The Tower at Stony Wood

Nine

Thayne Ysse, following the wind, rode west to the edge of the world and watched the sun burn out like a candle flame in the sea.

The sound of the waves was different in Skye. They boomed down a long, endless boundary of land, broke against high cliffs and broad stretches of white sand longer than some of the North Islands. A village in the crook of a bluff to the south had begun to burn its evening lights; the tiny fires looked frail as insect wings against the vastness of sea and the night flowing toward it with the tide. He would find shelter there. But he lingered on the cliff, watching waves below curl and burst into butterflies, feathers, fingers beckoning from the deep. He wondered where Skye hid its dragons. Crossing it, he had scented for sulfur on the wind, for charred earth and bone, for gold. Words, Craiche had said. They could change into themselves. If he said the word for dragon, the word would become dragon. He whispered it slowly, let the wind drag it out of him like flame. Nothing happened. His mouth crooked. In what world could he bring words to life? Not even in Skye, apparently, where the wind, insistent, chilly, everywhere, in his ear, up his sleeve, down his throat, seemed to want to knead him out of the shape he knew into something other. He let it blow him off the cliff, finally, toward the distant lights. Words were what people gave even strangers for nothing. If there was a tower full of gold in Skye that no one had managed to plunder, then truth would have turned into many tales, by now, and tales cost nothing either, especially in a tavern.

But the tavern he found had few travelers and they spoke of fish and families and the weather instead of dragons. He turned inland again, for the image in his father’s book had been precise: a plain, ringed by what looked like craggy hills blasted treeless by the dragon’s breath. Both tale and true, the bard had said; it was up to him, he knew, to recognize the difference. But where to find such barrenness, such danger and magic, in that green, misty, peaceful country, he had no idea.

He caught a glimpse of direction a day or two later, when his drifting path crossed the trail the knight of Gloinmere had left across Skye.

“You’re the second man from beyond Skye staying here in three days,” the innkeeper told him as she set ale and lamb stew in front of him. She had a slanting smile, a rook’s nest of straw-colored hair, and shrewd blue eyes. She lingered as he began to eat. “It’s rare for a knight of Yves to come this far west. And I don’t remember anyone at all of the North Islands finding his way here before.”

Thayne, chewing a tender bite of spring lamb, and watching the innkeeper’s charming, quirky smile, blinked. The stew grew suddenly tasteless in his mouth. He swallowed, asked calmly, “Who was he, this knight of Yves?”

She told him. “I didn’t believe him at first,” she added. “Anyone can wear a sword and call himself a knight. But he spoke to me so courteously, and he wore those towers.”

Thayne took a sip of bitter ale. “He is one of the most powerful and honored knights of Gloinmere.”

“I always thought knights looked less—well, bedraggled. I cobbled one of his boots back together.”

“Where was he going? Did he say?”

“He was trying to find a tower…” She held his eyes then, in an open, disconcerting gaze. “Why? Do you know him?”

“We met, in Yves.” He stirred up a piece of leek, added briefly, “He was fighting some thieves, when I came across him. They had already stolen his boots.”

“Which explains his boots. So you stopped to help him?”

“I did what I could,” he answered evenly. “He was wounded. I didn’t think he would make it into Skye.”

“He did. But I don’t know where he went from here, to look for his tower. It sounded like something out of a tale, to me. A dream.” She wiped a corner of apron across a spill on the table, slowly enough for him to see the pearl on her finger, and the milky underside of her wrist. She said without looking at him, “My husband is out on his boat; he’ll be gone for days. The salmon are running, up north. Travelers are scarce yet, which is why I can remember one from the next.” She gave him a sidelong flash of her smile. “You’ll let me know if you want anything else.” She turned away briskly, left him to consider what else he might need.

He considered the knight. If a man of Yves who knew no more of magic than what he could do with a sword were searching for that tower, then it existed. The thought of the dragon slain according to the ruthless, efficient, unquestioning methods of Gloinmere, its magic destroyed and its treasure snatched away from the desperate North Islands, fed the fury and desperation that had impelled him on his improbable journey. The image of the stranger in the forest, standing his ground barefoot against armed riders, blood running through his hair, his broadsword leaving patterns of light in the air, faded from memory. Only his eyes, the color of cold, tempered metal and the gold towers that linked him to Regis Aurum remained. Thayne, his own eyes on the split, seared logs on the hearth, heard himself whisper, “You should have gone back to Gloinmere.”

The dragon possessed his dreams that night: a bright, sinuous, deadly thing that tore out his heart with the flick of one claw and swallowed it. He saw out of the dragon’s eyes, then, felt the fire pulsing through him. He coiled himself around the gold in the tower, and watched the knight riding toward him across the wasteland. Fire the color of gold billowed out of him, ate everything living in its path. Only the knight’s surcoat remained, lying like a fallen banner on the scorched ground. He spread his wings then, and uncoiled his body in a spiraling flight toward the sun, smelling more gold, more death, in the towers of Gloinmere.

He rose early the next morning, still feeling the dragon fire smoldering behind his eyes, in his heart. He lost himself in Skye, drifting away from roads, for no road he had ever heard of led to dragons. The land turned lonely, unpredictable. A lake might appear out of nowhere, stretching flat, still, and cold as a blade on the horizon. Rivers he followed seemed to change the direction of their flow. A ridge of stones on a high peak slowly turned into an intricate lacework of wall and window, ruins older than Yves, and with no name anyone could remember. He met few people in the woods and marshlands. Those he chanced across seemed to see the dragon he looked for coiled in his eyes, and answered his questions uneasily. No, they had never heard of a plain where nothing grew, and there were old towers of various origin scattered all over Skye. There was one in the birch wood; he couldn’t miss it, heading that direction. There was nothing in the tower, though, but bats.

He rode among the pale, slender trees, with their new leaves of green whispering around him, the dead leaves that had turned to gold luminous beneath shafts of light. He missed the tower; it had fallen, or moved itself, or it was hidden within a blur of brightness falling through the trees. Coming out of the wood, he crossed a meadow and followed the shallow, silvery stream flowing through it. As dusk fell, he startled a hare in the grass and shot it. He made a fire beside the stream, skinned the hare, and spitted it above the flames. He ate it with bread the innkeeper had given him. When the makeshift spit and the bones collapsed into the fire, he lay back to watch the moon rise. It dropped its reflection among the stones in the stream. Water tried to drag the moon away; it rippled, wavered, but clung stubbornly to the bottom of the stream. Thayne’s eyes closed. The water chattered at him, like some old crone trying to tell him a story he couldn’t understand. He saw her finally, wading in the water, trying to rescue the horned moon. Fishlike, it eluded her; she kept catching at it, still talking breathlessly. He could not see her face clearly, but he thought he might recognize her. The ring on her left hand sparked silver white now and then, catching at moonlight. He interrupted her finally.

“Dragon,” he said. “Tell me how to say the word for dragon.”

It opened a baleful maw that could have swallowed him standing, and howled fire. He felt it engulf him, charring his skin and then his flesh, and then changing the shape and position of his bones, until he realized that he was the hare on the spit, slowly turning to face the flames.

He jerked himself awake, saw an ember in his own fire flare, and pulled away from it, gasping. Still shaken, he rolled toward the stream, drank from it to clear the charred taste out of his mouth. The smoldering embers dragged at his eyes again; the small bones in it, he saw starkly, might well be his own. He wondered what word in any language might get a dragon’s attention in the middle of its mindless burning. None he knew. He lay back down finally, staring inward, for the first time, at the bleak, unremitting notion that he might lose his life in a strange country, on a plain in a tale that no one even knew existed.

At sunrise, he saw three hills in the distance, green and silvery with ash, so alike they seemed reflections of one another. He rode toward them. They disappeared for a while as he made his way through a forest of oak so old and massive they might, petrified with centuries, grow into, towers. He saw the hills again in the afternoon, across a broad valley. The placid river that flowed through it disappeared between two hills; the third hill was visible between them.

He stopped at the river to let his horse drink. Gazing absently at the placid hills, he saw that their close flanks nearly touched; the three broad, rounded hills made a ring around whatever lay within them. He thought of the picture in his father’s book. But that plain was circled by harsh peaks, sharpened into teeth as if by the constant dry pound of light. These, with their linked, green slopes, seemed to surround some secret loveliness.

He followed the river toward them. They were not so far as they had looked; he came swiftly to the place where the river began its curve between the two closest hills. It quickened there, grew narrower, shallower. It took forever, he felt, to make his way between the hills. They seemed to shift closer, flinging their shadows over him. The ash forests growing on them thinned, dwindled into brush, and then into grass. In the late afternoon, the grasses on the slopes began to turn brown, as if he had spent a season or two trying to round the hills. He felt the sweat on his face from the hot afternoon light, and stopped again for water. The banks of the river were hard, cracked mud now; grass grew sparsely along them. He felt his heartbeat then, knowing what secret the hills held in their midst. He had been, without thinking, testing the wind for the smell of dragon for some time now.

He saw Craiche’s face, very clearly, lifting out of a book and giving Thayne his sweet, dauntless smile. He saw their father, recognizing Thayne, speaking his name. A longing for home swept through him then. He could simply turn, ride out of the hills and all the way back to the North Islands, defeated but alive. It seemed worth it, simply to see Craiche smile at him again. “I am not Bowan,” he whispered. “I am not Ferle, who had a way with words. I can’t make magic out of nothing. I don’t want to die for gold.”

He saw the knight’s eyes then, clear and cold, fearless. Then go home, they said to him, without judgment, without surprise. I will do what you cannot.

He mounted again after a swallow of warm, murky water, and continued his journey.

Near sunset, the river trickled to a stain on the cracked earth. The endless hillsides were barren now, jagged, ground down to stone. His horse’s black hide was silvery with a gloss of sweat. The hills pushed closer together, loomed above him, their peaks fiery against a blazing, changeless blue so parched it could not even make a cloud. Thayne urged his weary mount forward, through an opening between the hills so narrow that they nearly formed an arch above his head.

On the other side, he stopped. Dust shimmered across a plain ringed by three hills on which nothing could ever have grown. Light from the lowering sun scorched the earth like dragon’s breath. The immensity of stone rising out of the parched ground cast a shadow halfway across the plain. The dragon coiled around the tower opened its eyes.