Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

He stopped at the river to let his horse drink. Gazing absently at the placid hills, he saw that their close flanks nearly touched; the three broad, rounded hills made a ring around whatever lay within them. He thought of the picture in his father’s book. But that plain was circled by harsh peaks, sharpened into teeth as if by the constant dry pound of light. These, with their linked, green slopes, seemed to surround some secret loveliness.

He followed the river toward them. They were not so far as they had looked; he came swiftly to the place where the river began its curve between the two closest hills. It quickened there, grew narrower, shallower. It took forever, he felt, to make his way between the hills. They seemed to shift closer, flinging their shadows over him. The ash forests growing on them thinned, dwindled into brush, and then into grass. In the late afternoon, the grasses on the slopes began to turn brown, as if he had spent a season or two trying to round the hills. He felt the sweat on his face from the hot afternoon light, and stopped again for water. The banks of the river were hard, cracked mud now; grass grew sparsely along them. He felt his heartbeat then, knowing what secret the hills held in their midst. He had been, without thinking, testing the wind for the smell of dragon for some time now.

He saw Craiche’s face, very clearly, lifting out of a book and giving Thayne his sweet, dauntless smile. He saw their father, recognizing Thayne, speaking his name. A longing for home swept through him then. He could simply turn, ride out of the hills and all the way back to the North Islands, defeated but alive. It seemed worth it, simply to see Craiche smile at him again. “I am not Bowan,” he whispered. “I am not Ferle, who had a way with words. I can’t make magic out of nothing. I don’t want to die for gold.”

He saw the knight’s eyes then, clear and cold, fearless. Then go home , they said to him, without judgment, without surprise. I will do what you cannot .

He mounted again after a swallow of warm, murky water, and continued his journey.

Near sunset, the river trickled to a stain on the cracked earth. The endless hillsides were barren now, jagged, ground down to stone. His horse’s black hide was silvery with a gloss of sweat. The hills pushed closer together, loomed above him, their peaks fiery against a blazing, changeless blue so parched it could not even make a cloud. Thayne urged his weary mount forward, through an opening between the hills so narrow that they nearly formed an arch above his head.

On the other side, he stopped. Dust shimmered across a plain ringed by three hills on which nothing could ever have grown. Light from the lowering sun scorched the earth like dragon’s breath. The immensity of stone rising out of the parched ground cast a shadow halfway across the plain. The dragon coiled around the tower opened its eyes.

In Stony Wood, the baker lumbered her slow, implacable way down the cobbled street between the bakery and the tavern at the bottom of the half-moon harbor. The fishers tended toward an older, brinier tavern at the end of the pier. There the floorboards were warped from their wet boots, and the only adornment among the scarred tables and benches was a jar in which something scaly green, pale as pearl, with tangled strands of dark moss or hair dimly floated. A mermaid, the tavernkeeper called it. Late at night, her face grew almost visible to those who stayed that long. Then, they would swear, she sometimes turned her head and smiled.

Sel preferred a quieter tavern with no drowned, pickled mermaids in it. She went to a place at the bottom of the harbor, where she could watch the waves scroll across the endless sea before they heaved into the harbor mouth, bringing the boats back with them. In that tavern, the stone sills were littered with odd pebbles and shells. Old fishing nets hung along the windows for curtains. In the distance, on the opposite cliff, she could see the strange stumps of the stone wood, that could take on the dark, silken sheen of mother-of-pearl when the last light touched them.

The baker eased her long, heavy seal’s body onto a bench at her favorite window overlooking both the harbor mouth and the open sea. Her eyes, wide set like a fish’s, were kelp dark, hiding thoughts and stray flecks of color deep in them. Her hair, which was long and wild when she loosed it, hung in a single braid of black and silver. As she watched the sea and drank there, she let old memories stir up from the bottom of her mind like things in the deep unburying themselves, drawn up to light.

“What can I get you, Sel?” Brenna asked her. She was a massive, cheerful, round-faced woman with butter-colored hair and long, graceful hands. Her children had collected the shells and stones in the tavern; they were out on the rocks now, fishing in the incoming tide.

“My youth,” Sel said. “My husband. A spell to get my child out of that tower.”

“What about your usual?”

“My usual,” Sel agreed. Brenna brought her dark ale as bitter as brine. Then she poured one for herself and sat down with Sel, since the place was empty but for them.

“What keeps her up there?” she asked puzzledly. “It’s a dank, solitary thing, standing there in the stone wood.”

“Stories,” Melanthos’s mother said dourly.

“Stories?”

“And magic. She’s caught up in it. It’s like being in love, only with nothing real. And she refuses to see the danger. She thinks it’s all innocent.”

“Well, nothing’s happened,” Brenna said soothingly. “Nothing yet.”

Sel looked at her silently, color flashing unexpectedly in one eye, vague and swiftly gone. She took a sip of ale and answered obliquely. “I hoped that Anyon would be enough to keep her out of it. But no. She’s willful. She prefers mystery to love.”

“Well, sometimes…” Brenna murmured, gazing reminiscently out to sea herself, until a movement caught her eye and she leaned forward to push the casement wider. “Hoi! The baby’s eating your bait!”

“She’s up there all night sometimes. She embroiders pictures, she says. Things she sees in a mirror. But she never shows them to us. They’re gone, like words are gone on the wind as soon as they’re spoken.”

“Have you been up to see?”

Sel shook her head. “I’ve sent Gentian. It won’t let her up. And Anyon has tried.”

Brenna stirred. “Oh, well, Anyon—”

“I know; he hates walls. But he tried, for her. And even he can’t follow her.”

Brenna contemplated her ale, honey brown, sweeter than Sel’s. She smiled suddenly. “They’re a pair.”

“They would be,” Sel said darkly, “but for that tower.”

The door opened. One of Brenna’s froth-haired children came in, one hand carrying a shell, the other dragging the baby. “Look at this—”

“What was she eating?” Brenna asked, dipping two fingers into her ale and wiping the baby’s dirty, sticky face.

“Herring guts. Look at this shell! It’s like the stone wood—so old it turned to stone.”

Brenna took the shell without looking at it, laid it down abruptly. “Then you must go,” she said to Sel. “Go into the tower yourself and see if she’s in danger.”

Sel turned the shell; its delicate ribbing fanned across a stony underside. “It must be as old as the world,” she murmured. “I don’t care for the idea. I don’t have a mind for such things anymore. I don’t know if I could make it up the steps without getting stuck like a slug in a chambered shell, inching into smaller and smaller spaces until I couldn’t go in or out. I don’t know if I remember how to do it.”

“Remember what?” Brenna asked blankly.

Sel gave the shell back to the child. “Pretty. Well. We’ll never get the work done without her. She’s taken lodgings there, it seems. And I have to listen to Anyon complain.”