The Tower at Stony Wood

Nineteen

Melanthos watched the woman in the tower. She was lying at the edge of the pallet, snoring softly. She had burned candles through the night, making her interminable patches of smoke and dust and ivory. They lay in a heap against the wall, patches for a drab quilt, or an unlikely cloak. Twice Anyon had to bring more thread; she must have gone through several sheep already, and she had not even begun to piece them together. Perhaps she never would; she would just make and make until there was not one cloudy, irregular shape left in her. Then she would leave the tower and return to life, her baking, her children, her cups of bitter ale with Brenna while she watched the sun go down.

She looked thinner, Melanthos thought; she kept forgetting to eat. And she left her hair loose, except when she braided it to go back to the bakery for an afternoon. It fanned across one shoulder and down her back as she slept, a rippling mass of tarnished silver. Her back to Melanthos, her hair flowing into the dark of her skirt, her hands and feet tucked away somewhere out of sight around her long body, she looked scarcely human. Melanthos contemplated her silently, sitting motionlessly in front of the mirror, her eyes narrowed, flecked with tiny flames from the candles.

Maybe, she thought finally, I should just toss the patches out the window.

But that seemed cruel, even unnecessary. Maybe she had in mind some brighter thread to join all the patches together, so that it would look like stones under flowing silvery water in the end, or a cobbled street seamed with gold. Maybe there was magic in the making of this odd thing, so that in the end it would bring Sel peace.

The mirror opened its eye then, showed Melanthos another tower, the woman in it busy at her own embroidery. Her elegant mirror reflected the blank face of night; the woman, threading crimson into her linen, was not paying attention to the mirror. As she drew the needle through and lifted her arm to tighten thread, she gave Melanthos glimpses of her night vision: a tower on an island within a deep, slow-moving river thick with water lilies. From the blank windows of the tower crimson petals of flame opened toward the trees across the narrow channel between the island and the bank. Above the tower, a strange bird with a long neck and pale wings of a swan, a predator’s fierce hooked beak and talons, flew away from the flames gripping a white, twisting snake with a woman’s face. The eyes of the bird and the snake were sky-blue.

As Melanthos watched in wonder, the woman knotted her thread and snapped it. She tore the picture out of the long swath of linen as she might have torn a memory out of her life. Then, without looking away from her threads, she reached out, tossed the burning tower into the night.

She waited a little, still, tense, as if she expected the image to come flying back through the window, or something to emerge out of the dark, crawling up the steep walls on its white belly, a forked tongue flickering out of its human lips. Nothing happened. Her hands moved after a while, pieced the ripped edges of the linen together; she took a needle threaded with the color of flax and began to mend the rent.

How strange, Melanthos thought, her skin prickling. Perhaps you are as real as the knight…

Her own hands moved toward thread, compelled not by the woman’s burning image but by her face, no longer a beautiful, nameless, thoughtless face out of story, but the face of a desperate woman threading her needle with hope, trying to work magic into her stitches, to transform the world that trapped her. Could she change her shape? Melanthos wondered. Could she fly out of her prison, eluding the eye of the mirror which would no longer recognize her?

Sel was awake, Melanthos realized just before she lost herself, became her threads and her image until it was finished, out of her mind. Sel had stopped snoring, some time ago. Her body held the silent tenseness of one awake in the dark, remembering a dream. She faced the mirror; she might have seen the burning tower, the woman transformed into that shape of grace and danger gripping the deadly sorcery in her talons. As the mirror darkened, Sel sat up. Melanthos, drawing thread the tender blue of the woman’s eyes through her needle, disappeared into her picture.

At dawn she threw the haunted, beautiful face out the window. Emptied like an old bucket, and stupid for sleep, she crawled under a blanket on the pallet. She scarcely noticed that Sel was gone. She woke hours later, sweating in a flood of light, thirsty and ravenous. She was alone, she realized groggily. Her mother must have felt an urge for the human world. She put her shoes on and stumbled down the stairs. She found Anyon sitting on the bottom steps.

“I called you earlier,” he said. “Nobody heard me.” He paused at something in her eyes. She could not, she realized, go one step farther in the world without paying some attention to the wonderful line of Anyon’s mouth. She bent thoughtlessly to kiss it. He added breathlessly a moment or an hour later, draped on his back over the steps with Melanthos blinking in his arms, “Gentian wants your mother.”

She lifted her head after a moment, looked at him. “She’s not in the bakery?”

“No.”

“She’s not in the tower.”

“She’s not?”

“No.” She pulled herself up, puzzled. “I wonder where she is. Has Gentian got someone to help her?”

“With the baking, yes. With the baby, no. It’s snuffling or something.” His hands tugged at her lightly, coaxing her back. “Do that again.”

“Later…” She stood up, frowning, and gave him a hand, peeling him ungently off the steps. “I want to find her.”

“She’s probably at Brenna’s.”

“Maybe.” She thumped him sharply on the chest for the grin on his face. “Don’t laugh at my mother.”

“I wasn’t! Don’t I give her all my earth colors? What is she making with them?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing.” She took his arm in both her hands, smelling sharp soap on him, oil from the wool, the tangy scent of bracken. She pushed against him, sniffing like a dog, then pulled him through the stone wood. “Hurry. I want to find her.”

They walked along the harbor cliff and talked to Brenna, who gave Melanthos a pickled egg and told her she had not seen Sel for days. But don’t worry; Sel was tough as an old piece of driftwood and she was probably out negotiating the price of sugar, anyway she’d never go far from her children. All of which gave Melanthos an odd pang of worry. She swallowed the last of the egg and headed for the bakery.

There she found the baby in a squall and Gentian looking disheveled, a hair out of place, a thumbprint of dough on one cheek. The young girl helping her, one of Lude’s, was putting buns in a basket, counting each one loudly and carefully. Anyon hauled the baby over his shoulder, rubbed her back, and she subsided, wiping her nose on his neck. Gentian sighed deeply, dislodging another hair.

“Where’s our mother?” she asked Melanthos.

“I don’t know.” She took one of the warm buns out of the basket and bit into it, causing Lude’s daughter to stare at her in consternation. “She was in that tower all night, making her shapes. Maybe she just went to bed.”

“I looked for her in the house.” Gentian, brows crooked prettily, like a fretting mermaid, gazed back at Melanthos questioningly.

“Maybe she went for a walk,” Anyon suggested. Both their gazes swung to him. He shrugged. “Maybe she went to another tavern, or she’s visiting someone. Maybe she’s just doing something ordinary.”

The two sisters consulted one another wordlessly. Melanthos said, “You go find her. I’ll watch the store.”

“No.” Gentian sighed. “You go. I need to feed the baby. Here.” She gave Melanthos a warm meat pie, then tossed Anyon one, too, at the expression on his face. She took the baby from him. Lude’s daughter started her counting again, sounding aggrieved. Melanthos crossed her eyes at Lude’s daughter, but Gentian, nursing the baby, only smiled peacefully.

They found Sel at twilight on the cliff near the stone wood, when it was almost too dark to see anything but a monolith standing alone on the cliff edge, looking out to sea. They argued over it a little, before they recognized her.

“It has always been there,” Anyon insisted.

“No, it hasn’t. It’s as if a dead tree wandered out of the stony wood…”

“You just never noticed.”

“I notice all the stones,” Melanthos protested. “I have counted all the trees in the stone wood—” Then the monolith moved, turning slowly in the wind, and took her breath away. She saw a graceful, sinuous swirl of long hair, long skirts flowing around a woman’s body pulled tight by the wind, only a little drift of cloth, like the foamy ruffle of a wave, fluttering free at her ankles. Beside Melanthos, Anyon had fallen as abruptly still.

Then the wind unwound the skirt, and hands came up, swept the hair back and twisted it into submission. Melanthos, gripping Anyon’s arm, made a noise.

“That’s her. Your monolith that’s always been there…”

“Well, it looked…” Anyon began, and followed Melanthos along the grassy lip of the cliff.

Sel waited for them, still holding her hair. “Where were you?” Melanthos demanded. “What have you been doing?”

It seemed a long time before her mother spoke, as if she had trouble remembering. But the answer itself was simple enough. “I went swimming,” Sel said. “Then I sat here for a while and watched the seals. Why? Did Gentian need me?”

“She wanted you,” Melanthos said. “The baby has a cold.” It sounded trivial to her ears, suddenly. She could almost hear her mother’s thoughts: Two grown young women and you can’t take care of a few loaves of bread and a baby? What will you do if? When? But Sel only grunted and followed them, tying her hair with a streamer of kelp as she walked.

Melanthos did not find her in the tower again until the baby abandoned her cold and produced a tooth. By then, Melanthos had studied every bit of needlework in Sel’s pile. It all seemed as formless and innocuous as cloud. Nothing caught the eye, nothing suggested… Melanthos put them back into the clutter in which Sel kept them, and pondered. Maybe that was all her mother had in her head, those days, she decided. Misty, shapeless thoughts that hid other things she wouldn’t say. Maybe when they all came out of her, the other things would be revealed. Or maybe… She gave up trying to guess.

“She’s changing,” Gentian said to Melanthos one morning, when Melanthos had gotten up early to help with the baking and found Sel gone again. Yawning over the breakfast rolls she shaped, Melanthos looked a question at Gentian.

“Well,” Gentian answered, putting loaves in the oven, “for one thing she lets her hair down sometimes. And she’s getting thinner.”

“There’s not much to eat in the tower.”

“And there’s the look in her eyes. As if she’s watching something very far away. Or listening for it.”

“She’s fey,” Melanthos said, yawning again.

“You say that. But you never really mean it.” She paused, shaking flour onto a board. “Besides, what does it mean, exactly?”

“Magic,” Melanthos answered vaguely.

“I mean what does it mean to us if she is?”

Melanthos pummeled some dough, thinking about the question. She pulled it into pieces, shaped the pieces into starfish, scallop shells, as Sel had taught her, thinking about Sel finding her way up the tower, moving through Anyon’s thorns as if they—or she—did not exist. She twisted a handful of dough into a spiraling auger shell, wondering what her mother was doing now, thinking, feeling. She rarely told them anything, Melanthos realized, not even when they asked. Did she tell herself what she thought, what she felt? Or did she just make another amorphous shape and let that speak for her?

She pulled starfish legs out of another bit of dough impatiently, set all the shapes on the baking stone, and propelled them into the oven, slamming the door behind them. “I don’t know,” she said tersely. “I’ll ask her. Is someone coming to help you this morning?”

Gentian nodded. “Lude’s eldest. She’s not so noisy as her sister.” She draped her sticky fingers over the board and leaned against it, gazing at nothing. Melanthos saw the worry in her eyes. “I’m afraid,” she said softly. “And I don’t know why. Ask her about that, too.”

In the tower, Melanthos found Sel sitting placidly on the pallet, sorting through her patches. Sel lifted her head, turning as Melanthos walked in, and in that sudden glance, she glimpsed the stranger’s face beneath her mother’s face: another woman, secret-eyed, graceful in her bones, maybe wild, maybe fey, old or young, but not clearly revealing which.

“What are you doing?” Melanthos asked.

The woman answered in Sel’s prosaic voice. “It’s time,” she said, “to piece them together.”

“Why now?” Melanthos asked sharply, and Sel looked at her, surprised.

“Because I’ve got all the shapes I need.”

“For what?”

“A sort of cloak, I think… It’s not very colorful, but it suits me, and the wool will keep me warm. And you need all the brightest threads.”

She smiled unexpectedly at Melanthos, who felt a sudden, augury turn of pure terror, for her mother had already vanished, left this smiling stranger to lie for her.

She said nothing. When Sel left the tower to go back to the village, Melanthos left also, to cross the plains among the sheep. There she found one of the wild ponies she used to catch when she was young. She rode north out of the plain, toward the Three Sisters.