I began to crawl.
Ranior pierced Bardrem’s shoulder and belly. When the knife fell it struck Teldaru’s thigh. Teldaru was laughing silently, watching now, through all the layers of both the worlds.
I was nearly to them.
Ranior raised his sword once more. There was a wind, just then—a sweeping of feathers and a slicing of talons. Uja was diving. She grazed Ranior’s head with her talons and beat upward so that she could attack again.
I dragged myself over Bardrem’s legs. I had the knife, but could not feel it in my hand. I lowered my head to draw a deep breath—and fingers grasped my braid. They pulled and pulled, and I was too weak to resist. My head was up, back; my eyes swam with tears, but I saw him anyway, staring down at me. The black and gold of him.
He tugged my hair sharply and I cried out. His other hand was around my throat, stroking, tightening. I saw bursts of white light and then darkness. I heard my heart thudding—and other sounds, too: snarling and snapping and one high, broken shout.
I was free. I coughed and sucked in air that made me cough more. The darkness flowed away.
Teldaru was on his back. Borl’s front paws were on his chest; Borl’s teeth were in his throat, or what was left of it. Teldaru’s feet and hands twitched wildly. And that was all. He was limp and ragged, and he stared up, unblinking, into the first of the stars.
Bardrem’s lips bubbled with blood. He had been lying on his side when I pulled myself up to sit beside him. I had rolled him so that his head was in my lap. Now I bent close to the slow, uneven thread of his breath. My hair was half-unbound; it dipped both our faces in shadow. There was just enough light left for me to see his eyes.
“Don’t go,” I said. My dress clung to my legs, sodden with his blood.
His lips moved.
“Hush,” I said, even though I did not think he was trying to speak.
“Nola.” It was a gurgling—a wet, uneven word—but I understood.
“Tell me,” he said, as I bent even closer. Tendrils of my hair brushed his forehead.
“Yes?” No “hush” any more, because I needed to hear his voice, even as it was.
“Tell me, because you should . . . oblige me now, at least. At last.” He smiled. Foam gathered and stretched at the corners of his mouth. “What has your Pattern been? What Paths . . . have brought you here?”
I thought, at first, that the shivering was all his. I thought that I was flushing only because my head was down and I was sick with weariness and grief.
I wish I could tell you. But Teldaru cursed me . . .
“Teldaru cursed me.”
I was shivering. I was fever-hot.
“You will not be able to refuse a request to Othersee,” Teldaru had said, so long ago, in a prison room. “If the words of command are spoken, you must answer.”
Not Pattern-yet-to-be; Pattern past. Paths already walked. Questions asked that must be answered, as the swaying shadow-streaks of my hair wove my own Otherworld around me. And I could see it—I was in it because Bardrem had held a mirror up to my face and told me to look.
“He cursed me with Bloodseeing—I have been his, and mute, for eight years, but now you have returned my words to me with yours.”
My head and chest were aching. My throat felt open and raw. My hair had turned to silver ribbons that rippled outward to distant hills. Many of these were cinder-black, and most stayed that way—but one, then two flooded with climbing green. The Paths looped around them and back to me, and in. My veins throbbed with change.
I could see him through my Otherworld, and my Otherworld through him. Bone lattice lay beneath him. He lifted his hand and it trailed ivy, which he twined in my unravelling braid.
“Nola,” he said again. His mouth stayed open. I kissed it. I kissed his scar and I closed his wide eyes and kissed them. I wound him in silver and held him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
My arm hurt. I felt bruised and torn and wondered why it should be my arm that hurt the most—but I realized, as I straightened, that Uja was running the tip of her beak along it. I wondered then why I was sitting up. I must be in the kitchen or library; why was I not in my bedroom, where she usually woke me, when Teldaru was away?
“Careful, Uja,” I said as her beak slipped up and down—a keen edge, just as sharp as metal. “Teldaru told me once that he saw you kill someone this way, on Belakao. . . .” I stopped speaking. I remembered where I was.
Bantayo and Neluja were standing together, perhaps ten paces away from me. Haldrin was crumpled closer than that, and Mambura beside him. Ranior was lying with his limbs splayed wide. Wounded, I thought, and maybe irreparably, because one of the people who remade him is dead.
Teldaru is dead. I turned the words over without saying them. His throat was as raw and meaty as Chenn’s had been clean. Borl was sitting beside me. I scratched his ears and he leaned into me. I smelled blood on his breath and fur.
“Master Teldaru believed a prophecy that was not even true,” I whispered. I remembered this, too—that I could speak. That there was nothing in my own throat except my voice. “Or perhaps he did not believe it. He was mad. I was mad. A brothel girl died at the house where I used to be his prisoner. He murdered Zemiya.”
I looked down into Bardrem’s face. There was a faint light left in the sky; I could see his eyelashes lying against his cheeks. “As pretty as a girl,” Yigranzi had said, before his hair was short and his legs were long.
I could bring you back, I thought. I’m already bleeding. You haven’t been gone long; you’d be blind, but you might still speak and walk. . . . It was just an echo of a thought, really. One I had to hear just so I could turn away from it. I laid my hands on his motionless chest and closed my eyes.
“Ispa Nola.”
Neluja was above me. The hem of her dress was touching the sole of Bardrem’s boot.
“Get away from him.”
“Mistress, I could not—”
“Get away from me, ispa, or I will rot your Paths as Teldaru did mine.”
She stepped back. She lifted her arm, and Uja dipped from the darkness and landed beside her. As she settled her wings in against her body, a new light crept up over the grass and stone. Lanterns. Torches.
Lord Derris stopped walking when he could see the hilltop, and who was on it. Four Belakaoan soldiers and four Sarsenayan ones held the flickering lights higher. Some of them dipped wildly, as the soldiers saw, too.
Lord Derris cried out. His ruined voice sounded like a child’s, or a bird’s. He strode to Haldrin’s body and fell to his knees. He turned him over.
“You did not call for me,” I heard him rasp. “How can I ever help you, Cousin, if you do not call for me?”
He lowered his head. When he raised it he looked directly at me.
“Mistress Nola,” he said. “I see that one traitor is dead. Why are you not?”
I could have answered him, with words that would have been true. I looked back at him and said nothing.
“She is no traitor.” Neluja’s long, thin fingers waved at me. “She was his slave. She could not choose.”
Lord Derris drew a shuddering breath. “Forgive me, Mistress, but this is a Sarsenayan matter.”
“Forgive me, Lord, but it is not. My sister is dead. My brother stands here now, and our people wait below us on the plain. This matter belongs to all.”
Bantayo walked to stand beside her. He was a small man, and he seemed smaller now. His eyes were dull in the firelight.
“Belakao’s honour is restored,” he said. “Though I cannot imagine speaking of what I have seen, we must do this—my victory must be known. And though I cannot imagine sitting for one more moment in that room of books or that empty hall, I must. Isparra has chosen me. All the tides have drawn me here, to see my people avenged. Now it is done.”
Lord Derris did not move. I watched him; I knew, even from the numb, far place where I was, that he was struggling for control. His hands clenched and the bump behind his
neck scar lurched as he swallowed. But he could not show his rage, or even his grief.
“Come, moabu,” he said at last. “Let us go back to my castle. And you,” he called to the soldiers, “wait here with her.” A nod toward me. Nobody looked at me—not even him. “I will have wagons sent for her, and the others.”
Haldrin was transported in his own wagon, hours later. I lay in the second one, beneath a canvas roof. I folded myself around Bardrem’s body and waited for the horses to draw us—the dead, and me—back into our city.
King Derris spent several days with Bantayo. Many lords and even soldiers were permitted to listen to their conversations. Bantayo maintained that isparra had led Haldrin to his death, for injustices done to Belakao. Derris replied that the Pattern favoured no one, but that it had brought Sarsenay and Belakao to this crossroads for a purpose. They agreed that further hostilities were unnecessary, now that balance had been restored. They agreed that trade must continue. Each likely believed he was indulging a fool.
Bantayo left the city on Ranior’s Pathday. There was no procession this year, and no celebration. The Belakaoans rode along empty streets and out onto the wider road. They rejoined their countrymen on the plain, and a few days later the plain, too, was empty.
Neluja stayed at the castle. I stayed at the castle—King Derris allowed me this much. I should have wanted to leave. I should have gathered my few belongings and made for the city gate the moment my shock and weakness had passed, but I did not. I had no desire to see if this part of the curse had been broken, with Teldaru’s death. I wanted only to be still and small in a place I knew. Derris gave me a different room, at least: one on the lowest floor of the keep. The single, narrow slit of window looked out on the steps to the main courtyard. He took over Haldrin’s rooms. He shut Teldaru’s up and declared that no one would ever live there again. My old room he gave to a princess from Lorselland, who arrived a few months after the night on Ranior’s Hill. The king married her, when the months of mourning had passed. Leylen became her serving girl.
Grasni’s Sildio was granted leave to stand guard outside my door. “To keep certain people out,” he said, in his sweet, serious way, “not to keep you in.” He told me that Mistress Ket often asked for me. She did not know what had happened, and no one told her. She sat in her room, Sildio said, and did not teach or Othersee any more, nor did she seem to remember she once had. Soon the king summoned another Otherseer, from somewhere outside Sarsenay City.
Mistress Ket might not know what had happened, but everyone else did. King Derris made it known: the treachery of the great Teldaru; the curse he had placed upon Mistress Nola; the forbidden art pursued by both. Mistress Nola was to be pitied, for she had been but a plaything, and the victim of a monstrous man. Pitied—and yet she had used Bloodseeing. She had participated in murder. Her Paths had been tainted by Teldaru’s, and she would no longer be “Mistress.” Not in name, and not in nature—for King Derris tested her Otherseeing abilities on a series of servants and city folk. It was discovered that, while she was able to speak of what Teldaru had done to her, she still could not refuse a request to Othersee, and her words afterward were still lies. Now, after speaking these lies, she could say, “No. That is not what I saw at all.” But it was not enough. Most of the curse remained. Her Paths were twisted beyond repair—so she was only “Nola” now.
He was a wise king, the people already said. Wise and compassionate, and stronger of will than his cousin.
So I sat in my small, bright room, and I did not miss my old one. I did not miss the seers’ courtyard—the schoolrooms and the lycus trees and the pool with its green, glowing fish. I felt nothing, not even when Sildio told me, haltingly, that Mambura and Ranior had been moved into the house in the city. He did not tell me about Selera, or Laedon, who would be truly lifeless, now that Teldaru was. He did not tell me about the king, or Bardrem, and I did not ask him to, because I was too empty to care. He spoke only of my hero-creatures, who would only die if I did. He told me that people gathered at the gates of the house. They looked at the overgrown garden and the tall, barred windows, and they did not know whether they should pity me or fear me or admire me, still, maybe a little more than they had before.
I was alone for a time, except for Sildio. And Borl, too, was with me. King Derris tried to take him for himself: the hound who, though a product of Bloodseeing, had boldly attacked an enemy of Sarsenay, just as his forbears had centuries ago. But Borl howled day and night, in the royal kennels and in the king’s rooms. He howled and clawed at wall hangings and doors until they brought him back to me.
And then the king himself brought someone else.
“She is sick,” he said. He gestured to a nursemaid, who passed Layibe into my arms. “I thought to raise her myself, but I cannot—look at her—she is ill and miserable. And in any case, she is yours. The Pattern has seen fit to make this so.”
Layibe hardly seemed to be breathing. And she was so tiny, so thin—she should have been crawling by now, and laughing, and sitting up waving plump little fists. I brushed the curls away from her forehead, where a single vein throbbed. She rolled her milky eyes at me and made a mewling noise. I thought: This poor, poor child; she, at least, should make you feel something.
But she did not.
Sildio rapped on my door, one morning in autumn. “Mistress,” he said. He still calls me this, when there is no one else to hear. “The ispa is here to see you.”
I sat for a moment, looking down at Layibe, who was asleep in her cradle. Then I rose and walked to the door and opened it.
“Ispa.” I had come to realize that my dead, flat voice sounded dignified. I stood back to let her enter. Uja waddled in behind her, her tail feathers swishing on the floor. Sildio stared at both of them.
“You must be glad to have her back,” I said, gesturing at Uja. I had had no intention of being pleasant. For more than a month I had thought only about shaking Neluja and screaming up into her face—but these had just been imaginings. Now that she was here, I could not summon any sort of strength.
Neluja gazed at the bird, and at me. Her bright yellow headscarf set off the polished darkness of her face, and its hollows and edges. Her dress was orange. She and Uja were so bright that I thought even Layibe might be able to see them.
“I am,” she said. “I feared for her a little, when she chose to go with him.”
“She chose . . .?” I would have laughed, if I could have. “He thought he had stolen her. Of course you and she were both too clever for that.” I hunkered down in front of Uja, who cocked her head at me. “Why? Why would you sit in his cage, all those years, when you could have been free?”
Neluja cupped her hand over Uja’s head. “Isparra flows through her as it does through us. We cannot expect always to understand it—just to feel it and watch it.”
I straightened. “Words!” I said, almost as I had to Yigranzi. It seemed there was strength in me, after all. “Such pretty, empty words! But no—the watching—that’s true. That’s something you do well.”
I could feel my face flushing. I tried to breathe, to cool and calm myself; if I began to feel anything, I might never stop.
“And what would you have had me do, at that hill? Ispas do not hold spears. We do not hurt; sometimes this means we also cannot help.”
“But before the Hill,” I said. “Isparra has shown you only darkness for years—you told me this. You told Haldrin this. If you had been able to do something, just once—if you had drowned Teldaru when he was on Belakao—if you had poisoned his wine when you first came here—your sister would still be alive. So many people would be, if you had acted.”
Her eyes were unbearably gentle. “You could not choose. And you cannot understand why others do not. But look, too,” she continued, stepping over to the cradle. She bent and put her hand on the side; she tipped it a bit, so that we could both see Layibe’s thin, sallow face. “See what happens when there is action, not acceptance.”
“No
. No—your sister was so lovely, when this baby was in her—she wanted it, Haldrin did; I was only trying to spare them grief.”
My voice wobbled. Uja nibbled one of my palms; Borl licked the other. I snatched my hands away and thrust them under my arms.
“Now,” I said, more steadily, “you will tell me something wise about suffering. You will say that one person’s suffering is but a twig in the current of isparra.”
Neluja smiled. She was so different from Zemiya, but something in their smiles was the same. “Now that you have said it,” she said, “I will not.” She was serious again, already. “You have suffered too, Ispa Nola. Do not think this does not matter.”
I dug my fingertips into my skin. “I am no longer Ispa Nola,” I said. “As you know.”
“And would you be once more, if you could?”
I looked out my window at the strip of sky. There were no clouds in it. I could tell there was a wind, though; every few moments a strip of cloth fluttered into view. One of Haldrin’s mourning flags, blue and black, flying from the gatehouse tower.
“I used to imagine it all the time.” I swallowed. Sometimes my desire to speak my own words was as thick and solid in my throat as the curse used to be. “I would imagine him remaking my Paths. I would imagine Otherseeing—all the visions, all the words—and me being deserving of people’s awe and thanks and even their anger and tears. As long as it was truth.”
I turned my gaze back to her. “I was fourteen when I was lost, Ispa. I saw butterflies and a hillside, in my last vision, and I made a brothel girl happy. It will never be like that again.”
“No. But what if there were someone powerful enough to remake these last, cursed roads of yours?”
The lizard scuttled along her shoulder and upper arm, as I stared at her. I thought: The white in her black eyes is as fluid as foam upon a wave. It was an image Bardrem could have come up with—and I would have mocked it and he would have tossed his hair out of his eyes to glare at me, and stomped to his slanted room and slammed his crooked door. A few hours later he would have dropped sugared almonds into my lap in the kitchen while Rudicol wasn’t looking.
The Pattern Scars Page 40