“A vision,” she said. Her arms were lying on the tub’s sides. Her legs must have been extended all the way, because they were invisible, even her knees. The rest of her was hidden too, except for her neck and head. There were no shells or gems in her braided hair but it shone anyway, beaded with water.
“Yes.” I had to look at her when I spoke, but this was not as difficult as I had feared it might be; when I looked anywhere else the undulating light made me dizzy.
“Another as grand as the one you spoke of on that hill, by the stone? Another battle between Firebird and War Hound, with your lover the master of both? It must have been grand like that for you to come here to me now.”
She rolled her head toward me. I saw the scorn in her gaze and on her full, moist lips, and I wanted to say, Zemiya, we could be friends, if you knew the truth—but I felt the other words rising and wanted to say them, too.
“I saw your child.”
She did not move. The bath water that covered her was as smooth as a sheet made of silk. My lips felt terribly dry but I did not lick them; I could not move until she did.
“What child?”
“The one you carry now, my Queen.”
She was still for a moment more. Then she shrugged, and the water parted around her shoulders and breasts. I could see her scar; wet, it was a brighter shade of pink. Both smoother and more puckered. “Haldrin told your lover and he told you and you dreamed of it—maybe that is all.”
“No.” My voice was rough with urgency. “It was a true vision. He—Teldaru—asked me to Othersee for him after my vision at Ranior’s Hill. I saw many things, but the child—your child—was the clearest.”
“But you did not come to me until now.”
“I did not know how . . . my Queen, I am accustomed to telling people of pain and darkness, but this was you. I did not know how to do it.”
I felt sick, all of a sudden. Why? I thought again. Why this reason, this story? I swallowed over the sourness in my throat. Because it had to be a believable reason for me to come to her here. Because it will hurt no one, in the end.
“Haldrin esteems you,” Zemiya said. I blinked at her. “He believes what you say.”
“And you do not?”
“My sister does not. Me, I simply do not like you. But know that Haldrin listens to your seeings and trusts in them. And remember that this is his child.”
There was sweat all along my brow. I could feel tendrils of hair clinging to my neck.
“So tell me,” the queen said. “Say what you want me to believe about this child.”
I swallowed as I had before: convulsively, in a way that nearly choked me. Remember, I thought. You prepared these words.
At first they came out right. “I saw a baby lying on a bed lined with bright red feathers.” Obvious—too obvious—don’t look at her now, or you’ll falter. “A boy baby, plump and brown, with thick loose curls. Beneath the curls were the folded velvet ears of a dog.” How had I thought that this would sound convincing? Too late.
“He is laughing. He is beautiful. The sun is shining on his face. But then the feathers turn into flames, and the dog ears on his head are wounds opening.”
This last part was wrong. His chin lengthens into a muzzle, I had intended to say, and his whiskers tangle together, and the flames singe them black. The baby is crying. But I said none of these things. The words flowed from my mouth as if I were speaking of a true vision, and yet they were lies; was it curse or Pattern or just my own wayward mind that had made them?
“He bleeds. He burns. His flesh falls away until there is nothing but a spiral of bones on the ground. Someone is laughing—people—a man and a woman. Night falls, and even though there is no fire any more, the bones glow red.”
I took a deep breath. I had not planned to say any of this, and yet I knew I was finished.
The queen’s eyes were heavy-lidded, as if she were nearly asleep. “And so, ispa,” she said slowly. “What does it mean?”
I closed my eyes. “Danger,” I said. “Peril for your child and both our lands.”
She rose. I heard the water surge and I opened my eyes and she was standing facing me. She was all dark, wet muscles and curves. “Such insight,” she hissed. “Peril—truly? Leave me.” She said this loudly, without pausing. “Go back to your teacher, your lover, and tell him I did not believe you—tell him you were glad I did not summon my husband. Jamenda! Selvey!”
Jamenda came in immediately. “I shall dress now,” Zemiya said, “and Ispa Nola shall leave.” Jamenda lifted a long, yellow robe from the floor. She did not look at me. Zemiya did not look at me. Selvey, who was hovering in the doorway, did. She was wide-eyed, and her hands were bunched in her skirt.
“I am sorry, my Queen,” I said. Truth, at last. I turned away from her and walked to the door. Move, Selvey, I thought; go to Zemiya—but she followed me into the other room.
“Mistress Nola,” she whispered, “I wish she had not spoken to you that way.” She was twisting her skirt now. Her knuckles were white. Her eyes were blue, I noticed as they leapt from me to the bathing room door. Please, I thought. Go—go. I was not looking at the shelf but I felt Mambura’s bones there, like a heat against my back.
“Mistress,” the girl said, just as the queen called, “Selvey!” very loudly. Selvey bobbed her head to me and hurried back into the bathing room. She closed the double doors behind her; for a moment, as she was doing this, I saw her face clearly. Her freckles, so like Grasni’s. Then I whirled. I took four paces, already reaching out and up. I swept the bracelet off the shelf and looped it around my own arm. It clung to me, beneath my loose sleeve. I opened the door to the hallway and pulled it shut behind me, as quietly as I could.
I ran. It was still very early, and the keep’s corridors were empty except for a few serving boys and guards. I slowed a bit, when I saw them, and smiled. All of them smiled back, and some bowed. One boy, who was spiky-haired and sleepy-eyed, tripped and blushed furiously. When I was past them all I ran again, all the way out of the keep and down the long staircase to the courtyard, and from there into the sprawl of kitchen buildings, with all the tiny rooms beneath.
I had to stop, at the bottom of the stairs that led to this corridor. I stared at the rows of curtains, which were all the same. I heard some murmuring, but I saw no one. I walked to the door that I thought was the right one (my feet were silent; my breathing was not) and parted the curtain just enough to peer through. The embroidered bag was hanging from its hook. I glanced behind me and slipped inside.
I drew the bracelet off my arm. The bones were strung on a slender wire, which had been wound into balls at either end. It took me several minutes to pluck one of the balls apart; my sweaty fingers slipped, and I pierced the tender skin beneath my nails over and over and had to suck at the blood, because I did not want it to drip anywhere. Leave, I thought. Take it and go—there is no real need for this—Teldaru will hide the bones and you will never be blamed for stealing them. But this had been part of my plan—a clever part—and anyway, it was more than a plan, now: it was a story, and I had to keep trying. So I plucked, and I swallowed blood that tasted like metal, and at last the ball unwound.
The bits of bone slid off onto Selvey’s pallet. Scattered, they no longer looked like beads; they were something dead and small, perhaps a cat. Teldaru, I thought, you will never make a hero out of these. I put the largest ones into the pouch at my belt. The smallest (I chose four) fit into my palm. I opened the embroidered bag and slipped them inside. (There were other things within but I did not pause to see what they were.) I threaded the wire so that it was half in, half out of the bag and tugged at the frayed blue ribbon. I looked at the bag for a moment. There was a shout from outside, and the sound of footsteps running past, and I turned again to the door.
Two girls were standing at the foot of the stairs, their heads bent together. They were talking, and I did not have time to wait for them to move. They were not Selvey or Jamenda or Leylen, but I
stiffened anyway, as I walked toward them. They noticed me when I was a pace away, and then they straightened and gasped my name. I nodded at them. I wanted to say something that would justify my presence here, but I did not. I smiled a bit, as if I were telling them what a hurry I was in, and that I had no time to explain. Not that I would have needed to—for I was Mistress Nola, who had spoken of the Otherworld on Ranior’s Hill. And if one of these girls remembered that I had been here, just before Selvey was found with the remnants of the queen’s bracelet, it would not matter to the girl or to anyone else. So I smiled a bit and walked past them up the steps.
The sky above the keep was pale grey, but the corridors inside were still dark. I went by my door, to Teldaru’s. It was not locked; it never was, though I had heard Haldrin scold him for this. I passed the wooden table and chairs and entered his bedchamber. His shutters were open, so I saw him very clearly. He was on his back, with his arms sprawled above his head. A sheet lay over his belly (his hips made two gentle hills in the cloth). His chest was bare. His face and arms were golden; the rest was pale.
The tiny jewelled knife was lying on the floor beside his bed, between his worn leather shoes.
Pick it up. Plunge it into his heart. He told you that the curse would live on if he died, but maybe he was lying; maybe it would die with him.
No. Everything he has told you about the curse has been right. And so—you kill him, and the curse does not lift. Then what? You will never speak truly, or be able to leave this place. Your Paths will be twisted beyond repair, forever.
You are a coward.
There will be another way.
I drew a deep, silent breath. I pulled up my skirts and eased myself onto the bed. I was above him, the insides of my thighs barely touching his sides, when he opened his eyes. He did not move. I lowered myself so that I was astride him. I opened my pouch and lifted it and watched his black gaze focus and still. I tipped the bag and the bones rained down onto his chest. I leaned down until my lips were brushing his.
“There,” I said. “What now?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
He made me wait three more days. “You did well,” he said, still on that first day, hours after I had scattered the bones onto his naked chest. “Very, very well. Let us see what comes of your clever little plan.”
“What do you mean, what comes of it?” We were standing beneath the seers’ courtyard trees. I remember that I was very tired; four people had come to ask me to Othersee, right after I had stolen the bracelet. I had been very popular, since Ranior’s Hill, and this was exhausting and exciting and horrible. So many true vision and false words, and the Otherworld lingering like a mist at the edges of my eyes.
“We have the bones,” I said to him, beneath the trees. “That’s what we wanted. What more is there?”
Teldaru put his fingers in my hair and pulled my head closer, so that he could lean his own head against it. “There is always more,” he said.
He was right, of course.
“Oh, Mistress!” Leylen gasped when she came to me in my room a few hours later. “One of the queen’s girls stole the bracelet her sister gave her to keep her safe! It was made of the bones of the greatest hero of Belakao—imagine us doing such a thing with Ranior’s bones. . . .”
By now she was unbraiding my hair (something I had found ridiculous, when Teldaru first sent her to me, but which I now enjoyed immensely). I twisted away from her hands.
“Which girl was it?” I tried to sound innocently curious, but I spoke too harshly. Leylen blinked at me.
“Selvey. She just had time to break the thing into pieces and put it in her bag before the queen realized it was gone and went herself to search Selvey’s things. You should have seen her, Mistress, holding the pieces in her hands—Selvey, I mean—crying that she’d taken nothing, over and over, and the queen just staring down at her and saying not a word.”
Blue eyes, I thought, and squirmed even further away from Leylen, as if she was the one who had upset me. “And then what did she do? The queen?”
Leylen bit at the inside of her cheek. “She told us all to go away, and she did talk to Selvey, behind her curtain, but too quietly to hear. Then two guards came and took her away. To the king, I think. And I heard”—she was leaning toward me, and I hated her whispered glee because I almost shared it—“that the queen wanted her flogged and the king said no—but Selvey will be sent back to her village and cannot ever return. And now,” she said, straightening and drawing a deep breath, “all the Belakaoans in Sarsenay City have heard, and they are unhappy.”
“Unhappy,” I thought one night later, standing with Teldaru on the castle wall, looking at the fire-spotted darkness below. “Unhappy” is not the right word at all.
News of the theft had spread quickly. When the wagon carrying Selvey left the castle, at dawn, the city’s streets were already lined with people. Some of the Belakaoans threw stones and rotten food. Some of the Sarsenayans simply watched; others attacked the Belakaoans—any of them, not just the ones who had thrown the stones and food.
“By Pattern and Path,” said Mistress Ket, after the students told us this, “was the piece of jewellery really so precious?”
Teldaru laughed when I told him this, atop the wall. “Old fool,” he said. “She does not deserve her black eyes. ‘Piece of jewellery’—oh my.”
“But I didn’t know either,” I said. The fires looked beautiful from here, and the shouting was faint. “I didn’t know, or maybe I just didn’t think . . .” A game. A clever little plan that would impress him. I imagined Selvey huddled in the wagon, clutching her embroidered bag. I could not sleep, later that night; she was the only thing I saw, when I closed my eyes.
The night after that the fires still burned. Soldiers patrolled the city. Some of them came back to the castle bloodied or even unconscious. The cells beneath the keep were full of Belakaoans, and a few Sarsenayans, too. Queen Zemiya urged her people to be forgiving and calm; King Haldrin urged his to be reasonable. And Teldaru told me to walk with him into the middle of it all.
“Come, Nola. You must see what you have done.”
“I would rather not.” I was tidying lesson books in the school, even though it was very late. He came up behind me and reached around to put his hands over mine. Borl growled at him, from his place by the door—as if he could actually see Teldaru’s motions.
“It is time for me to show you what is next. And we must go down into the city, for me to do this.”
And so I went with him into the streets, which smelled of burning. Don’t look, I told myself. You are about to find out something you can use against him—think only of this. But my feet scuffed through ash and torn, blood-splotched cloth, and I could hear shouting, too close to us, and I had to press myself against walls whenever soldiers ran by.
The third time I shrank back from the street, trying to avoid the flailing bodies of a Sarsenayan and Belakaoan, who were pounding at each other silently, Teldaru grasped my hand and drew me on. Borl’s breath was hot against my other hand. “Now, Nola,” Teldaru said, as the sound of blows faded behind us, “you should not be afraid—you should relish this, as I do. But then, you are not as strong. . . . So walk close to me—like this—and listen only to my voice.” He squeezed my hand; my own fingers were limp. I watched my feet, moving through the white-grey ash and the black soot.
“I’m thinking of another night,” he said, as if we were strolling through the seers’ courtyard. “Rain. You beside me for the first time. Nearly six years ago—do you remember?”
“Of course.” I remembered my old hope, too, with a useless, stinging shame.
“I will take you to the same place we went then. We can pretend these years haven’t happened. Go together as if it is the first time.”
“So you still go there,” I said.
“Did you imagine I did not, just because you were no longer there? For shame!”
He pulled me to a stop. Ran his hands up my arms and over m
y shoulders to my neck, where he laid them lightly. He stroked my throat, my jaw, my cheeks. I looked at him and thought of how I had reached for him beneath Ranior’s Hill, and how I had touched him the other night, when I brought him Mambura’s bones. I remembered his surprise and thought, Would it be the same?—and then I stepped back, so that his hands were touching nothing.
“And the other girls you keep there?” I said quickly. “Do you think they rest, while you’re away?”
He laughed and took my hand again, and we walked on.
From the outside, the house looked the same. The garden seemed changed, though I could not tell how; it was too dark, and he drew me up the pebbled path too swiftly. The chain of keys was around his neck; he set one to the double doors. As he was doing this, I felt Borl’s wet nose in my palm. I scratched at his head absently. “Come, Borl,” I said when the doors were open, but as I stepped toward them he whined and cowered and would not go forward with me.
The smell inside was different. I could not recall exactly what it had been before, but it had certainly not been this heavy, sweet decay that stung my nose and throat and made my stomach heave. Teldaru did not appear to hear the low sound I made; he was lighting lamps as he had that first time, years ago. I watched the flames bloom, my hands clenched at my sides, waiting to see the source of the stench—but all I saw was the familiar entrance hall, with its mirrors and tapestries.
“Your bedroom first,” he said when he was done.
I went ahead of him, thinking: I forgot. All those years at the castle I never thought about this place, but now it’s as if I was climbing these stairs only yesterday. . . .
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