The Pattern Scars

by Caitlin Sweet

  Borl was lying as he had been before. His head was resting near my left hand. He seemed indistinct, outlined in blurry purple, and I strained to make him clearer, even though I did not want to.

  “Still can’t see well enough?” Teldaru said. He leaned across my lap and took my hand, stroked the back of it with a fingertip that was more like a needle. “Feel, then.”

  Coarse fur with bumpy ribs beneath. Warm fur, warm flesh—but he had only been dead a short time; surely he could still be warm. . . .

  His side rose and fell beneath my hand. Once—an imagining, an impossibility—but no, twice, and again. I felt Borl breathe. I heard him too, making wet, wheezing sounds. Had he been making these before, or had the pressure of my hand prompted them? It did not matter. He was breathing.

  Teldaru whistled. The same few notes he always used to bring Borl back to his side, or simply to attention; they echoed in the domed chamber and behind my eyes. My vision was much clearer: I saw the clean, pink edges of the dog’s wound meet as he lifted his head, very slowly.

  “Good boy,” Teldaru said, and reached out his hand. Borl ignored it. He whimpered. He held his head shakily up. His eyes were brown beneath a gauze of white—rolling, unblinking above the moist red of his tongue. His eyes rolling, wide and blind as Laedon’s.

  “Borl!” Teldaru spoke more sharply, and his fingers stiffened into claw shapes. Borl could have shifted his head to the side just a little and touched him. He did not. He lowered his muzzle, instead, down into my upturned hand. He licked my palm in long, rough strokes that did not change, even when Teldaru gave a ragged shout and lurched to his feet. I laughed; when he struck me across the face with the back of his hand I kept laughing. Borl raised his head again and snarled, baring his teeth. By now my laughter was thin and breathless. It ached against my ribs. Teldaru kicked Borl in the side, over and over, and even though the dog whined and thrashed on the floor, he never stopped growling.

  Teldaru spun and grasped the lantern. He strode to the stairs that led down to the doorway, where he turned to look back at me. He opened his mouth as if he would say something, but he did not. He gazed at me a moment longer and then he left me alone in the dark.

  Only it was not quite dark, and I was not quite alone. Borl wheezed beside me, the whites of his eyes shining in the torchlight that guttered, now, as the flames burned low. I wheezed a little too. Neither of us moved very much. Borl’s paws twitched and I bent my legs up and flat, up and flat. It was all I could do for quite awhile.

  Perhaps I should have been frightened, but I was not. I had been earlier, lost in the maze of dead-end corridors, but now I was quite calm, and not because I was numb with shock. I knew, despite horror and revulsion, that I was safe.

  Many, many hours must have passed. I imagined the sun setting above the hill, Ranior’s monument a long arm of shadow on the ground. I imagined stars and wind. I slept.

  When I woke I could move again, and the torches had gone out. Borl’s head was in my lap. He was no longer wheezing; just panting lightly, as if he were hot. I stretched my arms up and jiggled my legs until he lifted his head.

  “Come on, now,” I said. My voice hurt my throat, but mostly because I was desperately thirsty. He whined questioningly. “Up you get. And me too.”

  I managed this before he did. My legs buckled and I leaned against the sarcophagus, gripping its top edge so hard that my fingernails bent. When I felt steady I let go and stood with my arms out, like a child balancing upright for the first time. “Up, boy,” I said to Borl. His legs scrabbled and his claws clicked wildly on the stone and he blew his breath out in great, heaving gasps, but he could not rise. “Fine.” I bent carefully and scratched his ears. “You stay there until you’re stronger.” He laid his head back down but his rolling eyes followed the sounds I made.

  Once I was upright my own strength returned quickly. I set my hands and feet to the carved bumps in the sarcophagus’ side and pulled myself up, slowly and steadily. I twisted onto the lid, on my belly like a snake. I sat up and swung around so that I could peer down again.

  “Easy, Borl,” I said as he whimpered and scratched again at the floor. “Rest a little more. All we have to do now is wait.”

  Teldaru came in very quietly. Perhaps he intended to surprise me, or to watch me sleep—but I was awake and sitting atop the sarcophagus with my legs dangling. He put the lantern down by the stairs and walked over to me. There was a bag in his hand. He looked at me—only at me; not even once at Borl.

  I took the bag when he held it up to me. It was heavy, full of lumpy, bumpy things: a waterskin, I saw when I opened the cloth, and an apple, a rounded end of bread, a block of yellow cheese. I ate and drank everything, but not greedily. “I have better manners than I did the last time you watched me eat,” I said, between bites. “Good castle manners. Must be much less interesting for you.”

  He said nothing. Just stood below me, watching me with still, black eyes.

  When I was done I dabbed at my mouth with the hem of my skirt. We looked at each other for a very long time. “You didn’t expect that,” I said at last, gesturing at Borl. “You expected me to succeed, but you had no idea what would happen after. It surprised you.”

  Another silence. I had no trouble meeting his gaze. I was strong and sure, and I knew that this feeling would not last, and the knowledge only made it all the sweeter. “Isn’t there anything you want to tell me? Like why he’s blind?”

  Teldaru frowned but I knew he would speak; he could never resist an opportunity to instruct. “It is a result of remaking. Those who are remade are always blind. Also, sometimes they can only move a bit, and sometimes not at all—this depends on how long they were dead.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I have done just the tiniest bit of studying, in my time.”

  “Studying? That is hardly proof. In fact, you have hardly ever proven anything to me—I wonder if you really—”

  As I was saying those last three words he drew the knife from his belt and plunged its blade into Borl’s side. I leapt from the sarcophagus as he went on stabbing: belly, throat, belly, while I hammered at him with my fists and wrapped my arms around his jerking shoulders. Borl made no sound. A few moments later, Teldaru sagged back into my arms, pressing them against his chest so that I could not move them.

  “So,” he said, and poked Borl with the toe of his shoe. The dog was oozing black liquid that did not quite look like blood. His breath whistled. He lifted his head and blinked at me with his new, blind eyes; a moment later he sat up, shook himself, and growled. “The creature cannot die again, for good, unless you do,” Teldaru said. “Shall I prove this part to you, now?”

  I shook my head. All my bravado had been swept away by a sickness that made my limbs judder. When he let me go I crumpled to my knees.

  “No?” he said from above me. “Well, then. Let us go home.”

  He walked to the door and I rose and took a few wobbly paces after him, then stopped and turned. Borl was panting, his black-streaked tongue lolling. “Come,” I said, and he whimpered. I went to him and knelt and put my hands on his flanks. They were trembling. “Come, Borl,” I murmured. “Get up. Walk. We’ll go together.” He licked my hand. His breath was hot and smelled of rotting meat. “Up, now. Up you get.” He trembled and trembled.

  “Move aside, Nola.” Teldaru bent down next to me. He lifted Borl and cradled him. The dog was silent. His sightless eyes did not leave my face.

  Teldaru walked down the stairs and out through the door. I picked up the lantern and followed. “Close it,” he said, and I pulled the great stone slab shut behind us.

  This time I did not need to touch the walls. I glanced at the shadowed grooves that had led me here, but not for long; it was easier to concentrate on Teldaru’s back, and anyway, he was walking swiftly. There was no Otherworldly glow in my eyes or against my skin; just the lantern light. We passed through corridors and beneath low doors with painted lintels; we climbed stairs so c
lose together that Teldaru took them four at once. It seemed to take no time at all to reach the final doorway—the squat, low one that opened onto dusk. I knelt beneath it and coughed, choking on fresh air. There was a gentle wind; it flowed around me from the hill and meadow, wrapped me in green, growing, flowering. I could almost see it.

  We paused only a few times on the road back to the city, so that Teldaru could set Borl down and shake the stiffness from his arms and shoulders. He did not speak to me or even look at me. I hardly noticed. I watched the last of the sun as it turned the grasses to gold and the far-off castle stones to fire. I watched the leaves darken. I watched my own shadow on the ground and thought that it was taller than I’d ever be, and I saw it get fainter and fainter yet, in the darkness that grew around the small light of the lantern.

  The sky was blue-black and speckled with stars when we reached the eastern gate. Teldaru stopped for the last time, here. Borl barked once and Teldaru put him down, and this time the dog stood firmly on his feet. He turned to me and wagged his tail. I held my hand to his damp muzzle and said, “Well done, Borl,” and he barked again, as if he was answering me.

  Teldaru waved at the tower guards and we walked into Sarsenay City. It had been so long since I had seen these streets at night, and they seemed magical—even the smelly, muddy ones—and despite all that had happened at Ranior’s Tomb, I looked on the darkened stone and flickering torches with something that felt like joy. I thought of the brothel and of Bardrem, and this caused me no pain. There is such beauty in the world, to balance out all the horror, I thought, and then: I must be drunk—and I smiled at nothing and everything.

  Borl and I both had a bit of trouble with the castle steps. Teldaru let us rest. He stared up at the keep with an intensity that should have unsettled me but did not. I wondered, when I was walking again, whether Borl would stay with me when we reached my room—but we did not go there. Teldaru led us into the keep and stopped, turned to block our way when we reached King Haldrin’s study door. He knocked on it.

  “Yes?” The king’s voice. My joy fluttered in my chest and vanished.

  Teldaru opened the door. I saw a blaze of light and faces—ones I didn’t recognize, except for Haldrin’s. He was not smiling.

  “Teldaru,” he said in a tight voice I had not heard from him before. “I was looking for you—I wanted you here for this, but I could not find you. Come to me later; in an hour, say, and—”

  “My king.” The words rang. Five men—for I had managed to count them, by now—stared at the Great Teldaru. “I am sorry I was not here when you sought me and I am sorry to disturb you now, but something terribly important has happened. Nola has had a vision and you must hear of it.”

  The king’s eyes shifted to me. I looked at my feet, but it did not matter; I could still feel his eyes. “And what was this vision?” he said. A mild question, but I thought I heard uneasiness, beneath.

  “Haldrin,” Teldaru said slowly, “it is as I have been telling you; it is what I have seen myself in the Pattern of this land. In your Pattern. The fact that Nola, too, has been shown—”

  “Daru,” said the king, “just say it.”

  Teldaru waited one long, quiet moment more. Then he took a deep breath. “For yourself and for your country,” he said, “you will marry Princess Zemiya of Belakao.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I’ve been having a dream—the same one for years and years. I am standing by my mother’s old, scarred table, but not in the house, nor even in a room. My surroundings change: sometimes desert, sometimes lush riverbank, other times a plain of waist-high grass. The table is always there, though, as are the paths: giant, red, wet-looking ones that hover above the ground and flow around me. These paths bring me people. They bob along, just specks at first, then shapes with some definition, and finally themselves: men and women, children, all of them familiar to me. Larally has been among them—the first person I ever Othersaw for; the first person I wounded. Grasni is there, floating, looking down at me. Selera, lazily plaiting her blonde hair. There are so many others whose names I have forgotten, but this does not matter. I know I have wronged each of them. They return to me, on their river-paths of blood, and I try to turn away from them, but the only other place I can look is down at the table. Potato slices there, and a bag of coins, and a row of severed fingertips that I know are my mother’s, and probably the other children’s, too: my siblings’, whose names I have also forgotten. The red rises, and arms reach out to wind around me, and I wake gasping and sobbing to be forgiven, and saved.

  I had the dream again last night. It was not enough, this time, to thrash my twisted sheets away and take a few paces around my room. This morning I poked the almost-dead fire into a fitful glow; I cracked the thin layer of ice on my basin (quietly, so as not to wake the princess) and drank enough water to numb my throat—and I still had not shaken off the dream’s weight. So I went to the door and stepped through it. It was so early that Sildio was not on his stool. I walked by it and out into the dawn, and down to the main courtyard.

  It was such a strange, headlong feeling: my feet bearing me over the patches of snow and the crinkly grass between. My lungs filling with sharp, cold air that was all around me, not just gusting in my window. Full winter is coming; I smelled it, felt it beneath my feet and on my skin.

  It was the dream that sent me outside. It was winter. It was the press of all the words I’ve written, these past many months. And it was my stillness. For all these months I’ve been in my room. I’ve been still. This morning I needed to move.

  The tower guard opened the gate for me. I wrapped my cloak more tightly around me, for it is always windy at the top of the road that leads down into the city. I did not know where I would go, but I suppose I expected to walk a ways. As it was, I took a few steps and then I turned back. Because I wanted to look at the castle from the outside, for once, and also because I heard the fountain.

  This fountain is built into the castle wall. Its bowl (a half-bowl, really) is very large, with a lovely scalloped edge, but no one sits on it to gossip or cup their palms for a drink. This is the king’s fountain. The stone hands that channel the water are his hands: protector’s hands, worn smooth and white by centuries. I turned expecting to see only these things—the stone, the water—but there were others too. Lengths of cloth and ribbon, I saw as I stepped closer. Scraps of colour fluttering from the wall beside the fountain, held by nails that had been driven into the spaces between the red stones. I have seen such offerings before, around the fountains and sometimes the trees of the lower city. They are for mourning, for people beloved and lost. I had never seen them by this fountain. It was only when I was very close that I realized why they were here. For whom.

  Layibe. A name, sewn into one of the broad pieces of cloth. The thread was silver, and caught the light that was spreading behind me. Red and purple ribbons, blue and gold cloth, and this name in ink, in thread.

  Layibe. Haldrin’s little, lost daughter. The princess who was sleeping in a cradle in my room, guarded by a bird and a dog. The girl whose face also appears in that nightmare of mine, because I have wounded her, too.

  I hardly remember going back into the castle. I only began to breathe again when I was at my desk, clutching my quill as if I would protect myself with it. Or harm myself—I don’t know—it seems like the same thing, sometimes.

  And so I am still sitting here, gazing from my paper to the bright blue-white of the sky and sometimes down to the child who is sleeping in the cradle at my feet. My need to go forward—to write and then to ready myself for whatever comes after that—is so strong that I am frozen.

  Move, Nola. Back to the king’s study—to all those eyes on you.

  To Haldrin, breaking a long, long silence: “What have you seen, Nola? Why must I marry Princess Zemiya?”

  You mustn’t. I’ve seen nothing. It’s Teldaru’s plan and I don’t understand it yet but I know that it will hurt many people.

  I could n
ot say this but, as I swallowed and blinked away all the faces except Haldrin’s, I knew that I could try to say something else that might be almost true. I had had no vision of Belakao or Zemiya; there were no true images that the curse could twist. I would only have to take care, choose words that would be vague.

  “It is not certain,” I began. One man leaned forward and another leaned back. I felt their scrutiny, their waiting, and drew myself taller.

  “Not certain?” Haldrin said. There was a tiny crease between his brows, just above the bridge of his nose.

  “Of course it is certain,” Teldaru said from behind me. He sounded amused and perhaps a little impatient. “The Pattern is a maze of possibilities, but only the Belakaoans themselves believe that there is no—”

  “That is nonsense,” I snapped over my shoulder. “You always teach that there are often many images; that an Otherseer must choose among all the—”

  “Enough.” Haldrin did not shout, but his voice rang in my ears anyway. “This is not the time for a debate about the characteristics of Otherseeing. Nola—speak to me.”

  I wish I could, I thought with a surge of despair and need that made me dizzy. “I am sorry, my king,” I said. I bowed my head, then lifted it again, and brushed a strand of hair away from my eyes. There was no vision, but there is so much I must tell you. . . . “One of the images was a volcano in the sea, it’s true, but another was a northern mountain range, and yet another—”

  “Nola,” the king said, and I stopped speaking, my mouth open a bit. “Lift your arm again, as you did a moment ago.”

  I did, and the sleeve of my blouse fell away from it. All the men stared at my arm. Haldrin looked only briefly before he raised his eyes to mine.

  “You are bleeding.”

  “Yes,” I said, flushing, dizzy again—so close to truth. “I was.” The bandage around my arm felt hot, as did the trail of blood that had escaped it, hours ago, and dried. The cloth was dark and damp, growing brittle against my skin. Teldaru cut me. He forced me to use the Bloodsight. “Teldaru took me into the city and I stumbled and cut myself.” The lies came so smoothly, though there was a place in my throat that ached when I told them.