I did not move, and I made no sound.
“Well?” Selera demanded, frowning. “Is there?”
I said, “No.” This false word rose effortlessly over all the true ones.
“She may be mad,” Selera said to Teldaru, “but I think I like her visions.” She looked back at me. “You will Othersee for me tomorrow.”
No. Never again.
“Of course,” I said, and bowed my head.
“The most difficult part was first.” Teldaru was pacing. He looked at me every time he spun to walk the other way, but he was not seeing me: he was lost in the memory of my Paths, and what he had done to them. “I suffered more exhaustion the second and third times, but it was the first that truly shook me. I had to find so many separate strands—vision and speech, volition and will; all the ones that ran toward your time-to-come. It was excruciating, but I expected this; I’ve tried such things before, on others. I made mistakes before, but not this time: I knew this even before I brought Selera to you.”
Selera was gone. He and I were alone, as we always had been. I was curled on my bed, crying. I did not care that he would see me cry. I hardly noticed it myself, except that now and then I made deep, wrenching noises that shook my whole body.
“You will see true visions but all the words you speak about them will be false—I had to find all the roads that would make this possible, Nola! Imagine that! Find all the ones that would threaten this, too, and pinch them out. Burn them black.”
He took a long drink from the wine ewer. Wiped the wetness from his mouth with one savage sweep of his arm. “After that it was easier. You will not be able to refuse a request to Othersee. If the words of command are spoken, you must answer—nothing terribly difficult about that, once I had altered those first Paths. You will tell no one of what I have done, or what we will do together and, You will never leave me—these ones were the easiest of all. Though by the time I was finished I hardly had the strength to move. I nearly did not catch you when you ran, you know.”
He was seeing me, now. He smiled, knelt by my bed. Drew circles on my cheeks with my tears and his fingertips. “But now you understand: it would not have mattered, if you had escaped me. For if you had tried to tell anyone about me, about what I have been doing—if you had tried to tell the truth, you would have failed.”
He lay down beside me. I thrust at him with hands and feet but he did not move, except to draw me against him with his muscle-roped arms.
“I’ll break it,” I said. The curse, I wanted to add, but could not. I’ll break the curse. He was so close that my own breath was warm on my face.
He chuckled. “Break what, dearest? More crockery? Your arm?” He paused. He rubbed my back, which had stiffened; long, slow strokes, up and down. When he spoke again his voice was serious. “You won’t, you know. Not unless you find another seer powerful enough to alter all the Paths I did. Powerful enough to remake them. And how will that happen, if you cannot ask them to?”
“I’ll kill you, then.”
He wrapped his hand in my hair and pulled until I was looking up at him. His eyes shifted like the black, boiling water of my vision. “If you do, your Paths will stay as they are now. Only I can restore them. No, Nola: if you kill me, you’ll forever lose the chance to free yourself.”
“You’re lying.”
“And yet you will not harm me, in case I am not.” He ran his hand from my shoulder to my thigh; his thumb kneaded, there.
“I’ll kill myself.”
He smiled. “You won’t. Feel your breath, your skin—you’re young, my dear—you won’t. But hold your rage close. It makes you beautiful and it makes you strong. And you will need strength, for what we are to do together.”
“I’ll do nothing.” My voice broke on the last word.
“You will—yes, because I will tell you to. And because, if you are very, very good and do as I say, I shall remake your Paths myself.”
I wanted to believe him, and he must have seen this on my face. He smiled. “I promise, Nola. If you help me and forgive me, I will undo what I have done. But you must be good.” He drew me to him again. I shuddered and gasped the last of my tears, and I listened to his heart, and then, somehow, I slept.
He was still there when I woke. He was sitting on the bed now, with one hand on my hip and the other on a dress. I remembered everything, as I stared at its clean, flat, blue folds and its silk ribbons. I remembered in a rush and thought, No—that cannot have happened; it cannot be true.
“Are you hungry?”
I did not look at him. I was terribly hungry—cramping with it—but I said nothing.
“Put the dress on, Nola. We’re going outside.”
Outside, I thought—and everything else fell away.
He stood and walked to the door. I waited for him to turn his back but he did not, and even this did not matter. I tugged the filthy linen shift up over my head.
“You’ll have a new room, of course,” he said. “And a bath. Right away.” His eyes leapt and lingered and I bent to hide my flush (for apparently it did matter, after all). I picked the dress up and it slipped over my hands like water. I pulled it over my head and let it fall, and I thought of that first dress—the one I had taken from the wardrobe at the house. So that wasn’t really your great-aunt’s house, I would have said, if I could. If the words had not been about his hidden life, and thus unspeakable. And I already know that Uja isn’t really your bird.
He smiled broadly, as if he had managed to hear what was in my head. “Let me pin your hair up; it’s terribly dirty, but this should help.”
Outside, I reminded myself as I walked to him. You’re about to go outside; stay calm. He drew a collection of pins and combs from his pouch. I expected him to fumble with them (as Bardrem had once, when he tried to help Chenn with her hair), but he did not: he inserted them quickly and firmly. When he was done he teased two strands out to fall at the sides of my face. He cupped my cheeks in his hands.
“Good enough,” he said. “Now come.”
I expected it to be day: dazzling, blinding, like the last time I’d been so close to outside. But the light was soft and indigo, and I only squinted a little bit as I stepped out beyond the doorway. There was a warm wind blowing, and I turned my face into it. It smelled like rain.
“This way.”
I hardly heard him. I felt as if I were floating, so light that I noticed nothing but the touch and colour of the air. I suppose I followed him. Trees, a dusk-darkened pool, the stones of the keep—they all flowed past me, or I past them. People, too, their faces gentle and featureless. A sweet, soft, drunken blur, until Teldaru grasped my wrist and squeezed it, hard.
The first face I saw clearly was the king’s. He was smiling, though his eyes were worried, as he looked at me (at my gaunt, sallow face and my too-thin body, on which the blue dress hung loose). I smiled back at him. Then I looked around at the hall: a large, dim room lined with tapestries and filled with long tables. No one was sitting on the benches, though there were servants moving about, gathering up plates. I stared at the food on the plates; I could not, in fact, look away.
“Nola. Nola—sit—eat, please. . . .”
I sat. There was a bowl in front of me. A piece of bread in it, and some bean stew that was no longer hot enough to steam, but that warmed my tongue and throat. Haldrin and Teldaru did not speak while I ate. I thought fleetingly of the Lady, and her horror of noisy, voracious eating. I imagined her seeing me now, hunched over a bowl, shovelling food into my mouth in front of the King of Sarsenay and Great Seer Teldaru.
When I was done I straightened on the bench. I was full, and every bit of me, inside and out, wanted me to be happy. But I could not be; I remembered this, truly understood it, even as Teldaru said, “You see, Hal: she has evidently regained her appetite, along with her senses.”
The king leaned forward. He was sitting on a dais, upon a wooden throne that was inlaid with whorls of pearl and strips of gold. “Is this true?” he a
sked me. “Are you feeling well, now?”
Teldaru has cursed me. He is the mad one. He will use his forbidden power to destroy the peace of this land. He is not your friend.
“Yes,” I said, “I am.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I spent three days alone, in the room they gave me. It had coloured glass bottles on its shelves, and little carved wooden boxes. Two horses made of fabric so worn the straw stuffing was coming out. They never quite stood up on their own.
“You’ll be interested to know that this was Chenn’s room,” Teldaru said from the doorway, that first time. I think he expected me to be afraid, or at least unsettled. I might have been, if it had been night. But the sunlight was shining past the open shutters and onto the blue and red glass bottles, and the horses seemed to be smiling lopsided smiles. I smiled too, and said, “Good.”
So for three days I was by myself in this room. I threw the door and shutters wide, even at night, when the air was early-winter sharp. There was always a man outside—a succession of men, in fact; Teldaru must have had them on a schedule. They wore no armour, but their thick necks and bulging shoulders would have revealed them as soldiers, even if the short swords at their sides had not. They began by standing, tensing whenever I appeared. I would glare at them, then turn to look out at the seers’ courtyard. I only ever looked—at the other small, stone rooms that clung, like mine, to the red wall; at the drifts of fallen leaves and the bare branches above them; at the sky. Especially at the young people who would gather at their own doors and out under the trees. Two boys, two girls: it seemed that Teldaru had told me the truth of this, anyway, when he had still been Orlo. They stood, singly or in a group, and stared at me—Selera most often, though thankfully she did not come too close. She made a show of whispering to the others, and her rolling eyes and scornful smile were obvious enough—but I was not sure what I saw in the faces of her companions. I showed all of them—guards and youths—an expression of defiant helplessness. See, my eyes and straight, stiff body said, I am not afraid, but I am also frozen here. I could not move quickly, even if I truly wanted to.
The guards seemed to believe this, for they all began to relax. They leaned and watched me with hooded, careless eyes, and I thought, Yes, you think this. Think that I will just stand here forever.
Because I meant to run.
At first I was too tired to think about this with any precision. I simply knew I would reason it out when I could. But before I could, Teldaru came for me.
He had not appeared at all, those first three days. A silent, stooped woman had come instead, with my food, and to take me (escorted by whichever guard was nearby) to the dark, dank outbuilding I was now permitted to use, rather than a bucket in the corner. I had tried not to think at all about Teldaru, and I really only failed at night, when every scraping branch or pacing guard became him, coming to me again in darkness.
He came at noon. I had just eaten and was sitting on the chair by the desk. (There was nothing inside it: no papers, no quills or ink. Nothing that could help me, now that my own voice could not.) I saw him when he walked out of the naked trees, along the path of tiny white stones. He was wearing a deep red cloak that he twitched at, every few strides, to keep it from tangling in his legs. Borl loped beside him, his tongue lolling. Teldaru nodded to the guard, and then his eyes found me. He did not smile, and my insides clenched. I knew what his smiles meant; his smooth, expressionless face could mean anything.
“Good,” he said when he was in my room. “You’re dressed and you’ve eaten. We can go.”
“Where?” I did not want to speak to him, of course, but I needed to know this.
“To the history lesson room. It’s time you met the others.”
I followed him outside, my belly sour with nervousness. Borl rose and planted his legs wide and snarled, showing his pink-and-black mottled gums. I snapped my own teeth at him. “Enough,” Teldaru said brusquely, maybe to both of us. He walked, and I hurried to walk beside him. (Borl loped behind, still growling deep in his throat.) We stopped at a building that was nestled in the crook of the courtyard wall. This building had two floors and a much larger door. A great tree stooped in front of it, its branches touching the upper casements. There was a corridor inside, and a flight of smooth, uneven stairs, and a dimness that made me hesitate.
“Up,” Teldaru said, and wrapped his fingers around my arm, just above the elbow. He pushed me before him on the stairs, which were unnervingly slanted, worn down and inward by generations of student-seer feet. When we reached the top he put his hand against the small of my back, just as he had when we had crept out of the brothel. He kept his hand there as he rapped at a new door, this one painted green. It opened. Heads and eyes turned to us.
“Master Teldaru!” The teacher was a short, round woman with white hair that had been pulled into an unruly knot. Behind her were a high table, shelves of books, an open window filled with a tangle of bare tree branches. All four students were sitting around the table. There were books open in front of each of them: slender ones with large, colourful pictures for the two boys and thicker ones with only text for the older girls. Sheets of paper too, and quills and ink. My palms began to sweat; I pressed them against my dress.
“We were not expecting you today! But welcome, of course; we were just reciting the twelve laws of the Paleric Age. . . .” Her black eyes leapt from Teldaru to me and back again. I could tell that she did not want to stare, as all the students were, but that she also could not resist.
“Ah,” Teldaru said, “the Paleric Age. Excellent.” I could hear his smile. His warmest, most relaxed tone; everyone else smiled too, though all of them except Selera lowered their eyes to their books or hands. “You must forgive my interruption, but I have brought someone to meet you. You may have seen her in the courtyard.” I thought he had probably watched them there, as they watched me, and whispered. And now I am one of them, I thought, with another thrum of eagerness and dread.
“Her name is Nola. Her Otherseeing power is so strong that it made her sick, for a time, but now she is well again. She will be studying history with you.”
A pause. The younger boy wriggled on his chair. Selera twisted a long, blonde coil of hair around her forefinger.
“Only history?” the teacher said.
“Yes.” He was stroking my back. I wanted to whirl and cry, “What? Now that I’m finally here you won’t even let me take lessons with the others?” Instead I flushed slowly, as his fingers circled.
“As I have said already, she is powerful. In fact, she could probably teach several of your classes.” He chuckled low in his throat, and it sounded like one of Borl’s growls. “So I will be taking charge of her Otherseeing instruction.”
Selera stopped playing with her hair. Her emerald eyes widened. And I felt triumph, flooding over everything else. I smiled a tiny smile at her.
“I will leave her with you now. If you could just step outside with me for a moment, Mistress Ket?”
“Certainly. Children, write down laws eight and twelve without consulting the texts.”
She was gone. They both were.
I walked to the table. There was an extra stool pushed beneath it; I pulled it out, sat down between Selera and the littlest boy.
“What are your names?” I said as I reached for paper and quill. My voice was steady; my heartbeat was not. Perhaps my hand would be unsteady too, and I would blot the ink, smudge it so that no one would be able to read my words.
“I believe Mistress Ket told us to write.” Selera glared at each of the other students. The two boys avoided her eyes; the girl looked back at her with an expression of profound disinterest.
“She did,” I said, and dipped the quill in Selera’s ink pot.
I had imagined what I would write, when the opportunity arose. The words had been very clear, these past few days:
I am Teldaru’s captive. He uses Otherseeing for evil purposes and has cursed
me so that I cannot t
ell anyone. Please give this information to the king. Please help me.
I did not expect anyone to believe me, but I did think they might fetch King Haldrin. I would write much more for him, of course, but now I needed to set down only enough to bring him to me.
I placed the quill’s tip against the paper, aware of everyone’s eyes on me. My hand moved and letters scratched forth, dark and wet.
Teldaru Teldaru Teldaru Teldaru
Selera giggled.
Teldaru Tel
“Well. It seems that Master Teldaru’s special student wishes to learn more than visions from him.”
I set the quill down. Folded the paper in half, and in half again. Of course, I thought, flooded now with a numbness that was too familiar. Of course he would think of this; he would make sure to take everything away from me . . . There was a warm pulse, in the numbness: the memory of another Path I had not even known about until it was gone. I lowered my head for a moment, so that my freshly washed hair hid my face.
“Anyhow,” said the other girl, who was sitting beside Selera. This girl was covered in freckles (even her arms) and had greyish eyes and lank brown hair. She was shapeless, too—fourteen but somehow old as well, all rounded edges but no curves. “My name is Grasni.” She nodded at me as if we had just conducted a satisfying bit of business. I nodded back at her.
“Grasni is tedious and annoying,” Selera said. “You and she should be fast friends.”
“I believe Mistress Ket told us to write?” Grasni said in a high, querulous imitation of Selera. Selera herself scowled and the little boy to my left cringed back on his stool, but Mistress Ket came back in then, and we all bent over our papers.
The eighth law of the Paleric Age, I wrote, as familiar numbness gave way to familiar pain.
I ran that night.
I put the largest glass bottle under my cloak. It was heavy and had a broad, thick bottom. It was also red, and this seemed important, even though I would not be able to see it.
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