Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

“You’ve fought a war without weapons since then,” Thayne said bitterly, “against even our children.”

“You started the war!”

“You drained everything but the breath out of the North Islands to punish us for it!”

“I’ll concede the air you breathe to you. But the ground you walk on is mine.”

“What of Skye?” Sel asked.

“Skye is also mine. By heritage, by marriage—”

“Even the magic in it? This dragon came out of the heart of Skye. If we ever offend you, and you bring your knights to fight us, beware what you might face.”

Regis Aurum stared at her. So did Thayne Ysse and the dragon. Sel would have stared at herself if she had an extra eye, for the words had come out of nowhere, solid as stone piled on stone, making an unshakable argument for peace.

The king asked incredulously, “Are you threatening me?”

Sel thought about it and nodded. “I am. If you go to war with Thayne Ysse and the North Islands over this, then Skye will go to war with you. And you’d better learn some magic, Regis Aurum, because your weapons will be useless there.”

The king opened his mouth; for a moment nothing came out. The blood raged into his face and faded. “The Lord of Skye would never war against his own daughter—you can’t speak for Skye—”

“It’s not the Lord of Skye you would face,” Sel said grimly. “It’s all the folk whose faces you have never seen. Like the folk in the North Islands, they have names, and lives they think important. Unlike the North Islands, Skye has not forgotten its magic.”

The king blinked. He glanced up at the dragon, whose head had curved back above them, as if it were listening. One eye loomed over them like a bright, swollen moon. He said heavily to Sel, “I thought you came here as a favor to one of my knights, to defend Gloinmere.”

“That knight,” Thayne Ysse said tautly, “of all your knights, had some pity for the islanders. He left your side while you were wounded, to save my brother’s life.”

“How do you know that?” Regis Aurum asked sharply. “He never told me that.”

“I know because I nearly killed him myself, battling over this dragon in Skye. But he knew my brother’s name. So I let him live.”

The king’s eyes narrowed; in the torchlight, his face lost color. “You are a very dangerous man, Thayne Ysse. That knight, of all my knights, I value most.”

“So do I,” Thayne said simply. “We will tear three lands apart if we war with one another. And war it will be, nothing less than that, unless you yield the North Islands to me.”

The king was silent, motionless, his eyes on Thayne, seeing him, Sel guessed, for the first time. He swallowed something, said softly, “Now I know what you tasted in the back of your throat when you knelt in defeat to me in north Yves.”

Thayne shook his head. “You don’t know even now. You haven’t lost anything you loved.”

Regis lowered his sword finally. “I can’t fight dragons. Or my wife’s land. Not over a handful of islands with nothing on them but sheep. I claimed the North Islands when I was crowned, with no more thought than my father gave the matter, or his father before him. I spared them a thought once a year at most. Still, I would go to war with you over barnacles and sand, if you gave me any choice.” He looked at Sel dourly. “I don’t see that I have a choice. I have never lost a battle on the back of a dragon before.”

Thayne drew breath soundlessly, loosed it. He shifted, brought Craiche forward, one arm tight around his shoulders. His eyes turned briefly as gold as coins. “As you said, it’s only sand.”

The king sheathed his sword slowly, studying them both. “You look like your father,” he said abruptly to Craiche. “I saw him once or twice, when my father was alive. Come into the hall, before someone plots another attack. I need to make this very clear to my knights: that the North Islands belong to Ysse, and that you owe nothing more to me.” He added, seeing the reluctance in Thayne’s eyes, “Arm yourself if you want, but come in peace. Which you have already done, very effectively. You could have taken Gloinmere from me. Perhaps Yves itself. You have no reason to trust me, but perhaps I have some reason to trust you.”

Sel found herself silently consulted by the Lord of Ysse. She said, “Cyan Dag seems to love him. That must mean something.”

The dragon flattened a wing like a bridge to the steps. The king offered his arm to the baker in a gesture that melted her heart. “It’s time he came home,” Regis murmured as they made their way across a carpet of bone and glittering scale. “My wife sent him on some errand, two days after we were married. I haven’t seen him since.”

“I thought he came to Skye looking for the dragon,” Thayne said after a moment. “Why else would he have entered the dragon’s tower?”

“He told us in Stony Wood that he was looking for a woman…”

The king pulled futilely at the doors, then stood aside to let Thayne unseal them. The doors flew open as if the entire household were pushing at them. Men stumbled out. Swords flashed, seeking hither and yon, but the Lord of Ysse and his brother were suddenly nowhere to be found.

The king raised his voice for calm. A woman followed in the wake of the chaos, stood at the doorway looking at the dragon. The shouting and turmoil dwindled in Sel’s head into something heard within the chambers of a shell.

It was the woman in the mirror: her lovely face with its grace and luminous eyes, her hair, though in this world she wore it so smoothly coiled and braided, it might have been carved of ivory. She felt Sel’s stare and smiled at her, a private smile, as if they shared a secret. The king, restoring order finally and coaxing Thayne Ysse back from nowhere, led him to the woman in the doorway.

“This is the Lord of the North Islands, Thayne Ysse, and his brother, Craiche,” he said. “And this is Sel, who came from Skye to tell us all what to do. Make them welcome in my house.”

“From Skye!” the Queen of Yves said, taking Sel’s hands, as the astonished and vociferous knights and guards followed the king into the hall. “Tell me where you live; perhaps I know it.”

“Stony Wood,” Sel answered, her voice grown small with wonder.

“Yes,” the Lady from Skye said with delight. “I rode down the coast once from my father’s house, to see the strange stone wood.” She put her hand on Thayne’s arm as he waited behind the crowd so that Craiche would not get unbalanced in it. Some impulse from the dragon made him turn as the last guard drifted after the king. Sel felt it, too, as she lingered in the queen’s gentle grasp: the glance of a dark eye out of the dragon’s mind. The four of them stood alone outside the noisy hall, watching the dragon change.

A tall old woman with hair as white as bone and eyes as black as the eye in the bole stood in the yard where the dragon had been. Sel heard Thayne loose a sharp, incoherent word. I know you , she thought with wonder. You watched me in the mirror …

She smiled at Sel as if she heard her thinking, her heartbeat, the next thought still finding words in her head.

“You won’t need this now,” she said to Thayne, and picked her staff out of the clutter fallen off the dragon’s back.

He whispered as the old woman turned her back to them and faded into fire and night on her way to the gate, “I should have known.”

Cyan Dag returned to Gloinmere at twilight, weeks or years after he had left; he was not certain which. It was still summer, the fields and orchards told him, patterning the rolling land around the city like a rumpled quilt. But which summer, they did not say. He had ridden hard from Skye, driven all the way by the vision of charred, broken towers, the city emptied, its occupants killed or fled, the knights of Gloinmere scattered, the king nowhere to be found, and the Leviathan of the North Islands flying over the rums.