The knock finally came hours after night had fallen. I waited for a long, silent moment before I called, “Come in.”
Selera shone, with all that light behind her and all the dimness in front. She was silhouetted in points of fire: her curves both gentle and sharpened, her hair a glittering mass of gold. I had never seen it down before—not like this, in rippling waves that had no pins or combs or ribbons in them.
“Go away.” I still sounded like that child, sullen and hurt.
She stepped into the room.
“Selera. Please. I want to be alone.” My voice wobbled and leapt.
She took another step, and another. “What do you have to cry about?”
She was right in front of me, and I could see her better: her wide eyes and the tears on her cheeks. “I’m the one, Nola. I . . .” She sat down beside me on the bed and I did not think to tell her to get up again.
“You what?” I said. There was something different about her—the unbound hair and something else. As she turned her head to face me I knew what it was: she was not wearing any scent.
“Take my place,” she said. “Go to Meriden.”
I laughed. “And you will stay here and be Mistress Teldaru, is that it? And what would Master Teldaru say to this?”
“I’ve already asked him.” She was speaking so softly I could hardly hear her. “He said no. But I thought if I asked you, and if you agreed . . .”
I snorted, rubbed my hands over my eyes and under my nose. “And what else did he say?”
“That he will let me stay until the Princess Zemiya arrives, if I wish.”
“And do you wish?”
She leaned over so that her forehead was almost touching mine. “Of course I wish—do not ask me questions you already know the answers to—do not mock me.” Her spittle fell on my face but I did not wipe it away. “You . . . you. You and he.” She sagged backward as if I had been holding her and had let her go. “What is there between you? You can tell me, now that it doesn’t matter any more.”
“What do you mean?” Because I wanted to know, suddenly, with a desire that made my flesh throb.
She laughed, this time. “You and he, Nola! Looking at each other all the time and pretending not to! Together all the time, even when you’re not! Ever since that first day, in that tiny smelly horrible room, when you were so filthy and mad—I tried not to see it then but I did, and I still do, and I don’t understand—he loves me—what is there between you?”
I heard singing, in the silence—two of our girls, whose voices rose above all the other courtyard noise like smoke. Weaving a pattern too lovely and vivid to endure.
“He will have to tell you,” I said at last. “I cannot.”
She stood up. It was strange that she was just herself, with no perfume to waft every time she moved, and no jewellery to rearrange. I thought with a stab of envy that she was even more beautiful than she had been by the pool, just before Teldaru had told us what would happen.
“I hope he ruins you,” she said.
I laughed as I had cried, earlier: wildly, desperately, aware of nothing but the pressure in my head and chest. When I finally opened my streaming eyes, Selera was gone.
I slept, for a time. When I woke the night was deep and moonless. It was not quiet, though; I could hear the thrumming from the main courtyard. I could feel it—all those people, awake.
My own courtyard was empty. The tables were gone; the lanterns were still hanging in the trees, but no longer lit. Maybe they looked like stars, I thought as I walked beneath them. I imagined flames shattering the glass and streaking through the leaves. A smell of burning wood and cooked fruit; the water hissing and bubbling; the air brighter than day. Am I dreaming? I felt the pebbles of the path grind against my bare feet, so I had to be awake—but no—even dreams could be this clear. Even visions could.
There were extra guards at the doors to the keep. For safety, Teldaru had told me, because of all the outside people here. Lord Derris had not wanted them here at all. He had asked the king what the princess would make of all the noise and the crowds, when she arrived.
“I have met her, remember,” Haldrin had replied. “I do not think she will mind.” He had smiled.
I stood on the staircase above the main courtyard. Here were the lantern stars, the torch stars, flickering below me so brightly that I could not see the ones above. Shadows moved among them. The people of Sarsenay, dancing, eating, fighting, singing, all within the red stone arms of the castle. I felt a slow, sweet bloom of joy, looking down. I almost did not want to go down myself and see the torches that were not stars—but I did, stair by stair, until I was among them.
It was hot—no breeze, and so many bodies, so much fire. I tied my hair back as I walked but the sweat still gathered at my temples and slipped down my cheeks and neck. I saw a man wearing only a strip of cloth around his hips, squatting before a block of stone. I saw a woman in the stone: brows and eyes and the curves of nose and chin. An unfinished woman. The man looked at me, a chisel and mallet in his hands, waiting.
There was a stage hung with coloured sheets. Three girls—my age, perhaps—were dancing on it. They were wearing loose, light shifts that slid as they moved; I glimpsed thighs and breasts, skin that gleamed with moisture and muscle. I was staring at them when arms come around me from behind.
“Lovely lady.” A man’s voice, rough and slurred; a man’s hands clutching my dress into bunches, drawing it up my legs. “Come with me. . . .”
I wrenched myself around, caught a glimpse of him (bald, shiny head, grizzled cheeks) and ran. I heard him grunt another word, and I heard his feet pounding after me as I darted among the fires and wagons and people. Very soon I had left him behind, but I hardly slowed. I did not stop until a woman reared up before me and we sent each other sprawling.
“My apologies!” she said as she helped me to my feet. “We poets are always getting underfoot.”
“Poets?”
“Yes,” she said, and gestured. “I’ll show you.”
She led me beneath some low awnings, where people were standing, talking, or sitting, reading, scribbling on scrolls or gazing at them as the sculptor had gazed at his stone. “The king will be judging our poems very soon,” the woman said. “No one can sleep—it’s wonderful—we’re all half-mad, just as poets should be.”
You annoy me, I thought—my first clear thought since waking. I let my feet drag, ready to turn back.
“Oh!” the woman said, and gripped my arm. “Listen . . .”
Someone was speaking in a loud, sonorous voice—so sonorous that it had to be a jest. As my guide and I pushed our way through a knot of onlookers the voice rose to a tremulous, breathy height. People laughed; the woman laughed too, and squeezed my arm. “Listen to him!” she hissed. “He’s marvellous!” We were at the front of the crowd, now. I saw him.
He was taller and not quite so thin and his hair was very short, but I knew him right away. The shape of his eyes; the quirk of his mouth as he rolled the word “ravaging” around on his tongue. He waited for the laughter to subside and opened his mouth to say some other word that belonged to the silly verse he was reciting. Then he saw me—and the word that came instead was “Nola?”
I walked to him. I reached for the one thing that was new: the long, white scar that ran above his eyebrows. I touched it with my fingertips, which trembled. “Bardrem,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
He smelled of bread and wood smoke and onions, just as he had when he was a boy. But there was something else—sweat; something rich and different. I discovered all this because we held each other tightly for a moment, before he thrust me away.
He pushed through the crowd and I followed. He did not look back at me but he knew I was there, for as soon as he had ducked into a tent he rounded on me.
“Go away,” he said.
The tent was very small. Its sides pressed against us both every time someone passed outside.
“Go away
,” he said again, in his deep, harsh, man’s voice. “You had no trouble doing this before—why hesitate now?”
“No, Bardrem.” I could already feel the ache of the curse in my throat. “I didn’t. I won’t.”
“You won’t.” He gestured wildly and smacked the cloth and someone on the other side of it called, “Mind your arm, Master Bardremzo, or take the lady somewhere else!” Bardrem ignored this. He was so close, staring down at me with such raw, fierce anger—and even though I knew I should feel only dread, I was breathless with joy at the sight of him.
“Tell me, then. Explain yourself. Make your excuses, six years too late.”
Orlo was Teldaru. He lured me away. He said he would kill you if I ever tried to escape. I have never stopped thinking of you. “I was apprenticed. To Teldaru. Someone from the palace came, and he took me with him right away; I had no time to find you.”
Bardrem smiled a wide, false, crooked smile. “Ah, so that was all! Well. Did you think”—his voice dropping, suddenly; the smile gone—“to write, perhaps? To tell me you were fine and happy and living at the castle instead of dead, as I thought you were?”
Teldaru’s cursed me; I have no words that are true, any more. None to speak, none to write. “I couldn’t.”
“What—no paper, here? No ink?” He laughed as he had just smiled, and I flinched back against the cloth as if his bitterness had actually touched my skin. “I never thought that you would be like that. A person who forgets her friends as soon as she finds something better.”
“I didn’t,” I said, but he waved my words away.
“But we were young—how could I have thought I knew you?”
“You did.” I reached for him and gripped his wrists until my fingers went white. “You did, Bardrem. It . . . it is impossible for me to tell . . .” I was crying, each sob a word I could not say. He stared at me with a confusion that looked familiar, and he was so much the same and so different that I cried harder, dry and wracked, hardly any tears. I thought I had finished with those earlier that night.
“Do you know what was the worst?” he said when I had quieted. I was still holding his wrists, loosely now. “I thought you were dead—and I thought that this would be easier to bear than if you had gone away without telling me.”
“I would have thought the same thing,” I said in a low, rough voice that some far-off part of me found rather alluring.
“But do you know what convinced me that you were still alive?”
I shook my head.
“That Orlo man appeared one night, years ago. He asked if I knew where you were, and when I said no he attacked me. With my own knife.” He lifted his hand to the scar above his eyes. “I don’t know why this made me think you still lived, but it did.”
“It must have been a terrible cut,” I said, remembering Teldaru with Bardrem’s knife and Borl with Bardrem’s note, coming slowly toward me in the darkness of my room. “Though,” I added, “you must be just a little proud of the scar.”
He gazed at me for a moment and then he smiled a real smile—slow and slight but there—and in the rush of relief that filled me I had my first clear thought of that evening.
Orlo. Teldaru. Bardrem.
“You mustn’t stay here,” I said, the relief sinking, spreading into heaviness as he frowned. “You can’t be near the castle.”
“Oh? And why not?”
I let go of his wrists; he would soon have twisted them free, in any case. Teldaru will see you and you will recognize him and he will hurt you. . . . “I can’t,” I said brokenly. “I can’t—”
“Can’t tell, can’t say—how very convenient for you, Nola, to make pronouncements that don’t require explanation!”
“You must not enter this competition,” I said, my voice as shrill now as it had been husky before.
“So you’re a person like that, as well!” Again I felt a strange, keen thrill, because his breath was hot on my face; because he was here. “Someone so mad with selfish weakness that she can’t bear anyone else to succeed! You’re living the life you’ve dreamed of and yet I’m not allowed to try to do the same—is that it?”
“No”—a soft, ebbing word that neither of us truly heard.
“I’ll stay at the castle, Nola, but I won’t stay here now; I won’t stay with you.” He pushed past me. Wrenched the cloth door open and ran—or so I guessed, for I did not watch him go. I stared at the door, and I was still and empty and cold. I heard some murmuring and incredulous laughter from the other side of the wall; two men, maybe more, probably wondering what “Master Bardremzo” had got himself into.
When I finally ducked back out into the night, I seemed to be moving very slowly. I found my way back to the place where I had first seen him, but there was an old woman speaking there, and he was not among the crowd watching her. I wandered among fires and stages and embracing people, sleeping people, people who reached for me and then recoiled (something in my face?). I dragged myself up the stairs to the keep and looked back down into the courtyard for a long, long time, as the sky paled above me.
Bardrem, I thought, and even his name like this, silent, was a gift. Bardrem—where will this new Path take us?
I hardly ate or slept, in the week or weeks that followed that night. Every young man I saw became Bardrem, at first glance, and my heart would stop, then pound again when I realized it was actually a soldier or a gardener, someone who did not resemble him at all. Mistress Ket asked me what was wrong; even Grasni did. Selera had not spoken to me since she left me laughing in my room. I have no idea what I told them. All I remember is that I was close to some sort of collapse—and then Zemiya arrived.
“Mistress Nola.” One of the boys—Dren—was standing in my doorway. The sky behind him was purple-black; his own black curls looked even darker than usual, and his face was a sickly white. I blinked at him from the bed. I was sitting at the very edge of it, as if I might rise at any moment. I had probably been sitting this way for hours.
“Yes, Dren?” I said, thinking, I must go back down into the courtyard; it’s been two days since I was last there; this time I’ll find him. . . .
“Mistress, the Princess is coming. I mean”—he shifted, cleared his throat—“she’s nearly here. Mistress Ket says go to Master Teldaru and King Haldrin in the Great Hall, please.”
Suddenly my head was clear again—too clear—and I realized that I was wearing an old, ragged dress, and that I had not combed my hair in far too long. So I did comb it, and pinned it up with my bronze butterfly clips, and put on a brown dress with cream-coloured lace at cuffs and hem. Brown slippers too—and then I rushed out into the courtyard.
The air felt like storm. We had been waiting for this—for a breaking of heat, a washing-away of dust—but it felt wrong now, somehow. Even Borl seemed unsettled; he whined and panted and did not follow me, as he usually did. The purple-black really was alarming; it pressed on me and on the trees and I imagined all of us shrinking away from whatever would come from the sky.
It came quickly. By the time I reached the keep’s doors the rain had started (fat, heavy droplets), and as I stepped inside, lightning turned the darkness yellow. The thunder followed me—still distant, but it seemed to shudder all the way into the stones beneath my feet.
I ran from the keep down to the Great Hall, and I did not even think to look for Bardrem. I would not have seen him, in any case; I could barely see my own feet through all the mud and water. The rain came down in warm, billowing, blinding waves.
“You will do no such thing, Cousin!” I heard Lord Derris say as the double doors were opened for me.
“I should,” said the king. He was pacing in front of the dais. I had never seen him pace before; usually it was Teldaru who did this, and Haldrin who reprimanded him. Teldaru was motionless now, leaning back against the dais, his legs crossed at the ankles. But while his body showed only ease, his eyes leapt as if he were seeing everything, or nothing.
“I should,” Haldrin said again,
then turned and saw me. “Nola! Good. Come in. We wanted you, since you also had visions of her—of Zemiya—we wanted you here.”
“Notice, Hal,” Teldaru said, “that Nola has just been outside.”
Haldrin scowled at him and looked back at me. I saw him take in the dripping, sodden mess of my clothing and hair. “I want to meet her,” he told me. “On the road outside the city.”
“Can you give him a single reason why he should?” Lord Derris had never addressed me directly before. I cleared my throat, just as Dren had done as he fidgeted in my doorway. I was far too aware of the way my dress had moulded to my body, and I thought, quite suddenly, how relieved I was that I had not chosen the one with the white bodice.
“Perhaps, my king,” I said, with pretend solemnity, “if you have not yet had time to bathe today . . .?”
Haldrin laughed; Lord Derris smiled; Teldaru nodded at me as if I had pleased him unexpectedly.
“I wanted to welcome her,” the king said. “I wanted the entire city to greet her. There were going to be flower petals.”
“And there still can be.” Teldaru straightened. “In here. Stop worrying; you’re making us all nervous.”
“Just think, though,” Lord Derris said, “the rain will wash away the smell of the latrines—at least for awhile.”
“And our grass may be green again, when it is over,” Teldaru added. I could almost see his energy—restlessness, excitement, even anger, pulsing from his skin and eyes.
“Very well,” the king said, and sighed. “Nothing to do but wait, then.”
I heard later what happened in the city below us, while we waited—for many Sarsenayans did lean out their windows and stand shivering in the streets, despite the storm. A carriage—sent by Haldrin to meet the Belakaoan boats—halted just outside the southern gate. A woman climbed out of it and stood very still in the downpour, gazing back the way she had come. Her skin and hair were so dark that they were difficult to see until lightning forked, and even then her image was swiftly gone again. Her dress might have been a colour—one of those glorious, bright island colours for which all Sarsenayan girls yearned—but now it was dark too, wind-whipped and clinging.
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