The Tower at Stony Wood

Fourteen

Sel climbed the spiral steps to the top of the tower. She paused at the last step, one hand to her heart, and panted awhile. Melanthos was not there, which suited Sel. So far, Melanthos did not know she had come there. Gentian knew, but thought only that Sel came to look for Melanthos. Time she had whiled away in the harbor tavern she spent now in the tower, without any noticeable change in her habits. Both daughters thought she was drinking bitter ale at Brenna’s; she had left them to sell the last of the cakes and pastries. Melanthos tended to come down near suppertime, which was when Sel went up. She liked looking into the mirror; she never knew what it was going to show her next.

This time, as she waited for her heart to quiet, it showed a roil of slick, dark brown that slid and twisted against itself, and finally revealed a deep-set eye above a row of long whiskers. She smiled, recognizing one of the seals in the harbor. She knew all their shades of brown, their dapples of black and gray, their scars, their ages, their children. She had watched them for years from Brenna’s windows, while she drank her ale. Sometimes one died and washed ashore on the rocks before it got eaten in the water. She would watch the fishers gut it and skin it, holding the skin wide, with the blank sky showing through its empty eye sockets, before they draped it across the high rocks to dry. That drew the children, and the screaming gulls thick as a snow squall above the butchering. The fishers tossed coins to see who would get a coat out of the skin, or a watertight pair of boots. The meat and fat they gave to the oldest villagers, to smoke for winter, to render into soap and lamp oil. The sea got back its bones.

Once, when she was much younger, Sel had left Joed’s side at night and gone to the rocks to take a sealskin. She could not remember why she wanted it, only that it drew her, beyond reason, to hold the stinking skin up to the stars and waves and let it see again through her eyes. But the skin was gone. Someone else had gotten there first. Or something. Or maybe the splashed shadows of blood on the rocks around her were old, dry, and that seal had died only in her dreams.

The seal in the mirror dove out of sight; the heaving water slowed, froze, faded. Sel stepped into the room, sat down on the pallet. Behind the mirror the sun was setting. Mist fanned toward land, trying to engulf the boats before they reached the harbor. The still air within the stones felt warm yet with afternoon light. She slipped her shoes off and settled comfortably into the pallet. She tried not to shift things, though she suspected that Melanthos was too untidy to notice a needle moved from floor to ledge, or pieces of linen separated from the jumble of bedclothes. She did refrain from tossing out old tea upon which floated a furry island of mold. Even Melanthos might notice a clean cup.

The mirror showed her scraps of images, as Melanthos had said: broken pieces of stories. One of the oddest, Sel thought, was the woman in the tower who embroidered, as Melanthos did, everything in her mirror. She had a strange, pale, underwater beauty, as if, in a different story, she might have been part fish. She could not seem to find a way out of her tower. Perhaps she did not want to leave. She never leaned out of the window and called for help, though armed and comely knights rode beneath her. Sometimes Sel saw her standing in front of her fire. Sometimes she ate a solitary meal. The building of the fire, the bringing of food, seemed beyond the mirror’s notice. Sel never saw anyone else in the room. The beginning and the ending of the woman’s tale seemed equally obscure. Sel wondered if the old mirror had forgotten them.

The mirror dreamed privately a little; so did Sel. Images and memories swirled to light, lingered, faded: Joed mending a sail, Gentian running across sand with her hands full of butterfly shells, herself raging and weeping a storm over some small broken thing just before Joed died. Or had it been just after? The mirror went suddenly black as if it had closed its eye. Sel blinked, waited. It gave her nothing. Her attention caught, she watched it. For a long time it remained mindless and dark as a fish’s eye; she wondered what tale it was trying to begin or end. Then she saw a frost of moonlight on black stone. Peering closer, she separated dark from dark: stone from night from shadow within the oblong of stone. The shadow widened, filled the mirror. Within the utter dark something moved.

An eye opened.

Sel stared into it, astonished. The light in the tower seemed to fade around her, so intense was the blackness in the eye. Like the new moon, Sel thought, in the thin, silvery ring of the old. Thoughts seemed to move across the eye like clouds over the sea. Sel shifted closer to the mirror, as if she might see the thoughts reflected in the eye. It gazed implacably at something. Death? Sel thought, chilled. But the old eye blinked at the word. Sel leaned closer.

Her hands moved, remembering something. Braiding hair, she thought. Or maybe it was waves, their silvery foam she caught just before the waves broke, peeling it away like lace from cloth, twining froth together so that the waves slowed, washed in before they crested, with a sigh rather than a shout. The fishers waiting out the rampaging sea in their boats far from the harbor, drifted in finally on a docile tide. Never saw that happen before, she heard them say as she went down the cliff to meet Joed: High tide riding to meet the full moon, and the moon letting go of the tide. And the strange tide became a tale added to the human faces seen watching in the water on a misty afternoon, and the fish with the unicorn’s horn.

Once, she thought. Once I did such things.

But that young woman seemed no more a part of her now than what swam so freely in the waves with their curious eyes. She shifted back a little, away from the memory, and the eye in the mirror turned silver.

Sel blinked. The lines around the eye flattened, and became an elaborate frame around the silver. The eye became a mirror, she saw, amazed again, and recognized the mirror.

“But where,” she wondered, “is the lady?”

She walked into view a moment later. She was no longer sitting quietly in her chair beside the window, looking at life passing through her mirror. She was doing what Sel, observing anyone in the context of her own life, would call pacing. The force and power of her magical stillness, her spellbound silence and habitual movements, had dissolved for the moment. She moved as restlessly as a fish in a bucket, back and forth across the circular chamber. She avoided the window, Sel noted. She walked with her head bent, her heavy skirts swaying, her hands opening and closing against her thighs. She did not lift her eyes from the strip of carpet on the floor, in which white lilies bloomed against a gold background. She seemed intent on wearing a path through the lilies.

She was very beautiful. Now and then, one hand lifted, uncurled long enough to pull a strand of white-gold hair behind her ear. Sel could see her graceful fish’s profile then, her set mouth, an eyebrow of the palest gold slanting over a flash of sky-blue eye. Her lowered eyelids seemed as delicate and translucent as shells. Beyond her, the images in her ornate mirror changed constantly: a hawk plunging out of the sky straight down into water to drag a fish out of the current, the pepper-scatter of blackbirds against the bright sky, the rider just coming into view down the road.

What would happen, Sel wondered, if the woman did not see the rider in the mirror? If she let him pass without a comment among her threads?

What would happen if she leaned past the mirror and looked out the window to watch the rider come to her down the sun-dappled road?

What would happen if she called?

For a moment past and present and the timelessness of tales drew together in Sel’s mind. The woman walked out of story and paced, trapped, helpless, under terrible enchantment somewhere in time, somewhere, perhaps, in Skye.

She leaned forward, her lips parting. “I know,” she whispered to the woman. “I know.”

The woman saw the rider in the mirror. She stopped midstep, gazing at it, her eyes wide now, with despair and hope.

She sat down quickly, reached for threads. So did Sel, not knowing what she might make, but wanting suddenly to feel the magic of making in the movement of her hands.

A cry interrupted her sometime later. Melanthos, she thought, hiding her threads and linen in a cluttered pile on the floor. She went to a far window, looked out at a perplexing sight.

Anyon was moving back and forth below, near the tower door. She leaned farther out. He did not see her, or Melanthos, who was running toward him. He was busy at something nameless, bewildering, something involving a wagon full of huge old tangled vines as spiny as puffer fish with thorns. He wore heavy gauntlets up to his elbows, and had stuffed the tower doorway halfway to the top with thorns.

Melanthos shouted again, too furious to notice her mother watching in the high window. Anyon, turning to pick another clump of thorn off the wagon, did not notice Melanthos until the wave of her fury smacked against him.

“What are you doing?” She careened into him, slapping and kicking, knocking him off balance with surprise. He was already bleeding here and there on his face and his sleeves; she left a new rill of blood beside his mouth with her open palm. “What do you think you are doing?”

She kicked him in the knee as he stared at her, and he went down. Her knuckles caught him across the head; her flailing knee smacked into his jaw. Sel, wincing, heard his teeth meet with a click. He caught Melanthos’s leg as he reeled over backward, pulling her down on top of him.

He lay panting, holding her tightly while she struggled against him. “Stop—” he pleaded when he could speak. “Please.”

“I might have been up there!”

“I saw you earlier.” He paused, dragging breath wearily. “Working in the bakery. I wanted. I just wanted to talk to you. Hold you. But you’re always up there. And I can’t follow—”

She fought out of his hold, her hair flying wildly; Sel could not see her face. “So you put up a wall of thorns between me and what I make.”

He pulled her back down. “Between you and what has you captured—”

“Why,” she demanded, her fist thumping down on his heart, “don’t you just learn to come up? There’s nothing at all to be afraid of in that tower.”

“Not for you, there isn’t.”

“Not for you, either, if you would just listen to me.”

He let go of her cautiously with one hand, wiped the blood from his mouth. “I’m sorry.” He sighed. “I’ll move the thorns. Just let me catch my breath.”

“I would have just burned them, anyway. That wouldn’t have stopped me.”

“Don’t you miss me at all?” he asked wistfully. Melanthos straightened, drawing back to study him, not knowing, evidently, the answer to that. Their voices were quieter now. Sel, her chin in her hands, strained to hear them.

“Do you miss me,” Melanthos asked steadily, “when you’re alone for days working on your blankets?”

“No,” he said, surprising Sel. “But it’s because I know you will be there when I’m finished. If I didn’t know that, I would be out looking for you instead of working. Or looking for whatever would fill the hole you left in my heart when you left me. You don’t feel that for me?”

“I don’t know.” He shifted, his face turning away from her answer; she held him still. “I never thought of it like that. I never thought of how it might be if you weren’t there when I wanted you. I always think that of course you will be there.”

His face turned to her again, his cracked mouth taut. He moved a little, or Melanthos did. Her head dropped. Their lips touched. Sel’s mouth crooked. She turned, moved through memories of Joed down the tower steps. The sound of crackling, rending thorn startled her as she emerged through it; she had forgotten it. The two stared at her, mouths gaping, she thought, like herring.

“What are you doing?” she asked, as near to a sea-lion bellow as she had gotten for some time. “Trying to bury me in thorns?”

“No.” Anyon sat up quickly. “I was only trying to—”

“What were you doing up there?” Melanthos asked. Her eyes narrowed, glinting, at her mother, who had just walked through thorns without a scratch. “How did you get up there?”

“I walked,” Sel said shortly. “I was looking for you. You’re always up there, and I never see you anymore.”

“Exactly,” Anyon sighed, “what I was telling her. And why I put those thorns there. I’m sorry. I had no idea anyone was in the tower.”

“Just get them out of here.”

“Mother,” Melanthos said.

“I will,” Anyon promised.

“That’s no way to find your way up, blocking your own path.” She straightened a sleeve, set her face to the stone wood like a figurehead on a prow, trying to sail her way out of Melanthos’s questions.

“Mother. How did you get through those thorns?”

For a moment she was not going to answer. Then she shrugged, not looking at her daughter. “I thought it was just another trick of the tower’s.” She moved away among the old stumps. “I’ve got to get back to the bakery. You stay and help Anyon.”

“Mother!” Melanthos cried. Sel ignored her, walking quickly through the stone wood. It glittered around her with stray pearls of light. She heard running steps behind her, and then Anyon’s pleading shout.

“Melanthos!”

The footsteps stopped. Sel walked alone out of the wood.