Her brows went up; her eyes lost their smile at his distress. “But that’s another tower entirely.” Her hand emerged from her hair quickly as he felt the blood flare into his face. “What is your name? She didn’t tell me.”
“My name is Cyan Dag.” His voice shook with leashed anger. “I thought that bards in Skye never lie.”
“Did she? Did she lie to you?”
“She said—” He stopped, running a hand over his face, trying to remember exactly what she had said, that night on Verlain’s dragon tower. “She said that finding the tower would be dangerous. And that this is the tower I needed to find.”
“What you need,” Sidera said, “is not always what you are looking for.”
His mouth tightened. He turned, before he shouted, and picked up his sword. He said tersely, as he sheathed it, “She tells me what to look for. I didn’t need this tower.” It pulled at his heart then, as he faced it; he saw again the hundred tantalizing paths, the nameless kingdoms. “But I wanted it,” he whispered.
“Cyan Dag,” she said softly, before he took a step toward the dreaming darkness. He turned away from it to look at her, the woman who had come out of nowhere to thwart him. Then it struck him: she had not come out of nowhere, she had come from within. As if, he thought, she had been waiting for him.
He said a word finally; it did not come easily. “Sorcery.”
She nodded. Her brows were crooked; she stood very still, watching him, as if she were luring a wary animal with her stillness and her calm. “Magic,” she said. “Witch, I suppose you could call me. I am adept in the ancient ways of Skye. Which is why I am more often found in wild places instead of the civilized world. Some of the things I know are older than the coming of humans into Skye. The language of horses, for instance. The healing powers of plants.”
He felt the tension in his body ease; the confusion in his thoughts yielded, like cloud, to a ray of certainty. She had saved his life; she meant him no harm.
“I’m grateful for that magic,” he said simply. “But I don’t understand why the bard sent me to this place.”
“I’m not sure what she is doing, either.” She folded her arms within her cloak of hair, paced a step, musing. Light was fading around them, leaving the air silvery with dusk. “Bards do speak truth, but sometimes in riddling ways.”
“Nor do I understand,” he added steadily, “what you were doing in the tower.”
Something in her eyes warned him that he would not like the answer. “She sent me here to stop the knight who would enter.”
He drew breath sharply, wanting to blaze at them both, the bard for sending him to the wrong tower, the witch for rescuing him from it. His hands clenched; he said tightly, “I have never wanted anything more than the worlds I glimpsed in that tower.”
“Well, you must be content with this one,” she sighed, “with all its ambiguities and magic.” She paced another step or two, trying to riddle from the passing breeze what the bard was thinking. Her steps, Cyan noticed, made no more sound in the grass than air. “She wanted me in there, you there, both of us lost to the world for a while. If you had pulled free of me, I would have had to search for you…”
He watched her, calmer now, trying to think in unaccustomed ways, as bards or witches thought. “She didn’t expect you to stop me?”
“I don’t think so. You think with your heart, Cyan Dag. It’s an unusual and risky magic. She expected you to enter, me to follow… So there we are, lost in the dark, while she—does what?”
“Maybe the path to the lady in the tower is somewhere in there. It seemed the beginning place for many paths.”
“It seems.”
“What?”
“That tower. It’s best at seeming.”
He gazed at it, bewildered again, tempted simply to walk into it and let it answer their questions. She turned, as if she felt his impulse, and added, “I know my sister well, and I trust her as I trust the wind when it tells me what I smell, or the rain to go down instead of up. She does not lie. But she does not state the obvious, or take the shortest path, or do anything that might make life simpler if for her own reasons she prefers it complicated.”
He shook his head, baffled, murmuring, “There are too many towers… She sent me to Skye to find one, not three—”
“Three?” She turned so quickly that her hair clung to the spare, graceful lines of her body. A small bird flew out of it; he blinked. “What three?”
“This dark tower. Thayne’s dragon tower. And the one with the woman trapped in it.”
Her eyes glimmered oddly in the dusk. “The dragon tower… Someone is searching for it?”
“Thayne Ysse. The man who left me to die in the forest. He wants the dragon and its gold for the North Islands. I saw the dragon,” he added, “on a piece of embroidery. I took the embroidery from the dead it watched.”
She did not comment on the embroidery; such things, he guessed, happened daily in Skye. Her head was bent; he could not see her face. But he knew from her quick, certain steps that her thoughts were circling just as quickly, homing toward a point. “That is the way Idra thinks,” she said. “At a tangent, like a weaver connecting threads beginning so far away that you don’t even see them.”
“I saw the dragon Thayne Ysse is looking for through Verlain of Skye’s dragon lens.”
She grunted, surprised. “I didn’t know it worked. Nobody has ever seen a dragon in it before.”
“Do you know that plain? That dragon?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Would it be easy for Thayne to find?”
“If he wants it badly enough… Why? Do you want this dragon, too?”
“Only to stop Thayne from destroying Yves with it.”
“So you want to kill it first?”
“No,” he said starkly. “I’ve seen it. I’d rather just forget about it. But I am sworn to guard Regis Aurum and protect Yves. I must stop Thayne Ysse any way I can. The bard refused to listen to me when I told her about Thayne. She sent me here to rescue a woman. So here I am. The only woman I found was you. I have no idea where to go now, except back into this tower where I was sent in the first place.”
The witch looked as if she were trying to hear a voice beneath the chatter of birds settling for the night. Her hair fell like a hood around her face. Cloaked in such darkness she looked, he thought uneasily, something other than human. She shook her hair back, frowning. “Bards listen to everything. They hear everything. They hear stones age. I can find Thayne Ysse for you, if he is in Skye. It’s a very simple kind of magic, done with water. You’ll know then if he has found the dragon.”
“Yes,” he said recklessly, too relieved to fear her sorcery. “Thank you.”
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
She smiled. “Not far at all. A slight adjustment to the heart.” She raised her hand. The gelding, pulling grass idly until then, crossed the clearing to her. She took its reins, held the stirrup for Cyan to mount.
“Now,” she said. “We will follow the stream a little, watch what might flow down it. Don’t move, don’t speak, whatever you see, do not make a sound…”
He started to pull himself up. Then he heard harp notes as delicate as bird bone spiral around him. Sidera said something; she seemed suddenly too far away for him to hear her. The gelding vanished under his hands. The dense night inside the tower filled his eyes again; he wondered, astonished, if he had ever really left it. He heard a thin, bitter wind weave into the harping, pick it apart and scatter it, until nothing was left but wind roaring through the darkness now, revealing the shapes of harried trees, torch fire stretched thin as thread.
“Cyan Dag,” someone said from very far away: Sidera, perhaps, or the bard, or someone else entirely.