The Tower at Stony Wood

Twenty

In the squat, dark tower with the open doorway, Cyan Dag talked to the Bard of Skye. They sat on massive oblongs of stone, like doorposts that had fallen down and been replaced. The floor was dirt; there seemed nothing else in the tower but stone and shadow, and the two of them, illumined by a silvery light shining from a ring on Idra’s finger. Beyond the doorway, evening stood at the threshold. The air smelled of damp grass, earth, wildflowers. The palest, most tender shades of green were still visible in the dusk.

“The difference,” the bard said, “between weaving and embroidery becomes most obvious if you happen to do one or the other. Most knights don’t. The looms are different, the threads are different, the stitches, the instruments that carry the thread… Are you planning to stay here long? There is still another tower to get to.”

“It’s pleasant here,” Cyan said. “Peaceful. I might stay the night.”

“Nights are long here. Nights can be endless.”

“You sent me here,” he reminded her. “I have been trying to find that tower with Gwynne of Skye in it, but the towers keep changing… Is she weaving? Or embroidering?”

“Gwynne?”

“The monster who married the king said she weaves and weeps.”

“I doubt that she knows enough about either to tell the difference.”

“Gwynne?”

“She was never one for sitting still. That you have with you is embroidery.”

He pulled it out of his sleeve, where it had somehow gotten wedged, and spread it on the stones between them. He studied the fine stitches, the bright threads making a picture of the gold-haired man sitting on a pile of gold. He said softly, “I could have done without that tower.”

“He needs you,” the bard said, her old eyes black and flat as beetles’ wings in the silvery light. She wore black now, from throat to heel; her long white hair rippled over her straight shoulders down her back to flow across the stone. “We embroider our days. Life weaves.”

“I didn’t come to Skye for Thayne Ysse.”

“How do you know why you came here? The woven thread touches many other threads on its journey across the loom.”

He did not answer; he had no answer for her yet, though he knew what she wanted. They sat in his silence, she waiting, watching him, while he watched the still evening outside the door. So still it was, nothing stirred, nothing made a sound. Only bright young leaves of ferns and lilies changed, their hues of green turning to darker greens, the shifts of color the only movement in the tranquil dark.

I could stay here, he thought, looking back at his failed journey across Yves and Skye, watching himself leave king and court without a word of explanation. No one knew where he was but Thayne Ysse. And the Bard of Skye, with her eyes like pools so deep nothing stirred the surface from within. But he could feel what she wanted from him. She wanted something; why else was she there?

I am no closer to doing what I came to do than I was when I left Gloinmere, he thought dispassionately. I am farther away than ever, now, thanks to Thayne Ysse. I am so far away I might never find my way back.

“I know,” she said.

“So,” he answered, unsurprised that she had read his thoughts, “maybe I will stay. I remember what I glimpsed in this tower when you sent me here. Dreams, quests, wonderful lands, strange kings with ancient and magnificent courts… Was it real? Or did you work some illusion to twist my heart with longings?”

“What you see here,” she said, glancing around at the worn stones, the relentless, motionless darkness overhead, black as a toad’s eye and as senseless, “is all.”

“So you say now.”

“So I say,” she answered in her riddling way, giving him truth or lie and letting him choose.

“Still,” he mused, leaning back against the stone, watching a star form through the doorway, “it’s far more appealing than the dragon’s tower. That place reeks; it’s full of bones; the stones sweat in the heat. And if I go back, Thayne will only kill me. So he said. I’ll spare myself the trouble, staying here.”

“You told him you saved his brother’s life. Thayne would die in that tower himself rather than allow harm to come to Craiche. Perhaps he changed his mind about killing you.”

“Perhaps it’s not worth going back to find out. My last glimpse of life would be Thayne Ysse’s harrowed face blaming me for all the sorrow in the North Islands. I’d rather watch the night fall, here. Its face is calm and lovely, and full of mysteries.”

She picked up the harp lying beside her on the stones, flicked a few sweet notes into the air. “You should make up your mind.” She did not meet his eyes. “It’s a long way back and you’ll get lost trying to find your way in the night.”

He looked at her thoughtfully, the Bard of Skye sitting with him in the dark tower. “Why do you care?” he asked her. “What do you want from me?”

Her eyes flickered at him, then. “There’s still another tower.”

“There are many other knights.”

“But only one of you, Cyan Dag. I need you.”

He was silent again, with wonder; it sounded, for once, like truth. Still, her need was complex, bewildering, and extremely dangerous. He said indifferently, for there seemed nothing left to tempt him, “Make it worth my while.”

“Is the Lady from Skye not worth your while?”

“Not at this particular moment. You want me to choose between a tower of night and a tower of fire. You don’t offer me the tower with the lady in it. Not yet. Never yet. Always something else first. Do I go or do I stay? Which tower do I choose? You want me to choose fire. Make it worth my while.”

He saw the first flicker of expression in her ancient eyes, uncertainty, perhaps even the pain of some memory. He waited, watching the gentle evening darken, smelling the mysteries of bracken, fungus, rotting wood, flowers scattering their faded petals over the grass. The bard asked finally, pulling him back out of the night, “What do you want?”

Nothing, he thought. Nothing.

Then the answer washed over him, through him, in a color: the faint, young green still visible just beyond the door. “Cria,” he whispered. “Cria Greenwood.” And she was there between him and the night, with her violet eyes and smoky hair, her sweet, husky voice full of flaring embers and wine. Cyan, she said. Where are you? “Tell her,” he pleaded to the Bard of Skye, “that I will come back.”

The bard bowed her head above the harp. She seemed, as he watched her, to shape herself into it, until her bones formed its bones, her hair strung it; the harper became the harp. He heard her play.

He listened for a long time, it seemed, until the darkness dissolved around him. Gold burned behind his eyes. He struggled to find his way back into the tower of shadows, but he had left it and he could no longer find the door. The sun was rising. It spilled over him, stifling, blinding, merciless. He drew a sudden long, shuddering breath, as if he had been under water and had finally reached the surface. Then he felt the fire all through his bones.

He tried to roll away from himself. Hands closed on his arms, held him still. He cried out against the pain; his voice sounded cracked, frayed. His mouth burned like metal in the heat.

“Cyan,” someone kept saying insistently. “Cyan Dag.”

He dragged his burning eyes open. Thayne Ysse’s face loomed over him, blanched, haggard, his own eyes smoldering with gold, luminous and inhuman. Dragon’s eyes, Cyan saw. The fire licked through him again. He twisted in Thayne’s hold, his lips so tight between his teeth he swallowed blood.

“Don’t die,” Thayne begged. “Craiche would never forgive me.”

“I thought,” he whispered when he could speak, “you wanted me dead.”

“I changed my mind.”

Cyan closed his eyes again, remembering the dark hillside, the boy crawling through the grass, the rain. The rain. He opened his lips, searching for it blindly; it fell everywhere around him but not on him, not in his mouth, though he turned his head frantically to catch it.

“There is no rain,” he said, his throat tight with despair. “Only gold.”

Thayne loosed him and stood up. Cyan watched the gold around him blur to his movements, move with him like wings, cling to him like armor, turn his fingers to long shafts of light. He saw the dragon then, in every stone of the tower; the stones rippled to its breathing, bright, scaly shades of green, bronze, copper, flame. The jagged profile of its nostrils and jaw were clear now; its enormous eye, staring at them, opened its slitted iris wide, like a door opening. One of Thayne’s burning fingers illumined the dark within it.

“Freedom,” said the gold-shrouded figure that was once Thayne, “lies in the dragon’s eye.” Or the dragon spoke, giving them a riddle: truth or lie? Cyan tensed, torn between the two words. Fire that was not fire swept through him, hollowing his bones, until he felt he would become like the forgotten dead on the plain, flayed by the sun, pared down to what could outlast the burning day.

Thayne or the dragon spoke again. A great, curved scythelike claw moved from the dragon’s side through the circle of its body toward Cyan. He gasped, trying to pull himself away from it. Its shadow harvested his heart before it reached him. The shafts of light that were Thayne’s hands gripped him, raised his body to meet the dragon’s claw. It touched the blackened, melted disk on his chest, and a sudden flare of silver cracked through the air, so bright it blinded him. He fell back against Thayne, and then into a rattling pile of coin as the floor rumbled and jolted under them. Silver streaked the air again. He dropped his arms over his eyes; his bones seemed to scatter in all directions at the sound the air made as it split in two.

And then he felt the rain.

It was as if a river in the sky had sagged through its bed, torn it open, and emptied its water endlessly onto the plain. For a moment he let it pour into his throat; he tried to fill his bones with it. Then he turned his back to it so he could breathe, and saw the river of mud he lay in. He lifted his head, trying to find Thayne through the flickering sheets of rain.

He saw the dragon rising.

It burned like a sun on the other side of the rain. Its vast wings seemed to span the plain; it could have caught the lightning in its claws. Its back seemed made of gold. As Cyan watched, something spun away from it, flashing as it turned through light and mist, a falling tear of gold within the rain. It hit the mud near Cyan: a coin with Regis Aurum’s face on it.

Lightning, or the fire of the dragon’s farewell, seared the sky. Thunder bellowed and bounced, echoing from hill to hill. Cyan dropped his face against one arm and closed his eyes, while the rain pounded against him, seeped beneath his skin, searched out the smoldering embers of dragon fire within his bones.

He woke smelling grass and wood smoke, and a breath of chill dark air out of stone as old as the world.

He rolled wearily onto his back, knowing without opening his eyes where he must be. He felt the sun fall on his face, gentle now, dappled with shadow from the trees. The wood smoke, the soft rustlings of fire, were puzzling. He opened his eyes finally. The tower stood where he had left it, in the little glade ringed by trees. Something else caught his eye: a flash of gold in the grass.

He reached for it, turned the small circle until the king’s profile rolled upright between his finger and thumb. Thayne Ysse had flown away with the dragon and its magnificent treasure; in Ysse, he would hammer Regis Aurum’s profile into the mask of war and give it back to him. Cyan tasted a bitter breath of smoke in the back of his throat, the taste of this failure. He dropped the coin in his boot and began what seemed an arduous challenge to get up.

Someone touched him.

He started. At first, glimpsing the long dark hair, he thought: Sidera. But this young woman with her wild, tangled hair, her eyes flecked with unusual colors, was a stranger. He struggled to rise; she helped him sit. She was lean and long-limbed, with what looked like a dusting of flour in her hair. Her clothes were simple, linen and wool, crumpled from riding. She was barefoot. The wary-eyed horse snorting at Cyan’s gelding wore neither reins nor saddle.

It was her fire he smelled, and her fish roasting on it. As if, he realized, she had been waiting for him beside the tower.

“Are you all right?” she asked, her eyes widening at his torn surcoat, the brand the disk had left on his chest. “Did you find the dragon?” Then the tarnished disk caught her eye and she blinked.

“How do you know,” he whispered, “the dragon?”

“It was in the mirror. So were you. The mirror told me where to find you.” She raised a slender, callused hand, touched the disk very gently, as if she were touching a face.

Cyan raised it, looked into it. Even within the clouds and veins of charred silver, he could see the midsummer blue of the lady’s eyes, the long, fine, white-gold hair. She was still there, he thought wearily. Trapped, but still alive. Then, stunned, he saw the recognition in the young woman’s eyes.

His breath caught painfully. “You know her?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. Her voice sounded plain as stone, eager as flame. “I’ve seen her many times. Are you hurt anywhere? What did you tangle with?”

“The dragon,” he said after a moment, still staring at her. “And a furious lord from the North Islands.”

“The man with the golden hair.”

“Yes. How do you—how—”

“The mirror,” she repeated, and touched the disk again, lightly. “It looks a little like this. Did you kill the dragon?”

“No. Thayne Ysse took it.”

She gazed at him, astonished. “Then he must have enormous power. A dragon’s power.”

“What is your name?” he asked, wondering at the way her strange eyes could so clearly and unflinchingly contemplate such power.

“Melanthos. You are a knight of Yves.”

He nodded. “My name is Cyan Dag.”

“When I first saw you in the mirror, I thought you were part of a tale. Then I watched you ride beyond the mirror, into Skye. I came here to ask you for help.”

“Help.”

“Yes. Knights help people. People in distress. Don’t they?”

He closed his eyes, slid his hands over them. The smell of roasting salmon blew his way; he was trembling, he realized, with weariness and hunger. But the pain had gone; the rain had put the dragon fire out. He dropped his hands and nodded, wondering what good he had done anyone in or out of distress since he had left Yves. But he promised her, “I will do what I can for you.”

“I can help you find her,” Melanthos said, taking his arm. “Can you get up? Come closer to the fire.”

“You know where that tower is?” he asked, breathless again, with more than effort. Guiding him, she did not immediately answer. The dark tower called him then, a deepening of shadow beyond the sunlit, drowsing air across its doorway. Something he had left in there, it suggested to him. Or left undone. He left the young woman watching him and walked unsteadily into it.

He found the piece of embroidery spread on one of the fallen stones where he had sat peacefully considering staying forever. There was just enough sun left in the world to show him that the image had changed.

Thayne and the gold and the dragon had gone. There was only the beautiful, troubled face of the Lady from Skye, finely stitched in colors so close to true that truth lay in a change of light. He went to the fire, where Melanthos was taking the bones out of the fish.

She held out a broad leaf full of fish to him as he sat. Then she saw what was in his hands. She gave a small hiccup of astonishment.

“It’s one of my pictures. So this is where they go.”

Cyan sensed worlds within worlds merge around him; he could almost see the dragon tower within the dark tower. In another shift of perception, he thought dazedly, he might see within the dragon tower to the tower where the Lady of Skye waited, without time, without hope.

He said, his voice shaking, “I kept finding these pictures. So you brought me this far. You know all the towers.”

She nodded, her eyes, like dark stones or shells, glinting with unpredictable color, and as unreadable. “I know the tower with the woman in it,” she said softly. “Eat your fish, and I’ll take you there.”