The Tower at Stony Wood

Six

Cyan Dag lost count of days and nights as he traveled west. He rode through sun and moon, wind and rain, and snow-white flurries of apple blossom without noticing them, as if, intent on Skye, he had already left the world he knew. Skye could be found as far west as one could ride without falling into the sea. How far that was, no one seemed certain. Seven days, he was told. Weeks. It depended, he was told, but on what it depended varied: the direction of the wind, perhaps, or the phase of the moon. He set his face to the path of the falling sun and continued his journey as methodically and relentlessly as he fought. If the sun set before he found a bed, then he slept where he stopped. If a road west took him across a mountain pass as narrow as a blade and so high he felt the cold starlight in his hair, he crossed it. Having left Gloinmere so quickly, he had taken little of anything with him, clothes, money, or arms. Sometimes innkeepers recognized the towers on his surcoat and gave him a bed for the sake of his name. Other times they bound him with a deed: a demand for justice, a rescue, a plea for mercy, or, when that failed, a battle. He did all that he was asked in the king’s name, and directed all gratitude and tributes back to Gloinmere. Sometimes, late at night, the lady’s eyes cut through his dreams, small and pupilless and ancient as stone. He would wake to find himself on his feet, sword in hand, searching for her shadow in the dark, while disturbed animals or other travelers edged nervously away from him. She haunted his dreams as if she searched for him, the knight who had seen her secret face, to snare him before he dragged her into light.

He thought she had found him one day. He stopped to seek a bed at a crazed inn beside the road he followed. The road ran west into a deep forest not far from the inn, and disappeared from view. The inn was a hunched, soot-blackened place with sagging floors and crooked lintels. He barely noticed such details; his journey west left him sleeping under a tree as often as not. But, he did notice the silence. Only one man sat at the hearth, making his way stolidly through what smelled like a bowl of scorched stew. At the sight of the armed knight walking in the door, he rose hastily, and Cyan saw the greasy, beer-stained apron he wore.

“My lord knight,” he exclaimed.

“My name is Cyan Dag.”

“My lord Cyan Dag—” He wiped his hands on the apron, then clutched Cyan’s arm as if the knight might change his mind and flee. “Have you come through that forest?”

Cyan shook his head, recognizing fear in the bloodshot eyes. “I’m riding west from Gloinmere. Are you the innkeeper?”

The innkeeper, a burly man as bald as an egg, loosed Cyan long enough to wipe the sweat off his head. “I am,” he said grimly. “You are the first traveler I have seen in three days. My lord, there is an evil in that forest. It will not let anyone pass without injury, and it’s frightening everyone away. You’ll be in peril if you continue on this road.”

Cyan was silent, trying to see the forest out of the thick, smoke-charred ovals of glass in a casement. He gave up. “I’m on my way to Skye,” he answered slowly, wondering if what troubled the forest had been waiting all these weeks, for him. “Skye lies west, so I ride west. If the road west goes through that forest, then so do I.”

The innkeeper sighed in relief. “You are a brave man, sir knight. If you choose to fight the evil in the forest, I will give you my softest bed, and whatever I have to eat and drink. Which is not much,” he admitted. “But the best I have, you will have.”

Cyan detached himself from the innkeeper’s hold and went to the door. The great, dark trees, blurred with dusk, might have been painted, they stood so silently. The road ran across a meadow to the edge of the forest, and then shadow swallowed it; he could see nothing beyond the night within.

He asked, thinking of a pale, enchanting face with eyes turning black as that shadow, “What does this evil look like?”

“Monstrous, they say. Merciless.”

“Human? Or animal?”

“Human, after its fashion.”

“Does it use magic? I can’t fight sorcery.”

“Its strength is its power, so they say.” The innkeeper watched the forest nervously over Cyan’s shoulder. “It attacks travelers, steals their horses and possessions, sends them running for their lives. Four armed men together could not bring it down. But you are a knight of Gloinmere.”

“And it is between me and Skye… If it stops me, I will fight it,” he promised simply, “in the name of Regis Aurum.”

He stepped into the yard to get his pack, since even the innkeeper’s menials had abandoned him. The innkeeper followed to take the gelding to the ramshackle stable.

“Thank you, Cyan Dag,” he said somberly. “You may fight evil in the king’s name, but it’s your name the plain folk around here will remember.”

Dawn was scarcely more than a flush of gray above the forest when Cyan continued his journey west. As he rode into the trees, a damp, webbed lacework of green from the heavy boughs brushed his face. No birds sang at his passage. He kept the gelding at an even pace as he watched for movement within the forest. He kept his thoughts as steady, not trying to guess what might come at him, or when, or how much warning it might give, before it struck.

It was not subtle. That he noticed immediately, as it rode toward him down the road. A pack of hounds after a stag might have made less noise. He reined abruptly; his horse started to rear, then checked itself and stood still, trembling. The rider was huge, bulky, twice as tall as any man Cyan had ever seen, and, it seemed, with twice as many heads. One, a mass of white hair, faced backward. The other faced forward, its bell-shaped head flowing into its shoulders without bothering with a neck. Only its mouth and the glint of its eyes were visible beneath a black helm. Its mouth was opened wide, and emitted a strange, continuous noise that sounded midway between the groan of some great bellows and the high, harsh screech of a rusty wheel. It was dressed entirely in black, and rode a black horse, which, for all its broad frame and massive hooves, seemed dwarfed by the giant on its back. Two arms swung a great broadsword through the air in front of it, back and forth, like some demented thresher. Two others guided the horse in a headlong gallop toward Cyan.

He stopped grappling with the strangeness, and let all his attention focus on what he recognized, rather than what he did not. The rider was top-heavy; it would not stop easily; on foot it would be clumsy, slow to turn, possibly confused by its double vision. He gathered his reins, waited until the grim, noisy monstrosity was upon him. Then he dodged the fanning sweep of the blade as he wheeled the gelding out of its path, and aimed a passing blow at the black helm. The helm tolled a deep, sonorous note, as if he had struck cast iron. One of the four hands loosed a rein and rose to still the clang. The backward face, bare, red-eyed, and glaring wildly, startled Cyan as it passed. He urged the gelding after it; its expression changed, in the moment, from fierceness to surprise, and then to apprehension as Cyan neared. Then it gave a yelp as the horse under it wrenched to a halt and spilled its unwieldy burden out of an extraordinarily high saddle onto the ground.

Heads and arms separated into two bodies that turned fully human as they rose. The white-haired one, with oddly pale skin and red eyes like a rat, leaped lithely to his feet, still holding the sword. The other stumbled up and turned in a circle as it struggled to lift the cumbersome helm. The face under it, older and heavier, was bloodied. Cyan swung at the younger man, who was attempting to mount again. His blade snagged the new sun flaring through the trees; the man, wincing at the light, slashed at nothing and slipped on a tree root. The great horse, stung by the flat of Cyan’s blade on his haunch, leaped away. Cyan rode at the armed man, and had backed him against an outcrop of rock at the side of the road, when something struck him from above.

The world disappeared in a sudden wash of red. Fire licked jaggedly across his wrist. He flailed desperately at his blindness and lost his balance. A hand gripped the cloth at his chest and heaved; the ground spun up to slam against him. He heard a horse’s hooves growing fainter and fainter, and then nothing.

He woke a moment or two later, with the hissing moan and shrill clamoring in his ear, as if the giant’s foremost head were trying to warn him of some dire portent. His sword lay beneath him, the angry red glint of its pommel near his eye. Someone, he realized with groggy astonishment, was sitting on his legs and pulling his boots off.

“Put these on,” a woman said briefly. “Leave yours for him. They could talk, the way they flap.”

“He won’t be doing much walking,” a young man commented. “That slash in his wrist is bad. He’s losing blood.”

“So am I,” the older man grumbled. “He’s got a fighting arm solid as a tree trunk. You wouldn’t think so to look at him.”

“He’s a knight of Gloinmere.”

“He’s a menace.”

“He would have routed the pair of you,” the woman said tartly, “if I hadn’t dropped a rock on his head. As it is, he’s seen both your faces and broken your noise box.”

“He’ll die soon enough,” the older man said dispassionately. “The animals will help him along. But where one knight comes, others may follow, especially if they search for him. We don’t want to linger in this forest. Where’s his horse?”

“I caught it,” the younger said. “There, with ours. He doesn’t have much else, for a knight.”

“Riding alone away from Gloinmere,” the woman mused, “on the road to Skye… Where was he going, I wonder, and why?” The weight lifted abruptly off Cyan; her voice grew distant, tangling with the odd, incessant din. “Take his sword. Leave that.”

“But I can fix it—”

“It would drive me mad. Leave it with him for company.”

Cyan gripped his sword and rolled to his feet. His first thrust, down at the ground to catch his balance, struck a round wooden box to the heart; metal cogs and gears groaned to silence around the blade. The woman shouted; the men groped hastily on the ground for their swords. Cyan shook the box away, and spun a dizzying circle of light around him, keeping the men at bay, trying to keep the woman in sight, while he edged toward the horses. Beyond the flickering, slashing web of silver he wove, someone shifted from view. He turned desperately, searching. A horse galloped up to him; a blade flashed overhead. Cyan ducked, then reached up, caught a wrist, and wrenched a stranger down into the fray. He paused a heartbeat, startled. But the stranger only gave a battle yell that Cyan had not heard for seven years, and hoisted himself up behind the white-haired man mounting Cyan’s gelding. A blade swiped at him. He fell over the other side of the horse, taking the rider down with him. The woman had already pulled herself up into the high, unwieldy saddle on the black, and was shouting again. The older man, blood fanning down his face, caught the reins of a snorting piebald mare and fumbled for a stirrup. Cyan started to pursue, then stopped as the trees bent low over him, leaves fluttering and sparking in his eyes. He leaned on his sword, groping suddenly for air. The stranger, one hand gripping the young man’s hair, the other hauling at his trousers, brought him to his feet. The woman rode up against them both, knocking them apart.

“Get mounted, you rat-eyed goose,” she snapped, and thumped the stranger’s head with a dagger’s hilt. He staggered. The cob-haired young man leaped up behind the hillock of saddle and clung to it as she plunged after the mare down the road toward Gloinmere.

“Thank you,” Cyan gasped through the close and oddly shimmering air. For a moment the stranger, with his gold hair and eyes, his blurred, flickering face, seemed something not quite human, another mystery along the road to Skye. Then the mystery rubbed his head violently and spat.

“Vultures.”

“I’m sorry I dragged you into it.”

“I was looking for a way in.”

“How did you know—” He stopped, until the leaves had floated back to the trees and he saw the man’s face clearly, spare and proud, scoured by wind and weather, young yet, but harrowed, it seemed to Cyan, beyond his years. “Which of us to help?”

The stranger smiled tightly. “You were the one with no boots.” He blinked then, at something not quite clear in his own vision. His smile vanished; all expression flowed out of him, as if he saw a ghost standing between them on their battlefield. He said very softly, “Three gold towers on a dark field of blue…”

“My name is Cyan Dag. I am a knight of Gloinmere, on my way to Skye. Do you know Skye?” he asked, for the stranger might as well have come from there as anywhere. “I need to find a certain tower.”

The stranger reached him in two steps. One hand closed with a hawk’s grip around Cyan’s torn wrist; the other caught the sword he dropped as he fell to his knees. He groaned, the trees rustling close again. The blade seared his throat. He shook leaves out of his eyes, bewildered, and saw the strange fury in the fierce, yellow eyes.

“I am Thayne Ysse. If you make it back to Gloinmere alive, remind Regis Aurum that Ysse once ruled the North Islands, and we will, with that tower and the dragon who guards it, rule again. If I see you in Skye, I will kill you.”

“There is no dragon,” Cyan told him, amazed. “There is a woman.”

But he only thought he spoke. The bloody jewel on his sword flared above him and the wind that roared among the leaves blew out the sun.

When he woke, the world was dark and the Lady from Skye watched him across her fire.

He caught breath painfully, choked on hot, charred air. She loomed over him suddenly, impossibly tall and angular, her face in shadow, the full moon rising out of her hair. Then she knelt, and he saw that what he had thought were the pale coils of her braids had been the aura of moonlight behind her. Her hair was long, straight, and black as night, falling around her like a mantle. She could fold herself into it, he thought feverishly, disappear into herself like a forest animal.

Fire shimmered over her eyes as over water; he could not see their color, or the thoughts in them. Her face, in the shifting light, seemed weathered smooth and dark as polished wood. A long, slender hand rose from within her hair, shifting gleaming strands and opening as it moved toward him. A silver ring flashed as it slid loosely between the knuckles of her middle finger. Then the hand disappeared; he felt it ease beneath his head, raise him a little. Something rough and dank, like wet bark, touched his lips.

He pulled away from it, though his throat was raw with thirst. “Who are you?” he whispered, trying to see beyond the fire in her eyes.

“Don’t be afraid.” The voice he heard seemed oddly familiar, and inside his head, rather than in his ears. Cria’s voice, he realized suddenly, deep and haunting, like a horn heard from far away in a wood.

“Drink. You must be thirsty. So thirsty you taste ashes when you swallow, you taste dry, bitter leaves. There is a little stream not far from here; the water is so cold and sweet…”

He drained the cup. She smiled and he glimpsed, in the graceful bones of her face, the tender, luminous expression, what he had feared across her fire. Then the night whirled around her and poured into his eyes.

He asked again, clinging desperately to his question, as if it was the one thing that might keep him alive, “Who are you?”

If she answered, he did not hear.

He woke on a lumpy bed he recognized: the innkeeper’s best. His sword and pack lay on top of a scarred clothes chest. The wounded noise box sat on a chair, the cracked boots he had inherited stood beside the bed, one sole gaping speechlessly. Through the window, he could see the gold gelding in the yard, feeding from a bucket. From beyond the walls came murmuring, sudden calls and laughter, the gabbling of returning guests.

He questioned the innkeeper before he left, the next morning. “No one brought you here,” the innkeeper said. “I found you across your horse’s back, coming into my yard. But someone cared for you. Someone tended your wounds and sent you here. You don’t remember?”

He remembered. He searched the forest for her as he rode through it. But he found her only in his thoughts, where her secret, luminous eyes, her smile, stayed with him all down the long road out of Yves into Skye.