He said slowly, peeling each word out of his dry mouth, “Craiche is my brother. He was twelve when the North Islands fought the king in north Yves. My father was badly wounded, then. He lost his wits and his strength. I paid tribute to the king with that. I paid with Craiche, who was crippled by some great knight taking a slash at a running boy the way you’d slap at a fly. I paid tribute with Ysse, on which we make our living catching fish and raising sheep. Half the working men did not return to that island where once kings were born. The king wants the first bite we put into our mouths. He wants the pearl in every oyster. He wants us to bend our heads so low he never has to look into our eyes. That’s why I came here. That’s why I’ll leave you here, when I take the dragon and its gold to the North Islands. I know now that I can take it. I found its fire and swallowed it. Its gold is my heart. I’ll kill you before I go. It’s an easier death than dying of thirst.”
The knight’s head moved a little, as if he finally heard a word he understood. He tried to swallow; his eyes flickered open, oddly dark in his bloodless face. They closed again. He lifted his hand somehow, his brows twisting together with the effort. He touched the disk, shifted it, and Thayne saw the brand seared into his skin, the perfect circle before the dragon’s breath warped it out of shape.
He spoke finally, his voice not much more than a whisper. “I remember Craiche.”
Thayne blinked. “How could—” His hands tightened suddenly on the sword hilt. “What do you remember?” he asked harshly. “The running boy you crippled?”
The knight’s eyes opened again, searched for Thayne, wincing at the flare of gold up the blade, until he found Thayne’s face above it. “No.” He stopped to swallow. “I heard him crying. On that hillside, after you searched it for your wounded. You didn’t find the king under the hedge.”
“He was there?” Thayne whispered.
“With me. I guarded him all night in the rain. Except—” He paused again, looking back into memory, into the rain that Thayne had dreamed of in the tower. “When I left him. For only a few moments. To carry a boy who was crawling down the hill back to your camp.”
Thayne stared at him. Something bulky and sharp seemed to shift painfully inside of him, as if his heart were changing shape. A strong, armed, faceless knight, Craiche had told him for years, until the telling wove itself seamlessly into the lore of the battle. He came out of nowhere, picked me up, and carried me down the hill. “What was his name, I asked Craiche,” he whispered, “after the sentries found him crawling through the trees into the camp. This faceless knight who came out of nowhere and saved your life? I don’t know, Craiche told me. I asked him, but he never spoke…”
“Cyan Dag,” the knight said, and was silent again, leaving Thayne alone under the dragon’s eye.
Nineteen
Melanthos watched the woman in the tower. She was lying at the edge of the pallet, snoring softly. She had burned candles through the night, making her interminable patches of smoke and dust and ivory. They lay in a heap against the wall, patches for a drab quilt, or an unlikely cloak. Twice Anyon had to bring more thread; she must have gone through several sheep already, and she had not even begun to piece them together. Perhaps she never would; she would just make and make until there was not one cloudy, irregular shape left in her. Then she would leave the tower and return to life, her baking, her children, her cups of bitter ale with Brenna while she watched the sun go down.
She looked thinner, Melanthos thought; she kept forgetting to eat. And she left her hair loose, except when she braided it to go back to the bakery for an afternoon. It fanned across one shoulder and down her back as she slept, a rippling mass of tarnished silver. Her back to Melanthos, her hair flowing into the dark of her skirt, her hands and feet tucked away somewhere out of sight around her long body, she looked scarcely human. Melanthos contemplated her silently, sitting motionlessly in front of the mirror, her eyes narrowed, flecked with tiny flames from the candles.
Maybe, she thought finally, I should just toss the patches out the window.
But that seemed cruel, even unnecessary. Maybe she had in mind some brighter thread to join all the patches together, so that it would look like stones under flowing silvery water in the end, or a cobbled street seamed with gold. Maybe there was magic in the making of this odd thing, so that in the end it would bring Sel peace.
The mirror opened its eye then, showed Melanthos another tower, the woman in it busy at her own embroidery. Her elegant mirror reflected the blank face of night; the woman, threading crimson into her linen, was not paying attention to the mirror. As she drew the needle through and lifted her arm to tighten thread, she gave Melanthos glimpses of her night vision: a tower on an island within a deep, slow-moving river thick with water lilies. From the blank windows of the tower crimson petals of flame opened toward the trees across the narrow channel between the island and the bank. Above the tower, a strange bird with a long neck and pale wings of a swan, a predator’s fierce hooked beak and talons, flew away from the flames gripping a white, twisting snake with a woman’s face. The eyes of the bird and the snake were sky-blue.
As Melanthos watched in wonder, the woman knotted her thread and snapped it. She tore the picture out of the long swath of linen as she might have torn a memory out of her life. Then, without looking away from her threads, she reached out, tossed the burning tower into the night.
She waited a little, still, tense, as if she expected the image to come flying back through the window, or something to emerge out of the dark, crawling up the steep walls on its white belly, a forked tongue flickering out of its human lips. Nothing happened. Her hands moved after a while, pieced the ripped edges of the linen together; she took a needle threaded with the color of flax and began to mend the rent.
How strange, Melanthos thought, her skin prickling. Perhaps you are as real as the knight…
Her own hands moved toward thread, compelled not by the woman’s burning image but by her face, no longer a beautiful, nameless, thoughtless face out of story, but the face of a desperate woman threading her needle with hope, trying to work magic into her stitches, to transform the world that trapped her. Could she change her shape? Melanthos wondered. Could she fly out of her prison, eluding the eye of the mirror which would no longer recognize her?
Sel was awake, Melanthos realized just before she lost herself, became her threads and her image until it was finished, out of her mind. Sel had stopped snoring, some time ago. Her body held the silent tenseness of one awake in the dark, remembering a dream. She faced the mirror; she might have seen the burning tower, the woman transformed into that shape of grace and danger gripping the deadly sorcery in her talons. As the mirror darkened, Sel sat up. Melanthos, drawing thread the tender blue of the woman’s eyes through her needle, disappeared into her picture.
At dawn she threw the haunted, beautiful face out the window. Emptied like an old bucket, and stupid for sleep, she crawled under a blanket on the pallet. She scarcely noticed that Sel was gone. She woke hours later, sweating in a flood of light, thirsty and ravenous. She was alone, she realized groggily. Her mother must have felt an urge for the human world. She put her shoes on and stumbled down the stairs. She found Anyon sitting on the bottom steps.
“I called you earlier,” he said. “Nobody heard me.” He paused at something in her eyes. She could not, she realized, go one step farther in the world without paying some attention to the wonderful line of Anyon’s mouth. She bent thoughtlessly to kiss it. He added breathlessly a moment or an hour later, draped on his back over the steps with Melanthos blinking in his arms, “Gentian wants your mother.”