The Pattern Scars (11 page)

He led me a very long way, through a maze of alleys and over low walls, and onto wider streets paved with cobbles that made me slip. “I thought you said it was close,” I said after he steadied me. I was bending over, my hands on my thighs, but also looking up at him.

“Of course I said it was close.” He smiled, tugged my lopsided hood straight over my head. “You wouldn’t have come with me if I’d told you you’d have to walk half the night, would you?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “
Now
are we close?”

“No,” he said. “So walk, Mistress Seer, and ask no more questions.”

The rain had turned to mist and the sky to silver when he finally halted. “Here,” he said, and I looked where he was pointing.

“Here,” I repeated, the word a slow release of breath. In front of me was a fence made of iron, curved into graceful shapes at the top. Behind the fence was a garden of dark, hanging leaves and flowers bent by rain. I could not make out their colours but guessed that they would be brilliant in sun.

Orlo pulled open the gate and bowed to me, deeply, with a wild flourish of arms that nearly unbalanced him. I laughed. The sound seemed very loud, in this place of tall walls and taller houses, at this hour just after dawn, but I did not care. I walked into the garden, onto a path of glinting pebbles (glass, I saw later: little pieces of blue, green and dark red glass, their edges rounded smooth). This house, too, was tall—three storeys—and not attached to any other houses. Its great stone blocks were a light, sandy colour. There were carvings around the arched windows, of animals whose names I had heard in Bardrem’s poems: stags, peacocks, lions. The windows had no shutters, for they were made of glass, and bound with iron bars that looked like the garden fence. I reached through the bars and touched the glass, which was green-tinted and thick and scattered inside with tiny, frozen bubbles.

“Nola,” Orlo said. The word had a smile in it. I smiled back at him and followed him through the enormous wooden door.

“This was my great-aunt’s house,” he said as he walked around the entrance hall, adjusting the oil lamps that hung from walls and sit on tables.

“Oh,” I said, as light bloomed. Mirrors and portraits in gilded frames; my own eyes and others’ (an old woman’s, a young woman’s, a boy’s) gazing back at me. Carpets on the floor and tapestries on the walls, among the frames. A ceiling so high I almost could not see it, and a staircase that spread out and up like a fan.

“I’ll show you these rooms later, after you’ve slept.” I nodded, too distracted to tell him that there was no way I’d sleep at all, not soon. “Up here”—the stairs creaking, maybe, somewhere beneath the carpet—and up again—“I’ll put you on the third floor, next to the room you’ll study in.”

I stopped, my feet on different steps. He did not notice until he was about ten steps above me, when he turned and looked down at me with his eyebrows raised.

“I’m to study here?”

“Yes. What did you think I’d brought you here for?”

I swallowed. My throat was dry and my heart hammering; sickness, if I hadn’t been so happy. “I . . . I didn’t think about it. You just said it was somewhere safe, where Prandel wouldn’t find me—I never thought of lessons. . . .”

He looked very serious, suddenly. The darkness of his eyes seemed to still. “Of course you never thought of it: there was no time. I surprised you in your room during a storm and told you to come with me, and you did.” He was coming down to me, step by slow step. “And I am so glad you did. Glad that you trusted me enough to leave your home, and so unexpectedly.” He was directly above me. He eased my wet hood back (I had forgotten it) and I thought that it must be heavy, that my whole cloak must be dragging and sodden, but I could not feel it.

“So let me tell you now, a little too late: you are here to be safe, and here to be taught. I saw it as soon as I met you, Nola: your power is great. You glow with it, with its promise. You could not have stayed in that place and let it wither. I could not have allowed you to.”

I wondered if I would fall backward, dizzy with the empty space behind me and him in front, close enough to touch. He put his hand on my arm as if he knew, as if he had heard my thought. “I will teach you here, when I’m not needed at the castle. And someday, if your instruction goes well and I feel the time is right, you may come with me.”

“To the castle.” My voice was hoarse and quiet.

“To the castle.” Another smile, as gentle and strong as the hand on my arm. “But let’s begin with some sleep, shall we? Up here just a little further . . .
that door there, you see? The one with the cut glass knob. My great-aunt was so proud of it; got it from some sort of gypsy peddler who told her she’d live to over a hundred, which she did. She always wanted me to use the knob for Otherseeing, since—she claimed—the gypsy obviously had. Look at this! So bright you won’t need a light—though you wouldn’t anyway, as you’ll soon be sleeping.”

Again I thought,
No, I won’t
, and again I did not say it, because wonder had risen in my throat like tears. The room was huge, full of windows and pieces of furniture fit for the castle itself: cushioned chairs, long couches, two wardrobes inlaid with (I was certain) real gold, in patterns of leaves and flowers. The floorboards were dark and polished beneath the carpet, which was the colour of wine. But it was the bed that drew my gaze most insistently: a wooden headboard carved like the wardrobe, and fat mattresses (at least two), and a tumble of pillows with bright, tasselled covers.

“Do you like it?”

I made a sound that was half laugh, half gasp. “It will suffice,” I said, and he did laugh, his golden head thrown back, his eyes briefly closed.

“Good,” he said when he was looking at me once more. “I had hoped . . . I am happy that it will suffice. Are you hungry?”

“No.” I was thirsty, though, and glanced around until I saw a water jug on a stand by the door—a jug so tall and slender and delicately decorated that it hardly seemed to resemble the one that had sat in my room at the brothel. But everything here was like that. I recognized and could name each thing, but it was as if they belonged to the Otherworld, to a place both brighter and blurrier than any I had seen before.

“Good,” Orlo said. “I will have a fine breakfast prepared for you when you wake.” He gestured at the wardrobes. “Make sure to look in those, too; you should find something dry to wear. And now”—at the door, his hand on the blue glass of the knob—”I must take myself to my own bed for a few hours before I return to the castle.”

“So you won’t be here when I get up?” I asked, twisting my damp cloak in my hands.

“Likely not,” he said. “Even when I’m not teaching, the king and Teldaru often request my presence. I must not be too long away from them during the day. But at nightfall I will be yours, Nola.” He smiled one more slow smile, with lips and restless eyes.

I stared at the door, when he was gone, as if a shadow of him still lingered. Then I turned to the wardrobe closest to me and tugged its double doors open. “Oh,” I said, hardly noticing that I had spoken aloud. I reached for silk and velvet, for scarlet and green and gold stitched with silver. There were so many
dresses—gowns, really—one for every day of the month, perhaps (if every day featured a ball or a visiting dignitary or a wedding). I did not wonder if they would fit me; would only have wondered if they had not.

The second wardrobe contained sleeping shifts: long ivory ones, short white ones trimmed with lace, which should have reminded me of the brothel and the girls—maybe even Larally, for whom I had seen snakes of blood—but did not, because they were so clean and soft. I chose a long one with two tiny pearl buttons at the collar and each of the wrists. Took my wet, dark, ragged clothes off and laid them carefully on the back of a chair. The cream-coloured cloth slipped over me, hung from my shoulders and arms as if it were not there. I wanted to feel it, so I turned, quickly, and it wrapped around my legs. I turned faster, faster, until I was spinning, and then the world lurched and thrust me face-first onto the bed.

This morning
, I thought as my breath warmed the coverlet,
I was in the courtyard. The courtyard! I cast barley for one of the Lady’s girls and saw butterflies. I kissed Bardrem.

I sat up slowly and stared at my old clothes. Stood and went back to them (my toes sinking into the carpet) and put my hand into the pocket of my dress. The paper there was no longer the shape it had been when I had first picked it up; it was flattened, bumpy with folds. I opened it back on the bed, smoothing it on my lap. There were four words, one at every corner of the paper. I read them once in the wrong order and again so that they made sense:

You are beautiful help!

I realized I was crying only when the neat curves of Bardrem’s letters began to wobble. And as soon as I realized I was crying, I realized I was crying hard, in wrenching gulps that hurt my chest. I peered from the note to the room, whose wood and cloth and tall, brightening windows were smudged now, but somehow even lovelier than before.
But I’m not
sad
!
I thought.
I’m the happiest I’ve ever been
—and I was crying harder still, curled on my side, clutching coverlet and paper in a moist ball.

When my tears were done, full morning was shining through the window glass. I pushed the coverlet down and pulled it up again, over my body, all the way to my chin.
I’ll just lie here for a moment
, I thought,
and then I’ll go down to breakfast; he will have made it for me by now. Perhaps I’ll see him before he returns to the castle. . . .

I slept, and my dreams were black and gold.

Bardrem once said that poets should write of passion without any. Something to do with great works requiring care and rigour.

This thing I am writing is neither poem nor great work, and I am not sure where I am. Sometimes I am Nola,
here
, choosing words for old pain and writing them with a steadiness that is almost pleasure. Sometimes a few of these words dig their claws into me and pull, and I am lost among them, and no pain is old.

I have written nothing at all for three days. The last section was so easy, at first, which surprised me; I had been dreading it, certain there would be no words at all. But they came, so smoothly that I barely paused to eat or stretch—until I began to write of opening the wardrobe. I started to shake, then. Then. Not when I was describing Orlo’s eyes, or Bardrem’s note, though the shaking did worsen. But it was the wardrobe that began it. The gowns, and my thirteen-year-old hands reaching for them.

It is strange, this unexpected passion. Beautiful and frightening—and also, when I am feeling impatient with myself, a little silly.

But enough. I am back now, after three days of sleeping and comforting the princess (who cries so much now, especially at night). I am ready again, because I am unready. A mysterious contradiction: for all my youth, I have become Yigranzi!

The words for this latest beginning:

I woke to a tugging on my sleeve.

I saw no one I expected, as I struggled up from sleep; not Orlo, or the Lady, or Bardrem. (He would have followed us, of course, and climbed over the fence. I would have to tell him to go back. He would try to kiss me again and I would have to turn my face away—perhaps.)

None of these people were by my bed, but the tugging continued. I rolled toward my arm, which was dangling over the edge, and peered down.

I think I would have jumped and scrambled to the other side of the bed, if I had been more awake. As it was I just lay and stared. A bird stared back at me. A very large bird with amber eyes, blue head feathers, a scarlet body, a green and yellow tail that swept along the floor behind it. Its beak was hooked and black and looked very sharp, though it held my sleeve quite gently, between the two pearl buttons.

“Greetings,” I said after we had been gazing at each other long enough that I felt alert. “I have seen you before.”

I had not known this until I spoke. I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember, and it cocked its head carefully, twisting my sleeve only a little. “I haven’t
really
seen you, of course, so it must have been a vision. I can’t recall. . . .” But, suddenly, I could. Grown-up Bardrem screaming rage and sorrow at grown-up me; a glorious, bright bird rising into the sky behind him. Yigranzi’s mirror in my lap for the first time.

“You,” I whispered to the bird, “and Bardrem and me. I had a long, thick braid. . . .” My Path, my Pattern; this house, and the tall, tall someday-stones.

The bird made a clucking noise and gave another tug. I smiled. “Very well—I’ll get up. But you’ll have to let go of me.”

It clucked again and opened its beak.