“I used to imagine it,” I said slowly. “I do not any more. And you would never do this. Why did you even ask?”
Neluja reached up and rubbed the lizard’s wedge-shaped head with her forefinger. “I simply wished to know,” she said, “before I left Sarsenay.”
“And why did you stay in the first place, when all your countrymen were gone?”
She shrugged slightly—a Sarsenayan motion, not a Belakaoan one. It made her look younger. “Because I was not ready to leave. Now I am.”
She bent once more and kissed Layibe’s forehead. Then she walked to the door.
“You have to go, really,” I said. If I kept talking, perhaps she would linger. I could not believe I wanted her to, but I did. “If you don’t, you’ll be here when the snow comes. And I think the winter will feel long, in King Derris’s court.”
She smiled again and lifted her hand to the latch. She looked sad, despite the smile. It was an expression I recognized, because I had worn it too, so many times. “Wait—Ispa—you said once that you’d seen me, in one of your visions. What was it you saw?”
She was silent for a long time. When her lips finally parted, I held up my hand. “No. I don’t really want to know. Sometimes it’s the knowing that brings the darkness in.”
“You are wise, Nola,” said Neluja, “and you are strong. These things are the rock beneath all the currents there are.”
She held out her hand to Uja. “Come,” she said. Uja trilled and fluffed her feathers but stayed beside me. “Uja?” Neluja said, and Uja whistled five descending notes. She still did not move.
Neluja said something to the bird in her own language—something low and tender. “It seems,” she said after she was done, “that Uja is not ready to leave yet, herself.”
“And you will let her stay?”
One last smile, this one wide and very, very like Zemiya’s. “She is Uja. She is moabe and ispa and even more than these. And it is for the best,” she added as she pulled the door open, “since birds and lizards are not friends.”
I almost laughed.
Sildio knocked on my door the day after Neluja left Sarsenay City. “Yes?” I called, a little crossly. I was tired. I had not left my room in weeks and even before that I had only gone down to the courtyard once or twice, at night so that no one would see me. Layibe had been too quiet, and I was trying to summon the strength to worry. Uja and Borl had been snapping and growling at each other, and it annoyed me that they might have been enjoying themselves. And now another knock—another visitor, perhaps, to interrupt my precarious solitude.
“Mistress,” Sildio called back in an odd, muffled voice, “there’s someone to see you—the new Otherseer the king summoned, weeks back.”
I stood up. I smoothed my skirts. Why? I thought. Why would this Otherseer come to me? Surely not because King Derris commanded it. To gloat? To pity? It makes no difference—I will not be able to bear it. Black eyes that see the Otherworld, when my own no longer do.
I pulled the door open.
“Nola,” said Grasni. Grasni with short, full curls, in a dress that did not fit right. “Oh, Nola, I’m so sorry.” And she held out her arms to me as I began to cry.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Grasni reminded me that I was broken. She did not mean to: she wanted only to mend me.
“You must leave this room; I insist on this now. Look at it! A dog and an enormous bird and a baby and you—come with me. Immediately. All of you.”
“No.” My voice shook. It seemed to have been shaking ever since she had returned, weeks ago. “Not during the day. People will know who I am—and anyway, you have lessons to teach. Otherseeing to do. So, no.”
“Yes.” She slipped two butterfly pins into my hair. She had cut it, two days ago—lopped the entire braid off; we both shrieked when we saw it in her hand—and now it was an unruly thatch around my ears. “People will know who you are, and they should. You are Mistress Nola. And yes, I have things to do at the school, but you can walk there with me.”
“Oh, Grasni,” I said, “I don’t know.” But I did go with her. I held Layibe on my shoulder and Borl loped behind us. Uja waddled until we reached the door to the seers’ courtyard and then she took three ungainly strides and flew, high above the trees.
I hesitated. We had seen only a few guards so far, and I had managed to avoid their eyes, but the courtyard was full of students—they had almost all returned. Students who used to be mine.
“King Derris would not want me to go any further.”
Grasni scowled. I remembered the way her blotches of freckles used to lengthen and blend, when she did this. They still did.
“King Derris would prefer it if there were no lycus blossoms to distract us from sober contemplation of the Pattern. He would banish kittens, if he could, and disallow tasty foods. But he cannot do these things, and he will not be able to stop you from walking in a courtyard.”
“Grasni . . .”
She looked at me—not scowling, not smiling. Solemn, in a way that made me want to cry again.
“Just a few steps, Nola. Just out onto the path, where you can feel the wind.”
She took my arm and we walked. Under the trees, I thought—just get me there. The leaves were russet and crimson and gold, and they would hide me a little.
But someone saw us before we reached the trees. A child—Dren—cried out my name. He ran from the patch of grass where he was playing. When he threw himself against me I staggered backward and squeezed Layibe so hard that she yelped.
“Mistress!” he gasped into the folds of my dress. “The king told us
you couldn’t ever come back but I knew he wasn’t right, even though he’s the king. . . .”
I eased his clinging arms free. Tipped his head back with my hand beneath his chin and shook it a bit, so that his black curls danced. I tried to smile, and succeeded, but I could not speak.
“Dren,” Grasni said, “Mistress Nola will not visit you again if you knock her over. Step back, now. All the way—off you go, before I ask you to sort lesson books.”
He grinned at me and turned and dashed away. The other students who had gathered drifted off too. Some of them—the older ones—stared at me over their shoulders. Of course they do, I thought. I should be relieved that they’re not screaming.
“That’s far enough,” I said.
“Very well,” said Grasni. “But soon you will go farther.”
I did not, though—not really. A few times I went down the steps to the main courtyard, and across it to the gate. Out the gate once, but only to the fountain. The shakiness in my voice and legs did not go away.
Grasni stopped suggesting walks, but she kept coming to me. She brought me sweets and fruit from Dellena, and books I did not read. She talked to me of innocent things (the early frost, the knots that formed in her hair the instant after she combed it), and sometimes she just sat beside me and was quiet. I wanted to talk to her of other things. I wanted to tell her everything, from my mother dropping the bag of coins into the Lady’s hand to me stirring a pot choked with Selera’s flesh and hair and bones. I wanted to ask, “Do you still love Sildio?” and “How is Mistress Ket?” I wanted to know the answers. But I hardly spoke, now that I was free to.
Until one cold, early morning, just as Grasni was rising to go.
“Sildio told me what happened to Mambura and Ranior. What about the rest? What happened to them, after Ranior’s Hill?” This answer I needed to have, suddenly, though I was not sure why.
She frowned—with concern, not anger. “King Haldrin is in the royal catacombs, of course,” she said slowly. “Bardrem was buried in the commoners’ grave outside the north wall of the city. I said that he should get a finer burial than that, seeing as he’d led King Haldrin to the Hill, and others thought so too, but the new king wouldn’t do it.”
She stopped speaking. Looked at me almost pleadingly.
“And Teldaru?”
She cleared her throat. “King D
erris had him burned on a pyre outside the city. He ordered the ashes put in a box and locked in the house with the other—with . . .”
I had only seen her struggle for words once before, on the night she came to ask me to Othersee for her. “With Mambura,” I said, “and Ranior. With Selera. Laedon will be dead—really dead, this time—because Teldaru remade him alone. But the others are still there because I remade them, or helped to.” I took a breath. “Derris knows they cannot die unless I do. He will not have them anywhere near the castle. So Teldaru, too, is at the house . . . yes—it’s perfect—it was already a tomb.”
I truly did not know why I was saying these things, and now. They had been in me, I suppose—waiting to surprise me as my lies used to do.
“I heard that he tried to burn them too,” Grasni said in a rush. “It didn’t work. Their skin melted a bit, but that was all. And they kept blinking. So he called for the flames to be doused and had them taken away. I shouldn’t be telling you this, though—it must be terribly hard . . .”
“No.” I smiled at her. “Or yes—but don’t worry.”
Grasni was quiet, but I could see that she wanted to say more. “Nola,” she said at last, “when I first came back—when I said I was sorry—you know what I meant, don’t you? That I was sorry for running from you, when I saw your Paths. For telling Mistress Ket. For not understanding anything.”
I shook my head. “How could you have understood? It was a horror. Better not to understand, ever. But yes. I know what you meant.”
She paused at the door and I hurried her out, murmuring that Sildio would be wondering what was taking her so long, and laughing when she blushed. I leaned against the door when she was gone. I looked at the small, guttering fire in my hearth, and the shadows it threw on the sleeping dog and the sleeping baby.
The bird, however, was awake.
“Uja,” I said, “we’re going out.”
The northern gate was far less grand than any of the others. No banners flew from its squat guard towers, and its doors hung crookedly on their hinges. I stood with my hand on one of the door’s splintered edges, looking out at winter light and hard winter ground, rising in hillocks on either side of the road. I knew what the hillocks covered. My mother was probably beneath them, and some of her babies, and Larally, whom I still saw in dreams. All of Sarsenay City’s dead commoners, together and nameless.
I left the city. Part of me expected to blink and see the castle before me again—Teldaru bringing me back with the curse, even though he was dead. After all, other parts of the curse had endured. But I walked and kept walking, dizzy with space and the air that bit me every time Uja wheeled close. I stopped when I saw a patch of earth that had been recently turned. It was hard and cold under my feet, and clay-russet except for one spot, which was bright pink. I crouched close to it and saw a piece of redfruit, peeled and carved into the shape of a long, tapering shell. I touched it and felt sugar, rough beneath my nail. I curled all my nails into my palms.
Who left this for you, Bardrem? I thought, and then just, Bardrem, Bardrem, over and over. I tried to remember all his ages and names, all the words he’d hidden on paper and carved into roast potatoes—but the trying only made him feel more lost to me. Tears burned in my chest but I did not cry them. Uja ran her beak through my hair and cooed and I unclenched my hands and pushed her away. She waddled back onto the road and waited. After I joined her there she flew again, just ahead, marking the way back.
That night I wrenched myself around in my sheets and dreamed in searing vision-strokes that I forgot whenever I woke up. I slept and woke and slept again—until the middle of the night, when I started up with my breath caught in my throat as if I had been about to scream. Borl and Layibe were sleeping. Uja was hunkered down by the hearth, blinking at me.
“Uja,” I said, “I’m so sorry about earlier. If you’re angry, you don’t have to come—but there’s somewhere else I have to go.”
I used the postern gate—of course I did, for it was night, and the hood of my cloak was pulled over my face, and my feet knew the way without my mind telling them anything. Uja took to the air as soon as we were beyond the castle walls, and I was alone (except for Borl), and then my mind had to say to my feet: Go on.
So much of the city had burned; I had not seen this clearly enough, on all the nights Teldaru and I had walked together. I passed roofless houses and shops, buildings that had collapsed to their foundations. Blackened, shattered stone and twisted metal. All of it his doing, and mine. The lantern bobbed in my hand.
The house looked the same, except that the fence was draped in strips of mourning blue and black. Uja was perched on the gate; she glided down to the cobbles when she saw me and set her beak to the lock. It opened with a click. The gate squealed a bit, and I glanced back over my shoulder, but the street was empty.
Uja gazed at me, when we were standing by the door. “Well?” I said. “What is it? Why are you waiting?” I knew why, of course; I hardly even needed to look into the gentle amber of her eyes. I did, though. I smiled at her. “This is good. This is what I must do. Please help me—you’re so good at helping me.”
She unlocked this door too, and we slipped inside.
The smell was so rank that my stomach heaved. It was worse than before—or perhaps the last time I was here I was simply accustomed to it. I rubbed my streaming eyes and held the lantern high. Everything was as it had been. There was a box, though—a small one made of black wood, sitting on the floor just inside the door. They wouldn’t take him any further, I thought. They shoved him in and slammed the door shut.
The others, though, had been taken upstairs. I wondered whether this had happened in daylight; whether people had gathered to watch as soldiers carried Mambura and Ranior up the glass-pebbled path. They were in the mirror room now: Mambura lying beside the knife cabinet and Ranior beside the cage. Their skin was black and covered in livid pink bubbles. Ranior’s hair must have burned away, for both their skulls were bare. I tried to envision this, too: the monstrous heroes on a pyre, their flesh charring and rippling but not melting; their eyes blinking from within the flames. King Derris shouting to stop—to pull them out and bring them here, where their accursed second lives began. I thought: They die if I do, and yet when they were consumed by fire I felt nothing. It does not seem fair.
Selera was sitting against the wall across from the door. She looked so lovely and clean, compared to the other two. Someone had arranged her green dress carefully over her legs. Her hair even looked brushed—though maybe I was just imagining this. She blinked. Her milky green eyes glittered.
Laedon was not here and he was not in the other rooms. Perhaps they had burned him too, after I told the king, in those first blurry days after Ranior’s Hill, that he would truly be dead, since Teldaru was. Perhaps they had watched his skin dissolve, as skin should, in fire, and felt weak with relief and disgust.
I set the black box down on the floor. I gazed at it for a moment before I slid its lid off.
I had imagined I was only going to look, and think, Well, there he is, and be done with it. But when I saw the white and grey grit that had been Teldaru, looking was not enough. I sifted it through my fingers. I scraped through it so that it lodged under my nails.
Teldaru, I thought, Teldaru—over and over—and every time I heard his name in my head I felt a stronger surge of rage. It should have been me who tore your throat out. Me who sank a dagger into your chest. But it could not be—and in the end I did not even get to look into your eyes as you died.
My fingers found bone. I drew it up in a shower of ash. Just a knob—a knuckle, perhaps, because I knew such things now. I held it in my palm. I stared at it so intently that the edges of my vision smudged, as if I was entering the Otherworld.
Just a small, white, pitted piece of bone, but it would be enough.
I curled my fingers closed and smiled.
I did not tell Grasni that I was remaking Teldaru. She would not have allowed it. She
would have locked me in my room until she had burned the house to the ground herself. And she would have been right to do these things. I knew this, as I walked through the sleeping city. I knew how wrong I was and it frightened me, in daylight, and as I walked in the dark. But when I was in the mirror room, and when I made those quick, small cuts on my arm or thigh or even my breast, I felt only hunger.
I took my time, with him. I was careful. Winter passed in gusts of snow and wind I hardly noticed. I heard that the queen would have a baby in the summer and for a moment I thought the queen was Zemiya, still, and that she and Haldrin would be so happy.
I was lost.
“You are nodding off again,” Grasni said one afternoon—not late, but it was already getting dark.
“Mmf,” I said, and straightened on the bed. She had been teaching me a game that involved different lengths of wood carved with symbols. I found the carvings beautiful but had no idea how to play the game, even after she had spent hours trying to show me.
“And you look terrible. Are you sleeping?”
I rubbed my eyes, which I was sure were bloodshot. “Not really. I’m . . . having nightmares. And Layibe is crying more, now.” A little lie, a little truth. Nothing had changed; nothing ever would.
As if she had heard and understood, Layibe began to cry. She was on her belly; she drew her thin legs up under her and tried to raise herself but slumped down again.
“She is so unhappy,” Grasni said as I picked the princess up. “So sick.”
“And she will never be well,” I said, “she will be this way all her life, because of me.”
My voice was matter-of-fact but Grasni said quickly, “Oh, I didn’t mean to . . .
I’m sorry I mentioned it. She would be dead, if not for you.”
“There are worse things than death,” I said. I gazed at Layibe’s face but it was Teldaru’s that I saw.
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