Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

Six fingers, his stunned eyes told him, on each shadow hand opened to the light. He made some sound. He saw her look back at him before the sun seemed to rise behind his eyes in an explosion of light that blinded him. I have ridden across Yves and across Skye , he thought bewilderedly, to free the evil that threatens the king . He felt his body move, though he knew he must be still frozen with horror and confusion on the threshold of the tower. The dazzling light faded a little; he saw her through a pounding wash of red, watching him as he crossed the tangled yard. He could not see her face, only the blurred shape of it within her hair. She did not speak; she raised one hand. He did not falter; he moved in fury and desperation to meet whatever deadly magic she conjured out of the air against him.

It was a small thing compared with the sorceries he had met in Skye: a splinter of silver that caught briefly in his eyes. But it brought him to a halt.

He stood staring at her, his sword poised to strike, his body trembling with the effort that stopped the blow. She did nothing else: her upraised hand, long-boned and slender, with the plain band of silver on the longest finger, was the only magic he recognized. He saw her clearly then, the face that had terrified him, that he had worn like a talisman over his heart, that he had hated, that for an instant and forever he had loved.

He could not move.

When, or how, she disappeared, he did not know; she had already blurred behind his tears before she left him. Still he did not move for a long time after that, feeling the pain of his failure, his helplessness, like a weight over his thoughts and body, as if he had been cast in iron and left like a statue in the abandoned courtyard. Finally, wearily, he sheathed his sword, remembering the long road between Skye and Yves, and the dangers still converging on Gloinmere. He swallowed the rust and charred, cold ash of bitterness, and walked out of the dark archway through the tower walls to find his horse.

Three Sisters rose around him, flooded with light from the setting sun. He stared at them, at the meadow grass under his feet, at the little stream where the gelding was drinking, at the squat black tower he had just left. The confusion welled through him again; he wanted to beat answers out of the tower with his fists, but it would not answer, he knew; it never did.

“How do I find my way out of you?” he shouted at the blank, dreaming faces of the hills. “When will you let me go?”

They did not answer, either. He called the gelding, and mounted slowly, wondering if all the paths to come in his life would loop forever back to those three hills, that tower. He turned the gelding away from the sun, toward what he hoped with all his heart was Yves.

Someone cried, “Wait!”

He reined, recognizing Melanthos’s voice. She rode up beside him, barefoot and tangle-haired, her horse whuffing nervously at the stolid gelding. Cyan did not look at her; she had to wheel her mount close to his to see his face.

She whispered after a moment, “What is it? Was she dead?”

His head rose abruptly; he found her eyes. “What do you—how do you—”

“I found this,” she said, her voice small, shaken. “In the tower in the stone wood. It’s not one of mine. I came looking for you. I wanted to know.”

He gazed wordlessly at the embroidery she opened. The dark-haired knight with the three gold towers on his surcoat walked out of the dark tower onto a swath of light from the setting sun. He was alone, except for the face in the silver disk over his heart, barely visible, a stitch or two of blue and gold beneath the jagged lines of power worked across the silver.

Cyan raised a hand to the disk, pulled it out of his shirt. She was still with him, harrowing his life. His hand closed over it, to snap the chain, fling the disk into the grass. But he kept it; it had saved him, he remembered starkly, from water, from fire, from Thayne Ysse’s blade, from the dragon.

Melanthos was still watching him, her strange eyes questioning, disturbed. He said painfully, “She is free. But I think—there is a reason that she was trapped in the tower, and I might have set someone very dangerous to Yves loose in the world. I must get back to Gloinmere to warn the king. Also—” He sighed, shook his head, one hand splayed over his eyes. “There is the matter of Thayne Ysse and the dragon. He took it, to help him war with Yves. While I stayed here to free—” He stopped again. Melanthos’s hand closed around his wrist.

“My mother,” she finished. He dropped his hand, oddly surprised. “I’m sorry. We kept you here. No one—no one would have guessed that the tale would end like this. We never thought the woman in the tower might be dangerous.”

He was silent, gazing at Melanthos, remembering how her face had changed, when he had last seen it, beneath the changing colors of her mother’s power. He whispered, words transforming an image in his mind, “The woman in the tower.”

“Which?” Melanthos asked, perplexed. “My mother? Or the woman in your disk?”

“Your mother. She has grown very powerful. I saw Thayne Ysse take the same fires from the dragon that your mother drew out of herself.”

“Because of you.”

He shook his head quickly, remembering the strange, masked face of the selkie. “No. She sewed my towers back together, and then she freed herself. I did nothing.”

“You went with her into the sea. You wouldn’t let her go alone. She had to return to the human world to rescue you.”

“I didn’t dare let go of her.” He smiled a little, brushed her tangled, smoky hair with his fingers. “It was you who called her back. Thank you for finding me again.”

“I had to, when I saw this. You, walking out of the dark tower alone—she must have embroidered it.”

“She saw me coming,” he said bitterly.

“Then she was here in this tower all the time?”

“She must have been. Sidera said that this tower is best at seeming.” He gathered his reins, an eye to the setting sun. “I must go. I want to find my way out of these hills before nightfall.”

“Come back to Stony Wood,” she begged. “Tell my mother about the woman, about Thayne Ysse’s dragon and the danger to Gloinmere. I don’t know anything about war, or the world outside of Skye. But if Gloinmere is in danger because of sorcery from Skye, then how long can Skye itself stay peaceful?”

“I don’t know. But at least you have Sel to fight for you. I can’t stay any longer in Skye; I have been away far too long.” He urged the gelding again toward Yves, and raised a hand in farewell to the selkie’s strange-eyed daughter, whose eyes, as they watched him, seemed to have lost their glinting lights and become as dark and secret as the stones behind her. He took her fey smile with him out of the hills.

Thayne Ysse sat in the dragon tower arguing with Craiche. Behind them, their father searched his books for a spell that would, he said, turn the dragon invisible over Yves, so that no one would see the path it took toward Gloinmere, only the mysterious devastation that charred the earth as the army from the North Islands marched through Yves.

“You can’t go alone to Gloinmere,” Craiche insisted. “If you get killed, the dragon will escape, or be taken by someone in Gloinmere. Then who will protect the North Islanders? We’ll be slaughtered. By the same king, in one lifetime—”

“There’s not enough magic in Yves to string a bow with, let alone capture a dragon,” Thayne said tersely. “And nothing will happen to me. You stay here with our father. Someone has to.”

“I’m going with you.”

“So am I, of course,” their father said, glancing up from a book. “I’ll take the dragon if you fall, Bowan. Leave Regis Aurum to me. I have a score to settle.”