“What?”
“She did. When Gentian and I were young. She’s fey. Now she just turns flour into bread and sells it. I used to think she was as old as the stones on the cliff.”
“She’s your mother,” Anyon said bewilderedly. “She was as young as you are, once.”
“So were the stones,” Melanthos said pithily. She gave the strand in her hand a sharp tug, and turned down the road toward the tower. “I used to think I understood her.”
Mist raced the wind across the sea toward land, swallowing sky and water, and chasing the last of the fishing boats into the harbor. Over the plain, a single star hung beneath the moon’s averted face like a tear. Melanthos wondered where the knight was beneath that tear, if he had stopped at some inn, or if he pursued his mysterious, urgent quest into the night. Beside her, Anyon walked silently, apprehensive, she could tell, with what he might meet in the tower. In an odd blurring of their thoughts, she saw the stone wood suddenly out of his eyes: not trees at all, never anything alive, just stones raised for some ancient, obscure, and no longer important reason. The tower changed, too, through his eyes. Black against the twilight mists, sagging with age, its doorway webbed with the coming night, it looked oddly like the tower she had embroidered out of all her darkest threads.
He hesitated at the threshold, then forced himself to take a step. She stopped him.
“I’ll go first. Just watch me. Don’t look at anything else.”
He nodded briefly, without meeting her eyes. She saw him swallow. She stepped through the doorway and began to climb the stairs.
“You see,” she said as she reached the top and lit a taper from the little oil lamp she left burning on the floor, “it’s simple. You just go up one step and then another, and ignore all the arguments along the way.” She turned when he didn’t answer. The room was empty but for her.
She heard him call her then, in frustration and fear, from somewhere down the stairs. But the mirror was speaking, too, filling itself with light, colors, movement, another piece of the fragmented tale.
“In a moment,” she called to Anyon, and sat down among her threads.
Eight
Cyan Dag, following a river across Skye, found the dead at sunrise. The river had grown shallow, and spread into thin, silvery fingers across a wide marsh. New light spilled over him as he dismounted; bright, startled marsh birds flickered around him, calling to the sun. Clouds in the distance, bruised purple and tumbled together, told him of the storm he had missed. He could smell it, rain still clinging to the leaves of the low, flowering brush he stood in, rain in the wind from the sea. For a moment the scent of the tiny, sweet flowers overpowered the stench of death. He stared at them. Six men, he counted, and two horses. Even the horses were armed. Two of the warriors wore rich, embroidered silks over their mail; the others wore fine black leather trimmed with silver. He did not recognize the emblems embroidered on the silk: black roses, or perhaps black suns. They were not of Gloinmere, and looked too rich for Skye. They might have wandered into Skye from some strange land across the sea, though why they had fought there, in that lonely marsh beside the sea, he could not guess. Light sparked in the jeweled chains still hanging around their necks, in the jewels in their ears. Their faces, bloody and smeared with dirt, seemed imperious. They gazed unflinchingly back at the sun, at the flies beginning to swarm, at the weapons scattered on the roiled ground, and explained nothing. But he stood listening to their silence, as if, becoming as motionless, as breathless, he might hear the language they spoke now.
A hawk cried above him, fierce, piercing, and he started. Something moved among the dead that was not windblown cloth or hair. A ring flashed; a hand shifted a spider’s step across the ground. He felt the cold, silken glide of horror over his skin. That warrior lay facedown, looking, Cyan had thought, into the black, rain-pocked shadow of his blood. He turned his head slightly, showing hair matted with blood, the bone sheared above his brow.
Cyan swallowed dryly, motionless again, waiting for the man to realize that he was dead. But the searching eye found him, held him until he was recognized: human and alive. Then it closed. The ringed finger beckoned.
Cyan stepped among the dead and knelt beside him. He bent low to catch whatever words the warrior thought he could still speak, and saw then how young he was. His lean jaw was smooth as a child’s, his eye golden and fearless, too young to believe in what it saw coming. He wore red and yellow silk; slashed ribbons of it swirled around Cyan as he listened.
“Name,” he heard, and said it. The warrior’s eye closed, opened when Cyan thought he had finally died. His hand moved; one finger touched Cyan’s arm. Words as frail as cobweb catching light among the leaves wove together somehow, made a coherent pattern.
“Who are you?” Cyan asked when he understood. Wind answered; a bird answered. He heard an indrawn breath, and then another. Then he realized that he listened to the sea. The warrior’s eye was still open. Cyan closed it gently and straightened, as stiff as if he had knelt there for hours.
His jaw tightened. He turned the young warrior over, knowing then how scavengers felt, prying under mail and cloth for treasure, trying to free it from the weight of flesh and bone growing rigid, unfamiliar. But he found at last what he had been asked to take.
He could make nothing of the plain silver disk. Round and polished to a mirrorlike clarity, it covered his palm. It refused to reflect anything, even his face, as he gazed into it. What it was, or meant, or did, it did not tell him. Magic, he decided finally. Incomprehensible. Still, he slid the heavy chain it hung on over his head, tucked the disk beneath his shirt. It would mean something to someone who knew the young man; perhaps that was why he had been asked to take it. Then he studied the cloth it had been wrapped in.
He felt the blood drain from his face; his skin prickled again with shock. There they all were, the six dead warriors, the armored horses. But they were made of thread now, depicted in bright, precise stitches. He recognized the yellow hair and silk, the golden eye, against a different background. They lay on a brown plain instead of a flowering marsh. A tower stood in the distance. The dragon wrapped around it opened one slitted eye wide, as if it had watched the battle on the plain.
Dragon, Thayne Ysse had said. Gold. Troubled, Cyan searched the picture for some hint of explanation. Neither dead nor dragon offered it. The dragon had killed them, he guessed. But nothing had been burned, and the dragon looked more curious than aroused. More likely, meeting by chance, they had killed one another, fighting over the gold they did not yet possess. But what were their bodies doing in the marsh?
He lifted his head then, perhaps at the odd silence. The relentless buzzing behind him had ceased. He did not want to turn, but he turned finally, slowly, to find that the dead had all unraveled into the wind behind him. There was nothing left of them, except their images in thread on the cloth he held, and the silver disk beneath his shirt.
He shivered, unsettled by the power that turned death into thread. He lingered, chilled in the bite of sea wind, but nothing else happened; nothing explained. He let the wind take the cloth, but did not watch to see if it, too, vanished. But he kept the disk, for a ghost had come out of nowhere in Skye and given it to him, like a portent. But of what, for what, why? Nothing said. He mounted finally and rode out of the marsh to the sea.