The Tower at Stony Wood

Twenty-two

Cyan sheathed his sword. He did not understand exactly what he faced, but he knew that he could not fight magic, and brandishing a blade at eccentricity in Skye seemed the height of discourtesy. The figure standing in an untidy clutter of blankets and pallet, threads, scissors, pieces of linen, with the strange mask dangling over its face and the smoky threads covering its body, seemed to be spellbound.

He said, while it stared at him through the round eyeholes in the mask, “I’m sorry I startled you. I was looking for a woman in a tower.”

The spell broke. The figure moved then, pushing the peculiar patched face back to reveal a woman, inarguably in a tower, but no one he recognized. She had a broad, strong-boned, weathered face, nicked and smudged by time, sun, wind, experience. Her hair spilled in long ripples of gray and black and white down her back. Her eyes were dark, remote with memory or sorrow. Light shifted in them, washing color through the dark, like light on a kelp leaf. He blinked, recognizing them.

“Melanthos brought you here instead,” she said abruptly, glancing behind him. “Where is she?”

“I asked her to wait below. I thought—” He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “I thought it would be dangerous.”

“Why did she bring you here? To see the lady in the mirror?”

His eyes went past her, to the round mirror in its plain wood frame on the window ledge. It was blandly reflecting the view from the opposite window. He took a step toward it, his voice catching. “You see her in there?”

“Sometimes. Very beautiful, she is—”

“Yes.”

“With blue eyes and long—”

“Yes. That’s the woman I have been searching for.”

The woman nodded, unsurprised. “Something of the sea in her past, it looks to me, with her pale skin and wide-set eyes, and her long butterfly-fish nose.”

He saw it then, what had puzzled the knights of Gloinmere when they first saw her. “Yes,” he breathed, amazed again.

“You’ve seen her, then.”

“Yes. No. I mean, I’ve seen the woman pretending to be her.”

She let her patches fall and gathered them in her hands, folding and rolling until they were nothing but a shapeless bundle. She tucked it unobtrusively beside a pile of linen. Then she faced Cyan, opened her mouth and closed it, looking a little fishlike herself. He saw the sudden hunger in her eyes. “Tell me about her,” she demanded in her deep, husky voice. “What put her in the tower, what will free her—”

He hesitated. Beyond her, colors in the mirror shifted, gave him a glimpse of sky-blue cloth, hands, delicate and slender, rings glinting as long, fine fingers drew a needle into the air. His lips parted; she faded. A distant mist of sheep grazed in the shadow of a tor.

The woman in the tower gazed at him intently, as if the force of her wanting could draw the story out of him. He drew his attention from the sheep finally, and asked, “Who are you?”

“Sel. I’m the baker, in Stony Wood. Melanthos is my daughter.”

“I thought so,” he said. “She looks like you.”

“What is your name?”

“Cyan Dag. I have come from Gloinmere.”

“I knew it. I knew you were a knight when I saw you in the mirror.”

“You saw me in that?”

“You and Melanthos, riding together. I thought she was taking you to—” She stopped, stepped to the far window, and looked down, cautiously, he thought, as if she did not want to be noticed. “I don’t see her. But then she’s always appearing and disappearing.” She looked at him suddenly, curiously. “Did you come up alone?”

“Yes.”

“Most can’t get past the magic. But you weren’t afraid of it?”

“I didn’t notice any,” he answered, puzzled.

“Well,” she said slowly, studying him, “if you don’t notice the small illusions anymore, you’re fey yourself, or you’ve seen behind them.”

“I know nothing about magic,” he said ruefully, “except that it exists. I could have used a touch of it on my way through Skye.”

“You’re here. There’s magic in that.”

“I’m in the wrong tower. Again.”

“Well,” she said after a moment, “maybe magic is all in the way you look at things.” She paused, studying him again. “And in that disk you’re wearing. It’s like this mirror…”

He touched it gently, as if he might disturb the woman within. “It holds more power than I can understand or imagine. It saved my life twice—three times—”

“Who gave it to you?”

He shook his head, remembering. “Someone dying. Someone long dead, more likely, and made of Melanthos’s threads. Who gave it to him to give to me, I can only guess.”

“Who?”

But he only shook his head again, his mouth taut. “That’s part of a different tale, I think.”

Color caught his eyes, flicking across the mirror. Birds, he saw, as yellow as buttercups above the sheep. The woman, Sel, stooped to straighten the pallet, pull the rumpled blankets across it.

“You look a little worse for wear. Take your towers off and sit down,” she suggested. “I’ll mend them for you. Maybe the mirror will show you where to go next.”

It seemed as reasonable as anything else he could think of doing. He shrugged the rent surcoat off and handed it to her. He stopped short of sitting, though, reminded then of what he had seen when he first came in, of what she had bundled away into a corner for him to forget.

“What was that you were wearing when I first saw you?”

Her eyes flickered away from him, then back, and were caught in his steady gaze. He glimpsed trouble in them, mystery, sorrow, secret shifts of darkness stirring like shapes beneath tide. Magic, he thought, recognizing it in memory: the inhuman mask over the human face, threads that he had seen, in other places, come to life.

“I’ll tell you a story,” she said finally, “if you tell me one.”

He hesitated, then nodded. They were so far from Gloinmere and its dangerous secret in this small, ancient, windswept tower, that Gloinmere itself seemed like a place out of a tale. “But I don’t know,” he warned her, “how it will end.”

“Neither do I,” she said.

She left him for a little, to get him something to eat and drink. He watched the mirror intently, until his eyes closed and he sagged down into wool and straw and warm light, and slept. Sel woke him, coming back. Melanthos had gone to the bakery to eat, and then had disappeared again, after promising Gentian, alone with the work, that she would come back soon. Soon, a stretchable word, was elongating itself across the afternoon. Sel unpacked wine and cups out of a basket, meat pies and oatcakes, bread shaped like scallop shells, cheese, and smoked fish. She ate nothing, he noticed, just sewed his surcoat back together while he ate hungrily. Soft threads of blue flowed across the mirror again, transfixing him. Sel turned to the mirror; the threads melted away.

“It’s like that,” Sel said. “But you’ll see her clearly. Just wait.”

His eyes moved from the mirror to her face. It was too heavy and coarse for ordinary beauty, its earthy coloring too strong. But there was a power, a mystery in it: she knew things, had seen things that he hadn’t. That and its strange sorrow drew at him. He could still find, beneath the chips and scars of time, the younger face, with its wide cheekbones and strange, wide-set eyes, its wild hair, its full mouth smiling at the world, that would have made its own beauty out of what it was. Her head was bent now over his surcoat; her long hair spilled over her, cloaking a big, graceful body she seemed to want to keep hidden under one thing or another.

He asked, as she pulled gold thread neatly through two halves of a broken tower, “How did you find this place?”

“It’s always been here, at the edge of the stone wood. I came up one day trying to get Melanthos out of here—she’d gotten spellbound by the mirror—and I stayed.”

“She embroiders, she said.”

“Yes. Pictures of what she sees in the mirror. She never keeps them. She throws them out of the window and they go—elsewhere. They disappear.”

“Not entirely,” he said, and showed her the embroidery he had taken from the dark tower in the glade.

She looked down at the pale, troubled, lovely face, the ripples of pale thread that formed her hair, her creased brows. “That’s one of hers,” she said, nodding. “So you found it—”

“I found others. They seem magical, in some way. They guided me… Do you also make them?”

“No. Only Melanthos does.”

“What did you make?”

Her eyes flickered to his face, away. She took a stitch or two, rebuilding the tower. Then she dropped her hands in her lap and stared out the window at the restless water that ran beyond the edge of the world, and pulled the sun and the moon and the stars every night down into its secret country. “I was born in—I was born so close to the sea that I fell in love with it when I was young. I knew the names of all the fish and the seals, and I understood the stories they told as they talked among themselves. Then Joed came along, and stood between me and the sea. Then my daughters came, Gentian and Melanthos, and I couldn’t see beyond their sweet faces. Then Joed died.” She lifted the surcoat, pulled another stitch. “He died in the sea. So, I thought, since I love Joed and I love the sea, that I would go there.”

He was silent a moment, struggling with that. “So you made this—” he prompted gently.

“I made my skin. To take me.”

He began a question, then answered himself. “The face on it—a seal’s face—”

“A selkie skin.”

“But would it work?”

Her lips moved, formed a crooked, wry smile that chilled his heart. “In one way or another.” She knotted the gold thread and snapped it, then pulled out a length of dark blue and threaded the needle again. He watched her, troubled, not knowing what to say. Finished with answers, she asked him, “Now tell me a story. Tell me how you came from Gloinmere to Skye, looking for a woman in a mirror.”

He told a story of a king bewitched by something monstrous and magical, who had disguised herself as the enchanting lady from Skye, and imprisoned the true lady in a tower from which there seemed no escape. Only one other in all the land knew the truth of the matter besides him: the bard who had traveled to Yves in the sorceress’s company.

“I couldn’t tell the king,” Cyan said painfully. “I could not warn him. I had no proof until after the wedding, when she showed me what she was, and mocked my helplessness. So I did what I had to do: I rode out of Gloinmere to Skye.”

Sel’s hands had fallen still; she watched the mirror through Cyan’s tale, as if she saw it unfolding there. “If she can’t leave the tower or look at the world without dying, then how will you rescue her?”

“I have no idea. But it must be done. So far I haven’t even found the tower. It keeps disguising itself as other towers.”

“Maybe you’ll see an answer in the mirror.”

“I hope so.”

Sel picked up her thread again. “What other towers have you found?”

“One with a dragon around it—”

Sel’s hands fell again; she looked at him in astonishment. “Melanthos saw that one.”

“And a small dark tower in a ring of trees, where the Bard of Skye talked me out of dying.”

She gazed at him, her eyes unfathomable. “What kept you from it?”

“She reminded me that I love a woman in Gloinmere…”

“Well.” She took another stitch. “I love a man in the sea.”

“He’s dead,” he said softly, venturing, he felt, into a place with shifting ground and uncertain paths. So:

“Is there nothing—no one—you love enough to stay for?”

“My daughters are grown; they can do without me. The seals swim into the harbor and call my name. It’s the only love I know, now, and there’s nothing to keep me from it.”

“But what of the grief and confusion you will cause for those who love you?”

“They’ll understand.” She made a knot, reached for the scissors, and snipped the thread; he felt as if she had cut in two the breath he drew for his next argument. She handed him the surcoat, said, while he pulled it over his head, “Tell me about this woman you love in Gloinmere. What is her name?”

“Cria. Cria Greenwood.”

“Pretty. Does she love you?”

“I don’t know,” he said starkly, heartsick at the thought. “I left her without explaining why, and at the worst time… Her father wants her to marry a very wealthy lord she does not love. But she might have done it by now; I wasn’t there to give her any reason not to.”

She stared at him. “You left her? You just rode away?”

“Yes.”

“Without saying good-bye? Without even seeing her? Without—”

“Yes,” he said, his face growing white, stiff with worry and fear under her incredulous eyes. “Without.”

“Well, then what can you expect?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. If I vanish out of the life of someone I love without a word, what can I expect?”

“She’ll think you don’t love her—she won’t understand any longer who it was she thought she loved—” She paused, the blood pushing up like tide into her own face, as he held her eyes. “It’s not like that for me,” she protested. “It’s different. My daughters know I love them—”

“So Cria should know I love her. Even if I never return. She shouldn’t think—she shouldn’t wonder if every word I ever spoke to her meant something else. She shouldn’t relive every moment we had together in her mind, wondering what she had done wrong, what she did that drove me away—”

He saw the tide wash into her eyes; they glittered with underwater colors. “It wouldn’t be like that with them. And I need this. I need this more than they need me.”

“Yes,” he said, and reached out to hold the broad, strong hands that had put his towers back together. “You need. But it can wait. Can’t it? The sea will be there all your life on land. Can’t you stay human awhile longer, to finish your loving on land? The sea will wait for you. Joed disappeared and left you grieving. You will pass that grief to all those who love you here, if you leave them like this.”

“So you might have.”

“So I might have,” he whispered. “That was the only time in my life that I have been terrified of someone. I might have lost what I love most, running like that out of Gloinmere because of a woman with eyes like a snake and silver scales on her feet, who routed me with a laugh…”

She gazed at him, her eyes dry again, deep and mysterious as what sang ceaselessly beyond the tower. He searched for an answer in them, found neither yes nor no to his pleas, only the fathomless, color-flecked darkness. He looked deep, shifting slightly, his hands tightening on her hands, sensing the human pain they shared beneath the mystery. Then he remembered the inhuman figure she had become within the tower, something masked, powerful in its strangeness because he knew no word for it. Something that did not need to be rescued; it would free itself.

Beyond her, the mirror changed.

She felt him start, and turned. “There,” she whispered, as blues and birds shaped themselves, and the rippling hair, the familiar face, bent over needlework, the needle just drawn out of the cloth and pulled taut.

Wonder caught his throat; he swallowed dryly, waiting for the needle to fall, her face to shift a little, perhaps lift a moment, so that he could see her more clearly.

Nothing happened. Her hand held the needle in the air; her lowered face, with its pale crescents of lashes, its curved, unsmiling mouth, did not move. He bent toward the mirror, puzzled by the stillness. Then he realized what he was seeing, and the breath went out of him as if he had been struck.

Sel saw it, too, then, coming up on her knees. “She’s thread—she’s made herself into thread!”

He cried out in despair, “Where is she? Is she dead?”

“No—she did this herself! We watched her sewing herself into cloth. She’s made a picture of herself for the mirror to see, something that will sit and embroider forever and never leave.”

“But where—”

“She freed herself. She left the tower.”

He stared at Sel, his heart hammering. “Then she’s dead.”

“Is she?”

“If she leaves the tower—”

“But she hasn’t left. Look. She’s still there.”

He closed his eyes against the tears of terror and frustration, opened them again to see the motionless image, the lady in the tower, trapped forever with no way out but death, and no word to speak except in thread.

He heard Sel move then, and the rustlings of her threads; he turned blindly, caught her wrist before he even saw the selkie face. “No—”

“She made that,” the selkie said again, insistently. “She made that like I made this, to escape. She made her choice. Maybe she is dead, but she took her chance and she didn’t die trapped.”

He did not answer, just tightened his grip. He heard the sea then, waves pounding against the cliff, pouring over it, into it, all around them, though he felt nothing but sunlight. Her breathing, he thought, dazed. She is turning the air she breathes into tide. He felt something slap at him then, like a wall of water trying to drag him away. The second time, it jarred him to the bone. He clung grimly to her wrist, trying to find breath. Wind smelling of brine moaned through the tower; spindrift fell like rain over them. He felt the tower tremble underfoot.

Just before it fell he heard Melanthos’s voice. “Mother!” she cried in horror through wind and the wave that smashed through the tower. Cyan, swept off his feet, no longer knew what he held, human flesh and bone, or selkie sea bones and slick, silky skin. He only held fast with all his strength, and went with her into the sea.