Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

Sidera was with her, standing between tower and wood, as still and dark as if she had been rooted with the stone trees. But her eyes flicked at Cyan and she smiled, turning human again for a moment. Melanthos, leaning against Anyon and looking oblivious of him, patted the tower stones beside her for the knight to sit.

“She’s making a riddle in the wood,” Melanthos said softly to him as Sel wandered through the stone wood, pulling new stones, or old trees, out of the earth, so like the real wood that Cyan could not see the difference.

“They even cast a shadow,” he murmured, astonished. Melanthos nodded, her eyes sparking with the muted fires within the stones.

“I can see through them,” she said. “I can tell the difference between stone and air. But I don’t know how she makes something out of nothing.”

Having broadened the small wood, spilled it beyond its familiar boundaries, Sel followed Sidera’s instructions, and pulled a cloud out of the sky. It fell like sea mist over the wood; sky and sea and village vanished behind it. So it seemed to Cyan. Melanthos, pushing closer to Anyon in the sudden chill, saw it from a different perspective.

“She’s hiding something from the villagers.”

“What is it?” Anyon asked.

“I don’t know yet. Watch.”

Cyan, watching, saw Sel turn herself into stone, her eyes flat, dark, reflecting nothing. She spoke. The word split the air with fire as abrupt and pure as lightning. The mist grew bright, pearly around them. Cyan, gripping the tower stones, felt for an instant that he was back in the dragon’s tower, with Thayne Ysse pulling fire out of gold. Anyon had disappeared. Cyan, blinking away the brilliant aftermath from his eyes, saw him pulling himself out of the tower ring, where he had fallen in surprise. Almost before he got himself settled again, Sel spoke another word. This one kindled the cloud around them gold, and toppled a stone out of the ring. Cyan felt the force of it in his bones. He stared, amazed, at the woman who had, scant days before, stood mute before him in the tower, cloaked and masked by threads, trying to find a way out of her life. Now she was a stranger with wild crackling hair, speaking trees and stone and fire into existence. Even Melanthos was speechless, one hand gripping Anyon’s shoulder as she watched the stranger, her face turning the luminous hues of the clouds.

Finally Sidera spoke, and the storm ended. The stranger turned into Sel again, weaving her hair back into its braid, and mildly expressing a misgiving.

“It’s more magic than I’d ever need for Stony Wood. Or all of Skye, for that matter.”

Sidera only gave Sel a fox’s unfathomable glance, and said, “You never know what you might need to know.”

“For instance,” Anyon said, with unexpected enthusiasm, “if the boats are lost at sea. You could light their way.”

“More likely set them on fire,” Sel suggested wryly, bending to pick her hair tie out of the grass, and startling Cyan with her smile. It might have been a mermaid’s smile, something that barely surfaced on her face, yet shone everywhere out of her, as if her bones were alight. Around them, the strange mist was dispersing, revealing, beyond the mystifying wood, a cluster of astonished villagers trying to see through Sel’s illusions.

She looked a question at Sidera, who said calmly, “You know them. Do what’s best.”

The maze of stony stumps around the true wood vanished. The villagers, mothers with children, tavernkeepers, old fishers with hands lumpy and crippled with age, moved cautiously toward Sel. A tall, massive, fair-haired woman, clutching a child to her thigh, her eyes as round as kelp bladders, said uncertainly, “Sel?”

It was, Cyan thought, a fair question.

“It’s me, Brenna,” Sel said. The smile still hovered within the bones of her face, just beyond sight. “I’m learning some magic.”

They were dumbfounded again. One of the old fishers shifted, planting his feet as if the ground rocked like a boat beneath him. He asked, “What for?”

“Because it’s there. Because it might come in handy. You never know.”

“You never do,” Brenna echoed faintly. “But your own private lightning storm?”

“Well. Not all of it is practical. But suppose the ovens go cold around my bread? Suppose one of your children falls sick, and you need more warmth than your fire can give? Or your animals in the barn need a less dangerous fire? Besides, it’s not all fire. I can knot up a torn net in a breath, untangle a tide under a full moon, tease a wind out of a tantrum. I could always do those things. I just forgot.”

“That high tide some years back,” a man with a leather needle stuck in his shirtsleeve said suddenly. “Raging under the full moon so that the boats were trapped after dark beyond the harbor. The waves began to quiet for no good reason, each one sliding in slower than the last, and breaking with no more force than wash water tossed out the door so that the boats could come home—was that you?”

Sel nodded, a splinter of light flickering gold in one eye, as at a memory. “I wasn’t married very long then,” she said softly. “I wanted Joed safely into harbor, out of his boat and into my arms. It was after that, with Melanthos and Gentian growing up, I began to forget things. Now I’m remembering them again.”

They gazed at her, their eyes no longer apprehensive, Cyan saw, but full of wonder, and calculating their good fortune at having a sea witch wash ashore into their lives.

“I’ve missed your visits to the tavern,” Brenna said. “I wondered what you were doing instead.”

“I was trying to remember. Ale helps, for that, but it doesn’t go deep enough.”

“But what about the bakery?”

“What about it?” Sel answered, surprised. “I’m not going anywhere. Except maybe to your tavern. I could use a splash of ale.”

Melanthos slid off the tower stones, went to Sel’s side; Anyon followed. Sel put an arm around her daughter’s shoulders, threw a look like a plumb line into her daughter’s eyes. Melanthos smiled. Cyan looked beyond them then, for Sidera. But only a dark, glittering stump stood where she had been, asking its constant questions: Stone or tree? Once alive or never? He sighed noiselessly, and followed the villagers back to Stony Wood.

The next morning, after he had dressed himself again in his towers, packed the loaves and the salted fish that Gentian had given him, slung pack and sword onto the gelding’s saddle, and prepared to mount, he found Sidera beside him.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

He pulled himself into the saddle, looked down at her. “I have no idea. Somewhere in Skye.”

She only nodded, as enigmatic, he thought, as one of the stumps in the stone wood. She smiled up at him, stroking the gelding’s head. “I will see you in Gloinmere,” she said.

“I thought you disliked courts.”

“I will see you there,” she repeated, as if she was giving him the answer to some riddle he hadn’t thought to ask. She stepped back, her eyes as lucent and unreadable as polished shell. “Be careful,” she added as he turned the gelding. “This is the most difficult tower.”

He twisted in the saddle to stare at her. “More difficult than what?” he demanded. “Than dying?”

“It’s the most difficult to see. Look at it with your heart, Cyan Dag, and you will survive it.”

“What about the lady?” he asked desperately. “Will she survive?”

But the gelding was already moving, leaving Sidera behind, looking, with her face and hands hidden within her hair, like a peculiar smudge of shadow in the morning light.

He rode south along the coast, away from the three hills, the stone wood, all the towers he had found. When the road he followed wandered inland, around a steep, impassable mountain looming over the sea, he went with it. The road met a river, meandered along it through orchards whose trees had lost the young fiery green of spring; hard buds of apple and pear clustered among the summer leaves. The water curved westward again at a leisurely pace. The valley broadened around it; fields of barley and rye and shallots scented the tranquil air. People passed him on the road: farmers with their harrows and carts, merchants, young, laughing riders with hawks on their fists or bows and arrows trailing ribbons from their shafts. In the distance, where the river flowed toward the ocean, he saw what seemed the walls and houses and sea-misted towers of a small city. Perhaps the folk within it could help him, he thought: suggest a direction, remember an odd rumor. The river had grown broad and slow; trees shadowed him, lining both sides of the road. He smelled a sweet, unexpected scent blown across the water and glanced toward it. On a small island in the middle of the river, white lilies massed along a stone wall half-hidden by trees and vine and the warm, dusty cloak of shadow and summer light. It seemed a small fortress. Separating shadow and leaf and light as he rode beside it, he discovered the dark, worn crenellation of four towers joining four walls. Sunlight glancing off the slow river trembled on the stones, blurring them slightly, as if he were seeing it underwater. Most of the windows had been blinded by a green web of ivy. Those he could still see were opaque; nothing stirred within them. Still he studied it idly, wondering who had built it and abandoned it, and why. As the gelding’s steady, even pace took him past the foremost tower, he saw something flicker in a high window. A shard of light splintering from something very bright caught in his eyes. He blinked away the blur of fire-white light, and saw a face within the silver disk on the window ledge.