Selera took; Selera told me to help her do it. Grasni would never do the same. Only that night, she did.
Before she did, she said, “Why do you keep letting her in?” Selera was gone, leaving behind a swath of her scent, which her father sent her in tiny bottles from some far-off country that had no rain, or some such thing. The perfume smelled like too many cut flowers, all of them just about to rot. I thought this in general, but especially after I had been Otherseeing, when all my senses were too acute.
“She amuses me,” I said thickly.
Tonight’s visions had been disturbing, as usual: a severed hand with emeralds for nails; a wolf shaking a cat in its jaws. “An apple tree,” I had said. “A woman dancing by a river.”
I waited for Grasni to respond with one of her dry, withering comments, but she did not. She sat down, stood up, walked over to the bed and back to the window. She stared out at the moonlit leaves—all of them unfurling, at last, after a long, bitter winter—then turned and strode back to the bed. I watched her, struck yet again by how badly her clothes fit her. She was a plump young woman—we were about nineteen, at this point—but her dresses were far too large, and entirely shapeless. (Selera had once told her to stop stealing curtains from the castle.) Looking at Grasni always made me feel better about myself, though I had the grace to feel guilty about this.
“Grasni. Stop pacing.She whirled; her dress billowed and subsided, slowly. “I’m sorry. I just . . . I . . .”
I had never seen her struggle for words before. “Grasni—what?”
She raised a freckle-splotched arm and held it over her eyes. “Othersee for me.”
I laughed, but she didn’t.
“Nola.” Her arm was still up, hiding everything but her mouth. “Do not make this more difficult.”
“I . . . all right. Is . . .”—now I was struggling, casting about for explanations even as a hard, cold weight settled in my stomach—“is it to do with your brother?” He had joined a band of rebels in northern Lorselland, whose rulers were preventing their people from using or even speaking of the Othersight. Grasni told me about such things, which I’d have had no idea about otherwise—political things; matters of injustice, violence and scandal that existed far beyond our walls.
“No. It’s . . .” Her arm came down. Her eyes were bright, but not with laughter; with that hunger, instead, which made people helpless and greedy. “It’s someone else—a guard. Sildio.”
“A man.” My voice was harder than it should have been, but the cold in me was spreading. I had no trouble using my cursed eyes and words on Selera and others I did not know enough to care about—but on Grasni? “You wish me to search Pattern and Path because of a man.”
“I know I’ve given you no warning—never talked about him with you—but I was too ashamed; I care about big things; I’m a stronger, cleverer person than this—only I’m not, Nola.” She drew a deep breath and cleared her throat and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Please don’t look at me like that. I already feel as if I’ve grown a tail; don’t make me grow fangs too. Because then I’d drool, and—”
“Think on this,” I said. “Think of the rule you’d be breaking—the one you always remind the children of. ‘You are too important for that’—remember—”
“And when have you ever worried about rules?”
“This isn’t about me! It’s about you: what you care about! And anyway, you’ve always mocked the girls who come to ask you about love.”
She smiled a smile I’d never seen before—thin and careful. “Well, then, I suppose it’s up to you to do the mocking, from now on.”
“Please, Grasni”—one more entreaty, even though I knew it would do no good.
She drew a mirror out from somewhere in her voluminous dress. It was small (would fit in a palm) and copper and she had brought it with her from her home when she had come to the castle, at ten. It was the first thing she had ever Otherseen with, when her brother (who had no Othersight but wanted it, desperately) had asked her to. She passed it to me, and I took it. Ran my thumbs over its dents and felt a stirring of anticipation, despite all the dread.
“Tell me, Nola,” Grasni said. “Tell me where my Path will take me.”
Grasni’s images were so bright, after Selera’s. Here were the lycus blossoms and the waterfall; the smiling woman and the baby’s dimpled fingers. There were shadows, but only at the edges.
When the brightness faded I lifted my eyes from the little mirror. Grasni was leaning against the wall. She was pale; her freckles—which were dark red and brown—looked livid. Other spots danced over her skin: the leavings of my Othersight, which I knew would fade, along with my dizziness. I wanted to smile at her—I tried to, but could not.
You will be happy. “I saw a sea of shadow. A purple thunderhead shot through with lightning.”
Her shoulders sagged.
You’ll cut your hair: it will be short and curly and it will suit you, just as your joy will. “An empty cradle.” Oh, please, I thought—an empty cradle? She’ll never believe that; she’ll think I’m being melodramatic to tease her—but she was turning her face away. No—those aren’t the right words; they aren’t.
How could the truth be so loud inside my head and silent on my tongue? Where were the pathways he twisted and snipped? I had to find them; I reached inward and strained to see, to feel, but there was nothing but a seeping white pain behind my eyes. This happened every time I tried, and it is why I had stopped—until now. This was important; she was my friend.
“A sea of shadow.” Grasni was smiling again. This smile I recognized; it was her wry, “ah, well” one. “I think I already know where it is. Do you promise to visit me there?”
“Oh, Grasni,” I said, and, “I’m sorry,” though she would not understand what I really meant.
And then, in a rush that swept the pain from my head, I knew what I must do.
“Now it’s my turn.”
She frowned.
I rose, walked to her, thrust the mirror into her hands. “Take this. Look at my Pattern, now that I’ve looked at yours. We’ve never done anything without each other, after all—not since that morning you came to me with the butterfly pins.” My excitement was like wind snatching the words from my mouth. Why had I not thought of this before? Why—had I been so lazy, so complacent simply because I lived at the castle (not in a brothel; not alone in a house), and because I had a friend, and because the king knew my name? Because I, too, had simply been reluctant to break an Otherseeing rule?
No, I told myself, clenching my trembling hands as if this would still my thoughts, as well; it is just that the time has not been right. Grasni was the one to show me this Path, and she did it tonight. This is the way, and I am glad of it.
“I’ll tell you what I told the children,” Grasni said. “You give; you do not take. Don’t try to just because I have.”
“No—it’s not just because of that. Truly: I want you to look. I need you to. Please, Grasni.” Those words again, breathless now.
She gazed at me for a long time. I heard a bird singing, in our quiet. There would be baby birds soon; bits of eggshell scattered in the new grass, and sometimes the babies themselves, fallen from their nests before their wings had had time to grow.
“It’s not a man, is it?” she said at last. “Because at least one of us should have loftier concerns.”
She wanted me to laugh. “Maybe,” I said instead. “I don’t know.”
She nodded. Gave me one more long look from her brown-grey eyes, then sat down on the chair with the mirror in her left hand.
“Tell me.” The words felt terribly strange on my tongue. They even sounded strange. I’d heard them so many times before—but now, suddenly, they were new. “Speak of what will come, for me.”
She bent her head. I saw the reflection of her eye—just one; the mirror was that small, and so battered that the image was warped and blurry. I edged away. I was dizzier than I had been; I felt behind me for the
bed and sat down hard. Only Teldaru had done this for me (to me) before, and I could not tell Grasni. I couldn’t tell her anything important—but maybe she would see, now. Maybe I wouldn’t need my voice, or a quill and ink and paper. I wrapped my fingers in the rough twine mane of one of the toy horses and waited for her to look up.
When she did her eyes were black. I had not expected this to surprise me, for this was what happened when seers were caught in a vision. But this was Grasni, and she was seeing the Otherworld—mine—and I sucked in my breath noisily and pushed myself back still farther on the bed. She stared at me, as the leaves hissed in wind and the night bird sang and my heart thumped its hope above every other sound. She was motionless until the black gave way again to brown, and then she blinked at me. Her mouth opened and her legs jerked and the mirror fell with a clang.
“Grasni?” My voice cracked.
She wet her lips with her tongue. I thought I should get her a drink from the pitcher of water by the bed, but I could not move. “It was like rock,” she said in a ragged whisper. “Rock with branches sticking up—burned ones, all black and bare. I didn’t know where I was. It wasn’t your time-to-come and it wasn’t your past. It was . . . now?” She stood but did not straighten; her shoulders stayed rounded, as if she were an old woman.
I was up too, lurching toward her. The old woman and the drunk woman; we made a fine pair. “But did you see anyone?” I asked. “Anyone at all? Did you understand that—” But my words tangled in my throat, too close to unspeakable truth, and I could say nothing more. I reached out, and when my hands were almost touching hers she stumbled backward.
“What’s wrong with you?” she cried. Just before she whirled and ran from me, I saw her tears.
Nothing will be the same, I thought—and I was right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Grasni came back to my room a week later. It was a wet spring night, this time, and she stood in the open door.
“You’re soaking,” I said, as casually as I could. I had missed her terribly but could not let her hear this. “Your hair’s sticking to your neck. And there’s rain on the floor—come in, Grasni. Sit with me.”
She had managed not to look at me at all in our history classes, and in the ones on Otherseeing tools that we taught the “babies” (as we called them), and she did not look at me now. “I haven’t been able to sleep,” she said in a hoarse voice that sounded nothing like hers. “I’m afraid I’ll dream of . . . that place. But I see it anyway, even when I’m awake. It’s behind my eyelids.”
“That happens sometimes with strong visions: you know that. It takes a few days, but—”
“I told Mistress Ket.” She looked at me then. Her eyes were bright. More tears? I wondered, and my own eyes blurred, washed red with rage and fear. Teldaru, I thought, very clearly, I’ll kill you for this.
“I had to, Nola. I’m so sorry. I thought it would ease my mind a little—weaken the image because I’d shared it. But it hasn’t.”
“Please come in,” I said, though I don’t think I truly wanted her to. What could I have said? What you saw is Teldaru’s doing would have become, “Rain is good for flowers,” or some such thing.
“No.” She was already turning. A gust of wind made the flames in my hearth gutter and spattered rain all the way to my bare feet.
“You’ve been my friend for five years,” I said. I had practised these words, in my solitude. “I am still the same person, no matter what you have seen.” I drew a trembling breath. “And who else will help me do battle with Selera? You’re the only one who knows how.”
Grasni almost smiled—or so I told myself. She seemed to hesitate, between the rain and the firelight. But then she shook her head and bit her lip; said, “No—I’m sorry, Nola; I can’t,” and fled from me. Again.
It only occurred to me much later that night to wonder what Mistress Ket had said, or what she would do. I didn’t have long to wonder, because Teldaru came to me the next day.
“Walk with me,” he said. He was standing where Grasni had stood the night before, but now the sun was shining. Everything (his hair, the leaves and sky behind him) was very bright. I blinked at him and did not move.
“Get up, Nola, or I will fetch Selera and ask her to walk with us.”
“May your Path end in torment,” I said pleasantly, “and soon.” I rose, stretched, bent to put on my slippers.
“You’ll need sturdier shoes than those,” he said. “We have a long way to go.”
Teldaru was wearing one of his finest tunics: deep blue, embroidered with whorls of silver and gold thread. His cloak was mostly gold, and seemed to pulse in the sunlight. Borl walked at his right side. He was the Great Teldaru, and everyone who saw him in the city recognized him. I watched them gape and murmur to each other. A group of girls by a well let out a series of squeals. Teldaru paused and turned to them and they clustered together, gasping now, clutching each other’s hands. He produced a slender lycus branch from beneath his cloak and held it out to the girl in the centre, who was short and plump and had lank brown hair and sweat-sheened skin. “Mistress,” he said, in a sonorous voice. He smiled as she took the branch and held its white and pink blossoms to her face. His perfect, “my world is you alone” smile.
The girls began to whisper as soon as we walked away. I looked over my shoulder and found their eyes on me, and again my insides crawled with pride and shame.
“So you always carry flowers,” I said. “Just in case.”
“Yes,” he said, already smiling at someone else.
A little boy ran up to give him a flower, when we were walking along the wide road of the wealthy east-town merchants. Teldaru wound it around his cloak pin. There were many children in the poor lower town, with its narrow streets and mud and the smell of rot and waste that I remembered so well. He gave them coins—every one of them, even when more came running from alleys and houses, whooping and holding out their dirty hands.
“And me, O revered Master Teldaru?” I said, cupping my own palm. The children were behind us now. He did not respond; he was walking faster, toward the faded awnings of the lowtown market. When he reached the stalls (with me behind him, trying not to pant) he slowed again, and put a hand on my arm.
“Look, Nola.” I did. “What do you see?”
The ragged cloth of the awnings; lengths of bleached, weathered wood covered in salt fish or fruit—pale lycus, picked too soon, and other scarlet ones I did not recognize. Women with dresses as worn as the awnings, and faces pinched beneath headscarves that were not faded, but bright greens and oranges. Like Yigranzi’s.
He saw where I was looking. “Belakaoan cloth,” he said. “Yes. And Belakaoan fruit. I have ensured that even the poorest of our citizens will be able to obtain at least some of the items that are so prized among wealthier Sarsenayans.”
The giggling girls by the well had been wearing jewels in their hair, I remembered. And strips of bright material tied around their waists.
“Belakao,” he said, as if to himself. I was suddenly cold. He has forgotten nothing, I thought. He has been busy for years, plotting, and I have no idea what’s been going on outside the school.
“So this is what you wished to show me?” I said. “Some scarves and fruit? And how beloved you are to girls and poor children?”
He gazed at me. I was as tall as he was, but this look of his always made me feel smaller—a girl again, craning up at him. “In part. I thought it would help you, after all this time, to see that I have been hard at work, drawing Belakao close. For it must be close, before we break it.” He shook his head, smiled a slow smile. “But there is more. There is something to be done.”
He led me swiftly away from the market. Whenever I lagged too far behind, Borl growled and snapped at my heels. I was so intent on avoiding his jaws that I hardly noticed where we were. Only when Teldaru halted abruptly—and I stepped aside to keep from walking into him—did I raise my head.
We were at the city gate. The easter
n one, with the great carved doors and the round towers with conical tops and the green banners that were prettier than the silver ones that flew above the southern gate. I had walked between these doors once a year, since my arrival at the castle, on Ranior’s Pathday. The entire city seemed to empty out on that day in late summer. I had never joined the procession as a child; the Lady had not allowed anyone to leave the brothel, since business used to increase dramatically during the festival.
The guards atop the towers saluted Teldaru, and we walked together onto the road that stretched like a ribbon or a snake—like a vision from the Otherworld, except that it was not. It was a real path, made of cobbles, crowded with wagons and people. But we walked among these people, all of them staring, whispering as the others had, and very soon there were fewer of them, and the way unfolded before us, among trees and over hills, beneath the empty sky.
“You see now where we are going.”
“Yes.”
I had never really noticed the details of this road and the land around it. All the other times I had come this way I had been giddy, surrounded not by walls but by people I knew: Grasni, who would insist on holding onto my skirt so that we would not be separated, and the younger students behind us, wide-eyed and gripping each other’s hands. Teldaru had stayed close to us, but I had not cared: there was too much singing and laughter, too much sun.
Now there was quiet. Our footsteps, and the clicking of Borl’s nails on the stone, and the wind stirring leaves and the tall, slender grasses that lined the road. Once or twice something moved in the grass and Borl plunged after it, but Teldaru whistled for him and he came, whining and slavering, and resumed his place behind me. The light was a pressure now, thrusting at my face, and then—as the sun moved, above—at my shoulders and my back. I was so tiny, here.
“Tell me.”
The first words in several hours; I started. “What?” My voice seemed too loud, even as it vanished.
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