I did not understand, and I could not keep from asking him questions, even though I knew that the curse would keep me from making these questions intelligible. “How does it work? How can we do all this with just these few bits of her?”
He smiled, of course—delighted to be asked, and to instruct. “Everything is in each part. Each part is whole. A man can be remade from a single hair, or a spine. An eyelash would be enough—but it is harder. The oldest, smallest Paths are well hidden. They are easier to find in the larger bones, the newer ones—and that is why we are using some of those.”
“But how do they know to knit?”
“They remember.”
And they did. I hoped that one night I would open my eyes and see Selera’s nose embedded in her belly, or a nipple protruding from her forehead, but this did not happen. Blotches of fat adhered to bones that had not been there before. All her bones, old and new, were hidden by white and red stuff that wobbled or stretched taut, and everything was in the right place.
“Let me see it,” I said one night. He had brought a pillow for her head, which by then was covered in a layer of moist yellow skin and patches of wispy hair. There was no velvet any more; just a piece of thick, folded linen, because she oozed and stained whatever was beneath or around her. “Let me watch you so that I can see how things join.”
Teldaru shook his head. “I need you in the Otherworld with me. There is no time for lessons now. We must remake her, and then Mambura and Ranior, as quickly as we can—for after the queen’s child is born there will be change. We must be ready for it.”
“Just once,” I said, as if I had not heard him. “Let me watch you once—surely that would not delay us much.”
He brushed my cheek with his knuckles, which were smeared with blood—Selera’s, I knew, for it was black, not crimson. “No, my love,” he said, and brushed my nipple then, until it hardened beneath the undershift I wore here. “I need you with me, always.”
We gathered the scarlet sand and spun it into lattice. We caught at ribbons of colour that flitted among the lattice and hills and up against the sky, and we made them into rolling green—but she was still dead. She will stay this way, I thought as I lay spent, staring at the fresh gleam of her lips or the arch of an eyebrow. Even as I watched her Paths stretch away from me over the greening hills I thought this—because they were black Paths, trails of soot or ashes, and the ends I held did not move. Maybe Laedon will be the only one, I thought; maybe Selera and Mambura and Ranior will simply lie on the floor like meat and we will fail and there will be no battle.
But at the end of that second month, a Path shivered between my fingers. It shivered and then it lashed, and I saw that the one Teldaru was holding was lashing too. The two roads rippled upon the green, and they flooded slowly silver, from our fingertips outward, to the farthest edge of sky. I cried out, for the silver came from me, and it tore at me as it left my veins. Teldaru laughed. He plucked up another road, and so did I, and I was laughing now, throbbing with pain and hunger. Every Path we touched turned silver. The red sky glowed brighter, and bruise-purple vines swarmed and knotted on the hills.
“Go back,” I heard Teldaru say. I saw him raise his hands, which were still tangled with silver, and felt them push me, hard. I was on the wooden floor, panting and whimpering, and Uja was singing, somewhere above the pounding of my blood. Teldaru was beside me, his eyes Otherseeing black, his shoulders hunched and straining. I struggled to my knees, scrabbling at my eyes to clear away the after-vision shapes. Selera was lying as she had been: her limbs straight, her face turned to the ceiling. Her nose was sunken and her lips were black. All her skin, from forehead to toes, was mottled white and brown. Her hair was too thin and short and filthy to look blonde. As she had been—except for her eyes. They were open, as always, but they were not green: they were black. And they were blinking.
I pushed myself backward and my feet scraped along the floor. Her head moved, as if she had heard me. It rolled on the pillow and she looked at me, or Teldaru did—maybe both of them did, out of her living eyes. Her lips twitched and pulled back over her teeth. She smiled, and Teldaru smiled, and I ran from them, retching and blind.
The smell clung to me, no matter how often I bathed. I hardly noticed it at the house any more, but at the castle it wafted up at me from my own hair and skin. When winter came, the stench seemed stronger because of all the layers of clothing I wore, and the smoky dampness of the rooms. I spent as much time as I could outside, walking the snow-crusted paths beneath the trees, but I had lessons to teach, and people to Othersee for, and anyway, the cold did not seem to help. The only relief it gave me was solitude.
“Something is rotten here,” the queen said one night at dinner. She leaned forward, both hands on the gentle swell of her belly. Her eyes flicked from Teldaru’s face to mine.
“Your sense of smell is heightened,” Haldrin said. “Perhaps the meat is old and only you can tell.” He cleared his throat. I knew that he was lying, and I felt sick with shame and rage.
“No.” Teldaru leaned forward too, and placed his hand lightly on mine. I stared at the piece of raisin bread I was holding. I could not lift it, now that he was touching me, and I no longer wanted to.
“I am showing Mistress Nola the deepest mysteries of our gift. I am leading her along the Paths of the dead.”
There was a servant reaching over my shoulder with a ladle full of soup. He dropped the ladle, after Teldaru spoke, and the soup spilled onto my lap and over our joined hands. Lovely, I thought, trying not to moan at the burning. Now I’ll stink of dead chicken as well as dead people.
“This is forbidden,” Lord Derris said. I could hardly hear his voice above the din of other voices in the Hall, and yet the words seemed very clear.
“Simply walking the Paths is not,” said Teldaru. “Dangerous, yes, and exhausting, but not forbidden unless you seek to change them. My own Master feared these roads and showed me nothing of them, so that when I found them on my own, the danger was even greater. So I am showing Mistress Nola. Guiding her.” He stroked my knuckles with his fingertips.
“Take care.” Haldrin spoke so quietly that I almost could not hear him, either.
“Of course,” said Teldaru. I felt my lips twist into something like a smile, and I bowed my head.
Brilliant, I thought. The Great Master will lead them so close to the truth that they will not see it.
Perhaps the servant went off and told other servants; perhaps Lord Derris told some of his pious friends. However it happened, I became even more popular and revered. In the evenings, when I did not teach, I sat in the Otherseeing chamber as a succession of people came to me—mostly nobles who gave me coins, but often servants too, or soldiers, who thought I was showing them great favour when I looked into their Otherworlds and did not ask for payment.
I thought, You poor fools; my words are as rank as my skin. And yet even the smell of me, it seemed, was cause for awe. Most of them recoiled at first, when they sat down facing me. I watched their hands and nostrils twitch, and then I watched them lean in closer. I saw their wonder and revulsion and need, and I hated them more than I hated the lies I had to tell them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
We remade Mambura, that winter. As he grew, so did Zemiya’s baby. I remember these things as if they had been one: a single act of creation, horrifying and exhilarating. The long bones of Mambura’s fingers, bare, then wreathed in dark skin. Zemiya’s dark fingers kneading her sides, finding other bones, beneath. Mambura’s skull on the mirror room floor, fashioned from nothing; the curves of it, chin and cheekbones, brows and eye sockets. Zemiya’s belly, round and high. Her face and breasts fuller too; Mambura’s wet red muscles thickening with fat and flesh.
It took us five months. We were slow and careful, and we used every Otherseeing tool we could, because Teldaru said this would make the hero stronger. Each tool made his Otherworld look different: the sky lighter and smaller when we used wax on water; the hil
ls dim and further away when we used grain. Though when Uja stepped through the grain—when our blood spattered the marks she left with her tail feathers and talons—the Pattern was almost unbearably vivid: the colours, the yielding ground, the sharpened edges of lattice and roads.
The only thing we did not use was the mirror. “Wait,” Teldaru told me, as he had so many times before. “It will be last.”
Selera lay in my old bed. She wore a silk gown—green, of course, which matched her eyes, beneath their blind white film. My own eyes were black.
I did not notice this until Teldaru took my face between his hands one night and said, “Your eyes are fully Other; you are the Pattern’s now.” I leaned close to the hall mirror, before we left the house, and saw that he was right. As I met my own gaze I thought of Yigranzi and Chenn and then Bardrem, and I was glad when Teldaru drew me away.
Selera in my bed and Laedon in the chair beside it; the Flamebird of Belakao taking shape on the floor by the mirror. And Zemiya—moabe, queen, island witch—swelling with the child who would change everything.
“An Otherseer must attend you when the babe is born.” Haldrin was holding one of her hands in both of his, and yet she seemed to be far away from him. She was sitting, looking out the window of the library. Her orange dress was loose around her legs and feet but taut over her belly, where her other hand lay.
“No,” she said.
Teldaru, who was standing beside me, sighed. Her eyes did not move from the snow, which danced and drifted in the partly shuttered window.
“It is our custom,” said the king.
“You mean Lord Derris wishes it.”
Haldrin glanced at us. “Yes—of course—but it is more than that. An Otherseer must be present at a royal birth—to witness, and to say the words of welcome. It is right.”
Zemiya turned her head fully toward the window. All Teldaru and I could see was the back of her head: the tiny braids, the tiny shells. Haldrin could see more.
“I want my sister.”
I thought her voice had trembled. I wondered if there were tears—or maybe I just wanted them.
“You cannot have your sister, moabene.” He was quiet, for a moment; then he squeezed her hand, said, “Nola would be good company.”
“No.”
“Teldaru, then. It must be one of them.”
Zemiya turned her head. She looked from me to Teldaru. There were no tears.
“Her, then,” she said. She spoke to Haldrin but was still looking at Teldaru. The hand on her belly was splayed and clenched, both. I wondered how it felt: the baby, twisting and grinding within her. I thought of silver roads wrenching at my blood and breath, and I wondered.
“Mistress Nola,” the king said. He smiled at me as he always had, because he had never understood. “Will you do this for us? Will you see our baby born, and welcome him?”
I bowed my chin to my chest. “Thank you both,” I said. “I will.”
Haldrin summoned us again the morning after we finished Mambura.
We had used the mirror, at last. Stood at the edge of it, our eyes leaping from the man-thing on the floor to the gold, and the blood that clung to it. The Otherworld rose around me like golden rain, falling up, pulling me down and away. Hills and sky were shadows behind blinding white; the snake-Paths were still black, but even darker than that. They breathed smoke, and Teldaru drew my hands into it so that it rose higher. It was cold at first, but it warmed as it flowed through our fingers, and very soon it was scalding. I cried out, and as I did the smoke turned from grey to silver and fastened itself to the roads. They shuddered, and they were silver too, and my veins coursed life into them, sending them out and out to where the white sky was deepening to red.
Mambura blinked his black eyes. His burnished chest—which was so dark that I could only see the purple blotches on it when I moved—rose and fell. His head was hairless and smooth. His arms and legs lay still. They were bunched with muscle; I expected them to flex and bend, to carry him up into a crouch or a spring.
“He is magnificent,” said Teldaru. I moaned, deep in my throat. I was too weary to speak. My own muscles were water.
A few hours later I was sleeping so soundly that Leylen had to shake me awake. I flailed at her, saw her duck away from my fists before I realized that they were mine. My eyes swam with purple spots, like the ones on Mambura’s body.
“Mistress,” she said breathlessly. “The king is asking for you.”
Teldaru was already sitting at the library table when I arrived. Lord Derris was there as well—and Zemiya, looking out at the seers’ courtyard again but standing, this time. Haldrin was hunched over in his chair, his elbows on the tabletop, his forehead in his laced-together fingers.
“There has been another incident,” he said when the door had shut behind me. He did not look up. “A Belakaoan merchant has been murdered by another merchant. A Sarsenayan—his neighbour. I need counsel from all of you before I decide what must be done.”
“Obviously we must punish the murderer,” Lord Derris said. “We must prove to King Bantayo that we do not condone such actions, no matter what the provocation may have been.”
“In that case,” Teldaru said, “the murderer too must die.”
Lord Derris’ eyes went wide. “No! Master Teldaru, that would be too much. Only the murderers of noblemen are put to death. Our people would be angry; there would only be more bloodshed.”
Teldaru and Haldrin were gazing at each other. “Perhaps,” the king said slowly. “But it would be more dangerous to anger Bantayo. He is already threatening to break our alliance. If we act swiftly now, he may be reassured. Zemiya, tell us—what will he think?”
For a moment she did not move. I could see her face, this time; she was looking at the trees, but her eyes were half-lidded, as if she were trying not to fall asleep. Her hands were pressed against her belly.
She licked her top lip. “It will not matter what you do. He hates Sarsenay now. Even if he forgets why, this will not change.”
She closed her eyes and leaned into the windowsill with one hip. She bent forward. Her fingers went pale as they tightened.
“My Queen,” I said, and took a step toward her. I was dizzy—awake but not fully; moving through space smudged with crimson and black.
Zemiya turned her head and looked at me. The others were on their feet, coming up behind me, but I saw only the gleaming whites of her eyes and teeth.
“Are they pains?” I heard Haldrin say. “How long have you been having them?”
“All night,” she said. Her breath caught, and the words trembled. Her eyes did not leave mine. “And now it is time.”
She did not make any sounds at first. No cries or screams, anyway, which I had heard so often from the brothel girls, and even (if I allowed myself to remember) from my own mother. Zemiya did moan, when the pains had her, and her breath was deep and ragged-edged between them, but otherwise she was quiet.
“It will be an easy birth,” the midwife whispered to me while the queen moaned. She was squatting in her bathtub, her arms rigid along its lip. Jamenda was pouring more warm water in. The girl’s eyes darted from me to the midwife, who lowered her voice further. “Yes—easy, because island women are made for birthing.”
The midwife is too young to know this, I thought. How many Belakaoan births can she have attended? How can she sound so certain, be so certain, as she puts her hands into the water and kneads at Zemiya’s belly?
And yet she was right. Only a few hours after the queen had left the library she finally cried out—a high, unwavering sound that brought the king to the doorway and the midwife back to the side of the tub.
“Out you get, now,” the midwife said to Zemiya as her cry turned into a low, guttural grunt. “The baby’s coming.”
The queen raised her head. Her eyes were as black as if she had been Otherseeing. I wanted to push past Haldrin and run, but the Pattern I longed to flee held me there.
“I know,” said Ze
miya. “And I am staying. Here. This place has no tides, no currents . . . no waves. But my child will be born in water.”
She closed her eyes. Lowered her head back down against the tub’s rim and groaned again, again, pausing only to take breaths that drew her whole body up.
“My king,” Lord Derris called from the other room. “Come away—leave them.”
“No.” The word was loud, but it shook. I saw the king’s shadow leaping on the wall where all the other shadows were—the fish bones and crab shells and seaweed—but I did not look over my shoulder at him.
Zemiya threw her head back and gave a yell that became a laugh. The midwife’s hands and arms were in the water; she pulled them out, and she was holding a small, limp, dripping thing. She grasped it in one hand by its ankles, and with her other hand reached for the length of ribbon she had set beside the tub hours ago. I moved forward to help, but the midwife was already looping it around the cord that joined the baby to Zemiya. The midwife grasped at the ribbon with her teeth and fingers and suddenly it was a knot, cinched tight around fleshy stuff that pulsed and then did not. She took hold of the knife that had been next to the ribbon—a little knife, just a sliver of blade. She sawed at the cord until it separated with a gout of dark blood. Zemiya was still laughing, softly now. The whites of her eyes were webbed with red.
The baby was a girl. When I saw this I felt a rush of relief, thought, Of course that dream I told the queen of was false; that child was a boy. But my relief ebbed as I looked at this child. She seemed to have no bones. She only moved because the midwife was rubbing her with a piece of cloth (soft and thick and white; it came away yellowish-green). The midwife stopped and leaned close to the baby. She swept her finger inside the tiny mouth, pressed gently on the chest, puffed breath between the parted lips. The baby lay splayed and glistening and still did not move.
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