“Thank you,” Cyan gasped through the close and oddly shimmering air. For a moment the stranger, with his gold hair and eyes, his blurred, flickering face, seemed something not quite human, another mystery along the road to Skye. Then the mystery rubbed his head violently and spat.
“Vultures.”
“I’m sorry I dragged you into it.”
“I was looking for a way in.”
“How did you know—” He stopped, until the leaves had floated back to the trees and he saw the man’s face clearly, spare and proud, scoured by wind and weather, young yet, but harrowed, it seemed to Cyan, beyond his years. “Which of us to help?”
The stranger smiled tightly. “You were the one with no boots.” He blinked then, at something not quite clear in his own vision. His smile vanished; all expression flowed out of him, as if he saw a ghost standing between them on their battlefield. He said very softly, “Three gold towers on a dark field of blue…”
“My name is Cyan Dag. I am a knight of Gloinmere, on my way to Skye. Do you know Skye?” he asked, for the stranger might as well have come from there as anywhere. “I need to find a certain tower.”
The stranger reached him in two steps. One hand closed with a hawk’s grip around Cyan’s torn wrist; the other caught the sword he dropped as he fell to his knees. He groaned, the trees rustling close again. The blade seared his throat. He shook leaves out of his eyes, bewildered, and saw the strange fury in the fierce, yellow eyes.
“I am Thayne Ysse. If you make it back to Gloinmere alive, remind Regis Aurum that Ysse once ruled the North Islands, and we will, with that tower and the dragon who guards it, rule again. If I see you in Skye, I will kill you.”
“There is no dragon,” Cyan told him, amazed. “There is a woman.”
But he only thought he spoke. The bloody jewel on his sword flared above him and the wind that roared among the leaves blew out the sun.
When he woke, the world was dark and the Lady from Skye watched him across her fire.
He caught breath painfully, choked on hot, charred air. She loomed over him suddenly, impossibly tall and angular, her face in shadow, the full moon rising out of her hair. Then she knelt, and he saw that what he had thought were the pale coils of her braids had been the aura of moonlight behind her. Her hair was long, straight, and black as night, falling around her like a mantle. She could fold herself into it, he thought feverishly, disappear into herself like a forest animal.
Fire shimmered over her eyes as over water; he could not see their color, or the thoughts in them. Her face, in the shifting light, seemed weathered smooth and dark as polished wood. A long, slender hand rose from within her hair, shifting gleaming strands and opening as it moved toward him. A silver ring flashed as it slid loosely between the knuckles of her middle finger. Then the hand disappeared; he felt it ease beneath his head, raise him a little. Something rough and dank, like wet bark, touched his lips.
He pulled away from it, though his throat was raw with thirst. “Who are you?” he whispered, trying to see beyond the fire in her eyes.
“Don’t be afraid.” The voice he heard seemed oddly familiar, and inside his head, rather than in his ears. Cria’s voice, he realized suddenly, deep and haunting, like a horn heard from far away in a wood.
“Drink. You must be thirsty. So thirsty you taste ashes when you swallow, you taste dry, bitter leaves. There is a little stream not far from here; the water is so cold and sweet…”
He drained the cup. She smiled and he glimpsed, in the graceful bones of her face, the tender, luminous expression, what he had feared across her fire. Then the night whirled around her and poured into his eyes.
He asked again, clinging desperately to his question, as if it was the one thing that might keep him alive, “Who are you?”
If she answered, he did not hear.
He woke on a lumpy bed he recognized: the innkeeper’s best. His sword and pack lay on top of a scarred clothes chest. The wounded noise box sat on a chair, the cracked boots he had inherited stood beside the bed, one sole gaping speechlessly. Through the window, he could see the gold gelding in the yard, feeding from a bucket. From beyond the walls came murmuring, sudden calls and laughter, the gabbling of returning guests.
He questioned the innkeeper before he left, the next morning. “No one brought you here,” the innkeeper said. “I found you across your horse’s back, coming into my yard. But someone cared for you. Someone tended your wounds and sent you here. You don’t remember?”
He remembered. He searched the forest for her as he rode through it. But he found her only in his thoughts, where her secret, luminous eyes, her smile, stayed with him all down the long road out of Yves into Skye.
Seven
Melanthos saw the third tower at night. It stood in a ring of trees, a squat dark flattened beehive of stone. Three great worn lichen-covered slabs formed the doorposts and the lintel. There was no door, only that yawn into blackness. The waning moon hung above it, low and cold. In the milky light, the shadows of trees melted into the elongated, impenetrable shadow of the tower. Only the doorposts, sagging heavily into the ground, and the crooked lintel they bore, all made of paler stone, caught the light in tiny flecks of silver.
Dark, its colors said. Light and dark, and darker still, with a faint grayish glimmer of green for the trees, and a blur of muddy white for the hare frozen in the moonlight, its ears cocked toward a sound.
A moving shadow spilled over the hare. The hunter? Melanthos guessed, transfixed. But it moved past, and the hare, freed, scuttled away.
The shadow stopped at the edge of the tower’s shadow; whoever cast it stood beyond the eye of the mirror.
Man or woman? Melanthos wondered. Hunter or hunted?
The shadow moved again toward the tower, disappearing into the black, until at the very edge of the tower’s shadow, the figure stepped into the mirror. It was cloaked, hooded, its face turned away from Melanthos toward the night within the stones.
“I don’t have thread that black,” Melanthos whispered. “It would not be visible.”
She watched the figure move closer to the threshold. It paused there, its back to Melanthos, one hand raised, touching the moonlit stone of a post, its body angled forward, as if it tried to see into the dark.
The image faded. Melanthos stared at the mirror, chilled as if she herself had felt the cold stone beneath her fingers, heard the silence within the tower.
She reached for black.
Melanthos saw the knight ride into Skye.
She had finished the tower at sunrise. She left it on the window ledge as always, and then curled up on the musty pallet to sleep. As always, when she woke, the embroidery was gone. Taken, she thought, but by what or whom she could not guess. Maybe it simply unraveled itself and melted back into the mirror. Desperate, by then, for light, she stepped out of the tower into the brilliant afternoon. She began to walk.
Later, she rested in the middle of a broad, rocky plain, watching sheep drift like sea mist across the grass. She sat in the shadow of one of the abrupt upthrusts of stone that rose starkly out of the ground. She watched the knight appear out of a smudge of forest on the steep, bony ridge of mountain that bordered the plain. He was very far away, picking his way carefully down the slope. But she recognized his colors: black for his long windblown hair and his cloak, gold for his horse, red for the jewel in his sword catching the sun in minute explosions of light, and gray, she remembered, for his eyes.
She watched him motionlessly, intensely, as she watched the images moving through the mirror. Then, her whole body prickling with astonishment, she realized that he was neither reflection nor thread, but as real as she, riding alone into Skye. The beginning of his journey, his tale, lay in the unknown land behind him; the ending was hidden somewhere in Skye. At the foot of the slope he turned north, toward three hills that faced one another, so alike in their wide, smooth lines that they seemed reflections of one another. Three Sisters, they were called, by those who saw them from the south; farther north, they were known by other names.