As long as she keeps doing what she’s doing, not looking at the world, not going into it, only seeing it backward and through her pictures, she’ll be safe.”

  “She’ll be lonely,” Sel said to her threads. “Never speaking, never touching, never looked at… You could die of that.”

  “So someone put her there to punish her?”

  “Maybe.” Sel’s needle slowed; her own eyes shifted, gazing backward. “Or maybe she’s something not quite human, from a place beyond the world, elsewhere. The tower is the only safe place between her and the human world… If she looks at the human world, takes it into her mind and her eyes, she will die because she can never belong to it. The tower is the doorway between the worlds.”

  “She’ll die of loneliness.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So.” Melanthos pulled her knees to her chin, rocked a little, thinking. “She must make herself human.”

  “It’s one way to look at it.”

  “She can’t go back to where she came from?”

  “I suppose that’s one way the tale could end,” Sel said.

  “I suppose if it were that easy, there wouldn’t be a tale.”

  Melanthos reached toward thread. Her hand hovered, dropped and drew back, empty. Sel looked a question at her. Melanthos shook her head. “There must be something else… I don’t want to do her words. I don’t feel the urge. There’s no magic in it.”

  “Maybe not yet…”

  “I mean for the mirror. It doesn’t want that.” Her eyes slid again to Sel; she wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees and asked tentatively, “Speaking of magic, do you remember the magic you used to do when we were small? When you were young and our father was alive?”

  Sel remembered. For an instant all the magic flowed like tide into her, catching light, dark tumbling within it, nameless creatures and unimaginably beautiful treasures. Then it was gone, like a vision of water on a waste.

  “No,” she said briefly to the memory and to Melanthos, whose eyes were wide and vulnerable. “I don’t.” She looked away from her daughter and saw the knight in the mirror.

  He was just stepping out of a squat, dark tower. Sel, who had never seen a knight, recognized the details: the towers on his surcoat, the sword, the suggestion of power and skill in his movements. There was a strange look on the knight’s face, wonder and bewilderment, as if whatever he had found in the tower was the last thing he had expected. Dawn, touching the sword with a golden fingertip, sparked a glitter of fire within the jewel.

  Behind the tower, in the distance, rose the smooth, graceful slopes of hills that seemed to mirror one another against the sky.

  Melanthos leaned forward suddenly, reaching out with both hands to the mirror, or to the knight. “Three Sisters,” she whispered. “That’s where he is.”

  She loosed the mirror, and sorted through her threads for green.

  EIGHTEEN

  Thayne, lost in a memory of rain on a dark hillside in north Yves, saw the armed warrior come at him out of nowhere. Yet one more of Regis Aurum’s interminable army, he thought grimly. He would make one less of this one… Some bony hand left from another battle had gotten hold of his sword; he felt the fingerbones scatter as he pulled it free. The hillside was slippery; he nearly lost his balance, rising, and again when he swung the broadsword slashing through a quarter circle of air before it struck the deadweight of the blade the knight had raised, as fixed in his grip as an old stump in the ground. The fury in his own blow shocked through the metal into Thayne’s hands. He hung on obdurately, raising the sword again.

  Someone was calling his name. He ignored it, shearing air downward this time, toward the silver disk the knight wore like a small, peculiar piece of armor. He had lost whatever else he had. His shirt and surcoat were ripped apart, his skin scraped and bloodied with battle. He had no shield; the torn emblem on his surcoat was undecipherable; nothing told who he was. But he was not an islander, with hardship and desperation beaten into his eyes. The knight’s eyes were clear, cold, and merciless, trained that way to look so at anything
beyond the graceful towers of Gloinmere, at anyone who wore thread spun out of wind, whose hands smelled of fish, who dared question a word that came from Regis Aurum’s lips. “One more,” Thayne whispered between his teeth, aiming for the heart beneath the disk. “One more for Ysse.”

  But the knight’s sword was in the way again, a diagonal flare of silver crossing Thayne’s. He felt the strength behind it, pushing at him, not letting him pull free, bearing down at him until he lost his balance again, falling back against a pile of bracken, or a field wall, something he hadn’t noticed. The knight’s hand closed on Thayne’s wrist, his thumb digging into the veins, until Thayne, hissing, dropped the sword. His other hand, scrabbling in the bracken, found small flat pebbles. He flung them into the knight’s face. The knight flinched from what looked oddly like a shower of gold. Thayne, sliding down a sudden spill of fieldstone, drew back his feet and kicked.

  The knight stumbled backward, slipped on what looked like a skull lying in the field. The skull, chattering, flew into the bracken. Thayne found his sword again, pulled himself up, and drove the blade hard at the knight, who seemed flung back against a wall of night and half-stunned by it.

  He lifted his own sword, but without strength. Thayne flicked it aside. The knight, trying to evade the death coming at him, had only time for a breath that made the silver disk slide on its chain and fall to meet Thayne’s sword. The point, battering into it, bounced away as if it had struck stone, and then did strike stone, as the knight twisted out from under it. Thayne heard him groping harshly for air. His own arm half-numb, Thayne backed a few steps. He kicked something in his path, and started as an entire skeleton bowed over his feet. A crown, precariously balanced, dropped down the skull to its throat, hung there like a collar.

  “Thayne,” it said, oddly breathless for something that no longer needed air. “Thayne Ysse.”

  “What is this place?” he wondered aloud, straining to see through the dark and the rain that streaked the air, but never seemed to touch him. “What is this battlefield?”

  The knight attacked again, or so Thayne thought, seeing silver flash out of the corner of his eye. He turned and sheared the arm off another skeleton dropping, armed, out of the bracken. Its fall was accompanied by the ringing of many tiny bells. Thayne swallowed, then choked at the sudden dry pain in his throat; he had been wounded, he guessed, though he did not remember how. The knight, quiet again, was not where Thayne had left him. Thayne whirled, and saw him coming from behind. As if the moon had parted the heavy clouds with a finger of light and reached down to touch the knight’s face, it grew suddenly clear. Thayne recognized him.

  “You.”

  He slashed at Cyan Dag, whom he seemed to find everywhere he found himself. Memory tugged bewilderingly against memory: gold illumined the darkness, then faded again. He stood in rain he could not feel, opened his mouth to catch but could not taste. Elsewhere molten gold burned in his throat; thirst gnawed at him with an old wolf’s blunt teeth. Elsewhere, he also fought Cyan Dag, but in another battle; in this dreary field of shadows, he would never have recognized the knight. He caught glimpses then, as their swords sparked silver and reflected gold, of a different landscape: burned dry and barren, with air that could kindle itself into flame if it ever moved. Nothing in the land but a tower, nothing in the tower but—

  Gold. Ringed by a tower, ringed by a dragon, ringed by a wasteland somewhere in Skye. And the knight of Gloinmere had followed Thayne to this secret place, to take the dragon and the gold for Regis Aurum. The knight had recovered his strength, and was beating back Thayne’s attack with a relentless, rhythmical, tireless force, as if, Thayne thought, he were scything wheat. He would kill Thayne, and then turn that cold fire in his eyes toward the dragon, offering it whatever it wanted, since he had all the riches of Gloinmere to back his promises, all of Yves. He would leave Thayne’s bones along with the collection in the tower and let the dragon burn the North Islands down to stone, in Regis Aurum’s name.

  “Craiche,” Thayne whispered between set teeth, a private battle cry. The knight’s methodical attack faltered a beat. His eyes lost their remoteness; he seemed about to speak. But Thayne’s sword drove under his guard toward his heart again. The knight, without seeming to move, was suddenly beyond Thayne’s reach, halfway up what Thayne had taken for a pile of bracken in the rain, and which had transformed itself into a pile of gold. He fought there like a man defending his territory, his hillock of treasure, against the traitor from Ysse, who had never learned to bow his head low enough to the King of Yves. Thayne swung a sideways cut at the back of one leg, aiming for the tendon. He caught a boot in the throat that knocked him into a clatter of plate and some astonishing gold armor filched, apparently while occupied, from an ill-fated coronation ceremony. The knight flung himself after Thayne, pinned him down on the floor, knocking the breath out of him. Thayne felt the edge of the knight’s blade across his throat.

  “Listen to me,” Cyan Dag said. “Thayne. Listen.”

  No, Thayne thought, staring fiercely back into those eyes like cold rain. You hear me.

  He saw the dragon watching, then, its enormous eye an oval of roiling gold inset in stone, with the dark slit fanning wide across it. He heard his own blood pounding in his ears, and beneath him, beneath the stones he sprawled on, he heard the secret course of dragon’s blood. The dry, golden waste stretched like skin over the dragon’s veins and bones; he felt its heartbeat deep within the plain, as if the earth itself were dragon, the mountains its backbone, the forests and plains its scales, the wind its breath, the tower full of gold its burning heart. His blood measured itself again to the pulse of dragon’s blood; the eye, gazing at him, reflected him like thought.

  He saw with sudden, mad clarity, as if he had drunk its blood or breathed its fire: we are all part of the dragon. Fire and bone and claw, waste, tower, gold: we are the dragon.

  He felt the fire then, everywhere in the air, there for the taking. All he had to do was recognize it.

  The knight was still talking at Thayne, the sword still pushing into his throat. Regis Aurum, he said, and north Yves. Then he spoke a word like a spell, the last name Thayne expected to hear out of his mouth: Craiche.

  Thayne kindled lightning in the hot, dry air and spat the name back at him. Then he caught fire in his eyes from everyplace he looked: the fire within the gold, within the dragon’s eye. When he spoke again, the word came out of his bones in a furious shimmer of fire and light. It hit the silver disk dangling in the air between them with a sound like sky shredded by thunder. The knight vanished. He reappeared briefly, splayed against the wall within the dragon’s eye. Then he slid to the floor and disappeared again behind the drifts and mounds of gold.

  Thayne moved after a moment, slowly. Something had burned out of him. He was made of paper, moth wings, ash, so dry and weak he could barely pick himself up. He stumbled across the floor, dragging a sword behind him, in case the knight was still not convinced that he should die.

  He lay on his back among scattered helmets and shields of gold. The disk on his breast was smoldering, veined with black, its perfect circle blurred and ragged, as if the edges had melted. Thayne sank wearily to his knees, balancing himself with the blade. Sweat poured down his face, though he would have sworn that the heavy, burning vise of heat had wrung all the water out of him long before. He wiped his eyes, blinked at the knight. He breathed, Thayne saw, but barely. His face looked blanched, even under the fey glow of gold. Thayne swayed against the sword that held him up, reluctant to kill the knight before he understood why.

  He said slowly, peeling each word out of his dry mouth, “Craiche is my brother. He was twelve when the North Islands fought the king in north Yves. My father was badly wounded, then. He lost his wits and his strength. I paid tribute to the king with that. I paid with Craiche, who was crippled by some great knight taking a slash at a running boy the way you’d slap at a fly. I paid tribute with Ysse, on which we make our living catching fish and raisin
g sheep. Half the working men did not return to that island where once kings were born. The king wants the first bite we put into our mouths. He wants the pearl in every oyster. He wants us to bend our heads so low he never has to look into our eyes. That’s why I came here. That’s why I’ll leave you here, when I take the dragon and its gold to the North Islands. I know now that I can take it. I found its fire and swallowed it. Its gold is my heart. I’ll kill you before I go. It’s an easier death than dying of thirst.”

  The knight’s head moved a little, as if he finally heard a word he understood. He tried to swallow; his eyes flickered open, oddly dark in his bloodless face. They closed again. He lifted his hand somehow, his brows twisting together with the effort. He touched the disk, shifted it, and Thayne saw the brand seared into his skin, the perfect circle before the dragon’s breath warped it out of shape.

  He spoke finally, his voice not much more than a whisper. “I remember Craiche.”

  Thayne blinked. “How could—” His hands tightened suddenly on the sword hilt. “What do you remember?” he asked harshly. “The running boy you crippled?”

  The knight’s eyes opened again, searched for Thayne, wincing at the flare of gold up the blade, until he found Thayne’s face above it. “No.” He stopped to swallow. “I heard him crying. On that hillside, after you searched it for your wounded. You didn’t find the king under the hedge.”

  “He was there?” Thayne whispered.

  “With me. I guarded him all night in the rain. Except—” He paused again, looking back into memory, into the rain that Thayne had dreamed of in the tower. “When I left him. For only a few moments. To carry a boy who was crawling down the hill back to your camp.”

  Thayne stared at him. Something bulky and sharp seemed to shift painfully inside of him, as if his heart were changing shape. A strong, armed, faceless knight, Craiche had told him for years, until the telling wove itself seamlessly into the lore of the battle. He came out of nowhere, picked me up, and carried me down the hill. “What was his name, I asked Craiche,” he whispered, “after the sentries found him crawling through the trees into the camp. This faceless knight who came out of nowhere and saved your life? I don’t know, Craiche told me. I asked him, but he never spoke…”