Sel felt something rill along her bones, sea or fire, she was not sure. “Where did you learn that?” she asked her daughter abruptly. “To talk to horses, and find your way into mirrors?”
Memory surfaced in answer: herself, when she was a scant half-dozen years older than Melanthos was now, and her children with their sea-anemone hair just walking, and something—a word, a finger, a bite—always in their mouths. Then she did things to amuse them and herself while Joed was away. Things she had learned from her own father, and remembered in bits and pieces, when she left that world for the other. She peeled their shadows off the floor and made them dance. She sent small, sparkling clouds of sand whirling across the floor. She made butterfly shells fly, and slipper limpets shuffle, and plucked the bands of harp shells to sound notes as clear and fragile as glass. She made dead fish swim through the air, blowing schools of silvery bubbles. All to make them laugh, and to charm away the sound of the calling waves. They would not remember, she told herself. When Joed came home, and found her sweeping up the sand, they tried to tell him, pointing delightedly at nothing. But the words they knew then belonged to some other country; they had not yet learned the language of Skye. Joed laughed with them, and understood nothing. Sel, wanting to be as human as Joed, wanting to be loved, kept her secrets. She had not understood then, that Joed might leave her stranded, beached, alone in the world while he himself escaped into the sea.
She had put away her magics when the children learned to talk. Now she knew that she might have made use of her powers in small ways; such things were not uncommon in Skye. But that might have changed Joed’s eyes when he looked at her. He knew her as he knew his boat, the fish he caught, the direction of the wind, the changing voices of the tide. For him, she walked on human shores; for him she turned her back on whatever he might fear in her. She walked so far away from what he feared that she thought she had lost even the memory of it.
But there it was, a flame of it, in Melanthos, who walked unafraid up a tower’s spellbound steps, and led images in a mirror back into life. That’s what she was doing with the knight, Sel guessed. No mirror, no tower, could trap Melanthos. She would find her way out of anything, even grief. So Sel told herself, sewing until the moon set. Then she rose, went down into the raw, chill, starless hour before dawn. The mists were blowing over the cliff. But she could see vague, creamy scallops of waves far below, and hear the restless tide booming hollowly as it hit the rocky sides of the harbor. It was on the verge of turning; she knew the sound of its wildness when it was at its peak. In an hour or so it would be running out, and the fishers would follow it in their boats.
She thought of joining Gentian in the bakery, for she would be up by now, setting loaves to rise. But the village seemed very far away, in another world, too far beyond the stone wood for her to reach now. She turned after a while, went back up the tower steps.
She turned up a lamp and unrolled her cloak.
She positioned the difficult portions, where human hands and head and feet would be, and sewed them into place. When that was done, the sun had risen; the mirror had opened its eye to the distant, glowing tors. She cut the two holes then, and hemmed them neatly. Then she measured it to her body, added a patch here and there so it would cover her hands and feet cleanly. That done, she whipped a hem tidily around the entire shape, with long, quick stitches. She hurried, for the morning was going fast, and she did not know when Melanthos might return.
In the mirror, the woman plied her need as intently. Sel glimpsed her now and then, making the line of birds and lilies at the hem of her dress. She ignored her own mirror, which changed its scenes every time Sel looked up, as if to entice the woman’s attention from her work. At one moment Sel saw the sea wash through the woman’s mirror, a burst of foam that, draining back, revealed starfish, small white barnacles, sea flowers clinging to a rock. Sel, entranced, stared thoughtlessly. The woman never raised her eyes from her work.
Finally the end of the hem reached the beginning of it. Sel snapped her thread and said softly, “There.” She stood up, adjusted the patchwork over her shoulders. She held the hand pieces lightly between her fingers, and let the head fall over her face, shaking her own head until the blank eyeholes met her eyes and she could see. She looked into the mirror, which was reflecting the true world at the moment, and saw her newborn face.
A step behind her made her whirl. She tried to toss the selkie face down her back before Melanthos saw it, but it clung there, its threads snagged in her hair. Then she caught her breath and held it, frozen, while the dark-haired knight, his sword drawn, stared at her from the top of the steps, looking as astonished as she felt.
Twenty-two
Cyan sheathed his sword. He did not understand exactly what he faced, but he knew that he could not fight magic, and brandishing a blade at eccentricity in Skye seemed the height of discourtesy. The figure standing in an untidy clutter of blankets and pallet, threads, scissors, pieces of linen, with the strange mask dangling over its face and the smoky threads covering its body, seemed to be spellbound.
He said, while it stared at him through the round eyeholes in the mask, “I’m sorry I startled you. I was looking for a woman in a tower.”
The spell broke. The figure moved then, pushing the peculiar patched face back to reveal a woman, inarguably in a tower, but no one he recognized. She had a broad, strong-boned, weathered face, nicked and smudged by time, sun, wind, experience. Her hair spilled in long ripples of gray and black and white down her back. Her eyes were dark, remote with memory or sorrow. Light shifted in them, washing color through the dark, like light on a kelp leaf. He blinked, recognizing them.
“Melanthos brought you here instead,” she said abruptly, glancing behind him. “Where is she?”
“I asked her to wait below. I thought—” He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “I thought it would be dangerous.”
“Why did she bring you here? To see the lady in the mirror?”
His eyes went past her, to the round mirror in its plain wood frame on the window ledge. It was blandly reflecting the view from the opposite window. He took a step toward it, his voice catching. “You see her in there?”
“Sometimes. Very beautiful, she is—”
“Yes.”
“With blue eyes and long—”
“Yes. That’s the woman I have been searching for.”
The woman nodded, unsurprised. “Something of the sea in her past, it looks to me, with her pale skin and wide-set eyes, and her long butterfly-fish nose.”
He saw it then, what had puzzled the knights of Gloinmere when they first saw her. “Yes,” he breathed, amazed again.
“You’ve seen her, then.”
“Yes. No. I mean, I’ve seen the woman pretending to be her.”
She let her patches fall and gathered them in her hands, folding and rolling until they were nothing but a shapeless bundle. She tucked it unobtrusively beside a pile of linen. Then she faced Cyan, opened her mouth and closed it, looking a little fishlike herself. He saw the sudden hunger in her eyes. “Tell me about her,” she demanded in her deep, husky voice. “What put her in the tower, what will free her—”
He hesitated. Beyond her, colors in the mirror shifted, gave him a glimpse of sky-blue cloth, hands, delicate and slender, rings glinting as long, fine fingers drew a needle into the air. His lips parted; she faded. A distant mist of sheep grazed in the shadow of a tor.