The Pattern Scars (24 page)

“She was lying,” I said. “She made it up just so she could mock you.”

“No.” His eyes seemed more golden than black, as if they had changed to match the knife that waited upon the mirror. “Listen.”

“No,” Zemiya said, “I will no doubt be weeping, begging you for mercy while your Dog bares his teeth at our Flamebird and my people flee and scream. Yes, I’m sure that is how it will happen, Great Teldaru.”

“
Zemiya
.” He had never heard Neluja speak with such force. “Do not play with words of
isparra.
Do not—” And then her own words were Belakaoan, thick and rich and angry.

The sisters argued, Zemiya gesturing, Neluja glaring down at her, twisting her hands in the loose fabric of her dress. Teldaru was gazing at her hands, thinking how long her fingers were, when the bird leaned forward and bit him.

He had been bitten by dogs before, and by cats, and by a chicken that Laedon had told him to kill. He had also been cut by knives, in Laedon’s kitchen and in the lower city, when he had been a poor boy serving rich, drunk men. The bird’s beak cut him like those knives had, except even more smoothly. The flesh of his forearm parted. He watched his blood well and flow. He blinked and then he felt the pain, and he lunged at the bird with a strangled cry.

“No!” Zemiya was between him and the creature. She held his shoulders, and her arms were dark, rounded muscle. “Uja has marked you for
isparra
and now my sister must look.” She was gazing past him at Neluja, her eyes bright with excitement or maybe triumph.

“Look?” he shouted. “What do you mean?”—because he did not yet know about Bloodseeing. Because this was the first time.

“I must look at you as
ispa
.” Neluja was where Zemiya had been, though she did not touch him. He thought,
Run!
but did not.

“You mean you will Othersee?” he said. “You can’t!” Relief, as warm as the blood. “You can’t do that unless I tell you to.”

She lifted his arm. Put her finger in his blood and drew it over the skin above his elbow, which was still clean. She made spirals and waves with fingertip dots between. “I can,” she said, and raised her eyes to his.

Werwick had looked at Teldaru’s Pattern when the boy had first been brought to the castle; Othersighted children were always examined like this when they arrived. But Teldaru had asked him to, and had felt nothing—only watched in fascination as the old man’s eyes turned an even darker black and bulged, along with a vein in his forehead. Afterward Werwick had drunk an entire pitcher of water and said, in a quavering voice, “I see greatness. The child must stay.”

But now, staring into the black-and-pearl of Neluja’s Otherworldly eyes, he felt a tremor in his gut—a swell like anger or desire that moved without his control. He bit his lip until he tasted blood—blood everywhere, in his mouth and on his skin and dripping onto the black stone beneath them. The bird Uja was moving its wings in a gentle, sweeping way that made him want to glance at it, but he could not. Neluja was all.

She cried out. Took two steps back and stumbled to her knees on the rock.

“Neluja?” Zemiya said. “
Ispana
Neluja . . .” She bent over her sister, frowning, stroking her forehead. Teldaru sat down heavily. He felt breathless and sick and did not understand—and then Neluja spoke in a torrent of words he also did not understand, while the bird clacked and cackled.

“What?” he said roughly. “
What
?”—high and loud, above the other noise.

Three pairs of eyes on him. A quiet of waves and his own ragged breathing. He stood slowly and looked at them. He was finally taller, finally strong, and they shrank from him just as Werwick had, all those years ago.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” he said. “Mambura and Ranior and Teldaru.”

Zemiya swallowed. “I don’t believe it,” she said.

He laughed.

“I don’t believe it, either.” I knew there would be pain, soon, and I wanted to provoke him, wanted to keep him talking. He rose, ropes and mirror and knife in his hands.

“But you will,” he said, smiling. “You will, when you help me remake the Patterns of Mambura and Ranior.”

I gaped but made no sound.

“Ah,” he said, shaking his head, “I have leapt ahead again, when there is much to do first. To do now.” He was in front of me, looping, tying, tightening. He undid the laces of my bodice and stepped back to look at me.

“You are mad,” I whispered.

He bent and kissed both my breasts—and then he raised the knife.

I kept bleeding, after that second time. I slipped in and out of consciousness, aware sometimes that the pain was just as burning and numbing as it had been the first time; aware that Teldaru was sitting where he had been before, sprawled, staring at me. Aware of little else. I was heavy, which was new. I could hardly move at all, even after Teldaru had gone and the numbness had mostly passed. I lay and half-slept and was too deeply weary to wonder what was wrong.

I woke fully when he started to shake me. A day later, maybe, when he came with my food? “Nola!” Shouting and shaking, and then he rolled me over and gave a ragged, fearful cry.

There was much coming and going, after that. Teldaru, and someone with cool, slender hands and a blonde braid that swung beside my head. They put cloths on me—on my forehead and below my breasts, where he had cut me. Poultices, too, which were so hot that I yelled. Bandages wrapped so tightly around my ribs that I thought I would suffocate. They tipped my head up and I drank warm, bitter concoctions that tasted like the mud beneath the courtyard tree would have tasted—and I squeezed my eyes shut and saw Bardrem’s feet in the mud, and Yigranzi’s lumpy fingers polishing her mirror, and snow falling on Chenn’s head—so cold on my feverish skin and on my tongue.

And then one day I woke and everything was clear again.

“So.” Teldaru was sitting beside me. I could see his crossed legs and his hands clasped over his knee. I felt much better and could have turned my head to look at his face, but I did not. “I just had an extremely awkward exchange with the king. He heard about all the commotion, somehow, and came to ask about it—tried to come in to see you, in fact. I convinced him that you were finally resting peacefully and should be left alone.” A pause. My belly grumbled loudly, as if it had no idea that the rest of me was upset. “I also told him that you had broken one of your food bowls, which I had foolishly left you alone with. That you sliced yourself open and nearly bled to death.”

“I wish I had.” I did turn, then, and gazed up at him. His face was almost as still as if he were Otherseeing. “You should be more careful with crockery,” I said, and he smiled.

“You’ll be relieved to hear that I won’t require a blade, this last time.”

“Last time?” I said.

“It seems,” he continued, as if he had not heard me, “that your monthly bleeding has begun.”

I glanced down at myself. I was under a sheet, and it lay on skin that felt mostly bare—except for strips of cloth around my ribs and between my thighs. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve taken care of you. Arranged things so that you’ll be clean and comfortable.”

I rolled away from him, pulling my knees up to my chest.

“I know you feel weak and tired, Nola. But we must finish, now. We are so close.” I heard the mirror’s gold clink against the flagstones as he lifted it. “Look at me, dearest. I need your eyes.”

For a long, long moment I stayed as I was. I imagined his hands on me, turning me over, and my naked flesh was hot again, beneath the sheet.

“Nola.”

I rolled over.

“Good girl.” He laid his palm on my forehead, drew his fingers through my hair. “One more story, first. Just one more.” He sat back in his chair. The mirror glinted at me. I saw, only now, that there were shapes in its filigreed rim: leaves and branches and tiny, plump birds.

“I am still eighteen, in this story. Still on Belakao. Does this please you? This time I am in a cavern—a grotto. Imagine: a place between land and sea. A deep, savage, dangerous place.”

Neluja stood on the tallest of the black rock spurs that rose from the water. All the other people, Teldaru among them, stood or sat on lower outcroppings. Teldaru stared at the water below—the sea, easing in the daylit entrance of the grotto.

A shaft of sunlight fell upon Neluja. There were openings above, and faces clustered around them. Belakaoans inside and out, waiting.

“You must come to the choosing,” the girls’ father had told Teldaru. “It is our most sacred time, and it is
isparra
, which is something you know. The others cannot see it, however.” Teldaru had glanced at his king’s arched brows and at Haldrin’s crestfallen frown, and he had nodded at the
moabe
, firmly, trying not to smile.

Now that he was here, though, and the sea was coming in (“the highest tide of the year,” the
moabe
had said), and the Belakaoans had fallen silent and were gazing at Neluja and her bird, he felt a quiver of dread in his belly. Zemiya was solemn and still, at her place between her father and brother, and this, too, worried Teldaru. She had refused to tell him what this “choosing” was, other than to say what her father had. Neluja had added, “It is the time of greatest blood-power. The only such time, for the power is hungry, and must be ruled on all other days.”

“But what does that
mean
?” he had demanded. They had both blinked at him, silent. Even the bird had blinked at him as if it knew but would not say. He wanted to wring its neck.

Some of the islanders in the grotto looked terrified. Some looked at him with their wide, white-rimmed eyes, and he looked back at them defiantly.
I am Sarsenayan
, he thought.
Whatever this blood-power is, it cannot unman me.
But the water was rising. It was nearly at his feet. It made sucking, seeking noises against the rock and he tried to edge backward, only there were people there, forcing him to stay where he was.

He focused on Neluja because now all the others were. She cried out a long, harsh word and turned to the bird. Laid her hand on the creature’s glossy blue head and closed her eyes.

Nothing happened. Nothing except the swelling of the water and someone’s rasping, ragged breathing behind him. Nothing—until the bird Uja gave a piercing cry and spread its wings.