“I’m to study here?”
“Yes. What did you think I’d brought you here for?”
I swallowed. My throat was dry and my heart hammering; sickness, if I hadn’t been so happy. “I . . . I didn’t think about it. You just said it was somewhere safe, where Prandel wouldn’t find me—I never thought of lessons. . . .”
He looked very serious, suddenly. The darkness of his eyes seemed to still. “Of course you never thought of it: there was no time. I surprised you in your room during a storm and told you to come with me, and you did.” He was coming down to me, step by slow step. “And I am so glad you did. Glad that you trusted me enough to leave your home, and so unexpectedly.” He was directly above me. He eased my wet hood back (I had forgotten it) and I thought that it must be heavy, that my whole cloak must be dragging and sodden, but I could not feel it.
“So let me tell you now, a little too late: you are here to be safe, and here to be taught. I saw it as soon as I met you, Nola: your power is great. You glow with it, with its promise. You could not have stayed in that place and let it wither. I could not have allowed you to.”
I wondered if I would fall backward, dizzy with the empty space behind me and him in front, close enough to touch. He put his hand on my arm as if he knew, as if he had heard my thought. “I will teach you here, when I’m not needed at the castle. And someday, if your instruction goes well and I feel the time is right, you may come with me.”
“To the castle.” My voice was hoarse and quiet.
“To the castle.” Another smile, as gentle and strong as the hand on my arm. “But let’s begin with some sleep, shall we? Up here just a little further . . .
that door there, you see? The one with the cut glass knob. My great-aunt was so proud of it; got it from some sort of gypsy peddler who told her she’d live to over a hundred, which she did. She always wanted me to use the knob for Otherseeing, since—she claimed—the gypsy obviously had. Look at this! So bright you won’t need a light—though you wouldn’t anyway, as you’ll soon be sleeping.”
Again I thought, No, I won’t, and again I did not say it, because wonder had risen in my throat like tears. The room was huge, full of windows and pieces of furniture fit for the castle itself: cushioned chairs, long couches, two wardrobes inlaid with (I was certain) real gold, in patterns of leaves and flowers. The floorboards were dark and polished beneath the carpet, which was the colour of wine. But it was the bed that drew my gaze most insistently: a wooden headboard carved like the wardrobe, and fat mattresses (at least two), and a tumble of pillows with bright, tasselled covers.
“Do you like it?”
I made a sound that was half laugh, half gasp. “It will suffice,” I said, and he did laugh, his golden head thrown back, his eyes briefly closed.
“Good,” he said when he was looking at me once more. “I had hoped . . . I am happy that it will suffice. Are you hungry?”
“No.” I was thirsty, though, and glanced around until I saw a water jug on a stand by the door—a jug so tall and slender and delicately decorated that it hardly seemed to resemble the one that had sat in my room at the brothel. But everything here was like that. I recognized and could name each thing, but it was as if they belonged to the Otherworld, to a place both brighter and blurrier than any I had seen before.
“Good,” Orlo said. “I will have a fine breakfast prepared for you when you wake.” He gestured at the wardrobes. “Make sure to look in those, too; you should find something dry to wear. And now”—at the door, his hand on the blue glass of the knob—”I must take myself to my own bed for a few hours before I return to the castle.”
“So you won’t be here when I get up?” I asked, twisting my damp cloak in my hands.
“Likely not,” he said. “Even when I’m not teaching, the king and Teldaru often request my presence. I must not be too long away from them during the day. But at nightfall I will be yours, Nola.” He smiled one more slow smile, with lips and restless eyes.
I stared at the door, when he was gone, as if a shadow of him still lingered. Then I turned to the wardrobe closest to me and tugged its double doors open. “Oh,” I said, hardly noticing that I had spoken aloud. I reached for silk and velvet, for scarlet and green and gold stitched with silver. There were so many dresses—gowns, really—one for every day of the month, perhaps (if every day featured a ball or a visiting dignitary or a wedding). I did not wonder if they would fit me; would only have wondered if they had not.
The second wardrobe contained sleeping shifts: long ivory ones, short white ones trimmed with lace, which should have reminded me of the brothel and the girls—maybe even Larally, for whom I had seen snakes of blood—but did not, because they were so clean and soft. I chose a long one with two tiny pearl buttons at the collar and each of the wrists. Took my wet, dark, ragged clothes off and laid them carefully on the back of a chair. The cream-coloured cloth slipped over me, hung from my shoulders and arms as if it were not there. I wanted to feel it, so I turned, quickly, and it wrapped around my legs. I turned faster, faster, until I was spinning, and then the world lurched and thrust me face-first onto the bed.
This morning, I thought as my breath warmed the coverlet, I was in the courtyard. The courtyard! I cast barley for one of the Lady’s girls and saw butterflies. I kissed Bardrem.
I sat up slowly and stared at my old clothes. Stood and went back to them (my toes sinking into the carpet) and put my hand into the pocket of my dress. The paper there was no longer the shape it had been when I had first picked it up; it was flattened, bumpy with folds. I opened it back on the bed, smoothing it on my lap. There were four words, one at every corner of the paper. I read them once in the wrong order and again so that they made sense:
You are beautiful help!
I realized I was crying only when the neat curves of Bardrem’s letters began to wobble. And as soon as I realized I was crying, I realized I was crying hard, in wrenching gulps that hurt my chest. I peered from the note to the room, whose wood and cloth and tall, brightening windows were smudged now, but somehow even lovelier than before. But I’m not sad! I thought. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been—and I was crying harder still, curled on my side, clutching coverlet and paper in a moist ball.
When my tears were done, full morning was shining through the window glass. I pushed the coverlet down and pulled it up again, over my body, all the way to my chin. I’ll just lie here for a moment, I thought, and then I’ll go down to breakfast; he will have made it for me by now. Perhaps I’ll see him before he returns to the castle. . . .
I slept, and my dreams were black and gold.
CHAPTER NINE
Bardrem once said that poets should write of passion without any. Something to do with great works requiring care and rigour.
This thing I am writing is neither poem nor great work, and I am not sure where I am. Sometimes I am Nola, here, choosing words for old pain and writing them with a steadiness that is almost pleasure. Sometimes a few of these words dig their claws into me and pull, and I am lost among them, and no pain is old.
I have written nothing at all for three days. The last section was so easy, at first, which surprised me; I had been dreading it, certain there would be no words at all. But they came, so smoothly that I barely paused to eat or stretch—until I began to write of opening the wardrobe. I started to shake, then. Then. Not when I was describing Orlo’s eyes, or Bardrem’s note, though the shaking did worsen. But it was the wardrobe that began it. The gowns, and my thirteen-year-old hands reaching for them.
It is strange, this unexpected passion. Beautiful and frightening—and also, when I am feeling impatient with myself, a little silly.
But enough. I am back now, after three days of sleeping and comforting the princess (who cries so much now, especially at night). I am ready again, because I am unready. A mysterious contradiction: for all my youth, I have become Yigranzi!
The words for this latest beginning:
I woke to a tugging on
my sleeve.
I saw no one I expected, as I struggled up from sleep; not Orlo, or the Lady, or Bardrem. (He would have followed us, of course, and climbed over the fence. I would have to tell him to go back. He would try to kiss me again and I would have to turn my face away—perhaps.)
None of these people were by my bed, but the tugging continued. I rolled toward my arm, which was dangling over the edge, and peered down.
I think I would have jumped and scrambled to the other side of the bed, if I had been more awake. As it was I just lay and stared. A bird stared back at me. A very large bird with amber eyes, blue head feathers, a scarlet body, a green and yellow tail that swept along the floor behind it. Its beak was hooked and black and looked very sharp, though it held my sleeve quite gently, between the two pearl buttons.
“Greetings,” I said after we had been gazing at each other long enough that I felt alert. “I have seen you before.”
I had not known this until I spoke. I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember, and it cocked its head carefully, twisting my sleeve only a little. “I haven’t really seen you, of course, so it must have been a vision. I can’t recall. . . .” But, suddenly, I could. Grown-up Bardrem screaming rage and sorrow at grown-up me; a glorious, bright bird rising into the sky behind him. Yigranzi’s mirror in my lap for the first time.
“You,” I whispered to the bird, “and Bardrem and me. I had a long, thick braid. . . .” My Path, my Pattern; this house, and the tall, tall someday-stones.
The bird made a clucking noise and gave another tug. I smiled. “Very well—I’ll get up. But you’ll have to let go of me.”
It clucked again and opened its beak.
I chose the plainest dress in the wardrobe: a dark green one with darker green stitching around the neck and hem and copper-coloured ribbon laces up the bodice. It fell to my ankles. A woman’s dress, not a girl’s.
The bird cooed at me when I turned back to it, and I laughed. “Ah—you like it? So do I.” I twirled once and the soft, light cloth rose in a bell-shape around me. “Very well, then,” I said when the dress lay once more against my bare legs, “show me this house.”
The door was open a bit. I remembered Orlo closing it behind him and gave my own low whistle. “I don’t know how you did this,” I said, opening the door wider, “but I commend you.”
The bird preceded me into the corridor, its silver talons clicking on the wood, then silenced by carpet. It paused at the door next to mine, which had a regular metal knob. “The teaching room?” I said, recalling what Orlo had mentioned on the stairs. The bird bobbed its head. This door was also open, just a little, and I put my hand to the knob, but I did not push. No, I thought, he should be the one to show me what’s inside.
Despite its slender grace, the bird waddled to the head of the stairs. I waited for it to fly to the bottom but it did not; it hopped instead, from stair to stair, sometimes raising its wings for balance.
There was a mirror at the bottom. I had not really looked at any of the mirrors, earlier; now I looked into this one. I saw myself—my whole self, from head to feet. I had only ever seen my face reflected back at me, and that only in thick, dented pieces of metal. This was glass, and it was smooth. I touched it—fingers meeting fingers—and my image was so clear that I did not recognize myself. A girl with short, reddish hair and skin made golden by the courtyard sun. Freckles across my long, straight nose, which somehow did not look quite as long as it had in the brothel mirrors. My eyes were very green—or perhaps the dress was making them appear that way. I leaned closer, staring at my own stare. There was a narrow rim around the outside of my eyes, between whites and centres. It was dark grey or light black, just a shadow now, but someday more. I remembered seeing Yigranzi’s eyes for the first time and shivering. I remembered Chenn’s. Othersight, Otherworld; people marked by power. I smiled at myself: at my eyes, my freckles, my breasts (small but noticeable beneath the cloth), my waist, which looked narrow because the hips below it were widening. “You are beautiful,” Bardrem had written—and I thought, Yes, with a certainty so strong and sudden that it was not even pride.
The bird burbled and I turned away from the mirror. I followed it into another corridor, lined with portraits and dark with closed doors. The bird was the only brightness, bobbing in front of me with its tail feathers splayed and dragging like a gown of impossible colours.
We turned a few more corners and came to a hallway with narrow windows and no portraits. At the end of it was an enormous oaken door with a brass ring in it instead of a knob. “What—you can’t open this one?” I asked the bird, which blinked at me but stayed silent. I pushed on the wood and the door opened.
My mother’s scarred table and dirty rushes and guttering, smoky fire; Rudicol’s stone hearth and cluttered countertops and the narrow pathways between them. These were the kitchens I’d known. This one was like the rest of the house: it had details familiar to me, but so grand that they looked Otherworldly. There were two hearths so big that I could have walked into them and spun around with my arms out and not touched their stone walls. A counter of some dark, burnished wood ran down the centre of the room. Pots and skillets and large-bowled stirring spoons hung from hooks above it. The walls were lined with shelves that held smaller bowls and plates—plain brown ones and lovely, blue-and-gold painted ones that must have been used only for special meals.
It was a very neat room. Everything was clean, hanging or standing in place; even the wood for the hearths was stacked in perfect, matching piles against the wall next to me. I thought of Rudicol, who always shouted about cleanliness and order but never produced them. I thought of Bardrem, of what he would do if he were standing beside me (his eyes would widen beneath the loose fall of his hair, and he would gape, then seize me and dance me up and down the wide spaces around the counter). These thoughts made my chest ache. I turned to face the three windows, as if the sight of flowers and trees and sky would distract me. And it did—for I saw that the light was the deepening bronze of late afternoon, and I realized that I was ravenous.
Orlo had left my meal at the end of the counter closest to the hall door. There was a wooden stool there, and I sat down on it, already reaching. Brown bread and honey and clotted cheese; apples and one orange and dark, glossy, wrinkled fruit I’d never seen before (dates, I later learned); salt fish and chestnuts, roasted and peeled. I ate as I had on my first morning at the brothel (though that meal had been thin porridge and a slice of stale bread, toasted over the fire to make it more palatable—not that it had mattered to me, eight years old and partly starving).
I was licking orange juice off my fingers when I remembered the bird. It was beside me, gazing reproachfully—I was sure of it—at my face. “Oh,” I said, around my fingers. “Would you like some?”
It stretched up on its silver-scaled legs and plucked a date from the bowl. It transferred the fruit from beak to claw and nibbled at it, looking at me again as if to say, This is how you should eat, here.
I rose and groaned at the fullness of my belly. “Yes,” I said to the bird, though I did not turn to it, “you’re right: it’s my own fault. Perhaps a walk will help.” There was another door, set between two of the windows; a low, wide one made of unvarnished, pale wood, which had probably been used for deliveries and as a servant entrance. I gripped the knob, jiggled it, leaned against the wood, but the door did not open. I looked through the window—between the iron bars—and out at the garden. Its blossoms were as vibrant in sunlight as I’d thought they would be: pinks and indigos, white with darker whorls inside and out. The trees were very tall, their trunks so broad that I would not be able to touch my hands together, if I put my arms around them. The grass around the glass-pebbled path was thick; I thought of how cool it would feel against my calves and rattled the knob again, as if I had merely done it wrong, the last time.
“Very well,” I said when it was clear that the door was, indeed, locked. “Let’s go back to the front hall.”
The fro
nt door was locked too, as was a side one to which the bird led me. I sat on the lowest step of the entrance hall staircase and leaned my head against its banister. The bird cocked its head at me and I sighed. “If I can’t go outside I’ll wait here for him. It’s getting dark; surely he won’t be long.”
I did not feel myself fall asleep. When I started awake the air around me was black, except for a wavering light that blinded me for a moment. I rubbed my eyes and blinked the lamp into focus. The lamp, and the hand that held it.
“Mistress Weary Seer,” said Orlo, “you do not need to sleep on the stairs when there is a perfectly good bed available.”
I stood up quickly. My feet tangled in the folds of my dress and Orlo gripped my arm so that I would not fall. “I’m sorry,” I said, hoping my flush would be invisible in the weak light, “I’m very clumsy. The Lady was always scolding me for it.”
Orlo’s smile gleamed. “It is a good thing, then, that grace is not a requirement for Otherseeing. Though we’ll make sure that you won’t be tripping over your own clothing by the time you arrive at the castle.”
By the time, I thought, as warmth spread through my stomach. Not “if.”
“I’m glad you slept a bit,” he said as we went up the stairs. “You’ll have to learn to rest during the day, since your lessons will almost always be at night.” He turned to me; I hoped he would not notice how awkwardly I was holding my dress, trying to keep it above my ankles as I climbed. “Did you enjoy the food I left for you?”
“Oh yes—I ate far too much, and too fast, and then I thought I’d take a walk, but all the doors were locked.”
We were at the top of the stairs, now. Orlo raised the lamp so that its glow lit both our faces. He was all hollows, in the shadow-light: his cheeks, his eyes, his mouth. “You must have wondered why,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied, though all I really remembered feeling was a mild sort of annoyance.
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