Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

Finally, the Lady from Skye danced.

She could not resist the enchantments of harp and drum and flute after supper the second night. She danced with everyone, while the king watched from the dais table, entranced and smiling. Cyan, beside him, watched unsmiling, but equally entranced. Her shadow whirled everywhere, candles casting a ghostly second shadow after it. The shadows blurred together at odd angles of light, formed a third that, to Cyan’s riveted eyes, seemed not quite human. As she lifted her hands, new fingers formed, then disappeared. Her feet left their shoes behind, in one moment, danced naked and flashing oddly. In another shift of light, her eyes darkened, grew small, and retreated into hollows of bone and shadow. Cyan’s breath stopped. Then she moved into torchlight and he saw her smiling, midsummer eyes. He breathed again, reached for his wine. A hand came down over his wrist, brawny and newly ringed with gold.

He looked at Regis, startled. The king asked bluntly, “What is it? You’ve barely spoken in two days. This is my wedding! In the fifteen years you and I have known each other, I have never seen you like this. What is it you are not telling me?”

Cyan gazed at him mutely. His brain, misty with wine and worry, refused to show him either an answer or a clear path around the question. It was late; the dais was all but empty; the last guests left awake were dancing. A bell tolled some brief hour. The Bard from Skye had vanished again. Cyan’s hair hung loosely around his face; the tie had vanished hours or days before. His eyes felt charred. He had worn the same clothes for a month. They had been celebrating the king’s wedding for a year… I see, he answered silently, helplessly. But I do not know exactly what I see, and I cannot say without accusing your wife or the Bard of Skye, and at this moment I know which of us you would toss out of Gloinmere if I spoke.

The king was still waiting. His eyes, oddly light for a bear, had begun to narrow; his grip on Cyan’s arm tightened.

“You have not danced with me, my lord,” said the woman from Skye. She stood behind Regis, still panting slightly from her last dance. Her shadow cut across the cloth between king and knight. Regis’s eyes flickered at her voice, but refused to loose Cyan. He raised his face to her finally, still unable to answer. But he could smile, and he felt Regis’s hand ease at that.

“My lady.”

That was all he could think to say to her. She spoke to him as they danced; he heard himself make brief, polite sounds. He tried to keep his hands from speaking suspicions to hers; he tried to keep their shadows from crossing. When he returned her to the king, she had also fallen silent. The king gestured to the musicians; they began putting their instruments away. The king’s bard began a harp song that sounded as old as night.

Regis took his wife’s hand. “You must be tired,” he said. “One more day.”

She smiled sweetly at him, while Cyan refrained wearily from counting the fingers the king held. She laid her other hand on Cyan’s shoulder, and he started. “One more day,” she said to Regis.

But not, the Lady from Skye decided, for Cyan Dag.

She sent for Cyan in the morning, while those who had found their way out of bed were breakfasting with the king. A hunt had been called. The new queen, dressed in raspberry and gold, her hair bound in a net of pearl and gold, seemed to Cyan something out of fable. He found her gazing out the open window as he entered.

She touched one of the tiny roses on the vine, and said at his step, “Close the door.”

He did so, and heard the silence throughout her chambers. She turned, then. He caught a glimpse of her eyes, small, deep, without pupils, like something dangerous staring out of a cleft of stone. He backed against the door, his heart pounding, knowing then that she had watched him in the night, and every hour since then: the dark, unsmiling figure at her wedding.

“My lord Cyan Dag,” she said briskly, while her shadow crawled like a living thing across the stone toward him, “you are disturbing your friend the king. You are disturbing me. I am Regis’s wife and the Queen of Yves; you are his faithful knight who has never failed in any test of strength or honor. Until now. You cannot fight me and win. You cannot tell Regis what you see. What would he say?” She held out her six-fingered hands; their shadows splayed across the wall on either side of him. “When you tell him this? Or this?” She lifted her gown to reveal her naked feet; they glittered silver, scaled like a fish or a snake. “Or this?”

She looked at him again out of the ancient, inhuman eyes of creatures that crept close to earth and had no language. He felt the shadows of her hands grip his arms, and he closed his eyes, trembling, his face drained in the warm morning light.

“What are you?” he whispered.

“Look at me. Brave knight. Open your eyes. This is what I am.” He looked, and found the king’s wife, with her tall, bewitching grace, her enchanting smile. She laughed a little, a sound as light as water flowing over pebbles. “I am Gwynne of Skye, Regis Aurum’s wife. I will be the mother of his heirs.”

He had to find breath before he could find words. “I will fight you,” he promised, feeling the icy touch of her shadow seeping like death along his bones.

“You cannot. What will you tell Regis? That I have eyes like a snake and feet made of fish scales? He will think you have gone mad. I mean no harm; there is no reason why we all should not be friends.”

“You are a lie—some kind of monster. Where is the true Lady of Skye?”

“Her.” She smiled again. “In a tower somewhere in Skye. If she leaves it, she will die. If she even looks at the world, she will die. I gave her a mirror in which to watch the world go by, and some threads to busy herself with. Or, if she prefers, she can watch herself stay young forever in the mirror. So you see, you cannot rescue her. You will only kill her.”

“I will find her,” he said, and saw her eyes grow shriveled, bleak. There is a way, he realized then. She fears it. Her gaze bored into him; he closed his eyes again and saw them, small and dark and merciless, behind his eyelids, and then within his thoughts.

He swallowed a cry of terror at the sorcery, pushing hard against the door to keep himself upright. She only laughed, and turned away from him to smell the roses on the vines. “Please, Cyan Dag, stay with us. The king loves you, your place is here, and I mean only to give Regis what he most wants. So should you. Forget Gwynne of Skye. She has her mirror, and—as long as she does nothing—her life.”

He turned without answering, his hands rattling at the door latch until they remembered how to open it. He left her, went to his own chamber, where he threw he knew not what into a leather pack, and carried that and his sword into the yard. As he waited at the stables for his horse, he heard a horn sound the gathering of the hunt.

He rode out of Gloinmere alone, only dragging once at the golden gelding’s reins, as a thorn snagged the breath in his throat.

He whispered, “Cria.”

He swallowed the thorn, felt it lodge in his heart, and found a road that led beyond the land he knew.

Melanthos saw the tower in the mirror at sunrise. Sun struck it, rising over the ring of hills enclosing the plain on which the tower stood. Nothing grew on the plain, possibly because of the monster that had wound itself around the tower. It appeared to be sleeping. But as the hills released the sun, it turned them red, and flooded the wasteland with light. The beast’s visible eye opened then, round and golden as the sun.

It yawned, showing sharp crystal teeth through which light blazed and separated into colors. For a moment rainbows trembled over the parched ground. Then fire rolled out of the beast’s maw, licking at the dust. Its teeth snapped shut; its flat, triangular head lowered again, both eyes visible now, and watching.