“My name is Sidera,” the woman said before Sel could ask. She laid a long, graceful hand, ringed with a silver band, on the knight’s shoulder. “I have been looking for this man. I didn’t expect to find him carried out of the sea and dropped at my feet by seals.”
“I never meant for him to come with me,” Sel said ruefully. “But he wouldn’t let go of me and I forgot about him when I changed. I nearly drowned him. Are you all right now?” she asked Cyan, “Other than soaked and shivering, like Melanthos?”
He gazed at her, still stunned. “I came to find a woman in a tower,” he said, his voice worn ragged with brine. “I had no idea she would tear the tower apart and rescue both herself and me.”
“I brought you to the wrong tower,” Melanthos said abruptly. She had ducked into Anyon’s dry hold, her wet shift clinging like skin, the goose bumps rising on her arms. She had, to Sel’s relief, finally stopped crying. “I was hoping you could say something to help my mother, do something. I thought that maybe she would talk to you, if you made it past the magic. You didn’t seem afraid of anything. Even dragons.”
“There’s still a woman in a tower,” he said slowly. “In my mind if nowhere else. I must find out what happened to her. If she is alive or dead, or still trapped. There are others who also need to know.”
Sel nodded. “Then you must.” She pushed the wet hair back from her face, and felt the sand caught in her clothes. “But not at this moment,” she added, feeling a little weary herself, suddenly. “You could use a rest, and a splash of something hot. Anyon, he left his horse next to the tower—it’s probably halfway across the plain by now. Could you—”
“I’ll call him,” Sidera said, and frowned a moment at the sand, so still that Sel thought she had become invisible and left an image on the air. She raised her head, and all their watching faces lifted at a whinny above their heads. The gelding peered over the cliff at them. Sidera smiled.
“We’ve met,” she explained, or thought she did.
“It’s the way I called the seals!” Sel exclaimed. “You feel them in your mind. You think their thoughts.”
Melanthos gazed openmouthed from Sidera to Sel and back again. “Teach me,” she begged. “Can you?”
But it was Sel the woman looked at when she answered. “I will.”
Sel took them all home with her, sent Anyon to Brenna’s for ale, and Gentian to her own home for more blankets and some of Rawl’s clothes for the knight. She went to the bakery for what was left of the loaves and tarts, disentangling herself from a crowd at the door wondering if she and Melanthos had fallen down the cliff along with the tower, and that was why no one was there to sell them bread.
“It was old,” she said absently of the tower. “It just fell apart. No one was hurt.”
Of the strangers glimpsed in the streets of Stony Wood, she said only, “A knight of Yves, passing through. And his friend.” Beyond that she would not say, not even when someone asked why her hair and boots were damp, and why the knight left a trail of water on the cobblestones, and where Melanthos had left the rest of her clothes. But her own children were not dissuaded. Even Gentian had left Rawl’s supper to his imagination and stayed with Sel. Her mermaid’s eyes had lost their torment; now they looked clearly at Sel, wanting to know. Melanthos, bundled in blankets and dropping crumbs of almond tart among them, watched Sel like a hawk watching a hare. The knight, dressed in fisher’s clothes and drinking ale, seemed still remote, a stranger, his own eyes haunted by his search, and by the face still visible beneath the scarred and blackened disk that hung on Rawl’s old shirt. Sidera wandered among them silently, sometimes watching Cyan, sometimes Sel; she waited, too. Even Anyon, who fluttered within walls like a firefly in a jar, sat beside Melanthos patiently, his eyes on Sel. Sel stopped finally, stopped pacing, patting the baby, straightening clothes drying beside the fire, checking the tide line in cups of ale. It was like being caught in a web, she thought, that their silence, their watching eyes had made; they left her, finally, with no room to move.
She sat down on a stool beside the fire, looked at her daughters.
“Once,” she said, awkward with the tale, for she had never told it before, “I lived in the country beneath the sea. I don’t know what I would have been to you if you had seen me then. Maybe there are no human words for it. I have to put human words on all my memories; that changes them. I had the best of all worlds, so I thought. I could swim with the whales, pick gold off the bottom of the sea, and push my face through the roof of that world to find the wind and sun, and watch the fishers and the folk who lived in air. Even in my world, with all the things that you might call magic, my father had great, strange powers. He could sing a sailing ship to sleep in a gale, slip it safely past the wind. He could build a palace out of a single pearl. He could heal a fish torn by the hook and tossed away, with the touch of his hand. He taught me things. I don’t know how much I can remember now, or if I can still do them, or what they might be worth to anyone in this world…
“And so I lived between sea and land, not knowing that I wanted anything at all, until one day I heard your father whistle a song my father knew. I looked at him, all brown and hard and smooth, like a piece of driftwood, his eyes like a seal’s eyes, curious and kind, and I took shape out of whatever I had been at that moment, and walked out of the sea.
“I never went back until today.” She lifted a hand, dropped it lightly, struggling a little to explain. “I don’t know if I went back out of sorrow and loneliness. Or because all that I had forgotten drove me to find it again. I didn’t know, until today, that I hadn’t left that part of myself in the sea; I had brought it to land with me, and forgotten it was there…”
“What?” Gentian whispered. “What did you forget? What have you remembered?”
“I don’t know yet,” Sel answered simply. “And after what I did to the tower, I’m almost afraid of knowing.”
Sidera raised her head, shook her long, gleaming hair back, a little like a seal, Sel thought, looking out from a wave. But her eyes were not seal’s eyes, nor human, nor anything that Sel had ever been seen by. The moon, she thought, feeling her heartbeat under that bright, clear, unfathomable gaze. I have been seen by the moon.
“I will help you remember,” she said to Sel. “We need you.”
Twenty-four
Thayne Ysse rode the dragon to the North Islands. He watched the world below him out of dragon’s eyes. Gold burned in random fires through the darkness. He could smell it, a dry, metallic sweetness, a whiff of honey mixed with the lingering traces of humans. Death, they smelled like, no matter what perfumes they wore, but that itself was not unpleasant to him. The land seemed a great, dark living body, with veins of liquid silver running across it, that breathed and moved and dreamed. It was a sleeping dragon on a vast plain of water. Thayne, tracking scents of gold through the scents of trees, smoke, the thick tangled odors of animals and humans, did not smell the sea until he reached it.
He remembered his human face then. He could feel himself move, separate his bone from dragon bone. His thoughts detached themselves from smells, began to form words again. He knew his name; its letters flamed within the dragon’s brain. He saw the seam of land and sea where the waves rolled and broke in a creamy lace of foam across the sand. Yves sank beneath the waves; Ysse rose out of them, the crescent moon of land among scattered stars of other islands. He felt the dragon’s question in his mind, a sudden, wordless faltering over the unfamiliar scent, the end of land and gold.