She found Melanthos in the tower among the broken ends of daylight, sitting on the pallet and staring at the mirror.
“Look what she’s doing,” Melanthos breathed as Sel knelt down beside her. “Look at it.”
The woman sat in her chair as usual, embroidering. But the side of the cloth that flowed with images down to the floor was oddly broken up with scatterings of thread on the pale background. Sel studied them, astonished. Tree, one group of threads said. Another, in an elongated strip of repetition said: Road road road road… Rider, said a third, at a tangent to Road, and in a different color. Above the Rider, in black, flew many tiny Crows.
“She’s making everything into words,” Melanthos said, entranced and nibbling on a thumbnail. “I wonder why?”
Sel gazed at the words, felt something stir in her, like some great, dark, amorphous sound on the verge of taking shape. “Magic,” she said suddenly, as close as she could get to the sound. “Magic put her in there, magic must get her out.”
Melanthos dragged her eyes from the mirror, flicked her mother a glance. “They’re just words.”
“So far.”
“Well, how much farther can they go?”
“I don’t know,” Sel mused, watching, while her hands reached for an unfinished patch of gray. “We don’t know her. But it must be magic trapping her there. Whether or not the story is true, it must be magic. She never changes, she never needs her hair combed, she never sees anyone that we can see, she never—”
“She never speaks,” Melanthos said softly.
“Until now.”
“She never—so.” She stirred, her hands clasping, unclasping. “Magic keeps her there, in a timeless enchantment.”
“She needs magic to fight magic.”
Melanthos looked at Sel again, out of her sea-fay eyes. “She’d get rescued in the tale. That’s how they end.”
“Maybe,” Sel murmured, drawing her needle out, “she’s gotten tired of waiting.”
Melanthos studied the woman, until tors grew out of her words, and the reflection of rocky fields. The woman melted away. Melanthos puzzled over threads; Sel wondered if she were contemplating some variations of her own: Woman, perhaps, in blues and pale golds, instead of the woman’s immaculate image. But it seemed more that her thoughts could not settle yet on what it had been given.
“How can she make magic out of nothing?” Melanthos asked finally. “How can she just sit there and make endless days of changing the world into threads into something powerful?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it. If you’re caught in a web and can’t move—if every line trapping you is a magic not your own—how could you spin magic out of yourself?”
“What’s the alternative?”
Melanthos opened her mouth, closed it. She studied the mirror as though she could still see the woman in it. “She will die? But she’s safe enough in there now. She never seems to go hungry or be tired, she’s always tidy—she’ll die if she tries to leave,” she added, illumined. “As long as she keeps doing what she’s doing, not looking at the world, not going into it, only seeing it backward and through her pictures, she’ll be safe.”
“She’ll be lonely,” Sel said to her threads. “Never speaking, never touching, never looked at… You could die of that.”
“So someone put her there to punish her?”
“Maybe.” Sel’s needle slowed; her own eyes shifted, gazing backward. “Or maybe she’s something not quite human, from a place beyond the world, elsewhere. The tower is the only safe place between her and the human world… If she looks at the human world, takes it into her mind and her eyes, she will die because she can never belong to it. The tower is the doorway between the worlds.”
“She’ll die of loneliness.”
“Maybe.”
“So.” Melanthos pulled her knees to her chin, rocked a little, thinking. “She must make herself human.”
“It’s one way to look at it.”
“She can’t go back to where she came from?”
“I suppose that’s one way the tale could end,” Sel said.
“I suppose if it were that easy, there wouldn’t be a tale.”
Melanthos reached toward thread. Her hand hovered, dropped and drew back, empty. Sel looked a question at her. Melanthos shook her head. “There must be something else… I don’t want to do her words. I don’t feel the urge. There’s no magic in it.”
“Maybe not yet…”
“I mean for the mirror. It doesn’t want that.” Her eyes slid again to Sel; she wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees and asked tentatively, “Speaking of magic, do you remember the magic you used to do when we were small? When you were young and our father was alive?”
Sel remembered. For an instant all the magic flowed like tide into her, catching light, dark tumbling within it, nameless creatures and unimaginably beautiful treasures. Then it was gone, like a vision of water on a waste.
“No,” she said briefly to the memory and to Melanthos, whose eyes were wide and vulnerable. “I don’t.” She looked away from her daughter and saw the knight in the mirror.
He was just stepping out of a squat, dark tower. Sel, who had never seen a knight, recognized the details: the towers on his surcoat, the sword, the suggestion of power and skill in his movements. There was a strange look on the knight’s face, wonder and bewilderment, as if whatever he had found in the tower was the last thing he had expected. Dawn, touching the sword with a golden fingertip, sparked a glitter of fire within the jewel.
Behind the tower, in the distance, rose the smooth, graceful slopes of hills that seemed to mirror one another against the sky.
Melanthos leaned forward suddenly, reaching out with both hands to the mirror, or to the knight. “Three Sisters,” she whispered. “That’s where he is.”
She loosed the mirror, and sorted through her threads for green.
Eighteen
Thayne, lost in a memory of rain on a dark hillside in north Yves, saw the armed warrior come at him out of nowhere. Yet one more of Regis Aurum’s interminable army, he thought grimly. He would make one less of this one… Some bony hand left from another battle had gotten hold of his sword; he felt the fingerbones scatter as he pulled it free. The hillside was slippery; he nearly lost his balance, rising, and again when he swung the broadsword slashing through a quarter circle of air before it struck the deadweight of the blade the knight had raised, as fixed in his grip as an old stump in the ground. The fury in his own blow shocked through the metal into Thayne’s hands. He hung on obdurately, raising the sword again.
Someone was calling his name. He ignored it, shearing air downward this time, toward the silver disk the knight wore like a small, peculiar piece of armor. He had lost whatever else he had. His shirt and surcoat were ripped apart, his skin scraped and bloodied with battle. He had no shield; the torn emblem on his surcoat was undecipherable; nothing told who he was. But he was not an islander, with hardship and desperation beaten into his eyes. The knight’s eyes were clear, cold, and merciless, trained that way to look so at anything beyond the graceful towers of Gloinmere, at anyone who wore thread spun out of wind, whose hands smelled of fish, who dared question a word that came from Regis Aurum’s lips. “One more,” Thayne whispered between his teeth, aiming for the heart beneath the disk. “One more for Ysse.”