The woman sat very still; so did Sel, watching her. Her hands tightened now and then on the chair arms; sapphire, emerald, gold flashed. So abruptly that she startled Sel, she stood up and stepped away from the chair.
Sel still could not see her face. Her head was bowed; her loose, pale, rippling hair hid her profile. She walked; the scene in the mirror shifted. The woman turned her back again, stood facing the fire.
The fireplace was an enormous piece of marble into which a graceful lily opening a bell-shaped mouth had been carved on either side. The woman’s gown, blue gray, embroidered with lilies and white birds, showed no sign of having been worn beyond the moment she had risen: not a crease, a strained seam, a stain.
She stood quietly in front of the fire, her head still bowed. Light shifted in a fluid sheen along her tight sleeves, as if her unseen hands moved, Sel thought, tightening and turning around themselves.
Her head lifted suddenly; she turned, as if she felt eyes on her beyond her tower, beyond her night. Sel saw her face.
She heard herself breathe after a long silence; she heard the sea again. “Once,” she whispered, as if she were telling the woman’s story to herself, “I swam out of the sea and stood on new feet on the shore of the world…”
The mirror blinked like an eye, and shone with all the colors of the sea.
Eleven
Cyan Dag came to the dark tower at sunset. It stood, as the bard had told him, in the small valley between three hills. A grove of oak surrounded it; beyond the trees stretched meadows of long sweet grasses and wildflowers. Across one meadow, near another wood, he saw a stag crowned with hoary tiers of antlers raise its head at the unexpected scent and look at him.
The tower was nothing like what he had envisioned. Something loftier, more elegant, more dangerous than this, he thought he would come to, in the end. This one was squat, sagging, its rough stones tossed onto one another and mortared together with nothing but age. Anyone could have walked in and out of its door, which was a crooked lintel balanced on a couple of slabs. Beyond the dusty threshold, black so profound it seemed to have texture and weight like a stone filled the entry. He could see no windows.
He dismounted slowly, perplexed by the darkness, the silence within it. But the bard had told him to find the tower within these hills and so he had. Nothing left but to enter it, he thought. He could see nothing to stop him; whatever danger there was to be faced must lie within.
He left his horse cropping among the wildflowers and walked to the door, unsheathing his sword out of habit, though he doubted that any traps within the tower for unwary knights would be that unsubtle. The utter blackness made him hesitate. But he could not do what he needed to do standing around in the tranquil light of day. He put one hand on a worn doorpost, bowing his head a little, for the lintel was not high. He had taken the first step across the stark line between light and night, when he felt something rouse in the blackness so close to him he thought they shared the same breath of dusty air. Startled, he swung the broadsword awkwardly; the blade sparked against the lintel and froze there, as if it had driven into stone.
Someone pushed past him out of the shadow, gathering form and color as it moved, dark slipping away from it like a cloak. He let go of the sword, which had been rendered useless, and stepped into the tower to make himself invisible while he watched whatever had come out. It did not let him get far; a hand caught his wrist as inexorably as the stone had caught his sword. A woman cried, “Stop!”
He felt an immensity open around him in the blackness. He did not know anymore what there was to fear, since anything within that strange tower seemed possible. He could barely see his own hand, all that was left of him in the light, and the other hand, long and brown, with a silver ring on one finger, locked around his.
“Come back!”
He could not move. More than an absence of light held him still. There were voices just beyond his hearing, words of immense and complex power and meaning. There were visions beyond the black: colors that had never existed before, places reached by endless, intricate paths, so beautiful he could search for them in one lifetime, then linger in them for another. There were promises of unimaginable rewards for impossible dangers overcome, for precious things found, for those in dire distress and mortal need rescued and made safe. They pulled at him with a hundred whispering voices, a hundred gentle touches. Come, Cyan Dag. Go there. Do this. Learn that. Take this path, find, fight, save, kill, kneel, swear, love. If he could only free himself and turn, he would serve the perfect king, do the impossible deed, achieve his heart’s desire, transform his world.
“Come back.”
The voice sounded very far away. He heard his breath suddenly, quick and sharp, as if he had been running. He had pushed his free hand hard against a post stone, using all his strength as leverage against the hand pulling him back into the light of day. He wrenched at it; it tugged as fiercely at him. Somehow, despite his formidable strength and longing, he was jerked across the threshold into light. He stumbled, caught his balance and his breath, his face slick with sweat or tears. He stared bewilderedly at the woman who had forced him back into the world. Behind him, his sword dropped to earth with a clang.
He cried at her, “Why did you stop me?”
Then he recognized her.
She had lost the eerie, frightening beauty he had glimpsed the night she had rescued him in the forest. She had taken it off like a mask, or hidden it somewhere within what he saw now. She could do such things, he sensed. She was tall, long-boned and lean, brown as earth; her astonishing hair, night black and straight as straw, still seemed something she could vanish into. By daylight, he could see her eyes clearly: amber flecked with gold. She smiled at the recognition; fine lines fanned away from her eyes, framed her smile.
“Sidera,” she said, before he could speak. “You asked me my name,” she reminded him gently, and he remembered.
“You saved my life. You left me at that inn and I couldn’t thank you.”
“I told your horse to take you there,” she answered. “I don’t care for such places. I’m not like my sister. I’m more comfortable with the foxes and deer than king’s courts.”
“Your sister—” He stopped, confused, as three faces imposed themselves over one another in his mind: the one he had glimpsed across her fire, the face he saw now, the face of the woman who had sent him to that tower.
“The Bard of Skye.”
He stared at her. The bard intruded between them, in his thoughts, tall and sinewy, with her black, sunken eyes, her long, rippling hair, her strong veined hands caressing the strings of her harp. He saw her in Sidera, then, in her height, her straight shoulders, her compelling eyes. But Sidera’s eyes held light, and they seemed kind.
“Does your sister have a name?” he asked finally. “I only know her as the Bard of Skye.”
“Her name is Idra. She didn’t tell you?”
“I never asked,” he said tautly. “I just seem to do what she tells me to do. She sent me here; she told me to find this tower, and rescue the woman trapped in it—”