The Tower at Stony Wood

Five

Melanthos saw the woman in the tower. She sat in light on an ornate chair covered with carved lions’ heads and roses. Melanthos could not see her face, only the white-gold hair that rippled down her back. She worked at a picture in thread on a broad round frame on a stand in front of her. From one side of the frame hung folds and swathes of unworked linen; from the other, transformed on its journey across the frame, bright images painted in thread poured down and piled on the stones.

Melanthos, kneeling in her own tower among her swirls of threads, stared, transfixed, at the vision.

The room seemed large; the window, its casement of colored glass open, was broad enough to sit in and look out. But the woman did not look at the world. She looked instead at the great round mirror angled across the window ledge to catch the scenes below. As she watched, her needle flashed ceaselessly, quickly. She paused only to replace one needle with another from a long row of them pinned to one side of the frame, trailing different colors down the unworked linen.

Melanthos’s eyes slid warily to the mirror. But she did not find herself there, watching the woman in another mirror within another tower. She saw lilies massed against the tower wall, a shallow river flowing past them, a road beyond the trees along the riverbank, and on the other side of the trees, furrowed fields beginning to flush green. A man rode through the mirror, too vague, translated between mirrors, for Melanthos to see clearly. Silver flared like the glance of light off armor. The woman’s hand rested briefly on the linen; her head turned very slightly toward the open casement.

She bent over her work again, her long hair trailing over her shoulder, shielding her eyes from the world.

Melanthos, her breath stopped as if the woman in the mirror might hear her, reached soundlessly for threads.