The woman in the tower gazed at him intently, as if the force of her wanting could draw the story out of him. He drew his attention from the sheep finally, and asked, “Who are you?”
“Sel. I’m the baker, in Stony Wood. Melanthos is my daughter.”
“I thought so,” he said. “She looks like you.”
“What is your name?”
“Cyan Dag. I have come from Gloinmere.”
“I knew it. I knew you were a knight when I saw you in the mirror.”
“You saw me in that?”
“You and Melanthos, riding together. I thought she was taking you to—” She stopped, stepped to the far window, and looked down, cautiously, he thought, as if she did not want to be noticed. “I don’t see her. But then she’s always appearing and disappearing.” She looked at him suddenly, curiously. “Did you come up alone?”
“Yes.”
“Most can’t get past the magic. But you weren’t afraid of it?”
“I didn’t notice any,” he answered, puzzled.
“Well,” she said slowly, studying him, “if you don’t notice the small illusions anymore, you’re fey yourself, or you’ve seen behind them.”
“I know nothing about magic,” he said ruefully, “except that it exists. I could have used a touch of it on my way through Skye.”
“You’re here. There’s magic in that.”
“I’m in the wrong tower. Again.”
“Well,” she said after a moment, “maybe magic is all in the way you look at things.” She paused, studying him again. “And in that disk you’re wearing. It’s like this mirror…”
He touched it gently, as if he might disturb the woman within. “It holds more power than I can understand or imagine. It saved my life twice—three times—”
“Who gave it to you?”
He shook his head, remembering. “Someone dying. Someone long dead, more likely, and made of Melanthos’s threads. Who gave it to him to give to me, I can only guess.”
“Who?”
But he only shook his head again, his mouth taut. “That’s part of a different tale, I think.”
Color caught his eyes, flicking across the mirror. Birds, he saw, as yellow as buttercups above the sheep. The woman, Sel, stooped to straighten the pallet, pull the rumpled blankets across it.
“You look a little worse for wear. Take your towers off and sit down,” she suggested. “I’ll mend them for you. Maybe the mirror will show you where to go next.”
It seemed as reasonable as anything else he could think of doing. He shrugged the rent surcoat off and handed it to her. He stopped short of sitting, though, reminded then of what he had seen when he first came in, of what she had bundled away into a corner for him to forget.
“What was that you were wearing when I first saw you?”
Her eyes flickered away from him, then back, and were caught in his steady gaze. He glimpsed trouble in them, mystery, sorrow, secret shifts of darkness stirring like shapes beneath tide. Magic, he thought, recognizing it in memory: the inhuman mask over the human face, threads that he had seen, in other places, come to life.
“I’ll tell you a story,” she said finally, “if you tell me one.”
He hesitated, then nodded. They were so far from Gloinmere and its dangerous secret in this small, ancient, windswept tower, that Gloinmere itself seemed like a place out of a tale. “But I don’t know,” he warned her, “how it will end.”
“Neither do I,” she said.
She left him for a little, to get him something to eat and drink. He watched the mirror intently, until his eyes closed and he sagged down into wool and straw and warm light, and slept. Sel woke him, coming back. Melanthos had gone to the bakery to eat, and then had disappeared again, after promising Gentian, alone with the work, that she would come back soon. Soon, a stretchable word, was elongating itself across the afternoon. Sel unpacked wine and cups out of a basket, meat pies and oatcakes, bread shaped like scallop shells, cheese, and smoked fish. She ate nothing, he noticed, just sewed his surcoat back together while he ate hungrily. Soft threads of blue flowed across the mirror again, transfixing him. Sel turned to the mirror; the threads melted away.
“It’s like that,” Sel said. “But you’ll see her clearly. Just wait.”
His eyes moved from the mirror to her face. It was too heavy and coarse for ordinary beauty, its earthy coloring too strong. But there was a power, a mystery in it: she knew things, had seen things that he hadn’t. That and its strange sorrow drew at him. He could still find, beneath the chips and scars of time, the younger face, with its wide cheekbones and strange, wide-set eyes, its wild hair, its full mouth smiling at the world, that would have made its own beauty out of what it was. Her head was bent now over his surcoat; her long hair spilled over her, cloaking a big, graceful body she seemed to want to keep hidden under one thing or another.
He asked, as she pulled gold thread neatly through two halves of a broken tower, “How did you find this place?”
“It’s always been here, at the edge of the stone wood. I came up one day trying to get Melanthos out of here—she’d gotten spellbound by the mirror—and I stayed.”
“She embroiders, she said.”
“Yes. Pictures of what she sees in the mirror. She never keeps them. She throws them out of the window and they go—elsewhere. They disappear.”
“Not entirely,” he said, and showed her the embroidery he had taken from the dark tower in the glade.
She looked down at the pale, troubled, lovely face, the ripples of pale thread that formed her hair, her creased brows. “That’s one of hers,” she said, nodding. “So you found it—”
“I found others. They seem magical, in some way. They guided me… Do you also make them?”
“No. Only Melanthos does.”
“What did you make?”
Her eyes flickered to his face, away. She took a stitch or two, rebuilding the tower. Then she dropped her hands in her lap and stared out the window at the restless water that ran beyond the edge of the world, and pulled the sun and the moon and the stars every night down into its secret country. “I was born in—I was born so close to the sea that I fell in love with it when I was young. I knew the names of all the fish and the seals, and I understood the stories they told as they talked among themselves. Then Joed came along, and stood between me and the sea. Then my daughters came, Gentian and Melanthos, and I couldn’t see beyond their sweet faces. Then Joed died.” She lifted the surcoat, pulled another stitch. “He died in the sea. So, I thought, since I love Joed and I love the sea, that I would go there.”
He was silent a moment, struggling with that. “So you made this—” he prompted gently.
“I made my skin. To take me.”
He began a question, then answered himself. “The face on it—a seal’s face—”
“A selkie skin.”
“But would it work?”
Her lips moved, formed a crooked, wry smile that chilled his heart. “In one way or another.” She knotted the gold thread and snapped it, then pulled out a length of dark blue and threaded the needle again. He watched her, troubled, not knowing what to say. Finished with answers, she asked him, “Now tell me a story. Tell me how you came from Gloinmere to Skye, looking for a woman in a mirror.”
He told a story of a king bewitched by something monstrous and magical, who had disguised herself as the enchanting lady from Skye, and imprisoned the true lady in a tower from which there seemed no escape. Only one other in all the land knew the truth of the matter besides him: the bard who had traveled to Yves in the sorceress’s company.