Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

Dragon, she thought, chilled and fascinated.

Its scales seemed luminous, sparkling green, gold, bronze, copper, outlining paler diamonds of pearl, ash, bone. It lay with its tail beneath its head, its body circling the round tower. She watched a wing shift, open slightly to the air. The other wing was pressed against the tower. In the new light, the tower, as red as the barren hills, burned brightly as a flame within the dragon’s ring.

She could see no door. The tower showed its back to her, she thought; it must show its face to the rising sun. Yet its blindness teased at her, presented an image to her mind’s eye: the tower with no way in, no way out.

What lay inside? she wondered as the image faded. What did the dragon guard? Who did it watch for, in the dead, fiery waste?

She chose her threads with difficulty, wanting more colors than she had, wondering that such a deadly place could be kindled to such astonishing beauty.

She began with the tiny, moving reflection in the dragon’s eye.

In a broken tower on the crescent island of Ysse, Thayne Ysse splayed his hands on the crumbling stone along the narrow sides of a lancet window and stared south across the sea. Behind him, his father played with fire and water, mumbling words to himself out of some rotting, mouse-chewed book. Sometimes he spoke to Thayne, though that was rare; more often he spoke to his own brother, who had died thirty years before. Thayne answered to either or not, depending on his patience.

He was a fair, muscular man with a face like a yellow-eyed hawk. The hawk’s stare was trained toward Yves. He had been to Gloinmere once, years earlier, to see Regis Aurum crowned King of Yves and the North Islands and the peculiar land of Skye. Thayne had gone with several of the islanders, very young men, watching out of still, unsmiling eyes as Regis paraded through the streets of Gloinmere flanked by his proud knights in their fine leather and silk and glittering mail. The islanders had not traveled so far to swear fealty, but to take a measure of Regis’s strength. They had no need to disguise themselves; they stood in the sweaty, screaming crush in their drab mantles and worn boots and looked like what they mostly were: farmers and fishers with the smell of brine blown into their skin and one coin among them to flip for their fortunes.

They tossed what they had and lost, when Regis came with his knights some months later to find out why no one of the North Islands had knelt before him and sworn faith and peace and a portion of their livelihood to him. The war was brief and bloody. Regis himself had nearly lost his life. Thayne had lost cousins barely old enough to fight, and his remaining uncle; his father had been badly wounded. He recovered his strength, but his wits had wandered away into some misty past when Ferle Ysse ruled the North Islands and there was magic in the world.

With the thin blades of wind scoring his palms through the ancient, unmortared stone, and his father muttering and blowing on water behind him, Thayne thought dispassionately: I am descended from kings.

He dropped his hands and turned. His father, gnarled and boled like an old tree with swollen joints, his hair the silvery white of ash bark, blinked as if Thayne had, in the act of turning, changed into someone else entirely.

“Bowan,” he said, waving Thayne to his side. “Look at this.”

“I am not Bowan,” Thayne said in his leashed, even voice. “Bowan is dead. I am Thayne.”

But he joined his father anyway, just as his father ignored Thayne’s words. He gripped Thayne’s sleeve, pulled him to the book on the table. The table was a magpie’s nest of odd objects: papers, stones, bowls, candles, bones, jars, lenses, mirrors, dried herbs, feathers, a small, mummified bat. His father turned pages of the book awkwardly, shakily, with his bulging, painful hands. He had grown old long before his time, Thayne knew. He should have been still pepper-bearded and powerful, trimming Thayne’s hair with a broadsword in the training yard, and dreaming up ways to annoy Regis Aurum. He tapped at a drawing of someone blowing sails with his breath, and said to Thayne, “You could do this, Ferle. You summoned a fog on a cloudless day over the sea and hid the North Islands from an army from the south.”

“I am not Ferle. I am Thayne.”

“You understood the language of seals.”

“I am Thayne, Father.”

“I know that,” his father said querulously. “Why do you think I called you here? You are my heir and you will be King of the North Islands.”

Thayne started to answer, then didn’t bother. He glanced at the open book, brushed a mouse dropping off a page. “What did you want to show me?”

“This.”

“This” was a tower without a door or a window, ringed by a monstrous dragon breathing flame at a rider whose face had been blurred away by centuries of fingers turning pages. “Yes,” Thayne said patiently.

“I want you to go there, Thayne.”

Thayne looked at his father, oddly moved by the unexpected recognition. But who knew, he reminded himself, what “Thayne” meant anymore to his father, who might as easily consider him as real or unreal as Bowan and Ferle, just another ghost. “You want me to get charred into cinders by this dragon. Then who would remember that you are up here, to send you meals and firewood, and take you down to bed at night?”

“You don’t always remember that,” his father complained lucidly.

Thayne touched a glass jar of what looked like old moldering oysters without their shells. “I try,” he answered mildly. “What is this?”

“Pearls.”

“Ah.”

“You will find a way.”

“A way to do what?”

“To fight the dragon. I taught you myself to fight. You were better than anyone but me.”

“I still am.”

His father blinked at him silently, confused, it seemed, by Thayne’s assumption that he was still alive. “You are,” he said politely, and Thayne leaned wearily over the book, his elbows on the table, fingers rubbing his eyes.

“And so,” he said, quelling impulses to laugh, or weep, or crack the jar of pearls against the wall to reveal the true nature of the world to his father’s frayed mind. He gazed down at the dragon, which was drawn with surprising detail in faint red ink. It wound a double loop of its body around the tower; its open lizard’s maw revealed a great many even triangles of teeth. “And so what do I gain by disturbing this dragon?”

“Gold.”

Thayne grunted. Dragons grew gold, apparently, as oysters grew pearls; one meant the other interchangeably, without the threat of fire or death or the reek of decayed sea life.

“I kill the dragon—”

“Slay. It says here to slay.”

“Slay the dragon and take its gold. And then—”

“You free the North Islands from Regis Aurum.” His father’s voice was suddenly so level and cold that Thayne stared at him in wonder. His eyes were rimmed with yellow like a hunting cat’s. “Thayne Ysse. My son. You rule.”

Thayne felt the small hairs prick on his neck. He watched his father, hungry for the strong, familiar, unyielding expression that even now faded, became uncertain, fretful. His father laid a hand on his shoulder, patted it awkwardly, trying to remember, Thayne saw, the name he had just spoken.

There is no door, Thayne thought, gazing numbly down at the drawing. There is no door in the tower. No way in. No way out.

He straightened. The thin archer’s windows framed slits of twilight purple and gray, the faint memory of gold. He said, “I’ll send Hael up with your supper. I’ll come back later and take you down. Don’t go by yourself; the steps are dangerous.”

“Thank you, Bowan.”