Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

“I don’t know you,” he whispered.

“You saw me instead of that false queen. You recognized what is true. We need you.” The dark in her eyes trembled slightly, well water disturbed by the first drop of rain. “All of us in Skye. And all in Yves. Your seeing eyes, your steadfast heart. Help us.”

It was the second longest night of Cyan’s life.

Perversely, the lady did not dance. She moved among Regis’s court after the feast, learning names and faces. Her eyes, always smiling, quickened when she met Cyan.

“The king has spoken of you, my lord,” she said as he bent stiffly over her hand, counting fingers. “Of your courage, and great skill, and of your very long friendship. So I must conclude that your three towers had their origins in Skye, since I think that everything extraordinary must have come somehow from my country. Even the king.”

He murmured something, and cast a glance at her shadow as she withdrew her hand. Five fingers, her shadow said. Her shod feet told him nothing at all. The only magic he could see lay in her charms.

Later, he sat in the king’s chamber with Regis and a dozen of his most trusted lords and knights. Regis, flushed with wine and happiness, assured them that he had found the perfect, the most beautiful, the wisest—for all that her father was an eccentric, absentminded old nodder, peering through lenses in search of dragons and trying to walk on water. Cyan, with three women on his mind, drank little and said less. She did not dance, his perturbed thoughts ran again and again. I saw nothing. I cannot accuse her of nothing. They will marry. The bard is mistaken. Or else the lady is a lie. But if that is true, and I am forced to tell Regis that all he loves is a lie, then all love will become a lie to him, and even my love for Cria will be worth less to him than cows…

Late at night, out of a mist of wine and goodwill, Regis fixed him with a disconcertingly probing eye. “Cyan. You aren’t smiling. Everyone else is smiling but you. You don’t like her.”

Cyan opened his mouth; nothing came out. Smiles grew thin around him, curious. He rubbed his eyes, evading the king’s, and found words finally. “I’m as bewitched as everyone else. Too bewitched to speak.”

The king threw an arm around his shoulders. “Maybe you have fallen a little in love with her yourself. You should marry. Everyone should marry.” He poured more wine into Cyan’s cup. “Drink with me. To Skye and all the magic that has come out of it.”

Cyan coughed on his wine. The king’s eye rolled toward him again. But someone else raised his cup to the king’s happiness, and that Cyan could swallow. The knights reeled to their beds as the stars began to fade. Cyan, walking along a battlement wall, saw the softly lit tower window framed with roses behind which the lady slept. Did she dream? he wondered. Or did she watch the flickering shadows and wait for dawn, having no need for human sleep?

A shadow melted over the candlelight in the window. He froze on the wall. Jeweled colors flashed in the casement as it opened. He saw her hair, rippling loose and limned with fire. He could not see her face. But he felt her eyes on him, the man on the wall, alone and sleepless, gazing at her across the well of night between them.

She closed the casement; the room grew dark. He went inside, woke a page dozing beside a door, and sent him to find the Bard of Skye. He waited in the great hall while servants moved around him, laden with garlands to hide doorposts, transform the throne, spiral up the oak columns to make a wedding bower. The page came back to him finally. The Bard of Skye was not in her chambers, nor with the lady, nor with the lady’s retinue, nor with the king’s bard, nor with the musicians, nor, it seemed, anywhere at all.

And that, Cyan thought, baffled, seemed to be that.

He took his place the next day among the men escorting the king through the hall to the flower-strewn dais. Caged doves, released at the entrance of the new queen, flew upward into shafts of light. Her escort of women held her to earth with ribbons of pearl they let fall when she reached Regis. She seemed to be wearing every pearl in the western sea. Like everyone’s, her eyes burned with sleeplessness, but with nothing more sinister that Cyan could see. The Bard of Skye had reappeared to play gentle ballads from Skye and Yves with the king’s bard, as Regis Aurum and the Lady from Skye pledged their lives to one another. The bard’s eyes caught at Cyan once, above the bone harp. Why , they demanded, are you still here ? He heard Cria’s voice then, raised alone, sweet and pure, singing verses to the harping. Her gaze had drawn inward; she saw no one, not even Cyan. Chilled, he wondered if her father had already promised her to one of the smiling courtiers watching her. Her voice soared toward the circling doves. The king and queen kissed. Trumpets sounded; bells pealed in answer, passing the message from bell mouth to mouth across the realm. Still, he picked out Cria’s voice, like a thread of gold in a tapestry, fine and true, yet fading into the growing tumult until he lost the thread and heard only the memory in his heart.

He had little chance, that day or the next, to speak to her. She seemed always hurrying somewhere with her father, or in her green tabard about to sing. The Bard of Skye was always elsewhere, when he found a scant moment free to question her. Constantly at Regis’s side, among an escort of knights, he watched the queen as she rode with falcons, or judged the offerings of a dozen ardent poets, or awarded prizes at the knights’ contests. On the field, he found himself battering with his sword at the web of uncertainties that entangled him. Someone pleaded breathlessly, again and again, “Cyan.” He blinked sweat out of his eyes and found a knight kneeling on the grass, trying desperately to yield to him. He stood before the queen to take that cup of gold. His head bent; he watched her shadow burning stark black lines across the pavilion carpet. Again, it told him nothing.

Cria, passing him unexpectedly on the field afterward, said bewilderedly, “You are always looking at her. Are you in love with her, now?”

“No,” he answered, horrified. “I love you.”

She said nothing; her eyes remained perplexed. She seemed weighed down in the hot spring afternoon, by satin and brocade; her hair was drawn tightly away from her face and captured in a gold net. It would take no longer than a breath, he thought, no longer than the thought of it, to slide a finger into the net and pull it down and let her dark, rippling hair fly free again across her shoulders.

“Cria,” her father said behind him, and Cyan turned to meet a hard, suspicious stare like a slap, before her father inclined his head the inch or so he accorded landless knights. “My lord Cyan Dag,” he added with perfunctory courtesy. “The king is fortunate in your prowess, and in your friendship. No wonder he keeps you close to him. I would not like to make an enemy of you. But prowess passes, prowess passes, in the end, and when you’re aging and balding, as I am, it’s important to have more tangible possessions. Come, Cria.”

“My lord,” Cyan said desperately, understanding, very clearly, the final word on the unspoken subject.

“My lord,” a page interrupted. “The king asks for your presence in the queen’s escort.”

“Come, Cria.”

Cria closed her eyes briefly. She pulled the net loose abruptly as she turned to follow her father, and flung it onto the grass. Cyan watched her shake her hair loose. He heard her father’s rumbling question; she answered shortly, “It fell off.”

Cyan looked down, to retrieve the little net of gold, but it had vanished. The page, moving quickly across the grass, was struggling with a button on his tunic above his heart. Cyan was left staring in exasperation at his own shadow. It told him nothing, either.