“I can help you find her,” Melanthos said, taking his arm. “Can you get up? Come closer to the fire.”
“You know where that tower is?” he asked, breathless again, with more than effort. Guiding him, she did not immediately answer. The dark tower called him then, a deepening of shadow beyond the sunlit, drowsing air across its doorway. Something he had left in there, it suggested to him. Or left undone. He left the young woman watching him and walked unsteadily into it.
He found the piece of embroidery spread on one of the fallen stones where he had sat peacefully considering staying forever. There was just enough sun left in the world to show him that the image had changed.
Thayne and the gold and the dragon had gone. There was only the beautiful, troubled face of the Lady from Skye, finely stitched in colors so close to true that truth lay in a change of light. He went to the fire, where Melanthos was taking the bones out of the fish.
She held out a broad leaf full of fish to him as he sat. Then she saw what was in his hands. She gave a small hiccup of astonishment.
“It’s one of my pictures. So this is where they go.”
Cyan sensed worlds within worlds merge around him; he could almost see the dragon tower within the dark tower. In another shift of perception, he thought dazedly, he might see within the dragon tower to the tower where the Lady of Skye waited, without time, without hope.
He said, his voice shaking, “I kept finding these pictures. So you brought me this far. You know all the towers.”
She nodded, her eyes, like dark stones or shells, glinting with unpredictable color, and as unreadable. “I know the tower with the woman in it,” she said softly. “Eat your fish, and I’ll take you there.”
Twenty-one
Sel pieced her life together. To the eye, only the irregular shapes of the embroidered patches, and a preponderance of gray or brown in one or another, made them different. Sel’s eyes, as she sorted them at the top of the tower, saw the memories in them. There was the patch with Joed in his boat at the dock lifting an oar to her as he cast off into a dazzle of light at sunrise. Newly wed, she could not stop watching him even when he was a dark fleck on the burning sea, and she could not stop smiling. There was the patch full of harbor seals threading brown and gray stitches in and out of the waves. There was the patch where Gentian was born, and the one where Gentian’s child was born, and the one where Melanthos caught the wild pony among the tors and rode it down the cobbled streets of Stony Wood. There was the patch with the stone wood in it, long streaks of brown and gray and ivory; she looked at it and saw the mysterious shapes. Stone or trees? they asked as always. Were we once alive?
Mostly she saw the sea.
It unwound the long banners of its waves across her days, constantly across her thoughts. It showed her its secrets, the oysters making their pearls, the mermaids among its corals, the luminous, calm-eyed ghosts of those who had once walked on land, and who had their hearts stolen by the sea. Each wave spinning to the shore with its tumbling strands of kelp and mermaid’s hair called her name as it broke and foamed and hissed across the sand: Sel… Dark ancient eyes watched her, harbor seals and others, strangers from the deep. Sel, they cried in their rough, tumultuous voices. Come back.
She plied her thread, piecing past and future together, so that when she was done, one might become the other: she would be done with memory as well. There would only be the sea.
She put her needle down after hours of sewing. Something had disturbed her, she knew vaguely: something in the world. Besides, her eyes were tired and she needed to rest them on the stone trees or the distant tors. She made her way down and found Gentian sitting at the bottom of the steps in the middle of the morning.
She was alone. She had been crying again, not a sweet spring rain this time, but a full-blown cloudburst. Her nose was red; her eyes were red and green; her apron, already flecked with dough and flour, was patched with tears. Sel gazed at her remotely, puzzled, then sat down. She could fit on a step beside Gentian now; winding up and down the tower steps, living in the tower instead of the bakery, had whittled her smaller.
“What is it?” she asked as Gentian’s face disappeared into her apron. “Is it the baby?”
Gentian reappeared, powdery now, and a bit sticky. She shook her head, swallowed once or twice as she looked at Sel. “You’ve changed,” she whispered. “I don’t know where you’ve gone.”
“Nowhere,” Sel said surprisedly, while the sea spilled all around her, tugged at her, drawing back.
“You’ve been up there since yesterday!”
“Have I? I’m sorry.”
“You say that, and you come back into the world for an hour or a day, and then you vanish again when I turn my back!”
“I’m here now.” For some reason that did not comfort Gentian, whose eyes filled again, shiny with brine. Sel patted her hand. “Stop fretting,” she said, with a ghost of her old abrupt, booming voice that could halt a whale in its sounding. “You’re not a child. You’ve got one now. Leave me to my life.”
“I would,” Gentian said, “if I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“What—”
“If I thought you wanted life.”
Sel was silent. Oh yes, she thought, feeling the tide tangling in her hair, the seaweed winding its long fingers around her, guiding her into a realm beyond the wind. Oh, yes, life.
She heaved herself to her feet after a while, forgetting why Gentian was there. “I must get back to my work. I’m nearly finished.”
Gentian stared at her, pale now, her eyes so dry she must have already cried every tear. “With what?” she asked huskily.
“My cloak.”
“Will you come down to stay when it’s finished?”
Sel nodded. “I won’t need the tower after that.”
Gentian’s face crumpled again. Sel dropped a hand on her head as she turned, having forgotten why she came down, and forgetting, as she settled again to her sewing, that she had ever left it.
The mirror caught her attention after a while, flashing as the mirror within the mirror within the other tower reflected a spark of light from something along the road. The woman in the tower paid no attention to the man riding down the road toward the tower. She was bent over her embroidery, her needle wheeling and diving like a gull. She had turned her loom sideways, Sel saw. The finished images fell to her feet now; she held the unworked linen in her lap. She was making an elongated figure of someone. She must have been working on it day and night, Sel thought, for the face hung invisibly past her knees, and she was busy with the hands now.
They were long and slender, jeweled, in motion against a complex background. A road, it seemed, wound through the fingers; trees were leafing out above the jewels. A small square of unworked linen lay like an empty field beneath one hand. Sel studied the image a moment, curiously. Then her eyes filled with tide; the threads in her hands flowed and tossed restlessly, flinging white stitches of spindrift against the gray.
She saw the riders in the mirror as she was shifting pieces around the floor to figure out the bottom line of her making. She envisioned it swimming, then unfolded, emptied, flattened now, stretched out to dry; this would go here, this maybe here… An unexpected color in the mirror caught her eye. She looked at it and saw the knight first, with his graceful, somber face, his long hair as black as mussel shell, his eyes like sea reflecting cloud. He rode a gold horse, with mane and tail of ivory. The dark red jewel on the hilt of his sword glinted at his knee.
After a while she took her eyes off him to study the second rider. She shifted forward, blinking, for a closer look. That lanky body, those bare feet, that wood-bark hair, knotted like vine… She whispered, astonished, “Melanthos?” She rode one of the wild, piebald horses from the plain, without a piece of harness on it. As Sel watched, Melanthos leaned forward bonelessly, whispered something in the horse’s ear, and it slowed its pace.