Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

She held him upright, he felt; if she let go of his hand he would have fallen. “Who are you?” he asked again, the question his heart was asking by now with every beat. “Who are you in the world?”

“Three sisters,” she answered simply. “Idra weaves. She wove your life into a perilous and complex path, and you changed everyone your life touched. We needed help, and Idra chose you. She was right, and we are very grateful.”

He was silent, swallowing the mystery she gave him, since she gave him no answer to his question that he could understand. He felt the stones beneath his feet again; the dry, silken grip on his hand loosened a little. He said bewilderedly, with only a touch of bitterness, “She could have asked me. You could have trusted me instead of terrifying me.”

“If I had asked you to outface a dragon, catch a selkie in the sea, persuade Thayne Ysse to trust a knight of Gloinmere, face death by water, sword and sorcery, and survive to bring magic into Yves, what would you have said?”

He blinked, and felt the blood ease into his face. “No one,” he told her, “could do all that.”

“You did,” she said gently, and loosed his hand. “You won’t see this face again. You won’t recognize me after this. But we three will watch over you, and return to you, as long as you let us, the peace and magic you have brought back into the world. I have many faces, and I might be any woman you meet, anywhere.”

She stepped away from him; he felt as if she had taken the disk away from him again. But wait , he wanted to plead. Stay here. Ask me something else. Send me anywhere . He watched her strange face and body blur and waver and merge into smoke and shadows. Just before she faded, he saw her eyes again, full of color and light now, and reflecting, it seemed to him, all the worlds he had glimpsed in the dark tower. He heard himself say abruptly, words coming out of nowhere, “Show me your true face.”

Stunned again, he stood for a long time after her shadow faded on the flagstones, watching that face flame again and again in his heart until, emberlike, the memory burned itself down, hid itself, and only flared, now and then, at unexpected times.

He returned finally to the hall.

He saw the face in the disk again, framed now by candle and torchfire, and stopped, his heart still raw. Gwynne of Skye, her eyes smiling, watchful, said softly, “I am glad for Regis’s sake that you returned safely from Skye, my lord. Sel told me that you met one of my kinswomen while you were there. My elusive cousin, Sidera. And of course you met her sister at my wedding, the Bard of Skye.”

“Yes, my lady.” He took her hand, raised it to his lips, grateful to her for bringing such mysteries into the light of day. “I met a third sister. I never knew her name.”

“Her name is Una.”

“Thank you.”

Thayne had risen to greet him. So had the young man beside him, who moved a little awkwardly out of his chair. His lean, dark-eyed face and sweet, fearless smile were unfamiliar. Then he put his hand on the back of his chair for balance, and Cyan remembered the boy’s slight weight in his arms, the face he never saw on the rainy night in north Yves.

“Craiche?”

“My brother,” Thayne Ysse said, touching Craiche’s shoulder. “This is the faceless knight of Gloinmere who saved your life.”

“I never thought I would meet you,” Craiche said, his smile suddenly gone. “I don’t think I believed that you were real. You came out of nowhere, like a knight in a tale, and carried me to safety, and went on your way. I never—I always wondered why you took the trouble.”

Cyan gazed at him wordlessly. Idra weaves , her sisters had said. Out of that single frail thread, an incident during a battle he had long forgotten, she had woven Cyan’s life and Thayne’s hope. “You were hurt,” he answered finally. “How could I not help? You saved my life in the dragon’s tower,” he added, and Thayne flushed.

“Sit down,” Regis said, gesturing to servants for a chair and food and wine. Cyan sat, flanked by Ysse and Yves. He raised his cup to Thayne.

“To the Lord of the North Islands.”

“And to the baker from Stony Wood, who saved the towers of Gloinmere,” Regis offered. “I’m hoping she’ll stay awhile, teach me some magic.”

Cyan met the selkie’s eyes, with their deep, underwater smile. “Are you going to?”

“Give up the secrets of Skye to Yves?”

“You must stay, Sel,” the queen urged. “My cousins taught me a few things; together you and I could bring the magic back to Yves. It was here once. I can feel it, in stone and moonlight, in earth under my feet.” Her smiling eyes, alight with magic, moved from Sel to Cyan. “In certain, ancient towers.”

A voice, deep and sweet, wandered away from flute and viol, singing, as they followed, of some impossible love. Cyan felt his heart melt and crack like ice in a fire. “Cyan,” the king said, as the flute picked up the singer’s note and sang with her. “We have waited long enough. Tell us what happened to you when Gwynne sent you to Skye. What of the woman in the tower? Did you find her? And how did you meet Thayne Ysse and Sel along the way? What improbable events brought them both to supper with me here in Gloinmere?”

Cyan found the singer much later. The king had left the hall; the servants were taking up the cloths; the musicians were putting their instruments to rest in velvet pouches and rosewood boxes. She wore her green tabard; her hair spilled in a soft dark cloud out of the gold clip at her neck. He watched the way she laughed at something the flute player said, and touched his arm lightly. Then she turned, and saw the knight, and her eyes grew as dark and still as the tower among the hills in Skye.

He went to her as uncertainly as he had moved toward any magic. She smiled a little, tightly, an unfamiliar expression.

“My lord Dag.”

“You’re still here.” He studied her silently, noting the shadows beneath her eyes, the slightest cobweb line beside her mouth. He said softly, “I left you without a word.”

“Yes.”

“I had no time to say good-bye, to tell you why I was leaving. I thought—I thought—”

“That I would be dressed in fine clothes and holding the arm of some wealthy lord of Yves by now? Because you left me?”

“Yes. No.” He drew breath. “I thought you would be given no choice.”

“So did I.” She paused; he saw the memories bloom, painful and distressing, in her eyes. “So it happened. My father wanted me to marry, you had vanished, and I was desperate. So I went to the queen for help. You go for help to those who possess what you desperately want. She told me to stay here and sing. She persuaded the king to talk to my father, to tell him that I loved the greatest knight in Gloinmere, and that the king would help you in any way he could, and deny you nothing. So my father, in high dudgeon, told me not to bother coming home, and left me here to fend for myself.”

“And do you still?” he asked steadily.

She looked at him without answering. Then her face answered, pulled suddenly between laughter and tears. “Oh, Cyan. When I saw you walking through the hall in your patched surcoat, your hair falling down around your face and covered with dust, wearing nothing of arms or armor but that strange tarnished silver on a chain, looking as little like the greatest knight in Gloinmere as a page in a doorway, what could I do but fall in love with you all over again. I sang to you. Did you hear?”

“I heard.”

He touched her face, then drew her into his arms, felt the silk of her hair against his cheek, and then against his eyes. When he could see again, blinking dark, feathery strands out of his eyes, the hall was silent, empty around them, but for the echo of music, and a strange shadow cast in a crosshatch of torchlight on the floor: three women growing out of one, their ringed hands raised in greeting or farewell.