Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

He walked down in the dark himself, feeling his way from step to crumbled, broken step in the spiraling staircase. At the bottom, he found his younger brother sitting on a step, reading by torchlight. At twelve, Craiche had fought their father to convince him that his rightful place was in a fishing coracle sailing to the mainland to stop Regis Aurum’s knights before they crossed the water. The battle had raged down the yard into the cow barn, where their father had left Craiche sprawling in a stall. But Craiche had followed anyway, which was why now, at nineteen, he dragged one withered leg behind him. He still had their father’s dauntless, reckless courage, all his love of the wind and the sea, the precarious life on the islands.

He closed his book over a finger and looked up at Thayne. He was dark, like their father, with the same challenging, teasing smile in the face of the raw night wind. He asked, “How is he?”

“Maundering,” Thayne said. “He keeps calling me Bowan.”

“Which Bowan?”

“His brother, I think. He died years before I was born. Did the sheep get penned?”

“Sheep are penned, cows milked, boats are in, everyone accounted for and at supper, including the stranger who climbed into Dirdre’s boat while she was digging for mussels across the channel.”

“What stranger?”

“A woman with a harp.”

Thayne grunted. “Good. I’ll send her up to play for our father.” He saw Craiche shiver. “Get inside and eat. You’re far too thin.”

Craiche rose, balancing against the stones a moment, then pulling himself forward on his own. Sometimes, when his leg ached, he used a sword for a crutch; waving it at straying cows, with his sweet, rakish smile, he could make even Thayne laugh.

They crossed the yard together. It was small, with thick stone walls and outhouses to slow the wind. The tower and the old castle loomed over it, both dark, sagging, ancient. Parts of the castle had been rebuilt with mortared stone, but not in Thayne’s lifetime. Possibly in Bowan’s, he thought sardonically, keeping an eye on Craiche as they went up the steps. At the top, Thayne set the torch in a sconce, then wheeled abruptly, not wanting more stone, more walls, wanting to clear his head in the night and wind, not listen to his household chew.

“Go in,” he said shortly to Craiche. “Send the harper to our father after supper. I’ll bring them both down later.”

Craiche lingered, looking at him curiously. “You’re eaten,” he said.

“What?”

“Something’s eating you inside.”

“You would think,” Thayne said harshly, “that after all these years I would have learned not to want my father to remember my name.”

Craiche was silent a moment; his smile flashed, edged but without bitterness. “I’d give my other leg for that,” he said simply. “I’d give my life to have Regis Aurum doddering in a tower instead of our father.”

Thayne dropped a hand on his shoulder, jarring him off balance. He caught himself on Thayne’s arm, laughing a little. Thayne touched his hair. “Don’t say such things out loud. I’m the will and the sword of Ysse. You are our heart.”

He was halfway across the yard when Craiche’s voice caught up with him. “Bowan was also Ferle Ysse’s grandfather. He spoke magic. He taught it to Ferle.”

Thayne turned. In the dark, he could barely see Craiche’s face, a pale profile beneath the fire. “What?”

“Something I read. You’re right about words. Bowan said they are full of wonder and danger, and they can change into themselves.”

Thayne shook his head, trying to untangle that. “Poetry,” he decided, but Craiche did not laugh. He adjusted his stance on the steps, ratcheting himself around to face Thayne, his face entirely dark now, his hair become flame.

“So that when you say cloud, the word itself becomes cloud. That’s how Ferle Ysse raised the fog that blinded an army on the sea.” He paused, letting Thayne contemplate that; Thayne, contemplating his windblown brother, wished he would go inside. Craiche added, “Or when you say, ‘I am the sword of Ysse,’ that’s what you become. Not just a dream. Not just something rusting in the scabbard.”

Thayne drew a breath and loosed it. He said tersely, “You only have me to lose. I have you. And there’s our father and this house and this island—”

“And sheep and boats—”

“All,” Thayne said with sudden intensity. “Our lives. We need far more than rusty, pocked metal to wave at Regis Aurum. We have no arms, no money, and no power.”

He could not see it, but he felt his brother’s smile flash across the night between them. “We have words.”

Thayne watched him turn again, lift himself jerkily, limb by limb, puppet fashion, up the steps. He got himself inside, and Thayne went out the gates, which had not been closed since the North islands swore fealty to Yves seven years before.

He went down a short path to the sea, which he found by starlight and memory, and sat down on a stone to watch the waves. Behind him, the tower on the cliff threw its weak, narrow oblongs of candlelight onto the incoming tide. He thought of his father, shut away from the world, nattering over his books, walking a labyrinth of past and present without a center, veering from one blocked path into another. He thought of Craiche, who went to battle smelling of cow dung and whom Thayne carried home in his arms. Where is the magic word , he thought, that will make him walk again ? The tide, dark and silver, coaxed at his attention; he heard it from a distance, ebbing and circling, the birds crying above the deep over something that had died.

He heard the harping woven into the sounds of the sea, inseparable as moonlight is inseparable from water. He listened thoughtlessly to the light, tender rills and phrases, until it seemed he breathed them out of the air, drew them deep into his bones, until his thoughts no longer coiled in endless tight circles around themselves, but flowed everywhere, as shapeless as water, touching everything. He could see the stars then, not just the night. He smelled the peculiar mix of sheep pasture and brine, Ysse and sea, and then, overwhelming them all on a wind from the mainland, the scent of Yves: its harrowed fields and rich forests, its mountains, its bloody earth.

The harping drifted through his thoughts again, luring, coaxing, charming his attention. He rose finally, wanting to meet the harper, for he had not heard anything so lovely in a long time. She might look like her music, some part of him hoped foolishly, as if she were something conjured out of the old tales Craiche was always reading. Her song stopped before he got halfway up the steps. He quickened his pace a little, before she vanished back into the tale. But the harper stood talking quietly to his father. As Thayne entered, she looked across the room at him and smiled thinly, as if she had read his thoughts.

Her face was seamed like a dried pool. Her eyes looked as though they had seen what existed before the world began, and taken their blackness from that. Her loose, white hair swept down past her knees. She was surprisingly tall and straight, for a woman so old; her arms, under the rolled sleeves of the long, gray tunic she wore, looked muscular from wielding the harp. Even that seemed ancient, unadorned, and the color of bone, as if she made her music out of something that had died.

“Bowan,” his father said eagerly. “She knows the dragon.”

“What?” Thayne, distracted, pulled his eyes from the secret black gaze and saw the tower in the open book his father still pored over.

“It’s a tale out of Skye,” the harper said. Her voice had grown a trifle hollow, reedy with age, but it was still pleasing, tuned from all the songs she sang. Thayne sighed noiselessly. His father’s hand lay on the page as if his touch claimed dragon and tower and all that lay within.