I never left him, he told the knights of Gloinmere when they resumed their search for the king, and Cyan emerged from the underbrush to greet them. That was how Regis, somehow still alive, remembered it as well. He stayed at my side all night, the king told his knights. He never left me.
So he became then and there, on the sodden field, and more formally later: Cyan Dag, Knight of Gloinmere.
It never happened, he thought as the dark around him grew thick, soundless, and the rain faded into memory. He smelled stone, dust, things that changed so slowly that they would be recognizable when the words for them were forgotten: bone, still water, ash.
He rose as the early light fell through the sagging doorposts of the tower. He stepped, blinking, into the dawn and remembered.
Fourteen
Sel climbed the spiral steps to the top of the tower. She paused at the last step, one hand to her heart, and panted awhile. Melanthos was not there, which suited Sel. So far, Melanthos did not know she had come there. Gentian knew, but thought only that Sel came to look for Melanthos. Time she had whiled away in the harbor tavern she spent now in the tower, without any noticeable change in her habits. Both daughters thought she was drinking bitter ale at Brenna’s; she had left them to sell the last of the cakes and pastries. Melanthos tended to come down near suppertime, which was when Sel went up. She liked looking into the mirror; she never knew what it was going to show her next.
This time, as she waited for her heart to quiet, it showed a roil of slick, dark brown that slid and twisted against itself, and finally revealed a deep-set eye above a row of long whiskers. She smiled, recognizing one of the seals in the harbor. She knew all their shades of brown, their dapples of black and gray, their scars, their ages, their children. She had watched them for years from Brenna’s windows, while she drank her ale. Sometimes one died and washed ashore on the rocks before it got eaten in the water. She would watch the fishers gut it and skin it, holding the skin wide, with the blank sky showing through its empty eye sockets, before they draped it across the high rocks to dry. That drew the children, and the screaming gulls thick as a snow squall above the butchering. The fishers tossed coins to see who would get a coat out of the skin, or a watertight pair of boots. The meat and fat they gave to the oldest villagers, to smoke for winter, to render into soap and lamp oil. The sea got back its bones.
Once, when she was much younger, Sel had left Joed’s side at night and gone to the rocks to take a sealskin. She could not remember why she wanted it, only that it drew her, beyond reason, to hold the stinking skin up to the stars and waves and let it see again through her eyes. But the skin was gone. Someone else had gotten there first. Or something. Or maybe the splashed shadows of blood on the rocks around her were old, dry, and that seal had died only in her dreams.
The seal in the mirror dove out of sight; the heaving water slowed, froze, faded. Sel stepped into the room, sat down on the pallet. Behind the mirror the sun was setting. Mist fanned toward land, trying to engulf the boats before they reached the harbor. The still air within the stones felt warm yet with afternoon light. She slipped her shoes off and settled comfortably into the pallet. She tried not to shift things, though she suspected that Melanthos was too untidy to notice a needle moved from floor to ledge, or pieces of linen separated from the jumble of bedclothes. She did refrain from tossing out old tea upon which floated a furry island of mold. Even Melanthos might notice a clean cup.
The mirror showed her scraps of images, as Melanthos had said: broken pieces of stories. One of the oddest, Sel thought, was the woman in the tower who embroidered, as Melanthos did, everything in her mirror. She had a strange, pale, underwater beauty, as if, in a different story, she might have been part fish. She could not seem to find a way out of her tower. Perhaps she did not want to leave. She never leaned out of the window and called for help, though armed and comely knights rode beneath her. Sometimes Sel saw her standing in front of her fire. Sometimes she ate a solitary meal. The building of the fire, the bringing of food, seemed beyond the mirror’s notice. Sel never saw anyone else in the room. The beginning and the ending of the woman’s tale seemed equally obscure. Sel wondered if the old mirror had forgotten them.
The mirror dreamed privately a little; so did Sel. Images and memories swirled to light, lingered, faded: Joed mending a sail, Gentian running across sand with her hands full of butterfly shells, herself raging and weeping a storm over some small broken thing just before Joed died. Or had it been just after? The mirror went suddenly black as if it had closed its eye. Sel blinked, waited. It gave her nothing. Her attention caught, she watched it. For a long time it remained mindless and dark as a fish’s eye; she wondered what tale it was trying to begin or end. Then she saw a frost of moonlight on black stone. Peering closer, she separated dark from dark: stone from night from shadow within the oblong of stone. The shadow widened, filled the mirror. Within the utter dark something moved.
An eye opened.
Sel stared into it, astonished. The light in the tower seemed to fade around her, so intense was the blackness in the eye. Like the new moon, Sel thought, in the thin, silvery ring of the old. Thoughts seemed to move across the eye like clouds over the sea. Sel shifted closer to the mirror, as if she might see the thoughts reflected in the eye. It gazed implacably at something. Death? Sel thought, chilled. But the old eye blinked at the word. Sel leaned closer.
Her hands moved, remembering something. Braiding hair, she thought. Or maybe it was waves, their silvery foam she caught just before the waves broke, peeling it away like lace from cloth, twining froth together so that the waves slowed, washed in before they crested, with a sigh rather than a shout. The fishers waiting out the rampaging sea in their boats far from the harbor, drifted in finally on a docile tide. Never saw that happen before, she heard them say as she went down the cliff to meet Joed: High tide riding to meet the full moon, and the moon letting go of the tide. And the strange tide became a tale added to the human faces seen watching in the water on a misty afternoon, and the fish with the unicorn’s horn.
Once, she thought. Once I did such things.
But that young woman seemed no more a part of her now than what swam so freely in the waves with their curious eyes. She shifted back a little, away from the memory, and the eye in the mirror turned silver.
Sel blinked. The lines around the eye flattened, and became an elaborate frame around the silver. The eye became a mirror, she saw, amazed again, and recognized the mirror.
“But where,” she wondered, “is the lady?”
She walked into view a moment later. She was no longer sitting quietly in her chair beside the window, looking at life passing through her mirror. She was doing what Sel, observing anyone in the context of her own life, would call pacing. The force and power of her magical stillness, her spellbound silence and habitual movements, had dissolved for the moment. She moved as restlessly as a fish in a bucket, back and forth across the circular chamber. She avoided the window, Sel noted. She walked with her head bent, her heavy skirts swaying, her hands opening and closing against her thighs. She did not lift her eyes from the strip of carpet on the floor, in which white lilies bloomed against a gold background. She seemed intent on wearing a path through the lilies.
She was very beautiful. Now and then, one hand lifted, uncurled long enough to pull a strand of white-gold hair behind her ear. Sel could see her graceful fish’s profile then, her set mouth, an eyebrow of the palest gold slanting over a flash of sky-blue eye. Her lowered eyelids seemed as delicate and translucent as shells. Beyond her, the images in her ornate mirror changed constantly: a hawk plunging out of the sky straight down into water to drag a fish out of the current, the pepper-scatter of blackbirds against the bright sky, the rider just coming into view down the road.