The Tower at Stony Wood

Twenty-four

Thayne Ysse rode the dragon to the North Islands. He watched the world below him out of dragon’s eyes. Gold burned in random fires through the darkness. He could smell it, a dry, metallic sweetness, a whiff of honey mixed with the lingering traces of humans. Death, they smelled like, no matter what perfumes they wore, but that itself was not unpleasant to him. The land seemed a great, dark living body, with veins of liquid silver running across it, that breathed and moved and dreamed. It was a sleeping dragon on a vast plain of water. Thayne, tracking scents of gold through the scents of trees, smoke, the thick tangled odors of animals and humans, did not smell the sea until he reached it.

He remembered his human face then. He could feel himself move, separate his bone from dragon bone. His thoughts detached themselves from smells, began to form words again. He knew his name; its letters flamed within the dragon’s brain. He saw the seam of land and sea where the waves rolled and broke in a creamy lace of foam across the sand. Yves sank beneath the waves; Ysse rose out of them, the crescent moon of land among scattered stars of other islands. He felt the dragon’s question in his mind, a sudden, wordless faltering over the unfamiliar scent, the end of land and gold.

Thayne guided it far over the empty sea, away from farms and animals. Only a fisher in a coracle, too busy with his nets to look up, might have seen the dragon fly toward the northernmost horn of Ysse. There Thayne guided it down onto a stretch of sand walled by barren, windswept cliff. The dragon breathed a weary lick of flame at the sea, in protest of the wet and cold. One drooping eye regarded Thayne bleakly out of the thinnest of slits. Thayne walked to the edge of the tide. The fishers rarely came close to this wild, rocky shore; the nearest boat was far south. He felt a brief, warm, ashy sigh of dragon on his back and turned. The gold covering its vast body, heaps of coin, jumbled cups and crowns and gold-hilted swords, bones wearing rings, armbands, pieces of armor, clung to the dragon as if held there by the force of its desire. Thayne swallowed something metallic, sharp, bittersweet in the back of his throat: the taste of ash, dragon fire, gold.

He picked a coin off the dragon’s back to show his father and said, “Stay quiet. No one should disturb you. I’ll come back for you soon.”

On the top of the cliff, he glanced back. The dragon had curled tightly around itself, tucking head and claws and tail close into its body. Its visible eye had closed. Thayne began the long journey to the southern horn of Ysse.

He reached the ancient, crumbling castle at night, running a boat he had borrowed in on the tide. He pulled it to shore and stood silently a moment. He could feel the dragon sleeping, a massive, shadowy power in the dark, like a dreaming mountain full of caverns, secret underground rivers, deeper veins of molten fire rooted in the heart of the world. Then he heard soft, uneven steps, the rhythmic beat of something hard against the ground between the steps. A figure appeared in the open gate, swung the crutch for another step, and stopped dead.

Craiche whispered, “I can see your eyes in the dark.”

Thayne went to him, held him tightly, wordlessly. He had journeyed so far from the man who had left Ysse with the dragon only a picture in his mind, that he thought not even Craiche would recognize him. He said, “I brought the dragon.”

Craiche shook his head a little, letting the crutch fall to cling to Thayne with both hands. “You are the dragon.” His voice shook. “Did it—was it hard?”

“It seemed impossible.” He loosed his brother, picked up the crutch. “I had to fight the battle between Yves and the North Islands all over again.”

“Did you win?”

“Yes.” He dropped his arm loosely over Craiche’s shoulders as he balanced himself again. “There was a knight of Gloinmere who came to Skye at the same time, looking for that tower. We fought—”

“Did you kill him?”

“Nearly.” He was silent a moment, remembering the eerie, desperate battle among the bones and gold. “But he told me something only he could have known to be true. That he was the man who carried you down the hill in the dark when you were wounded.”

He heard Craiche’s breath catch; the crutch struck earth and stopped again. “Who was he?” All the pain of the memory that Craiche kept so well hidden behind his smile surfaced suddenly, knotted in the words.

“Cyan Dag. The man who was busy, at the same time, saving Regis Aurum’s life.”

“Why did he—” Craiche stopped, swallowing bitterness. “Why did he bother with me?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have time to ask him that. Maybe, if he survives the war we will bring to Gloinmere, you can ask him yourself.”

Craiche was silent, moving again across the courtyard. No one else was awake; even the tower their father loved was dark. As they passed it, Thayne felt something other than dragon thought flare like an ember in his mind: an emanation of power within the ancient books.

He breathed, surprised. “So he is right about that, too.”

“What?”

“Our father. He never bothered with books when he could think. Now he can smell the power in them. How is he? Did he realize I was gone?”

“Well.” Craiche’s voice eased; Thayne felt his smile flash before he saw it, in the torchlight at the steps. “He got it through his head well enough that Thayne had gone to get the dragon. But he couldn’t connect Thayne the dragon hunter with the man who led him out of the tower at night and brought him supper. He kept wondering where that man was. So yes, he missed you.”

“One of me,” Thayne said wryly.

“Where did you put the dragon?”

“On the north horn of the island.”

“And the gold? Did you bring that, too?”

“Gold enough for us all to fill our plates with it and eat it for a year. Gold—you won’t believe what you see.”

“We should hide the gold. Ships out of Yves sail among the islands sometimes.”

“No one,” Thayne said grimly, “would touch that dragon’s gold and live.”

“Take me to see it.”

“I will. In the morning.”

When they woke in the morning, the dragon was in the yard.

Thayne was pulled out of a dream of some dark, bleak, dangerous place in which someone he could not see had just said something profound and vital that he did not quite understand. He reached for what he thought was his sword and stumbled out of bed before he opened his eyes. He bumped into his father in the hallway, barefoot and brandishing a sword.

“We are besieged,” he shouted at Thayne. The scantily bearded young man who milked and herded the cows ducked nervously behind a door. Thayne heard the shouts from the yard, the impatient bawling of cows.

“There’s a great thing in the yard, my lord,” the cow man said to Thayne. “I couldn’t get to the barns.”

“Arm the house!”

“It’s your dragon,” Thayne told his father. “The one you sent me to get in Skye.” His father stared at him.

“Bowan? You’re back home.”

“I came back last night. You were sleeping.”

“Your eyes are strange. Are you dead?”

Thayne rubbed them, swallowing a bitter laugh. “If I were Bowan, I’d be dead. I’m Thayne. Your son.”

“Oh.”

He dropped a hand on his father’s shoulder, feeling the cold that had seeped beneath the dragon’s scales and disturbed its sleep. “Come and see it.”

“Bowan.”

“Thayne.”

“Why are you carrying that?”

Thayne felt it, then: the smooth grain in his hand instead of metal, the lighter weight of aged wood. Some sort of staff, he held, with a knotted bole on one end worn smooth as a skull. “Must be something of Craiche’s,” he guessed, bemused. “I thought I had picked up my sword.”

“It looked at me,” his father said, gazing mesmerized at the bole. The shouts from the yard grew in force, as the household awoke; dogs had begun to howl. Thayne heard Craiche’s voice in the din, trying to quiet the dogs.

An ember flared in the dragon’s brain: impatience, annoyance at the noise, the cold, the chaos of smells, the unpredictable world so unlike the stillness of the burning waste. Thayne moved quickly, still carrying the staff like a shepherd, the anxious members of the household flocking in his wake, as he went out.

The dragon had coiled itself into the yard like a sea creature in its shell, its bulky body spilling from house to barns, from wall to wall. Its head was raised; it peered curiously into the tower where Thayne’s father played with magic. The gates were completely blocked by a wing. Dogs on the steps barked furiously at its other wing, then slunk back, whining at the smell of sulfur. The treasure on the dragon’s back, clinging like a crust of sea life on a rock, hurt the eyes like the rising sun.

Craiche was standing among the gold, his face butter yellow in its glow. He lifted a golden helm, tried to fit it over his head, then shook the skull out of it, laughing. He dropped it into place. An etched and hammered mask of gold swung toward Thayne, its eyes dark slits in the gold, its mouth a thin, grim line.

Thayne wondered suddenly what it would take to persuade Craiche to stay home from this war. He did not broach the subject then, just said quickly, “Craiche, get down. It’s a wild, dangerous thing and it could crush you if you fall.”

“It’s beautiful,” Craiche said breathlessly from within the helm. “It will do what you tell it. Let me fly it with you. You have to move it out of the yard. And you can’t expect me to march all the way to Gloinmere.”

A wing shifted, perhaps harried by a dog, perhaps to unfurl for flight. Thayne gripped the staff in his hand tightly. “Craiche,” he began, then did not bother. The dragon’s neck sprawled over most of the stone steps in front of the doors. Thayne walked onto it easily, down its broad, flattened back. The dragon, one eye still studying the disorderly contents of the room at the top of the tower, rolled its other eye down at Thayne. It snorted very gently; the acrid smell of damp ash blew through the yard.

Thayne, standing over its heartbeat, listened to it, until the massive, measured pound and wash of blood seemed to flow through him. His thoughts seemed enclosed by a glittering patchwork of scales. He felt again the intimation of secrets, enchantments within the room, and understood what treasure had lured the dragon to this unlikely tower.

He looked up at it, filled suddenly with the dragon’s longing. “Yes,” he said to himself and the dragon. Yes, said bone and marrow, filling with the word, in wordless dragon’s language. Yes, said the staff in his hand.

It flared suddenly; light spat out of the bole above his hand. It narrowly missed Craiche, who lost his balance anyway with surprise, and sat down abruptly on a pile of gold. Thayne heard their father shout his name. Craiche took the helm off his head and stared at Thayne.

“What is that?”

“I have no idea,” Thayne said tightly, wading through coin and armor to help his brother. “I thought it was yours. Are you hurt?”

Craiche shook his head, pulled himself up with Thayne’s hand. He bent to peer into the bole, making Thayne’s skin constrict with horror.

“Craiche—”

He straightened. “There’s something in there. A jewel or an eye.”

Thayne turned the eye toward the open gates. “Our father must have brought it down from the tower.” He added dryly, picking a sheathed sword out of the pile for Craiche to use as a crutch, “It took that for him to remember my name.”

He moved the dragon outside the yard, where it lay along the wall, its wings jutting upward like great, shining sails, its neck looped backward along its side, its heart pushed as close as it could get to the tower.

Then he sent messengers to all the North Islands, along with a single gold coin bearing Regis Aurum’s face.

By day he plotted a war, sending gold among the islanders to feed themselves, repair their houses and boats and barns for the families they would leave behind, buy arms and horses from mainland traders who asked no questions and left them alone, once they got a glimpse of the watchful dragon on Ysse. Thayne had moved the gold into the tower. At night he could wade through it and climb the stairs without a torch, it glowed so brightly; it never seemed to sleep. At night, he learned.

His father stayed with him, watched him pore over ancient books, inhaling words like air, feeling them become part of him, his bones adjusting to give them room, his heart taking a new shape. Occasionally, he struggled with the magic in the staff, trying to control its light. Sometimes it slept, deep in the dark, glittering faceted eye in the bole, no matter what Thayne did to coax it awake. Sometimes it spat its pale, dangerous fires for no apparent reason, and an ancient tome would flutter into ash, or a rock in the tower walls would crack. Once it shattered the jar his father had said was full of pearls. The smell blinded Thayne with tears, sent him stumbling with his father down the stairs. Outside, the dragon loosed a sudden snort; the stones around them trembled. For once, his father remembered his name.

“Is that the best you can do, Thayne?” he asked acridly. “Blast Regis Aurum out of Gloinmere with a stench?”

“It would work,” Thayne said inarguably, sagging against a gatepost and wiping his eyes. “They must have been very old pearls.”

When he slept, he was plagued with dreams.

Women came to him from all across the islands. They walked silently through the gates, sometimes one or two, sometimes endless numbers of them, crowding around him where he stood on the steps, watching them. Some were young and lovely, dressed in worn wool and linen, their hands and bare feet already grown broad and callused with work. Others had lined, weary faces, and children clinging to their knees. Others could barely walk; they looked at him out of eyes like cloud. No one ever spoke. They simply stood in the yard, gazing at him, until he jerked himself awake, and stared thoughtlessly into the dark. Awake, he understood their sorrow. But he could not let it touch him; even in his dreams, he refused to speak.

Finally, in his dreams, one woman spoke.

She sat in the tower with him, among the gold, holding the staff he had found. Her hair was white as bone, her eyes as black as emptiness. She turned the eye on the bole at him. He felt its light pour into him, trying to change the shape of his heart, which, he knew in the dream, was a helm made of gold, with two dark slits for eyes and a thin slash for a mouth. As relentlessly as the light melted the gold mask, he reshaped it with his own powers, showed her the expressionless, merciless face of war.

She said, “Then I will take Craiche.”

“No,” he shouted, and woke himself. It was barely light. A servant on his way to the kitchen opened the door to look at Thayne questioningly. Thayne shook his head, rubbing his face. He dropped his hands, felt the fear boring into him.

“Craiche,” he whispered. “I need you to stay here with our father. Craiche, I am tying you to this chair for a good reason; when they untie you, don’t try to follow us, the dragon will be gone. Craiche—”

Craiche eased the door open with his crutch then, startling Thayne. “I heard you shout.”

“Craiche, you are not going with us to Gloinmere. You will stay here with our father—”

“Don’t be absurd.” He backed out again, yawning, closing the door as he went. “You’re dreaming. I’m riding the dragon with you.”

“Who are you?” Thayne demanded helplessly, of the harper from Skye. “Who are you?”

But though she haunted his dreams, she did not answer.