The Tower at Stony Wood

Twenty-one

Sel pieced her life together. To the eye, only the irregular shapes of the embroidered patches, and a preponderance of gray or brown in one or another, made them different. Sel’s eyes, as she sorted them at the top of the tower, saw the memories in them. There was the patch with Joed in his boat at the dock lifting an oar to her as he cast off into a dazzle of light at sunrise. Newly wed, she could not stop watching him even when he was a dark fleck on the burning sea, and she could not stop smiling. There was the patch full of harbor seals threading brown and gray stitches in and out of the waves. There was the patch where Gentian was born, and the one where Gentian’s child was born, and the one where Melanthos caught the wild pony among the tors and rode it down the cobbled streets of Stony Wood. There was the patch with the stone wood in it, long streaks of brown and gray and ivory; she looked at it and saw the mysterious shapes. Stone or trees? they asked as always. Were we once alive?

Mostly she saw the sea.

It unwound the long banners of its waves across her days, constantly across her thoughts. It showed her its secrets, the oysters making their pearls, the mermaids among its corals, the luminous, calm-eyed ghosts of those who had once walked on land, and who had their hearts stolen by the sea. Each wave spinning to the shore with its tumbling strands of kelp and mermaid’s hair called her name as it broke and foamed and hissed across the sand: Sel… Dark ancient eyes watched her, harbor seals and others, strangers from the deep. Sel, they cried in their rough, tumultuous voices. Come back.

She plied her thread, piecing past and future together, so that when she was done, one might become the other: she would be done with memory as well. There would only be the sea.

She put her needle down after hours of sewing. Something had disturbed her, she knew vaguely: something in the world. Besides, her eyes were tired and she needed to rest them on the stone trees or the distant tors. She made her way down and found Gentian sitting at the bottom of the steps in the middle of the morning.

She was alone. She had been crying again, not a sweet spring rain this time, but a full-blown cloudburst. Her nose was red; her eyes were red and green; her apron, already flecked with dough and flour, was patched with tears. Sel gazed at her remotely, puzzled, then sat down. She could fit on a step beside Gentian now; winding up and down the tower steps, living in the tower instead of the bakery, had whittled her smaller.

“What is it?” she asked as Gentian’s face disappeared into her apron. “Is it the baby?”

Gentian reappeared, powdery now, and a bit sticky. She shook her head, swallowed once or twice as she looked at Sel. “You’ve changed,” she whispered. “I don’t know where you’ve gone.”

“Nowhere,” Sel said surprisedly, while the sea spilled all around her, tugged at her, drawing back.

“You’ve been up there since yesterday!”

“Have I? I’m sorry.”

“You say that, and you come back into the world for an hour or a day, and then you vanish again when I turn my back!”

“I’m here now.” For some reason that did not comfort Gentian, whose eyes filled again, shiny with brine. Sel patted her hand. “Stop fretting,” she said, with a ghost of her old abrupt, booming voice that could halt a whale in its sounding. “You’re not a child. You’ve got one now. Leave me to my life.”

“I would,” Gentian said, “if I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“What—”

“If I thought you wanted life.”

Sel was silent. Oh yes, she thought, feeling the tide tangling in her hair, the seaweed winding its long fingers around her, guiding her into a realm beyond the wind. Oh, yes, life.

She heaved herself to her feet after a while, forgetting why Gentian was there. “I must get back to my work. I’m nearly finished.”

Gentian stared at her, pale now, her eyes so dry she must have already cried every tear. “With what?” she asked huskily.

“My cloak.”

“Will you come down to stay when it’s finished?”

Sel nodded. “I won’t need the tower after that.”

Gentian’s face crumpled again. Sel dropped a hand on her head as she turned, having forgotten why she came down, and forgetting, as she settled again to her sewing, that she had ever left it.

The mirror caught her attention after a while, flashing as the mirror within the mirror within the other tower reflected a spark of light from something along the road. The woman in the tower paid no attention to the man riding down the road toward the tower. She was bent over her embroidery, her needle wheeling and diving like a gull. She had turned her loom sideways, Sel saw. The finished images fell to her feet now; she held the unworked linen in her lap. She was making an elongated figure of someone. She must have been working on it day and night, Sel thought, for the face hung invisibly past her knees, and she was busy with the hands now.

They were long and slender, jeweled, in motion against a complex background. A road, it seemed, wound through the fingers; trees were leafing out above the jewels. A small square of unworked linen lay like an empty field beneath one hand. Sel studied the image a moment, curiously. Then her eyes filled with tide; the threads in her hands flowed and tossed restlessly, flinging white stitches of spindrift against the gray.

She saw the riders in the mirror as she was shifting pieces around the floor to figure out the bottom line of her making. She envisioned it swimming, then unfolded, emptied, flattened now, stretched out to dry; this would go here, this maybe here… An unexpected color in the mirror caught her eye. She looked at it and saw the knight first, with his graceful, somber face, his long hair as black as mussel shell, his eyes like sea reflecting cloud. He rode a gold horse, with mane and tail of ivory. The dark red jewel on the hilt of his sword glinted at his knee.

After a while she took her eyes off him to study the second rider. She shifted forward, blinking, for a closer look. That lanky body, those bare feet, that wood-bark hair, knotted like vine… She whispered, astonished, “Melanthos?” She rode one of the wild, piebald horses from the plain, without a piece of harness on it. As Sel watched, Melanthos leaned forward bonelessly, whispered something in the horse’s ear, and it slowed its pace.

Sel felt something rill along her bones, sea or fire, she was not sure. “Where did you learn that?” she asked her daughter abruptly. “To talk to horses, and find your way into mirrors?”

Memory surfaced in answer: herself, when she was a scant half-dozen years older than Melanthos was now, and her children with their sea-anemone hair just walking, and something—a word, a finger, a bite—always in their mouths. Then she did things to amuse them and herself while Joed was away. Things she had learned from her own father, and remembered in bits and pieces, when she left that world for the other. She peeled their shadows off the floor and made them dance. She sent small, sparkling clouds of sand whirling across the floor. She made butterfly shells fly, and slipper limpets shuffle, and plucked the bands of harp shells to sound notes as clear and fragile as glass. She made dead fish swim through the air, blowing schools of silvery bubbles. All to make them laugh, and to charm away the sound of the calling waves. They would not remember, she told herself. When Joed came home, and found her sweeping up the sand, they tried to tell him, pointing delightedly at nothing. But the words they knew then belonged to some other country; they had not yet learned the language of Skye. Joed laughed with them, and understood nothing. Sel, wanting to be as human as Joed, wanting to be loved, kept her secrets. She had not understood then, that Joed might leave her stranded, beached, alone in the world while he himself escaped into the sea.

She had put away her magics when the children learned to talk. Now she knew that she might have made use of her powers in small ways; such things were not uncommon in Skye. But that might have changed Joed’s eyes when he looked at her. He knew her as he knew his boat, the fish he caught, the direction of the wind, the changing voices of the tide. For him, she walked on human shores; for him she turned her back on whatever he might fear in her. She walked so far away from what he feared that she thought she had lost even the memory of it.

But there it was, a flame of it, in Melanthos, who walked unafraid up a tower’s spellbound steps, and led images in a mirror back into life. That’s what she was doing with the knight, Sel guessed. No mirror, no tower, could trap Melanthos. She would find her way out of anything, even grief. So Sel told herself, sewing until the moon set. Then she rose, went down into the raw, chill, starless hour before dawn. The mists were blowing over the cliff. But she could see vague, creamy scallops of waves far below, and hear the restless tide booming hollowly as it hit the rocky sides of the harbor. It was on the verge of turning; she knew the sound of its wildness when it was at its peak. In an hour or so it would be running out, and the fishers would follow it in their boats.

She thought of joining Gentian in the bakery, for she would be up by now, setting loaves to rise. But the village seemed very far away, in another world, too far beyond the stone wood for her to reach now. She turned after a while, went back up the tower steps.

She turned up a lamp and unrolled her cloak.

She positioned the difficult portions, where human hands and head and feet would be, and sewed them into place. When that was done, the sun had risen; the mirror had opened its eye to the distant, glowing tors. She cut the two holes then, and hemmed them neatly. Then she measured it to her body, added a patch here and there so it would cover her hands and feet cleanly. That done, she whipped a hem tidily around the entire shape, with long, quick stitches. She hurried, for the morning was going fast, and she did not know when Melanthos might return.

In the mirror, the woman plied her need as intently. Sel glimpsed her now and then, making the line of birds and lilies at the hem of her dress. She ignored her own mirror, which changed its scenes every time Sel looked up, as if to entice the woman’s attention from her work. At one moment Sel saw the sea wash through the woman’s mirror, a burst of foam that, draining back, revealed starfish, small white barnacles, sea flowers clinging to a rock. Sel, entranced, stared thoughtlessly. The woman never raised her eyes from her work.

Finally the end of the hem reached the beginning of it. Sel snapped her thread and said softly, “There.” She stood up, adjusted the patchwork over her shoulders. She held the hand pieces lightly between her fingers, and let the head fall over her face, shaking her own head until the blank eyeholes met her eyes and she could see. She looked into the mirror, which was reflecting the true world at the moment, and saw her newborn face.

A step behind her made her whirl. She tried to toss the selkie face down her back before Melanthos saw it, but it clung there, its threads snagged in her hair. Then she caught her breath and held it, frozen, while the dark-haired knight, his sword drawn, stared at her from the top of the steps, looking as astonished as she felt.