Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

The innkeeper sighed in relief. “You are a brave man, sir knight. If you choose to fight the evil in the forest, I will give you my softest bed, and whatever I have to eat and drink. Which is not much,” he admitted. “But the best I have, you will have.”

Cyan detached himself from the innkeeper’s hold and went to the door. The great, dark trees, blurred with dusk, might have been painted, they stood so silently. The road ran across a meadow to the edge of the forest, and then shadow swallowed it; he could see nothing beyond the night within.

He asked, thinking of a pale, enchanting face with eyes turning black as that shadow, “What does this evil look like?”

“Monstrous, they say. Merciless.”

“Human? Or animal?”

“Human, after its fashion.”

“Does it use magic? I can’t fight sorcery.”

“Its strength is its power, so they say.” The innkeeper watched the forest nervously over Cyan’s shoulder. “It attacks travelers, steals their horses and possessions, sends them running for their lives. Four armed men together could not bring it down. But you are a knight of Gloinmere.”

“And it is between me and Skye… If it stops me, I will fight it,” he promised simply, “in the name of Regis Aurum.”

He stepped into the yard to get his pack, since even the innkeeper’s menials had abandoned him. The innkeeper followed to take the gelding to the ramshackle stable.

“Thank you, Cyan Dag,” he said somberly. “You may fight evil in the king’s name, but it’s your name the plain folk around here will remember.”

Dawn was scarcely more than a flush of gray above the forest when Cyan continued his journey west. As he rode into the trees, a damp, webbed lacework of green from the heavy boughs brushed his face. No birds sang at his passage. He kept the gelding at an even pace as he watched for movement within the forest. He kept his thoughts as steady, not trying to guess what might come at him, or when, or how much warning it might give, before it struck.

It was not subtle. That he noticed immediately, as it rode toward him down the road. A pack of hounds after a stag might have made less noise. He reined abruptly; his horse started to rear, then checked itself and stood still, trembling. The rider was huge, bulky, twice as tall as any man Cyan had ever seen, and, it seemed, with twice as many heads. One, a mass of white hair, faced backward. The other faced forward, its bell-shaped head flowing into its shoulders without bothering with a neck. Only its mouth and the glint of its eyes were visible beneath a black helm. Its mouth was opened wide, and emitted a strange, continuous noise that sounded midway between the groan of some great bellows and the high, harsh screech of a rusty wheel. It was dressed entirely in black, and rode a black horse, which, for all its broad frame and massive hooves, seemed dwarfed by the giant on its back. Two arms swung a great broadsword through the air in front of it, back and forth, like some demented thresher. Two others guided the horse in a headlong gallop toward Cyan.

He stopped grappling with the strangeness, and let all his attention focus on what he recognized, rather than what he did not. The rider was top-heavy; it would not stop easily; on foot it would be clumsy, slow to turn, possibly confused by its double vision. He gathered his reins, waited until the grim, noisy monstrosity was upon him. Then he dodged the fanning sweep of the blade as he wheeled the gelding out of its path, and aimed a passing blow at the black helm. The helm tolled a deep, sonorous note, as if he had struck cast iron. One of the four hands loosed a rein and rose to still the clang. The backward face, bare, red-eyed, and glaring wildly, startled Cyan as it passed. He urged the gelding after it; its expression changed, in the moment, from fierceness to surprise, and then to apprehension as Cyan neared. Then it gave a yelp as the horse under it wrenched to a halt and spilled its unwieldy burden out of an extraordinarily high saddle onto the ground.

Heads and arms separated into two bodies that turned fully human as they rose. The white-haired one, with oddly pale skin and red eyes like a rat, leaped lithely to his feet, still holding the sword. The other stumbled up and turned in a circle as it struggled to lift the cumbersome helm. The face under it, older and heavier, was bloodied. Cyan swung at the younger man, who was attempting to mount again. His blade snagged the new sun flaring through the trees; the man, wincing at the light, slashed at nothing and slipped on a tree root. The great horse, stung by the flat of Cyan’s blade on his haunch, leaped away. Cyan rode at the armed man, and had backed him against an outcrop of rock at the side of the road, when something struck him from above.

The world disappeared in a sudden wash of red. Fire licked jaggedly across his wrist. He flailed desperately at his blindness and lost his balance. A hand gripped the cloth at his chest and heaved; the ground spun up to slam against him. He heard a horse’s hooves growing fainter and fainter, and then nothing.

He woke a moment or two later, with the hissing moan and shrill clamoring in his ear, as if the giant’s foremost head were trying to warn him of some dire portent. His sword lay beneath him, the angry red glint of its pommel near his eye. Someone, he realized with groggy astonishment, was sitting on his legs and pulling his boots off.

“Put these on,” a woman said briefly. “Leave yours for him. They could talk, the way they flap.”

“He won’t be doing much walking,” a young man commented. “That slash in his wrist is bad. He’s losing blood.”

“So am I,” the older man grumbled. “He’s got a fighting arm solid as a tree trunk. You wouldn’t think so to look at him.”

“He’s a knight of Gloinmere.”

“He’s a menace.”

“He would have routed the pair of you,” the woman said tartly, “if I hadn’t dropped a rock on his head. As it is, he’s seen both your faces and broken your noise box.”

“He’ll die soon enough,” the older man said dispassionately. “The animals will help him along. But where one knight comes, others may follow, especially if they search for him. We don’t want to linger in this forest. Where’s his horse?”

“I caught it,” the younger said. “There, with ours. He doesn’t have much else, for a knight.”

“Riding alone away from Gloinmere,” the woman mused, “on the road to Skye… Where was he going, I wonder, and why?” The weight lifted abruptly off Cyan; her voice grew distant, tangling with the odd, incessant din. “Take his sword. Leave that.”

“But I can fix it—”

“It would drive me mad. Leave it with him for company.”

Cyan gripped his sword and rolled to his feet. His first thrust, down at the ground to catch his balance, struck a round wooden box to the heart; metal cogs and gears groaned to silence around the blade. The woman shouted; the men groped hastily on the ground for their swords. Cyan shook the box away, and spun a dizzying circle of light around him, keeping the men at bay, trying to keep the woman in sight, while he edged toward the horses. Beyond the flickering, slashing web of silver he wove, someone shifted from view. He turned desperately, searching. A horse galloped up to him; a blade flashed overhead. Cyan ducked, then reached up, caught a wrist, and wrenched a stranger down into the fray. He paused a heartbeat, startled. But the stranger only gave a battle yell that Cyan had not heard for seven years, and hoisted himself up behind the white-haired man mounting Cyan’s gelding. A blade swiped at him. He fell over the other side of the horse, taking the rider down with him. The woman had already pulled herself up into the high, unwieldy saddle on the black, and was shouting again. The older man, blood fanning down his face, caught the reins of a snorting piebald mare and fumbled for a stirrup. Cyan started to pursue, then stopped as the trees bent low over him, leaves fluttering and sparking in his eyes. He leaned on his sword, groping suddenly for air. The stranger, one hand gripping the young man’s hair, the other hauling at his trousers, brought him to his feet. The woman rode up against them both, knocking them apart.