Seventeen
In the tower at Stony Wood, Sel drew brown threads back and forth across a patch of linen. She barely thought about what she was making. Her hands made it, she told herself, and anyway, it was nothing at all but a pile of bits and pieces of muted colors, all jumbled together, nothing fitting anything. Melanthos had brought up pockets stuffed full of thread Anyon had given her, the grays and creams and browns of his father’s sheep. She had asked more than once what Sel was making. Nothing, Sel said, in particular, or: I don’t know yet. Her hands seemed to know; Sel did not question them.
Melanthos brought her food, too, when Sel forgot to come down from the tower. She had become engrossed, watching the woman in the tower, waiting for her tale to end, to see how the woman would finally become free. Melanthos warned her now and then that the old mirror might not remember, that the tale might not have an end. But Sel, watching the woman become little by little more restless, more desperate, thought that even if the mirror forgot, the woman herself might give some hint of how the tale began and ended.
So she sewed and waited for the brief, random moments when the mirror turned its memory toward the tower beside the river. The mirror showed her the harbor seals as often as not, which was as close as it ever got to looking at the village. She loved seeing them peering curiously above the waves, diving sleekly after fish without leaving a ripple behind. She wished, occasionally, that the mirror would find the bakery and open an eye into that. But it never did. So Sel, remembering Gentian and the baby, would heave herself stiffly off the pallet and circle down the stairs into the light of day. Gentian, her placid Gentian, had burst into tears in the middle of the bakery the last time Sel appeared.
The baby, starting out of sleep, wailed in sympathy. Sel picked her up and patted Gentian’s shoulder awkwardly, amazed.
“What is it?” she asked anxiously. “Don’t tell me it’s Rawl. I’ll put holes in his boat.”
“It’s you!” Gentian cried. She even wept tidily, Sel saw: one tear out of each eye, traveling to mid-cheekbone and hanging on the fine, flushed skin like pearls. “Rawl goes out in the mornings to fish and comes back to me at night and never complains when I leave him before it’s light to bake. But you—you don’t even know where your home is now. You’ve taken to living in that tower. I see Melanthos in here far more often than I see you!”
Sel was silent, shifting her patting hand to the baby now, while two pearls dissolved on Gentian’s cheeks, and two more fell. “I’m sorry,” she said vaguely, distressed and mystified at having made Gentian cry. The baby was more easily placated. “I’m just—”
“You’re what? Just what?”
“Just—if you’ll just be patient.”
“Patient!” Gentian stared at her, bewildered. “Patient over what? What are you expecting to happen? Is the tower going to fall down or something?”
“It could be,” Sel said, struck, wondering if that was how the tale in the mirror ended. Gentian pulled a clean, hemmed square of an old flour bag out of her pocket and blew her nose once, daintily, as if a flower scent had tickled it.
“Well,” she asked, “are you planning to be in it when it does?”
Sel blinked at her. “Oh,” she said, illumined. “That old tower in the stone wood. No. That might melt into the earth with age, but it’ll never fall.” She passed the baby over to Gentian, which soothed her a little. “Just give me some time.”
“For what?”
Sel’s eyes slid away from her toward the stony streets, the line of houses and shops hiding the sea. “I know it’s not fair,” she said softly. “And not easy. But I need this time. If you’ll just be patient. Get someone to help you in here. One of Lude’s older girls could do it. Just for a little.”
“But I miss you,” Gentian said simply, her eyes filling again with luminous pools that shone but did not spill. “And I’m afraid.”
Sel’s dark, flickering kelpie eyes came back to Gentian. She patted her daughter’s shoulder again, silently a moment. “Don’t be,” she said at last. “Things will come to an end of themselves.”
She sent Gentian home then, and worked, baking and selling and chatting, until she found herself drifting out of the door, through the village, into the stone wood to see if the woman was still in her tower. She was, and so was Melanthos. Sel took a seat beside her on the pallet, and picked up the thread where she had left off.
The mirror showed them the woman in the tower that evening. She sat very still, gazing at what must have been the feverish sky in her mirror: the streaks and washes of rose, purple, gold above the fields where the sun had set. Her hands, invisible in her lap, seemed motionless. The colors in the mirror intensified, grew lustrous; still her hands made no move toward her tidy line of threads. The sun glanced through the cloud as it set, a brilliant, baleful golden eye staring back at the woman through her mirror. Transfixed, it seemed, within her spellbound state, like a bird under a serpent’s eye, she might have been a memory of herself; Sel could not even see her breathe. After the sun had set and the colors faded in the sky, she moved, so abruptly that Sel blinked: it was as if a statue had come to life.
She chose odd threads: yellow-green and orange and a bruised red like a black cherry, colors rarely seen in the sky. Maybe there was something coming down the road of such disturbing hues, that Sel could not yet see. The woman bent over her work. Night misted into her mirror, and then spilled out of it across the other mirror, until the woman vanished in a pool of black.
Melanthos grunted. “That was strange.” Her fingers hovered over choices: the colors in the woman’s mirror, the colors in the woman’s hand.
“She’s making something of her own,” Sel guessed. “She’s tired of being told.”
“But who tells her, in the first place? And what will happen if she refuses?”
Sel shrugged. What will happen if you do? she wanted to ask Melanthos. But she understood too well, now, what lured her daughter: there seemed nothing more compelling in the world than the images spun out of the mind’s eye into thread.
Sel worked late, that night, even later than Melanthos. She did not notice when Melanthos left the tower. In her own mind, Sel walked along the harbor cliffs, a tall, slender, barefoot woman with long black windblown hair. Seals swam through the waves pleating and breaking along the stones. The seals had different faces, so long ago, different names. She could not remember those older names now, except that they were odd: a mix of sounds that glided under and twisted back around a human tongue. Wind collided with her, poured around her, gathered and broke like the sea. She did not watch where her feet took her, through tide pools, over barnacles, across narrow shelves of rock slippery with streamers of moss coiling and uncoiling like mermaids’ hair. She shouted, names, in memory, but Sel, remembering, could no longer hear the sound of them.
She found herself trying to say one, her tongue trying to lick a name into shape. A sound with too many ls, maybe, and beginning with a growl in the back of her throat. What was I thinking? she wondered, amazed. What was that young I thinking?
The young woman in her memory seemed to turn on the cliff to look at her, then. What are you thinking now? she asked Sel, who gazed down at the making in her hands.
But she could not even tell herself.
She forced herself to put it down, go into the world to help Gentian again for a bit. She baked and sold and patted the baby and listened to Gentian talk about Rawl and storms, and what the baby had tried to say. Her own mouth made appropriate noises, she thought. But still she caught Gentian looking at her out of those wide, lovely, perplexed eyes, as if Sel herself had wandered into life out of some forgotten tale. Sel, half her mind still waiting in the tower for her body to come back to it, did as much as she could, absently, perfunctorily, to persuade Gentian that she still knew how to cope with life. When she could do no more, she took off her apron with relief and slipped away when Gentian’s back was turned.