The Pattern Scars

by Caitlin Sweet

  When we reached my old door he put his hand on the crystal knob, then let it fall. “Please,” he said, and stepped back, gesturing at the door.

  I opened it. That first time—that first morning: the tall windows, the wardrobes with their layers of soft, clean cloth. The stench was overwhelming, now. I covered my nose and mouth, bent and retched and wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand. The light of the single lamp by the door blurred. I straightened, my other hand still over my mouth. The wardrobes were there—everything was the same—the chairs and carpets and the high bed. But no: one of the chairs had been pulled up beside the bed. It was turned at an angle, away from me. I took three paces, my feet moving before I could command them not to. Another pace. Teldaru lifted the lamp behind me, and in the sudden light I saw that there was a man in the chair.

  This is the Otherworld, I thought as the man’s features sharpened. Teldaru has trapped me somehow, and I only think this is real. . . .

  It was Laedon, but not—the same cap, the same straggling hair, but flesh that was so thin that I could see the web of bones beneath. The bones themselves were wrong: jaw and cheek and brow were twisted, as if I were seeing them through water. His lips sagged open. His eyes, too, were open.

  Otherworld, I thought again. He is dead.

  He blinked.

  I heard a sound, as I stood looking at him: a high, sweet skirl of notes. Uja—the word swept everything away, even the smell—Uja, help me. . . .

  “Is he always so lively?” I said, somehow.

  Teldaru smiled at me over his shoulder as he walked to the window. “Nola. How I admire your spirit.” He pulled open the curtain. I could see the shadows of the trees outside. He leaned back on the sill and looked at the dead man who was not dead, and at me.

  “I dug up his body,” he said. “Only the bones were left, and I used them all, and I was pleased with the results.”

  “Yes,” I said, “he’s even handsomer than he was the first time.”

  Teldaru pushed himself away from the window and walked back to me. Restless; something still to show. “Now to the kitchen,” he said. Again he gestured for me to go before him, and again I did, down the stairs and along the hallway I felt I had never left.

  I did not hesitate at the kitchen door; best to be quick about it and move before the dread held me still. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  The fires in both great hearths were low. Teldaru went past me to the stack of wood and picked up an armful of logs. He fed them to the guttering flames, which leapt higher and brighter and spewed sparks. I blinked, looking at shelves and windowsills and the long, dark table. All of these surfaces were cluttered—with bowls and jars, trays and knives and coils of rope. I stepped up to the table. One of the coils of rope was not, in fact, rope: it was a braid of white-streaked black hair, tied at top and bottom with red ribbon. Beside it was a jar full of amber liquid; suspended in the liquid was a finger. It looked fat and pale, even in the amber, and its nail was purple. Beside the jar was a saucer piled with tiny crescents—fingernail trimmings, yellow-white. Another jar, this one holding what looked like an eye. I turned away from it, from all of it, and looked at Teldaru, who was beside me once more.

  “You’ve been busy,” I said. The words sounded firm enough.

  He nodded as if he had heard me but was not really listening. “Yes, yes—now look there.” He pointed at one of the hearths. There was a cauldron hanging above the newly stoked fire. I heard bubbling. “It needs stirring.” He was watching my eyes.

  No, I wanted to say, but my feet moved just as they had in the bedroom. When I was nearly at the hearth I thought, Remember, Nola-girl: every new thing brings you closer to his ruin and your freedom. Remember, and be strong.

  The liquid in the pot was dark and flecked with foam. A long-handled spoon was hanging from a shelf next to the cauldron. I unhooked it and eased it into the liquid. I swirled the spoon around and then fell back a step, because the smell that rose was so horrible. I looked over my shoulder. He was watching, smiling. He nodded—go on, love—and I turned back to the cauldron.

  I stirred in wide, deep circles. The spoon caught; I lifted it, and a chunk of something came up with it. Bones—large ones—and a web of clotted hair and maybe flesh, pale and porous. I let it fall back into the liquid. I could not swallow, and yet my voice emerged from my throat anyway.

  “What is it?”

  “Not what.” He was right behind me. His breath was on my neck. “Who.”

  I drew the spoon out of the pot and hung it on its hook. It dripped blotches onto the brick.

  “A brothel girl? A child from the lower city? Someone you killed.”

  “No,” he said. “Someone you killed.”

  I stepped backward. Perhaps I would have fallen, if he had not been there. He wrapped his arms around me and brushed his lips along the curve of my neck.

  “Say it,” he whispered. “Say the name.”

  I managed one slow, dry swallow. “Selera,” I said, and I laughed, harder and higher, until I bent and vomited bile onto the hearthstones.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  We went to the house every night. Our cloaks were always dark and our hoods were always pulled up to hide our faces, but once the violence in the city had abated, there were hardly any people on the streets to see us.

  The anger was simmering, now. Even through the fog of my exhaustion I heard things: a delegation of Belakaoan merchants had come to the king to petition for the release of their countrymen; the king had let some go, but not the ones who had wounded or killed (though the Sarsenayans who had done the same also languished in their cells). Moabu Bantayo wrote to King Haldrin, expressing his outrage at the sacrilege involved in the theft of the hero’s bones, and at the laxity of the punishment exacted upon the thief. Bantayo told Haldrin that he hoped Ranior’s bones would be seized and scattered and broken by birds, so that Haldrin might comprehend the Belakaoans’ sense of violation.

  Teldaru gloated as he informed me of these things. “This is the true beginning,” he said, “for now my plan has its own breath, in the world.”

  I heard his words—and indeed everyone’s—through weariness that was like a weight of water on my ears. I spent my days teaching—more than I had before, since Mistress Ket’s health had begun to fail—and my evenings Otherseeing for everyone who came to me. I remember how vivid the images were—as if the only thing about me that was truly awake was my Othersight—and how dark and blurred my words were, and how I could not care. I returned to my room, once the last person had left the seers’ courtyard or the Otherseeing chamber on the first floor of the school, and I slept for a few hours, and then I woke, every night, to Borl’s tongue on my hand and Teldaru’s knuckles against my door.

  “You do not seem yourself, Mistress,” Leylen said to me one morning. She left me each evening as I was going to bed and came back just after dawn, and so she had no idea that I did not actually stay in my bed.

  “The Otherworld is with me all the time, since Ranior’s Hill,” I said, and she nodded as if she understood, and said nothing more about it.

  Teldaru and I left the castle through a postern gate set in the southern wall—so even the night guards did not see us. We were shadows.

  “I looked for you last night,” Haldrin said to Teldaru at the morning meal, one day. “You weren’t in any of your usual places.”

  “No,” Teldaru said, “Nola and I—we sometimes go . . .” He trailed off and looked at me with a crooked smile that was so gentle and full of desire that I flushed what must have been a dramatic shade of pink. Haldrin glanced at me and cleared his throat.

  Zemiya has spoken to him, I thought, or Teldaru has; the king thinks we are lovers. I imagined—fruitlessly, for the thousandth time—being able to stand up and tell the king everything. I imagined screaming curses, instead. I imagined speaking all sorts of words, but none of them—not even the true ones—could have described what Teldaru and I did, in the big, dark
house in the city.

  Teldaru took a knife from his belt—not Bardrem’s knife, but the one with the sapphires and rubies, which I had killed Laedon with. Teldaru jabbed at the tip of his forefinger and we both watched blood bead and tremble there. He stepped so close to the bed that his thighs were touching the mattress by Laedon’s head (for Laedon was lying on the bed now). The blood fell—very slowly, it seemed. It clung to the old man’s misshapen brow for a moment before it eased its way down his face and onto the sheet beneath him.

  Teldaru’s eyes were wide and fixed. There was no gold in them any more: only black, or something deeper than that. His lips were parted. I thought, He is still beautiful. And then I thought, as I had before, You could kill him, Nola, now—because while he seemed to be holding tightly to the knife, he was also in the Otherworld, and I might be able to wrest the weapon from him and use it before he could return. But no: I might not do it right—and if I did, how would my Paths return to what they had been? I felt sick with shame. I did not move.

  He bent toward Laedon, whose face was turned away from him. Laedon blinked. He blinked again, and Teldaru made a sound, deep in his throat, and Laedon’s head rolled on the pillow.

  I stumbled away from the bed. I was at the window, my fingernails gouging wood, my heart hammering so loudly that if Teldaru made other sounds, I did not hear them. Laedon was looking at him. He was looking, his eyes clear and focused, as I had never seen them when he lived—and as I watched, their blue flooded black. His whole body rolled, and he was facing Teldaru, and me. The sheet slipped off his chest and tangled between his thighs. His shirt was loose and unlaced, and I caught a glimpse of yellow-grey skin, pitted with tendons and muscles that looked like they were in the wrong places.

  Teldaru sagged forward, and the knife fell to the floor. His forearms and elbows were on the bed, holding him up. His shoulder blades jutted behind him like blunt, unformed wings.

  Laedon sat up. His muscles twisted and strained. Every slow movement was an echo of some other effortless, remembered one. His legs slid over the edge of the bed. His claw hands were upturned; his fingers twitched. His eyes were steady and still, fixed on Teldaru’s bent head. And then they shifted and sought and found me.

  His mouth was slack. His whole body was, now. Only his eyes lived. It’s just Teldaru behind them, I told myself—but this did not seem right: there was still blue in the black. Laedon was here, and he saw me.

  I straightened so that I was no longer leaning against the window. When he comes toward you, I thought, do not run; he will be slow and ungainly and you will have time to move away. But he did not come toward me. He sat staring at me for a moment more, and then he fell to his left, so quickly that it would have been comical, under other circumstances. At the same time Teldaru turned and eased himself down until he was sitting with his back against the bed. He licked his lips. His eyes were closed; his shoulders and arms were rigid. I had seen him like this before, in the tiny, windowless room that had been my cell, when I first came to the castle. No doubt I had looked like this before, in this very room. Spent; wrung by Bloodseeing.

  “Water,” Teldaru rasped, and I went to the pitcher and poured some into a thick clay mug. I wondered briefly whether it would taste the way the air smelled. My hands shook a bit as I held the mug to his mouth.

  “If it costs you so much simply to make him sit up,” I said, “what kind of effort will you need to make him stand? And when it is Mambura or Ranior, how will you make them hold swords—and use swords? Because this is how you intend these heroes to do battle, yes? You will control them.”

  Teldaru raised his finger—the one he had pricked—and put it in his mouth. “We,” he said slowly, around his finger. “We will control them; we will be them. You will be the island Bird. I will be the Hound.”

  He got to his feet. His strength was already returning; he moved smoothly, if more carefully than usual. He pushed Laedon onto his back and arranged him so his head was on the pillow again. Teldaru drew the sheet up over Laedon’s sunken chest.

  “And what will happen, after we do this?” I said—as if it were even possible. As if I wouldn’t have stopped him long before then.

  “I will be greater than either of them,” Teldaru said. “I will rule. And you with me.”

  I wanted to laugh, as he reached out a hand, but instead I forced myself to step forward and take it. I held his fingers very tightly. I will ruin you, I thought, yet again, and I smiled into the darkness of his eyes.

  Selera’s bones lay on a piece of red velvet. Teldaru arranged them, from nubby toes up to pitted ivory skull. She was hundreds of parts but also whole.

  “We must choose,” he said to me one night. “We do not have all of Mambura’s bones, so we cannot use all of hers.” He was stroking the brownish clump of stuff that was her hair, which he had laid on its own, smaller piece of velvet.

  He picked an arm, and her hips. He worked his wrist into the space between the hipbones and grinned at me. “Now you,” he said.

  I chose quickly—three ribs—the most graceful, unhorrifying things on the red velvet. I held all three of them in one hand. They were smooth and pocked with tiny holes, neither warm nor cool. Borl whined; his eyes darted as if he could see my face, and the things in my hand.

  “Good,” Teldaru said, and turned.

  We went upstairs. “It must happen here,” he said as he pushed the door to the mirror room open. “The Otherworld is here, always.”

  And so is Uja, I thought. I had not seen her since he brought me back to this house; I had only heard her, singing long, lovely phrases that I was sure were for me. So now my heart pounded as I stepped into the room and looked for her—and she was there, on one of the lower branches of her cage-tree. Her amber eyes were level with mine. I expected another song, or at least a whistle, but she sat silently and very still. She did not even blink. She gazed at me as if she did not know me, and did not look at Borl at all. I waited for him to growl at her, as he always used to, but even he was quiet, though the muscles of his back were rigid beneath my hand.

  Teldaru spread the red velvet out on the floor between the cabinet and the mirror. The knives were the same; the gold was the same. I wondered for a moment whether the woman whose white-streaked braid was coiled in the kitchen had ever stood here, staring at the knives and at the beauty of his face and beginning to be afraid.

  He arranged the bones on the cloth and sat back on his heels. There were so few bones.

  It won’t work, I thought. “And now what will we do?” I sounded eager; I was eager, and heavy with dismay.

  “I think you know.” The lamplight flickered on the golden facets and on his skin—all so smooth, so bright.

  I smiled, keeping my face turned to him even as I sank down into a crouch. I did not recall deciding to do this; it was the Pattern moving in me. I took hold of the knife hilt that jutted from his boot and pulled the blade free. I rose. I grasped his left hand and set it next to mine. Our palms were turned up; they looked ruddy, fleshy in the light. I drew the knife’s edge across his palm and then mine in one quick, steady motion. Neither of us flinched.

  “There,” I said as our blood welled black, together.

  The darkness is stifling and still. There are no ribbons of colour, as there were in Borl’s dead Otherworld. There is nothing but Teldaru, behind me. He feels cool—his breath, and the words that prickle my skin.

  “Wait. Be patient. Watch.”

  Time passes. Usually I do not feel this, sunk in a vision, but now I know: it has been minutes, hours, and I cannot breathe in the dark, and there is nothing to see. I am exhausted, and I have done nothing, yet.

  “There.” It is my voice. My hands reach, at last, for a deeper shadow. A black spark hangs somewhere in front of me. I move my hands carefully until I see the spark bob, and then I curl all my fingers around it. Cold spreads up my arms and into the space behind my eyes. I see my fingers loosen, and Teldaru’s closing over them, drawing them together ag
ain. The spark warms. Light pulses—wan and white, and after yet more time, silver. Teldaru’s hands open and so do mine, and the spark rises and floats away from me, trailing silver through the black. It is more and more distant, just a speck, and the path it has left is green now. I watch it, and I am holding it: it is coming from me, or it ends with me—I cannot tell which, but I am spinning slowly, clinging and gasping because I am so tired.

  “I can’t,” I say somehow, and Teldaru slips his hands around my waist as the Otherworld falls away beneath me.

  I coughed, and this hurt my chest and filled my eyes with tears. When they were gone I saw one of the ribs arcing gently about a hand’s breadth away from me. The black after-splotches wriggled over the bone, so that it seemed to be wobbling. It was no different. I could tell, even with the splotches—the bone was pitted and bare and just as it had been before.

  “Didn’t work.” My voice was a croak.

  “Did.” Teldaru’s was the same as mine. His hand twitched on my hip. He was lying behind me, of course.

  I lifted my head and his hand was there, propping it up, letting me see more clearly. The rib was bare, but it was not dry: it glistened with a sheen that looked orange, with my after-vision. And the bone was dark, not yellow. Dark red, I saw a bit later, when I was sitting up and my gaze was clear. The other bones lay around this one, and they were certainly the same as they had been.

  “You see,” said Teldaru, and Uja keened, long and low.

  So that was how Selera began again—with dampness and deep red and a single, curving bone. Every night for two months we remade more of her. I know it was two months because my bleeding came twice. I was relieved when it did, since it kept me from needing a knife, to enter the Otherworld—and I was already covered with tiny scars. My belly, under my arms and breasts—it took many, many cuts to bring Selera back.

  We tore at the darkness of her Otherworld; used our living blood to fashion scarlet sand and dull grey sky. All the bones on the cloth glistened with fat and flesh. There was always a moment of dizzy triumph as I looked down on what the old, dead Paths had become: fingernails and earlobe, a fuzz of hair and the wet glint of an eye. The moment would pass, of course, and my pulse would slow, and I would stare with horror at what we were making and think, I will not be excited next time; I will not catch my breath when Teldaru whispers, “Ready, love?” But I did.