“What are you doing?” Melanthos asked.
The woman answered in Sel’s prosaic voice. “It’s time,” she said, “to piece them together.”
“Why now?” Melanthos asked sharply, and Sel looked at her, surprised.
“Because I’ve got all the shapes I need.”
“For what?”
“A sort of cloak, I think… It’s not very colorful, but it suits me, and the wool will keep me warm. And you need all the brightest threads.”
She smiled unexpectedly at Melanthos, who felt a sudden, augury turn of pure terror, for her mother had already vanished, left this smiling stranger to lie for her.
She said nothing. When Sel left the tower to go back to the village, Melanthos left also, to cross the plains among the sheep. There she found one of the wild ponies she used to catch when she was young. She rode north out of the plain, toward the Three Sisters.
Twenty
In the squat, dark tower with the open doorway, Cyan Dag talked to the Bard of Skye. They sat on massive oblongs of stone, like doorposts that had fallen down and been replaced. The floor was dirt; there seemed nothing else in the tower but stone and shadow, and the two of them, illumined by a silvery light shining from a ring on Idra’s finger. Beyond the doorway, evening stood at the threshold. The air smelled of damp grass, earth, wildflowers. The palest, most tender shades of green were still visible in the dusk.
“The difference,” the bard said, “between weaving and embroidery becomes most obvious if you happen to do one or the other. Most knights don’t. The looms are different, the threads are different, the stitches, the instruments that carry the thread… Are you planning to stay here long? There is still another tower to get to.”
“It’s pleasant here,” Cyan said. “Peaceful. I might stay the night.”
“Nights are long here. Nights can be endless.”
“You sent me here,” he reminded her. “I have been trying to find that tower with Gwynne of Skye in it, but the towers keep changing… Is she weaving? Or embroidering?”
“Gwynne?”
“The monster who married the king said she weaves and weeps.”
“I doubt that she knows enough about either to tell the difference.”
“Gwynne?”
“She was never one for sitting still. That you have with you is embroidery.”
He pulled it out of his sleeve, where it had somehow gotten wedged, and spread it on the stones between them. He studied the fine stitches, the bright threads making a picture of the gold-haired man sitting on a pile of gold. He said softly, “I could have done without that tower.”
“He needs you,” the bard said, her old eyes black and flat as beetles’ wings in the silvery light. She wore black now, from throat to heel; her long white hair rippled over her straight shoulders down her back to flow across the stone. “We embroider our days. Life weaves.”
“I didn’t come to Skye for Thayne Ysse.”
“How do you know why you came here? The woven thread touches many other threads on its journey across the loom.”
He did not answer; he had no answer for her yet, though he knew what she wanted. They sat in his silence, she waiting, watching him, while he watched the still evening outside the door. So still it was, nothing stirred, nothing made a sound. Only bright young leaves of ferns and lilies changed, their hues of green turning to darker greens, the shifts of color the only movement in the tranquil dark.
I could stay here, he thought, looking back at his failed journey across Yves and Skye, watching himself leave king and court without a word of explanation. No one knew where he was but Thayne Ysse. And the Bard of Skye, with her eyes like pools so deep nothing stirred the surface from within. But he could feel what she wanted from him. She wanted something; why else was she there?
I am no closer to doing what I came to do than I was when I left Gloinmere, he thought dispassionately. I am farther away than ever, now, thanks to Thayne Ysse. I am so far away I might never find my way back.
“I know,” she said.
“So,” he answered, unsurprised that she had read his thoughts, “maybe I will stay. I remember what I glimpsed in this tower when you sent me here. Dreams, quests, wonderful lands, strange kings with ancient and magnificent courts… Was it real? Or did you work some illusion to twist my heart with longings?”
“What you see here,” she said, glancing around at the worn stones, the relentless, motionless darkness overhead, black as a toad’s eye and as senseless, “is all.”
“So you say now.”
“So I say,” she answered in her riddling way, giving him truth or lie and letting him choose.
“Still,” he mused, leaning back against the stone, watching a star form through the doorway, “it’s far more appealing than the dragon’s tower. That place reeks; it’s full of bones; the stones sweat in the heat. And if I go back, Thayne will only kill me. So he said. I’ll spare myself the trouble, staying here.”
“You told him you saved his brother’s life. Thayne would die in that tower himself rather than allow harm to come to Craiche. Perhaps he changed his mind about killing you.”
“Perhaps it’s not worth going back to find out. My last glimpse of life would be Thayne Ysse’s harrowed face blaming me for all the sorrow in the North Islands. I’d rather watch the night fall, here. Its face is calm and lovely, and full of mysteries.”
She picked up the harp lying beside her on the stones, flicked a few sweet notes into the air. “You should make up your mind.” She did not meet his eyes. “It’s a long way back and you’ll get lost trying to find your way in the night.”
He looked at her thoughtfully, the Bard of Skye sitting with him in the dark tower. “Why do you care?” he asked her. “What do you want from me?”
Her eyes flickered at him, then. “There’s still another tower.”
“There are many other knights.”
“But only one of you, Cyan Dag. I need you.”
He was silent again, with wonder; it sounded, for once, like truth. Still, her need was complex, bewildering, and extremely dangerous. He said indifferently, for there seemed nothing left to tempt him, “Make it worth my while.”
“Is the Lady from Skye not worth your while?”
“Not at this particular moment. You want me to choose between a tower of night and a tower of fire. You don’t offer me the tower with the lady in it. Not yet. Never yet. Always something else first. Do I go or do I stay? Which tower do I choose? You want me to choose fire. Make it worth my while.”
He saw the first flicker of expression in her ancient eyes, uncertainty, perhaps even the pain of some memory. He waited, watching the gentle evening darken, smelling the mysteries of bracken, fungus, rotting wood, flowers scattering their faded petals over the grass. The bard asked finally, pulling him back out of the night, “What do you want?”
Nothing, he thought. Nothing.
Then the answer washed over him, through him, in a color: the faint, young green still visible just beyond the door. “Cria,” he whispered. “Cria Greenwood.” And she was there between him and the night, with her violet eyes and smoky hair, her sweet, husky voice full of flaring embers and wine. Cyan, she said. Where are you? “Tell her,” he pleaded to the Bard of Skye, “that I will come back.”
The bard bowed her head above the harp. She seemed, as he watched her, to shape herself into it, until her bones formed its bones, her hair strung it; the harper became the harp. He heard her play.
He listened for a long time, it seemed, until the darkness dissolved around him. Gold burned behind his eyes. He struggled to find his way back into the tower of shadows, but he had left it and he could no longer find the door. The sun was rising. It spilled over him, stifling, blinding, merciless. He drew a sudden long, shuddering breath, as if he had been under water and had finally reached the surface. Then he felt the fire all through his bones.