What would happen, Sel wondered, if the woman did not see the rider in the mirror? If she let him pass without a comment among her threads?
What would happen if she leaned past the mirror and looked out the window to watch the rider come to her down the sun-dappled road?
What would happen if she called?
For a moment past and present and the timelessness of tales drew together in Sel’s mind. The woman walked out of story and paced, trapped, helpless, under terrible enchantment somewhere in time, somewhere, perhaps, in Skye.
She leaned forward, her lips parting. “I know,” she whispered to the woman. “I know.”
The woman saw the rider in the mirror. She stopped midstep, gazing at it, her eyes wide now, with despair and hope.
She sat down quickly, reached for threads. So did Sel, not knowing what she might make, but wanting suddenly to feel the magic of making in the movement of her hands.
A cry interrupted her sometime later. Melanthos, she thought, hiding her threads and linen in a cluttered pile on the floor. She went to a far window, looked out at a perplexing sight.
Anyon was moving back and forth below, near the tower door. She leaned farther out. He did not see her, or Melanthos, who was running toward him. He was busy at something nameless, bewildering, something involving a wagon full of huge old tangled vines as spiny as puffer fish with thorns. He wore heavy gauntlets up to his elbows, and had stuffed the tower doorway halfway to the top with thorns.
Melanthos shouted again, too furious to notice her mother watching in the high window. Anyon, turning to pick another clump of thorn off the wagon, did not notice Melanthos until the wave of her fury smacked against him.
“What are you doing?” She careened into him, slapping and kicking, knocking him off balance with surprise. He was already bleeding here and there on his face and his sleeves; she left a new rill of blood beside his mouth with her open palm. “What do you think you are doing?”
She kicked him in the knee as he stared at her, and he went down. Her knuckles caught him across the head; her flailing knee smacked into his jaw. Sel, wincing, heard his teeth meet with a click. He caught Melanthos’s leg as he reeled over backward, pulling her down on top of him.
He lay panting, holding her tightly while she struggled against him. “Stop—” he pleaded when he could speak. “Please.”
“I might have been up there!”
“I saw you earlier.” He paused, dragging breath wearily. “Working in the bakery. I wanted. I just wanted to talk to you. Hold you. But you’re always up there. And I can’t follow—”
She fought out of his hold, her hair flying wildly; Sel could not see her face. “So you put up a wall of thorns between me and what I make.”
He pulled her back down. “Between you and what has you captured—”
“Why,” she demanded, her fist thumping down on his heart, “don’t you just learn to come up? There’s nothing at all to be afraid of in that tower.”
“Not for you, there isn’t.”
“Not for you, either, if you would just listen to me.”
He let go of her cautiously with one hand, wiped the blood from his mouth. “I’m sorry.” He sighed. “I’ll move the thorns. Just let me catch my breath.”
“I would have just burned them, anyway. That wouldn’t have stopped me.”
“Don’t you miss me at all?” he asked wistfully. Melanthos straightened, drawing back to study him, not knowing, evidently, the answer to that. Their voices were quieter now. Sel, her chin in her hands, strained to hear them.
“Do you miss me,” Melanthos asked steadily, “when you’re alone for days working on your blankets?”
“No,” he said, surprising Sel. “But it’s because I know you will be there when I’m finished. If I didn’t know that, I would be out looking for you instead of working. Or looking for whatever would fill the hole you left in my heart when you left me. You don’t feel that for me?”
“I don’t know.” He shifted, his face turning away from her answer; she held him still. “I never thought of it like that. I never thought of how it might be if you weren’t there when I wanted you. I always think that of course you will be there.”
His face turned to her again, his cracked mouth taut. He moved a little, or Melanthos did. Her head dropped. Their lips touched. Sel’s mouth crooked. She turned, moved through memories of Joed down the tower steps. The sound of crackling, rending thorn startled her as she emerged through it; she had forgotten it. The two stared at her, mouths gaping, she thought, like herring.
“What are you doing?” she asked, as near to a sea-lion bellow as she had gotten for some time. “Trying to bury me in thorns?”
“No.” Anyon sat up quickly. “I was only trying to—”
“What were you doing up there?” Melanthos asked. Her eyes narrowed, glinting, at her mother, who had just walked through thorns without a scratch. “How did you get up there?”
“I walked,” Sel said shortly. “I was looking for you. You’re always up there, and I never see you anymore.”
“Exactly,” Anyon sighed, “what I was telling her. And why I put those thorns there. I’m sorry. I had no idea anyone was in the tower.”
“Just get them out of here.”
“Mother,” Melanthos said.
“I will,” Anyon promised.
“That’s no way to find your way up, blocking your own path.” She straightened a sleeve, set her face to the stone wood like a figurehead on a prow, trying to sail her way out of Melanthos’s questions.
“Mother. How did you get through those thorns?”
For a moment she was not going to answer. Then she shrugged, not looking at her daughter. “I thought it was just another trick of the tower’s.” She moved away among the old stumps. “I’ve got to get back to the bakery. You stay and help Anyon.”
“Mother!” Melanthos cried. Sel ignored her, walking quickly through the stone wood. It glittered around her with stray pearls of light. She heard running steps behind her, and then Anyon’s pleading shout.
“Melanthos!”
The footsteps stopped. Sel walked alone out of the wood.
Fifteen
Melanthos watched the woman in the tower. The woman in the tower was watching the mirror intently, though nothing much was happening in it except a flood of light over the tors from the setting sun. Melanthos wondered if Sel saw private, secret things in the mirror that it would not show Melanthos. Sel had been in the tower all day; she had left the baking to Gentian and Melanthos, who, for once, was up before dawn to do the morning loaves.
Melanthos leaned against the wall at the top of the stairs, her arms folded, yawning noiselessly. Sel had not heard her come up; she had no idea that Melanthos paid any attention at all to her comings and goings. She was doing whatever she did in the privacy of the tower, which involved needle and thread, but no particular image. What she embroidered seemed to have no shape, only vague clouds of pale browns and grays, colors she must have thought Melanthos needed least. Her hands were accustomed to work, stirring, kneading, shaping; empty, they fidgeted. Unlike Melanthos, she did not toss her own needlework out the window. A small pile of it grew, in various shapes and mushroom colors, like a fungus in a corner.