The Tower at Stony Wood

Seventeen

In the tower at Stony Wood, Sel drew brown threads back and forth across a patch of linen. She barely thought about what she was making. Her hands made it, she told herself, and anyway, it was nothing at all but a pile of bits and pieces of muted colors, all jumbled together, nothing fitting anything. Melanthos had brought up pockets stuffed full of thread Anyon had given her, the grays and creams and browns of his father’s sheep. She had asked more than once what Sel was making. Nothing, Sel said, in particular, or: I don’t know yet. Her hands seemed to know; Sel did not question them.

Melanthos brought her food, too, when Sel forgot to come down from the tower. She had become engrossed, watching the woman in the tower, waiting for her tale to end, to see how the woman would finally become free. Melanthos warned her now and then that the old mirror might not remember, that the tale might not have an end. But Sel, watching the woman become little by little more restless, more desperate, thought that even if the mirror forgot, the woman herself might give some hint of how the tale began and ended.

So she sewed and waited for the brief, random moments when the mirror turned its memory toward the tower beside the river. The mirror showed her the harbor seals as often as not, which was as close as it ever got to looking at the village. She loved seeing them peering curiously above the waves, diving sleekly after fish without leaving a ripple behind. She wished, occasionally, that the mirror would find the bakery and open an eye into that. But it never did. So Sel, remembering Gentian and the baby, would heave herself stiffly off the pallet and circle down the stairs into the light of day. Gentian, her placid Gentian, had burst into tears in the middle of the bakery the last time Sel appeared.

The baby, starting out of sleep, wailed in sympathy. Sel picked her up and patted Gentian’s shoulder awkwardly, amazed.

“What is it?” she asked anxiously. “Don’t tell me it’s Rawl. I’ll put holes in his boat.”

“It’s you!” Gentian cried. She even wept tidily, Sel saw: one tear out of each eye, traveling to mid-cheekbone and hanging on the fine, flushed skin like pearls. “Rawl goes out in the mornings to fish and comes back to me at night and never complains when I leave him before it’s light to bake. But you—you don’t even know where your home is now. You’ve taken to living in that tower. I see Melanthos in here far more often than I see you!”

Sel was silent, shifting her patting hand to the baby now, while two pearls dissolved on Gentian’s cheeks, and two more fell. “I’m sorry,” she said vaguely, distressed and mystified at having made Gentian cry. The baby was more easily placated. “I’m just—”

“You’re what? Just what?”

“Just—if you’ll just be patient.”

“Patient!” Gentian stared at her, bewildered. “Patient over what? What are you expecting to happen? Is the tower going to fall down or something?”

“It could be,” Sel said, struck, wondering if that was how the tale in the mirror ended. Gentian pulled a clean, hemmed square of an old flour bag out of her pocket and blew her nose once, daintily, as if a flower scent had tickled it.

“Well,” she asked, “are you planning to be in it when it does?”

Sel blinked at her. “Oh,” she said, illumined. “That old tower in the stone wood. No. That might melt into the earth with age, but it’ll never fall.” She passed the baby over to Gentian, which soothed her a little. “Just give me some time.”

“For what?”

Sel’s eyes slid away from her toward the stony streets, the line of houses and shops hiding the sea. “I know it’s not fair,” she said softly. “And not easy. But I need this time. If you’ll just be patient. Get someone to help you in here. One of Lude’s older girls could do it. Just for a little.”

“But I miss you,” Gentian said simply, her eyes filling again with luminous pools that shone but did not spill. “And I’m afraid.”

Sel’s dark, flickering kelpie eyes came back to Gentian. She patted her daughter’s shoulder again, silently a moment. “Don’t be,” she said at last. “Things will come to an end of themselves.”

She sent Gentian home then, and worked, baking and selling and chatting, until she found herself drifting out of the door, through the village, into the stone wood to see if the woman was still in her tower. She was, and so was Melanthos. Sel took a seat beside her on the pallet, and picked up the thread where she had left off.

The mirror showed them the woman in the tower that evening. She sat very still, gazing at what must have been the feverish sky in her mirror: the streaks and washes of rose, purple, gold above the fields where the sun had set. Her hands, invisible in her lap, seemed motionless. The colors in the mirror intensified, grew lustrous; still her hands made no move toward her tidy line of threads. The sun glanced through the cloud as it set, a brilliant, baleful golden eye staring back at the woman through her mirror. Transfixed, it seemed, within her spellbound state, like a bird under a serpent’s eye, she might have been a memory of herself; Sel could not even see her breathe. After the sun had set and the colors faded in the sky, she moved, so abruptly that Sel blinked: it was as if a statue had come to life.

She chose odd threads: yellow-green and orange and a bruised red like a black cherry, colors rarely seen in the sky. Maybe there was something coming down the road of such disturbing hues, that Sel could not yet see. The woman bent over her work. Night misted into her mirror, and then spilled out of it across the other mirror, until the woman vanished in a pool of black.

Melanthos grunted. “That was strange.” Her fingers hovered over choices: the colors in the woman’s mirror, the colors in the woman’s hand.

“She’s making something of her own,” Sel guessed. “She’s tired of being told.”

“But who tells her, in the first place? And what will happen if she refuses?”

Sel shrugged. What will happen if you do? she wanted to ask Melanthos. But she understood too well, now, what lured her daughter: there seemed nothing more compelling in the world than the images spun out of the mind’s eye into thread.

Sel worked late, that night, even later than Melanthos. She did not notice when Melanthos left the tower. In her own mind, Sel walked along the harbor cliffs, a tall, slender, barefoot woman with long black windblown hair. Seals swam through the waves pleating and breaking along the stones. The seals had different faces, so long ago, different names. She could not remember those older names now, except that they were odd: a mix of sounds that glided under and twisted back around a human tongue. Wind collided with her, poured around her, gathered and broke like the sea. She did not watch where her feet took her, through tide pools, over barnacles, across narrow shelves of rock slippery with streamers of moss coiling and uncoiling like mermaids’ hair. She shouted, names, in memory, but Sel, remembering, could no longer hear the sound of them.

She found herself trying to say one, her tongue trying to lick a name into shape. A sound with too many ls, maybe, and beginning with a growl in the back of her throat. What was I thinking? she wondered, amazed. What was that young I thinking?

The young woman in her memory seemed to turn on the cliff to look at her, then. What are you thinking now? she asked Sel, who gazed down at the making in her hands.

But she could not even tell herself.

She forced herself to put it down, go into the world to help Gentian again for a bit. She baked and sold and patted the baby and listened to Gentian talk about Rawl and storms, and what the baby had tried to say. Her own mouth made appropriate noises, she thought. But still she caught Gentian looking at her out of those wide, lovely, perplexed eyes, as if Sel herself had wandered into life out of some forgotten tale. Sel, half her mind still waiting in the tower for her body to come back to it, did as much as she could, absently, perfunctorily, to persuade Gentian that she still knew how to cope with life. When she could do no more, she took off her apron with relief and slipped away when Gentian’s back was turned.

She found Melanthos in the tower among the broken ends of daylight, sitting on the pallet and staring at the mirror.

“Look what she’s doing,” Melanthos breathed as Sel knelt down beside her. “Look at it.”

The woman sat in her chair as usual, embroidering. But the side of the cloth that flowed with images down to the floor was oddly broken up with scatterings of thread on the pale background. Sel studied them, astonished. Tree, one group of threads said. Another, in an elongated strip of repetition said: Road road road road… Rider, said a third, at a tangent to Road, and in a different color. Above the Rider, in black, flew many tiny Crows.

“She’s making everything into words,” Melanthos said, entranced and nibbling on a thumbnail. “I wonder why?”

Sel gazed at the words, felt something stir in her, like some great, dark, amorphous sound on the verge of taking shape. “Magic,” she said suddenly, as close as she could get to the sound. “Magic put her in there, magic must get her out.”

Melanthos dragged her eyes from the mirror, flicked her mother a glance. “They’re just words.”

“So far.”

“Well, how much farther can they go?”

“I don’t know,” Sel mused, watching, while her hands reached for an unfinished patch of gray. “We don’t know her. But it must be magic trapping her there. Whether or not the story is true, it must be magic. She never changes, she never needs her hair combed, she never sees anyone that we can see, she never—”

“She never speaks,” Melanthos said softly.

“Until now.”

“She never—so.” She stirred, her hands clasping, unclasping. “Magic keeps her there, in a timeless enchantment.”

“She needs magic to fight magic.”

Melanthos looked at Sel again, out of her sea-fay eyes. “She’d get rescued in the tale. That’s how they end.”

“Maybe,” Sel murmured, drawing her needle out, “she’s gotten tired of waiting.”

Melanthos studied the woman, until tors grew out of her words, and the reflection of rocky fields. The woman melted away. Melanthos puzzled over threads; Sel wondered if she were contemplating some variations of her own: Woman, perhaps, in blues and pale golds, instead of the woman’s immaculate image. But it seemed more that her thoughts could not settle yet on what it had been given.

“How can she make magic out of nothing?” Melanthos asked finally. “How can she just sit there and make endless days of changing the world into threads into something powerful?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it. If you’re caught in a web and can’t move—if every line trapping you is a magic not your own—how could you spin magic out of yourself?”

“What’s the alternative?”

Melanthos opened her mouth, closed it. She studied the mirror as though she could still see the woman in it. “She will die? But she’s safe enough in there now. She never seems to go hungry or be tired, she’s always tidy—she’ll die if she tries to leave,” she added, illumined. “As long as she keeps doing what she’s doing, not looking at the world, not going into it, only seeing it backward and through her pictures, she’ll be safe.”

“She’ll be lonely,” Sel said to her threads. “Never speaking, never touching, never looked at… You could die of that.”

“So someone put her there to punish her?”

“Maybe.” Sel’s needle slowed; her own eyes shifted, gazing backward. “Or maybe she’s something not quite human, from a place beyond the world, elsewhere. The tower is the only safe place between her and the human world… If she looks at the human world, takes it into her mind and her eyes, she will die because she can never belong to it. The tower is the doorway between the worlds.”

“She’ll die of loneliness.”

“Maybe.”

“So.” Melanthos pulled her knees to her chin, rocked a little, thinking. “She must make herself human.”

“It’s one way to look at it.”

“She can’t go back to where she came from?”

“I suppose that’s one way the tale could end,” Sel said.

“I suppose if it were that easy, there wouldn’t be a tale.”

Melanthos reached toward thread. Her hand hovered, dropped and drew back, empty. Sel looked a question at her. Melanthos shook her head. “There must be something else… I don’t want to do her words. I don’t feel the urge. There’s no magic in it.”

“Maybe not yet…”

“I mean for the mirror. It doesn’t want that.” Her eyes slid again to Sel; she wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees and asked tentatively, “Speaking of magic, do you remember the magic you used to do when we were small? When you were young and our father was alive?”

Sel remembered. For an instant all the magic flowed like tide into her, catching light, dark tumbling within it, nameless creatures and unimaginably beautiful treasures. Then it was gone, like a vision of water on a waste.

“No,” she said briefly to the memory and to Melanthos, whose eyes were wide and vulnerable. “I don’t.” She looked away from her daughter and saw the knight in the mirror.

He was just stepping out of a squat, dark tower. Sel, who had never seen a knight, recognized the details: the towers on his surcoat, the sword, the suggestion of power and skill in his movements. There was a strange look on the knight’s face, wonder and bewilderment, as if whatever he had found in the tower was the last thing he had expected. Dawn, touching the sword with a golden fingertip, sparked a glitter of fire within the jewel.

Behind the tower, in the distance, rose the smooth, graceful slopes of hills that seemed to mirror one another against the sky.

Melanthos leaned forward suddenly, reaching out with both hands to the mirror, or to the knight. “Three Sisters,” she whispered. “That’s where he is.”

She loosed the mirror, and sorted through her threads for green.