Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

“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.

The selkie, diving in and out of the waves, felt the land drag at her, no matter how fast, how frantically she swam toward the secret kingdoms. Even in the pale, freckled seal’s body plunging into the weltering, briny heart within each rising crest, she could not outswim her own name. It clung to her, tugged at her, like land, like love, not letting her go free. Voices cried at her, seal and human, dead and alive. The human voices tore at her selkie skin, caught at threads of her awareness of wind and water and scent, and unraveled them. They refused to let her be. They made their own demands, voices fighting with the wind, with gulls, with the sharp, imperative barking of the seals, trying to tell her something. Finally, fretted by these vague human disturbances, deep within the selkie skin, Sel opened an ear and listened.