“Only now and then.” She caressed the dough into a mounded circle and nicked a crossroads into its top with a sharp knife: north-south, east-west. “And I kept waking myself because I had a feeling no one would be here but me, this morning.”
“I’m here.”
“But our mother isn’t. She spends more time in that tower than you do, these days. What is she doing up there?”
Melanthos shook her head, cracking eggs into the flour. “I don’t know. She’s brooding, I suppose.”
“Over what?”
“Memories. Life. She likes it up there. She’s gotten herself drawn into it.”
Gentian sighed again. She opened an oven door, checked the fire, then brushed water and coarse flour over half a dozen loaves and slid the stone above the flames. “I wish she’d come back. I miss her.”
Melanthos patted her shoulder comfortingly, leaving a floury ghost of fingers. “She’s making something,” she said. Her brows were drawn hard.
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something patchwork.” She hesitated, stirring dough violently a moment, then stopped. “She’s watching a story in the mirror.”
“What kind of story?”
“A woman, trapped in a tower. She can’t leave it, she can’t even look out of it, except through a mirror. Our mother seems to like watching for her.” Gentian stared at her, horrified. “I think she’s waiting to see how that story ends.”
“Is it a story?” Gentian demanded. “Just one more picture to put into threads? Or is it real?”
“I don’t know.” She gazed into the bowl, her eyes narrowed, seeing the woman again: her frantic pacing, her unchanging tapestry of days. “I hope it is real,” she said softly. “As terrible as that is. Then it might have an ending.”
“But how—? But who—?”
“Or maybe she’s just there, caught forever in that part of her tale like a warning, a mystery. We’ll never know who she is, how she got there, what becomes of her. Our mother needs to see her, and when she stops needing she’ll come down.”
The baby opened her eyes, gazed at them peacefully a moment. Then she opened her mouth like a guppy and howled. Gentian picked her up and sat down on a stool. “Melanthos,” she said tautly, loosening her bodice, “don’t leave me alone here.”
“She’ll come back,” Melanthos said passionately. “She can’t forget the world entirely. She’s just—”
“Just what?”
Enchanted, Melanthos wanted to say. Spellbound. But such words seemed too elaborate for their mother, like putting her into finery worn to a king’s ball. “Sad,” she heard herself say, the word coming out of nowhere, and she and Gentian gazed at one another silently, above the baby’s contented head.
The fishers began coming in an hour later to buy their loaves to take on the boats; the rest of the village wandered in and out for a while after that, for oat biscuits and almond cakes and warm rolls flavored with pepper and anchovies. In the calm aftermath of the morning feeding, Melanthos took off her apron and went back to the tower. It was empty; her mother had wakened and walked down to the sea, perhaps, to watch the boats go out.
Light flooded across the mirror a moment after Melanthos entered. Her gaze was caught in such a flood of gold that her eyes teared in pain. The brightness faded a little; she could pick out shapes here and there: hillocks of coin, cups and crowns and shields of gold, even bones wearing armor and rotting cloth-of-gold. Slowly, within the glimmering mist, a man took shape. He was sitting on one of the piles of coin, staring at nothing, as if he did not notice the immense golden eye with the dark slit down it gazing at him through a wall of flame-red stone.
Melanthos, swallowing dryly, as if she could taste the fiery air, reached for thread.
Sixteen
Cyan Dag, stumbling into dawn, found his path crossed by an oblong of windblown embroidery fluttering in the grass.
He picked it up absently, part of him still shivering in the rain on a hill in north Yves, and wondering why his clothes were dry. The woman waiting for him, sitting on the grass as silently as dew, said his name. He turned, pulled back into time: Cyan Dag walking out of the wrong tower into the mysterious, light-flooded hills in Skye.
He said, his eyes gritty with sleeplessness, “I had the strangest dream. I thought it was a dream. Out here, in the light of day, I know it wasn’t. It was memory. Something I had forgotten.”
“What was it?” Sidera asked. She was invisible within the black fall of her hair; he could see only a triangle of her face, one hand resting on her knee, her amber eyes, so bright in the sunlight they seemed to reflect it.
He frowned, perplexed. The incident did not seem significant: he had carried a wounded boy down a hill after a battle. It had happened years ago. That the event had appalled him enough to block it from his mind seemed the result of sitting in the rain and worrying for dark, endless hours. He shook his head.
“Nothing important,” he answered; so it seemed now. “Why would I go into a tower in Skye to remember a minor detail from a battle in Yves?”
“For a reason.” She did not suggest what. She rose; he watched her hair slide around her, then shift like silk as she parted it with her hands, shook it over her shoulders. He swallowed suddenly, caught in a memory of such soft darkness he had lost himself in. She took a step; the light in her eyes faded a little, making them human again. “What is it?”
He whispered, “Cria.”
“Who is Cria?”
“Cria Greenwood. She has such dark hair…” He closed his eyes briefly, tightly. “I left her to come here. I did not even tell her why I left her. She might be pledged by now to a loveless marriage. And I am so far away from her in Skye, and as far as ever from doing what I came to do.” He glanced around, saw his horse. “I must find that tower.”
“The one with the lady in it.”
“Yes. I thought she might be in this one after all. But all I found there was Regis Aurum, whom I already rescued.”
He looked bewilderedly at the shrunken, silent tower, then turned abruptly, strode toward the gelding.
Sidera said suddenly, “Wait.”
He stopped, and felt the cloth in his fingers, the silken threads. He opened it, turned it so that the seated man was upright. For a moment it made no sense. A man sat on a mound of gold within the bright, massive walls of a tower; behind him an enormous golden slitted eye gazed at him through the stones. Then the image solved its riddle: he recognized the man with the golden hair. He said, stunned, “Thayne Ysse found his dragon.”
“And my sister,” Sidera said softly, “has found Thayne Ysse.”
“How do you know?”
She touched the cloth. “Someone embroidered that, and a wayward wind blew it to you.”
He caught a breath. “The woman I’m searching for.”
“Maybe.”
“Weaving and weeping in a tower in Skye.”
“This is embroidery.”
He brushed the finer point away. “Thread is thread—”
“It is indeed. And it’s my sister who is weaving. I think Thayne is in trouble, by the look of this.”
He said, tucking the embroidery in his belt, “I’ll come back later to help him. I must find the lady first.”
“Maybe so, but it’s Thayne Ysse who crossed your path this morning.”
“You could rescue him,” he suggested, pulling himself up onto the gelding’s back. “Far better than I could, with your magic. You talk to wild things.”
“I do. But this didn’t blow a spell across my steps. I told you: Idra weaves.”
“It’s embroidery,” he answered absently. “Not hers.” He reached down impulsively to take the witch’s hand. “Thank you for helping me again.”