The Tower at Stony Wood

Thirteen

On a hillside in the northernmost parts of Yves, Cyan knelt within a thick line of vine and bramble and brush growing along a ditch between fields. The brush dripped endlessly with rain. The fields, thick with pasture grass, were sodden underfoot; they glittered, under torch fire, as if the stars had rained out of the sky, leaving the thick, blank black overhead. In the deepest part of the brush, Regis Aurum lay shivering beneath Cyan’s sodden cloak. The fields were quiet around them for the moment; the nearest torch had passed them, hissing and smoking in the rain. It was cresting the hill now, snaking out from side to side, searching for the dead.

Regis muttered something. Cyan felt for his shoulder. He could see nothing of the king’s face, but he knew that he was on a hillside in north Yves with a memory: a newly crowned king warring to keep his kingdom together, and, having won this battle, fighting under a bush in the endless rain for his life.

“Where is everyone?” the king demanded suddenly, furiously. “Tell them to bring fire! And why is it raining in my bed?” His voice broke with a hiss of pain; his flailing hand found Cyan’s arm. “Who are you?”

Who indeed? Cyan wondered, feeling the cold rain drip down his neck, smelling the sweet, sticky leaves of the underbrush, as he had years before. Why he had been plunged into this particular memory, he could not imagine. The king was bleeding badly from a stray arrow shot as the ragged army from the North Islands retreated. It had been almost the last bolt fired, as Regis’s knights chased them uphill into a wood, leaving a wake of dead and wounded in the grass. Cyan, leaping off his horse, had pulled Regis under the brush out of the deadly path of the warhorses. The knights and the North Islanders disappeared into the wood, leaving him alone with the wounded king, not knowing, as twilight seeped into night, that the North Islanders were scattering for their lives down the other side of the hill. They won a few parting arguments as they retreated. The king’s most valued adviser caught an arrow in his throat and was speechless for the rest of his life. The king’s youngest cousin threw up a palm to ward away an arrow and fell with his hand pinned to his eye. Fury over their own dead drove the knights to follow the retreating army farther than they had to. When they collected themselves and their fallen, in the bleak twilight, no one remembered when the king, in the midst of his victory, had disappeared.

“Who are you?”

All Cyan knew, in the underbrush with the lost king, was that everyone around them except for the dead and wounded had vanished. He tried to keep the king sheltered and quiet, while he watched for the returning knights. When night fell, he saw the first torches move slowly up from the bottom of the hill. They did not get far before the busy flames found what they sought in the long grass. They took the dead away and returned for more. Cyan heard their voices, hushed and cautious, as they called to one another across the field.

While the North Islanders were gleaning their own off the battlefield, Regis, making his unexpected complaints about the cold and the wet, was one more random voice among the cries and groans and weeping on the field. As the torches grew closer to them, Cyan tried to quiet him, whispering desperately, knowing that if the North Islanders found the king, he would die there, under a bush in the rain, victory or no victory. Cyan, though he might pull a few under the ground with him as he went, would fare no better.

“Who?”

“Regis,” he breathed, “you must be quiet. I am hurt, and they will kill me if you are not quiet.”

“Cyan,” the king whispered back, his fingers tight on Cyan’s arm. “Don’t be afraid. I will kill them before they harm you.”

“I’m very cold.”

“I know. It’s wet in here. Where are you hurt?”

“In my left side, above my heart. I think they may not find me if you stay very quiet. Very still. Now.”

Torch fire passed over them, searched into the leaves and vines and brambles with their tiny white flowers. The king made a noise and quelled it, his lips caught tight between his teeth. The torchbearers chose that place to gather, a dozen weary, muddy, bitter men searching the unfamiliar field in the dark.

“Who is missing?” they asked each other.

“Ean Muldar.”

“He’s dead. I took him down.”

“My brother,” someone said. Torchlight flared, swam across a face, and Cyan bit back a word. Thayne Ysse stood there with his yellow eyes and his gold hair, longer then, lank and streaked with rain.

“You mean your father,” a man answered. “They found him earlier in the wood. He’s been hurt, but he’s safe, now—”

“No,” Thayne broke in, the word cutting sharp as an ax into wood. “Craiche.”

“Craiche!” someone repeated incredulously. “You left him home to milk the cows, surely—”

“He didn’t stay,” Thayne said tersely. “I saw him earlier. I told him where to wait, but he didn’t stay there, either.”

“I saw a boy running with us through the woods,” someone said. “I thought he was from these hills.”

“Which woods?”

The torch angled, pointed overhead. “Up there. Thayne, he can’t have come with us! He’s a twelve-year-old boy; someone would have spotted him in one of the boats when we crossed—”

“He knows how to row a boat.” Cyan heard the familiar, leashed fury in Thayne’s even voice. “He followed us.” He turned abruptly, a flame torn away from the circle of fire and heading uphill. Someone breathed a curse onto Regis Aurum’s head. The torches separated, lined across the field, still searching as they moved toward the wood.

“Cyan,” Regis whispered, when the light was gone. “Are you still alive? Did they find you?”

Cyan did not answer. No, he had said in memory. They did not find me. In memory, the North Islanders’ voices had been indistinguishable, barely comprehensible, as if they spoke another language. In memory, there had been no Thayne Ysse asking about a twelve-year-old brother, but a dozen armed strangers, their faces blurred by fire, saying things that Cyan, listening with all his attention on Regis’ silence, barely heard. Dead, they said. Safe. Up there. And then they followed the fire uphill, and Regis spoke, and Cyan, trembling with cold and relief, answered.

“No,” he said to Regis. “They did not find me.”

Yes, he said, to whoever was listening in the dark of the tower. They found me.

Regis fell asleep then, or what passed for sleep, leaving Cyan alone listening to his ragged, labored breaths. Cyan watched, motionless, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other hand resting on the king’s forehead. After a long time, during which the rain fell with monotonous steadiness, he saw the fires began to come back down the hill, a ragged line of them, the last a roving star just emerging out of the trees as the closest were halfway down the field. The last fire etched a jagged path to the underbrush, began probing into it. Cyan’s fingers locked on his sword. The king chose that moment to stir restively, tossing his head back and forth.

“Water,” he muttered. Whether it was a demand or a complaint, Cyan was uncertain. Uphill, the torch fire jabbed along the wall of brush, illumining roots, tangles; dry leaves sparked and burned out. Cyan, barely breathing, his attention riveted on the reckless fire, thought coldly: I will kill him when he reaches us. I will catch the torch as he falls, and carry it down the hill, follow until no one notices when I put it out, no one notices that he is missing… I will come back and hide his body in the underbrush…

“Cyan,” the king breathed abruptly, wakened, Cyan guessed, by the murmur of voices, the soft steps.

“You must be quiet again,” he whispered, “or they will find me.”

He could hear the brush crackling now, tiny explosions of flame that hissed to embers in the rain. The king, facing downhill, could not see it, but he heard; he moved his head fretfully but did not speak. Cyan looked uphill again, watching the fire come.

I did not know then, he thought, that the fire had a name.

“Thayne!” someone called, a sharp hiss across the face of the hill. The torch swung away from the brush. “Help me.”

The torch moved after a moment, to meet the still fire in the center of the field. The flames, mingling, revealed someone lying on the grass. The fires conferred; one torch fell to the ground. The twisted body sent a raven’s cry across the night as it was lifted. A man’s voice, Cyan thought, not a boy’s. But the other torches had reached the bottom of the hill. The searcher abandoned his search to carry the wounded, leaving his torch to gutter out in the grass.

Cyan unlocked his fingers from the sword hilt, felt his hand tremble. He leaned his brow against a crook of branches, breathing again, unsteadily. Regis’s voice, coming out of the dark with unexpected clarity, made him start.

“Will you die?” the king asked.

“No,” he whispered fiercely to the endless night. “No. I will not die.”

The field was silent for a while. He moved his hand to the king’s chest, kept it there lightly to feel him breathe. Cyan’s eyes closed. The branches supported his head; he breathed in small leaves, flowers. He dreamed of rain. He woke abruptly, listened for Regis’s breathing, to the changeless dark; his eyes closed again. He dreamed of someone crying in the rain.

He woke again, blinking water out of his eyes. He felt the king’s breathing under his hand, shallow and fitful; he muttered something, dreaming or feverish, then quieted. Cyan raised his head, scanned the night. He saw nothing but dark, heard nothing but rain. The night, he thought, was frozen in some terrible, enchanted hour; it would never change, dawn would never come, the rain would rain forever…

He heard someone crying in the rain.

It was a small, distant sound, a single, sharp sob. He had listened to such noises half the night. But this voice was high, light: a woman’s voice, a child’s. A boy’s. The sound came again, brief, taut. His muscles locked; he felt the sudden bone chill of horror, colder than any rain, as if the faint voice came from the dead already haunting the field.

“Thayne,” it pleaded. Then it was still for a long time while Cyan listened, his lips parted, his eyes straining against the dark.

I don’t remember this, he thought. I don’t remember. I heard the boy’s voice in my sleep, perhaps; I dreamed that I dreamed it…

“Thayne,” the voice said again, still faint in the constant rain. As if he heard it, Regis murmured, then stifled a groan. Cyan shifted his hand to Regis’s brow. The king drew a shuddering breath and quieted again. Cyan felt him trembling with cold.

“Thayne,” the boy said again. He seemed closer now, if only by a matter of raindrops, a few grass blades. Cyan swallowed drily, wondering if he were crawling down the hill.

I did nothing, he thought, in memory. There is nothing I can do. I cannot change memory.

“Thayne.”

I did not leave the king.

He heard nothing then but the rain, slipping among the leaves, drumming gently, persistently against the ground. He lifted his face to it, opened his mouth, swallowed what the leaves let fall. Then he listened again, as if he could hear the boy breathing across the field.

He fell asleep again. A whimper woke him. The king, he thought. But Regis lay still, so still that Cyan felt for his heartbeat, alarmed. He was clumsy; the king’s voice came in a sudden, anguished knot of pain. But he was still alive, and the voice in the dark, no longer alone, had been startled silent.

After a long time Cyan heard the breathing in the grass beside the brush. It shook with effort, dragging for air, keening, but so softly the boy probably did not even realize he made a sound. Cyan closed his eyes.

When he moved, it was as if he moved in a dream, because he would have died before he left the king alone and wounded under a hedge for this. He refused to listen to the brush crackling softly around him, or to the boy’s sudden, frightened gasp. He refused to hear Regis’s voice; maybe it was raised in a troubled, confused question, maybe not. He groped across the grass, found a slender, shivering body, and rolled it lightly into his arms. The boy hissed as Cyan straightened; one hand, surprisingly strong, dug into his forearm. The boy asked, his teeth chattering, “Who are you?”

Cyan did not answer.

He carried the boy down the hill, striding quickly, wanting to get back to the king before the dream of leaving the king ended. The boy, after a futile question or two, did not speak again; Cyan never spoke. At the bottom of the hill, he saw the fires through a small grove of trees; a few dark figures still moved restlessly among them. The sentry he could see wore the Leviathan of the North Islands.

He set the boy down soundlessly among the trees, hoping the sentries he didn’t see would not notice him. Then he turned, as soundlessly, and went back uphill, feeling the dream wearing away at every step, until he was Cyan Dag, listening in the rain for the painful breathing, and terrified that he had misplaced the King of Yves to rescue an islander’s brat whimpering on his first battlefield.

So he told himself as he finally heard the broken, chattering breaths under the brush: It never happened. It was a dream. He crawled back in beside the king and waited, tense and sleepless, for dawn.

I never left him, he told the knights of Gloinmere when they resumed their search for the king, and Cyan emerged from the underbrush to greet them. That was how Regis, somehow still alive, remembered it as well. He stayed at my side all night, the king told his knights. He never left me.

So he became then and there, on the sodden field, and more formally later: Cyan Dag, Knight of Gloinmere.

It never happened, he thought as the dark around him grew thick, soundless, and the rain faded into memory. He smelled stone, dust, things that changed so slowly that they would be recognizable when the words for them were forgotten: bone, still water, ash.

He rose as the early light fell through the sagging doorposts of the tower. He stepped, blinking, into the dawn and remembered.