She lifted her head after a moment, looked at him. “She’s not in the bakery?”
“No.”
“She’s not in the tower.”
“She’s not?”
“No.” She pulled herself up, puzzled. “I wonder where she is. Has Gentian got someone to help her?”
“With the baking, yes. With the baby, no. It’s snuffling or something.” His hands tugged at her lightly, coaxing her back. “Do that again.”
“Later…” She stood up, frowning, and gave him a hand, peeling him ungently off the steps. “I want to find her.”
“She’s probably at Brenna’s.”
“Maybe.” She thumped him sharply on the chest for the grin on his face. “Don’t laugh at my mother.”
“I wasn’t! Don’t I give her all my earth colors? What is she making with them?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing.” She took his arm in both her hands, smelling sharp soap on him, oil from the wool, the tangy scent of bracken. She pushed against him, sniffing like a dog, then pulled him through the stone wood. “Hurry. I want to find her.”
They walked along the harbor cliff and talked to Brenna, who gave Melanthos a pickled egg and told her she had not seen Sel for days. But don’t worry; Sel was tough as an old piece of driftwood and she was probably out negotiating the price of sugar, anyway she’d never go far from her children. All of which gave Melanthos an odd pang of worry. She swallowed the last of the egg and headed for the bakery.
There she found the baby in a squall and Gentian looking disheveled, a hair out of place, a thumbprint of dough on one cheek. The young girl helping her, one of Lude’s, was putting buns in a basket, counting each one loudly and carefully. Anyon hauled the baby over his shoulder, rubbed her back, and she subsided, wiping her nose on his neck. Gentian sighed deeply, dislodging another hair.
“Where’s our mother?” she asked Melanthos.
“I don’t know.” She took one of the warm buns out of the basket and bit into it, causing Lude’s daughter to stare at her in consternation. “She was in that tower all night, making her shapes. Maybe she just went to bed.”
“I looked for her in the house.” Gentian, brows crooked prettily, like a fretting mermaid, gazed back at Melanthos questioningly.
“Maybe she went for a walk,” Anyon suggested. Both their gazes swung to him. He shrugged. “Maybe she went to another tavern, or she’s visiting someone. Maybe she’s just doing something ordinary.”
The two sisters consulted one another wordlessly. Melanthos said, “You go find her. I’ll watch the store.”
“No.” Gentian sighed. “You go. I need to feed the baby. Here.” She gave Melanthos a warm meat pie, then tossed Anyon one, too, at the expression on his face. She took the baby from him. Lude’s daughter started her counting again, sounding aggrieved. Melanthos crossed her eyes at Lude’s daughter, but Gentian, nursing the baby, only smiled peacefully.
They found Sel at twilight on the cliff near the stone wood, when it was almost too dark to see anything but a monolith standing alone on the cliff edge, looking out to sea. They argued over it a little, before they recognized her.
“It has always been there,” Anyon insisted.
“No, it hasn’t. It’s as if a dead tree wandered out of the stony wood…”
“You just never noticed.”
“I notice all the stones,” Melanthos protested. “I have counted all the trees in the stone wood—” Then the monolith moved, turning slowly in the wind, and took her breath away. She saw a graceful, sinuous swirl of long hair, long skirts flowing around a woman’s body pulled tight by the wind, only a little drift of cloth, like the foamy ruffle of a wave, fluttering free at her ankles. Beside Melanthos, Anyon had fallen as abruptly still.
Then the wind unwound the skirt, and hands came up, swept the hair back and twisted it into submission. Melanthos, gripping Anyon’s arm, made a noise.
“That’s her. Your monolith that’s always been there…”
“Well, it looked…” Anyon began, and followed Melanthos along the grassy lip of the cliff.
Sel waited for them, still holding her hair. “Where were you?” Melanthos demanded. “What have you been doing?”
It seemed a long time before her mother spoke, as if she had trouble remembering. But the answer itself was simple enough. “I went swimming,” Sel said. “Then I sat here for a while and watched the seals. Why? Did Gentian need me?”
“She wanted you,” Melanthos said. “The baby has a cold.” It sounded trivial to her ears, suddenly. She could almost hear her mother’s thoughts: Two grown young women and you can’t take care of a few loaves of bread and a baby? What will you do if? When? But Sel only grunted and followed them, tying her hair with a streamer of kelp as she walked.
Melanthos did not find her in the tower again until the baby abandoned her cold and produced a tooth. By then, Melanthos had studied every bit of needlework in Sel’s pile. It all seemed as formless and innocuous as cloud. Nothing caught the eye, nothing suggested… Melanthos put them back into the clutter in which Sel kept them, and pondered. Maybe that was all her mother had in her head, those days, she decided. Misty, shapeless thoughts that hid other things she wouldn’t say. Maybe when they all came out of her, the other things would be revealed. Or maybe… She gave up trying to guess.
“She’s changing,” Gentian said to Melanthos one morning, when Melanthos had gotten up early to help with the baking and found Sel gone again. Yawning over the breakfast rolls she shaped, Melanthos looked a question at Gentian.
“Well,” Gentian answered, putting loaves in the oven, “for one thing she lets her hair down sometimes. And she’s getting thinner.”
“There’s not much to eat in the tower.”
“And there’s the look in her eyes. As if she’s watching something very far away. Or listening for it.”
“She’s fey,” Melanthos said, yawning again.
“You say that. But you never really mean it.” She paused, shaking flour onto a board. “Besides, what does it mean, exactly?”
“Magic,” Melanthos answered vaguely.
“I mean what does it mean to us if she is?”
Melanthos pummeled some dough, thinking about the question. She pulled it into pieces, shaped the pieces into starfish, scallop shells, as Sel had taught her, thinking about Sel finding her way up the tower, moving through Anyon’s thorns as if they—or she—did not exist. She twisted a handful of dough into a spiraling auger shell, wondering what her mother was doing now, thinking, feeling. She rarely told them anything, Melanthos realized, not even when they asked. Did she tell herself what she thought, what she felt? Or did she just make another amorphous shape and let that speak for her?
She pulled starfish legs out of another bit of dough impatiently, set all the shapes on the baking stone, and propelled them into the oven, slamming the door behind them. “I don’t know,” she said tersely. “I’ll ask her. Is someone coming to help you this morning?”
Gentian nodded. “Lude’s eldest. She’s not so noisy as her sister.” She draped her sticky fingers over the board and leaned against it, gazing at nothing. Melanthos saw the worry in her eyes. “I’m afraid,” she said softly. “And I don’t know why. Ask her about that, too.”
In the tower, Melanthos found Sel sitting placidly on the pallet, sorting through her patches. Sel lifted her head, turning as Melanthos walked in, and in that sudden glance, she glimpsed the stranger’s face beneath her mother’s face: another woman, secret-eyed, graceful in her bones, maybe wild, maybe fey, old or young, but not clearly revealing which.