The Pattern Scars (61 page)

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.

I made his bones. I made his muscles and tendons and all the glistening, heavy parts they bound. I made his nose and cheeks and eyes and the red-gold stubble of his hair. I made roads and hills and sky.

Near the end I finally grew impatient. The snow was melting in air that smelled of flowers. I was so restless that several times I went to the house during the day. It was dangerous, for there were often people who might see me, at the gate. Me, and the bird whose island brightness would have told them who I was, if my own face had not. (Sildio says that tales are being told, now, of the bird and me. Tales of Ranior’s Hill and castle courtyards and city streets; words to thrill or frighten children.)

Once I saw a group of girls, standing at the fence. They whispered and giggled. One of them darted forward and touched a wrought iron bar (the mourning cloth was long gone), and everyone shrieked, and they ran off down the street.

I finished him in sunlight. I tried to keep myself from going—wanted it to be night, when I was done, since this would feel more apt. But I could not keep still, in the castle. I paced my little room’s length and width and I paced the corridor outside it until Sildio cried that I was making him dizzy. “Go out, Mistress!” he said. “Go for a good long walk that will calm you.”

So I did. I told Borl to stay with Layibe and then I whistled to Uja and I walked straight out the castle gate.

Today
, I thought with every footfall.
It will be today.

I hauled at him until he was sitting up. I put my arms beneath his and tugged him backward across the floor and into the golden cage. I closed the door and locked it with the key that hung by the knife cabinet. I knelt. I slid the tip of the tiniest knife beneath my thumbnail. I watched the blood well beneath the nail and then into the webs in my skin: my Pattern, like ripples in a pool. I raised my eyes to his, which were closed.

I sink into the yielding ground of his Otherworld—his and mine, for I created it. There is only one Path that is still motionless. I bend and grasp it; open myself up so that my strength bleeds into it. It fills and shudders and turns from black to silver. This is all I need to do, but I linger. I lift my arms and laugh my power and my hunger into the sweep of his living sky.

I was still kneeling. I scrabbled at my eyes, trying to make the after-spots dissolve more quickly.

I saw the outline of him first: the broad shoulders, the stubbly curve of his head. Next came the shadows of his brows and the hollows of cheeks and collarbone. Next, his eyes.

They opened as I watched. They were brown, with a translucent sheen of white. They wandered, sightless and wide, and blinked. Uja sang a long, low note, behind me.

I leaned forward and wrapped my hands around the bars of the cage. “Welcome back, love,” I said.

I was very ill.

I went to the house night after night. I crouched by the cage and stared at Teldaru until I, too, felt blind. I walked the halls and sat in the kitchen; sometimes I clutched the dark braid that still lay upon the table, with its white streak and red ribbon. I shook so violently that I had to open my mouth to keep my teeth from clacking against each other and sinking into my tongue. I could not stop shaking, even at the castle.

“You are only feeling it now,” Grasni said as she cupped her hands around mine to still them. “Everything that happened to you—it’s like a slow poison, but it will soon be gone.” She squeezed my hands and tried to smile.

There had been a warm fragrant rain, the last time I went to the house, but I was so cold that I could hardly walk. Uja swooped down several times, clucking and twittering. Once she tugged at a strand of my hair as she wheeled by me, and the pain made me feel steadier, but only briefly.

It had been three weeks since I finished remaking Teldaru. I had been keeping count with the fingernail clippings in the kitchen, nudging them into a line of tiny arcs on the table. It took me a very long time to get from the mirror room to the kitchen, that last day, and once there my hands did not obey me; they swept the rows of nails off the table. Uja squawked at me. “I know,” I said, through my chattering teeth, “but I’ll be better soon.”

The rain was still falling when I left the house. It seemed thicker now; I could not see the houses around me—just the cobbles directly beneath my feet. I wished vaguely for Borl, but he stayed with Layibe, when I left the castle. I stumbled into someone, who yelled and thrust me away. I fell. The rain was so heavy; it pushed at me, until I slumped onto my side. I pulled my knees up beneath my chin. I thought:
I’ll never fall asleep. I’ll go find Bardrem; surely Rudicol won’t still have him working.
But I did not move. I lay in the rain and disappeared.

I woke up in a bed. I was soaked in sweat. I tried to toss the covers off but my limbs would not shift at all. Someone murmured, quite close to me, but my ears were not working either. In and out, hot and cold. Once I felt Borl’s nose pushing against my palm. Once I heard Uja singing. In my eyes, though, there was nothing but darkness.

“Nola. Come, now—look at me. I see you trying to.”

Grasni’s face leapt in and out of focus above me. Her freckles looked like inkblots in the firelight. She looked thinner. She looked afraid.

“Grasni.” My voice felt as hot as my skin used to.

“Oh,” she said, and bent her head. Her tears made blotches on the coverlet.

It was Sildio who had found me in the rain. He had worried when I was not in my room in the morning. When I was not back by the noon meal he took Borl outside, to the head of the courtyard stairs.

“Find her,” Sildio had said. And Borl had.

King Derris declared that it was somehow meaningful that the Pattern continued to cause me suffering. He also commanded Grasni to spend less time with me. When she refused, he told her he would summon another, more appropriate Otherseer, but the students were so distressed by this news that he allowed her to stay. (A few students were children of wealthy families who were generous with their gifts to the kingdom.)

I heard all this as my body recovered. It did not recover fully, however; even months later I could not walk the length of the corridor without gasping for breath. My legs ached and my head often did too, so badly that Layibe’s softest whimpers sounded like metal scraping metal. But my body was better.

Nothing else was.

“You don’t laugh any more,” Grasni said. It was early summer. The queen I had never seen was apparently already huge with child.

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said.

She frowned. “I am a very witty person. If I cannot make you laugh, nothing will.”

I did not speak. I was tying ribbons into Layibe’s hair—red Belakaoan ones stitched with blue shells. Her eyes followed the sounds my hands made as they picked the ribbons up and drew them tight around her curls.

“Nola,” Grasni said in a lower, softer voice, “would it help you to speak to me of . . . everything? I haven’t asked you to—I thought you’d do it yourself, if you needed to—but I want you to know that I’ll listen. I want to, if it helps you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re a wondrous friend. But it will not help—speaking. It isn’t what I need. Don’t worry,” I added as she opened her mouth, “I’ll be sure to tell you when I know what I
do
need.”

A few days later she arrived in the middle of the afternoon. Sildio knocked on my door and they both came in, and I sat up in bed.

“You should be at the school,” I said.

She was smiling. She shifted the sheaf of papers she was holding from one arm to the other. “I know—I’m only here for a moment. But Sildio’s had an idea, and we’re here to tell you . . .”

He nodded. He was smiling too.

“What, then?” I said.

He went out into the hall and returned carrying a tall, narrow desk. He set it beneath my tall, narrow window and went back into the hall. This time he came back with a stool, which he slid under the desk.

“You are going to force me to do lessons,” I said.

Grasni laughed. “Not exactly.” She put the papers down on the desk. Sildio produced an inkpot and quill from his pouch and placed them beside the papers.

“It was his . . . that is, Sildio thought . . .”

“Perhaps Sildio could speak for himself,” I said—and suddenly I was back in a different, smaller room, with a bucket in the corner, and King Haldrin was pulling a chair close to my filthy bed. “She will tell me herself,” he was saying to Teldaru.

“I thought,” Sildio said, “that since you can’t speak of what’s troubling you, you might to write it instead. It might be easier, and more secret, if that’s what you need.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think—”

“Nola.” Grasni was using her sternest voice, which usually made me smile. I did not, this time. “You must get it out of you. It’s bile—poison, remember? Vomit it out, then, right here. Bleed it onto paper. Promise you’ll try, at least.
Promise
.”

There were patches of crimson on her face and neck. She stared at me, and Sildio did too, until I sighed and got to my feet.

“Very well,” I said, “I’ll try.”

And so I have.