The Tower at Stony Wood

Fifteen

Melanthos watched the woman in the tower. The woman in the tower was watching the mirror intently, though nothing much was happening in it except a flood of light over the tors from the setting sun. Melanthos wondered if Sel saw private, secret things in the mirror that it would not show Melanthos. Sel had been in the tower all day; she had left the baking to Gentian and Melanthos, who, for once, was up before dawn to do the morning loaves.

Melanthos leaned against the wall at the top of the stairs, her arms folded, yawning noiselessly. Sel had not heard her come up; she had no idea that Melanthos paid any attention at all to her comings and goings. She was doing whatever she did in the privacy of the tower, which involved needle and thread, but no particular image. What she embroidered seemed to have no shape, only vague clouds of pale browns and grays, colors she must have thought Melanthos needed least. Her hands were accustomed to work, stirring, kneading, shaping; empty, they fidgeted. Unlike Melanthos, she did not toss her own needlework out the window. A small pile of it grew, in various shapes and mushroom colors, like a fungus in a corner.

The mirror swam with sudden fire, as if the dragon had looked at them. They both started. Melanthos sucked in a yawn sharply. Sel, pricking herself, loosed a grunt. Fire flowed like windblown swathes of silk across parched ground. The ground glittered oddly in the aftermath, as if sand had melted into glass.

Sel, shaking her hand, turned abruptly. Melanthos, meeting her eyes, thought that for an instant Sel did not recognize her. Sel’s eyes, silty, murky, shimmering like kelp with color, seemed flat, expressionless, something inhuman looking at something human. Then she blinked, and recognized her daughter.

She spoke first, gruffly. “There you are.”

“Here I am,” Melanthos said dryly. “And so are you. What are you doing up here?”

“Looking for you.”

“How did you get up the stairs?”

“I walked.” She amended that, as Melanthos regarded her dourly. “The tower let me up. I refused to listen to it on the stairs.”

“You’ve been here before. You’re making something.”

Sel shrugged. “To keep busy.” She watched her daughter, who was still hovering at the steps. “Do you mind?”

Melanthos shook her head, moving finally. “No.” She crossed the room, dropped down on the pallet beside her mother. “I know you come up here. I just don’t know why.”

“It’s peaceful up here. I didn’t know it would be peaceful.” She gestured at the mirror. “Except for that. What was that?”

“I don’t know. Unless someone annoyed the dragon.”

“What dragon?”

“It guards a tower in a wasteland.”

“In Skye?” Sel asked incredulously.

“In a story,” Melanthos answered absently, watching the mirror for more. “Or in Skye. What else have you seen?”

“An eye.”

Melanthos stared at her. “An eye?”

“It opened in the dark and looked at me.”

“Was it human?”

“Human,” Sel said after a moment, and added, “Old.”

“You woke something, I think.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t want to look at me.” She grew still then, remembering the knight. “Something real, I think,” she said softly. “I’ve been wondering about that… Some of this might be stories. But some of it… I don’t know. May not be.”

“The lady in the tower,” Sel suggested.

“Have you seen her?”

“She can’t get out of the tower because the mirror doesn’t remember how her story ends.”

Melanthos smiled suddenly. “Maybe. Of course she would call for help, if she were real. I haven’t seen anyone forcing her to stay there.”

“She’s what you’ll become,” Sel said, but without force, “if you stay up here with these threads.”

Melanthos ignored that. “What else has the mirror shown you?”

“One of the harbor seals.” She hesitated, suddenly shy in front of her own daughter. “Rogue, I call him. He has the longest whiskers and pelt like brown silk.”

“You name the harbor seals?” Melanthos said, astonished. “So do I. That small pearly one—brown and ivory—”

“Selkie.”

“Hero.” She paused, looking at her mother curiously. “Why did you give it a name so close to your name?”

“I liked watching it,” Sel said obliquely. “I wasn’t thinking of the name, just marking it for memory.”

Melanthos grunted, prodding a needle in and out of the straw pallet. Sel studied the empty mirror, evading her eyes. My eyes, Melanthos thought. My eyes. “Have you made any pictures?” she asked.

“No. My fingers are too big and clumsy for such work. And I wasn’t asked.”

“Nobody asked me. I just did it.”

“I didn’t. So there you are.”

“But where?” Melanthos muttered perplexedly as darkness gathered in the mirror. It shifted, took shape, became a black moon with strange, rippling dunes around it. Then it blinked. Melanthos caught her breath. Sel only shifted to see it more closely, as if she might catch the reflection in it of what it watched. The darkness thinned like a mist, let them see.

A woman walked alone through a forest. The road she traveled was matted with green needles and gold flakes of dried leaves. Oak sent vast tangled mazes of branch toward the light still lingering in the ancient wood. Their boughs were still. The road, dipping and curving around roots, held a steady pace toward the setting sun. Shafts of late light ran thin and straight as needles through the stitchery of branch and leaf. They faded in a breath, leaving dusk to gather among the trees, lie in wait within the underbrush.

Melanthos mused over her, wondering where the woman walked from and to. She was tall, with long hair falling freely down her back. It was unadorned and white as milk. She wore a long plain tunic that covered her arms and nearly all of her leggings and boots. She carried a weathered staff, a straight branch peeled of its bark and twigs, with a bole on the top, worn smooth as from her touch. A leather strap held something that Melanthos could not see slung across her back. As she came closer, walking toward Melanthos in the mirror, Melanthos saw a silver ring on the middle finger of her left hand, a plain band tarnished nearly black.

The woman’s face was a spiderweb of lines. The skin still fitted neatly over bones that once, Melanthos thought, must have made her beautiful. Her eyes, heavy-lidded and sunken now, watched the road beneath her feet, darkening fast with twilight and running on toward night.

Bone, Melanthos thought. Dust. Silver. But, she added silently, I cannot see your eyes.

As if the woman heard her, the old eyes lifted suddenly, widened to reveal a darkness like the inside of caves. The dark seemed ancient but potent, full of secrets. Melanthos, on her knees now, angling the mirror between both hands, strained to see what had stopped the old woman midstep in the wood.

Her breath blurred the mirror and melted; she saw only herself.

She put the mirror down, crawled back to her pile of threads, her brain busy now with colors. Sel, still staring at the mirror, loosed a sigh like an ebbing wave. “It was her eye,” she said obscurely.

“What?”

“Her eye watching us.”

Melanthos grunted, sorting thread. “Mother,” she complained, “you’re using all my browns.”

“Here’s a few strands left,” Sel said unremorsefully, passing them over.

“I’ll have to ask Anyon for more, and he is as cross as a crab in a trap, these days.”

“I’ll get more.”

“You could,” Melanthos suggested, “use my pinks instead… What are you making?”

But her mother did not answer. Melanthos, choosing shades and musing over the mysterious power in the aged eyes, forgot her question.

She remembered it much later as she stumbled down the stairs. It was early; the stone wood was dark, damp with sea mist. In the bakery, Gentian, half-asleep, kneaded and thumped and pulled dough into loaves, lining them up on oiled baking stones. She blinked painfully at Melanthos as she came in.

“Where’s our mother?”

“I left her sleeping,” Melanthos answered, yawning. She rolled up her sleeves, shook flour into a bowl for sweet almond cakes. “I’ll wake her when I go back up.”

“Did you get any sleep?”

“A little.” She yawned again, then froze as the baby wailed a sudden complaint. Gentian, dough stretched between her hands, stood as motionlessly. The baby searched for a finger. The dough began to droop. The baby settled again, her eyes closing. Gentian sighed. She looked a little off, Melanthos thought, like old cream. Her skin was patchy pale; her reddened eyes seemed to glitter and wince at the sight of the world.

Melanthos said with sympathy, “Was the baby up all night?”

“Only now and then.” She caressed the dough into a mounded circle and nicked a crossroads into its top with a sharp knife: north-south, east-west. “And I kept waking myself because I had a feeling no one would be here but me, this morning.”

“I’m here.”

“But our mother isn’t. She spends more time in that tower than you do, these days. What is she doing up there?”

Melanthos shook her head, cracking eggs into the flour. “I don’t know. She’s brooding, I suppose.”

“Over what?”

“Memories. Life. She likes it up there. She’s gotten herself drawn into it.”

Gentian sighed again. She opened an oven door, checked the fire, then brushed water and coarse flour over half a dozen loaves and slid the stone above the flames. “I wish she’d come back. I miss her.”

Melanthos patted her shoulder comfortingly, leaving a floury ghost of fingers. “She’s making something,” she said. Her brows were drawn hard.

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something patchwork.” She hesitated, stirring dough violently a moment, then stopped. “She’s watching a story in the mirror.”

“What kind of story?”

“A woman, trapped in a tower. She can’t leave it, she can’t even look out of it, except through a mirror. Our mother seems to like watching for her.” Gentian stared at her, horrified. “I think she’s waiting to see how that story ends.”

“Is it a story?” Gentian demanded. “Just one more picture to put into threads? Or is it real?”

“I don’t know.” She gazed into the bowl, her eyes narrowed, seeing the woman again: her frantic pacing, her unchanging tapestry of days. “I hope it is real,” she said softly. “As terrible as that is. Then it might have an ending.”

“But how—? But who—?”

“Or maybe she’s just there, caught forever in that part of her tale like a warning, a mystery. We’ll never know who she is, how she got there, what becomes of her. Our mother needs to see her, and when she stops needing she’ll come down.”

The baby opened her eyes, gazed at them peacefully a moment. Then she opened her mouth like a guppy and howled. Gentian picked her up and sat down on a stool. “Melanthos,” she said tautly, loosening her bodice, “don’t leave me alone here.”

“She’ll come back,” Melanthos said passionately. “She can’t forget the world entirely. She’s just—”

“Just what?”

Enchanted, Melanthos wanted to say. Spellbound. But such words seemed too elaborate for their mother, like putting her into finery worn to a king’s ball. “Sad,” she heard herself say, the word coming out of nowhere, and she and Gentian gazed at one another silently, above the baby’s contented head.

The fishers began coming in an hour later to buy their loaves to take on the boats; the rest of the village wandered in and out for a while after that, for oat biscuits and almond cakes and warm rolls flavored with pepper and anchovies. In the calm aftermath of the morning feeding, Melanthos took off her apron and went back to the tower. It was empty; her mother had wakened and walked down to the sea, perhaps, to watch the boats go out.

Light flooded across the mirror a moment after Melanthos entered. Her gaze was caught in such a flood of gold that her eyes teared in pain. The brightness faded a little; she could pick out shapes here and there: hillocks of coin, cups and crowns and shields of gold, even bones wearing armor and rotting cloth-of-gold. Slowly, within the glimmering mist, a man took shape. He was sitting on one of the piles of coin, staring at nothing, as if he did not notice the immense golden eye with the dark slit down it gazing at him through a wall of flame-red stone.

Melanthos, swallowing dryly, as if she could taste the fiery air, reached for thread.