The Pattern Scars (62 page)

It is spring. A year since Borl found me in the rain. A year—or nearly—of sitting at this desk. Armfuls of paper and rivers and rivers of ink (all of it taken from the school).

And yet the poison is still not out. It never will be, while I live.

I have not returned to the house, this past year, but its walls rise around me anyway. When I look into Layibe’s wide eyes I see Selera’s too, and Mambura’s, and Ranior’s. Teldaru’s. There are pictures, somewhere behind their eyes. There is feeling, somewhere beneath their blistered, too-thin flesh.

I have known for a long while what I have to do. I have ignored the knowledge, or denied it. Now that the story’s written, though, I’m certain: it has only one true ending.

Very soon I will put down this quill. It is late afternoon. Grasni will be teaching her lesson on Otherseeing tools (the rows of grain; the sticks of coloured wax melting in warm, clutching fingers). I will put Layibe on my hip and go to the seers’ courtyard. I will walk beneath the lycus blossoms and into the school and up those worn, sloping steps. Grasni will be surprised when I appear in the classroom door. She might be excited too, for a bit, because I haven’t been anywhere but my room for so long.

I will smile at her, and at the students, who will also be surprised.

“When you’re finished,” I’ll say to her, “come find me in the grove. There’s something I need to tell you, and somewhere I need to take you, in the city.”

I will do these things, now that my tale is done.

It was spring when Nola finished her writing. It’s the end of autumn now. It’s taken me too long to do this, even though I knew I’d have to. Even though I’ve wanted to.

Just reading what she wrote took me two months. I carried the pages with me—as many as I could without dropping any—and read them in the courtyard and in my room, which is the same one she had when we were students. King Derris tried to put me somewhere larger and grander in the keep, back when I first returned to the city, but I refused. I like this room. I always did.

I won’t be able to write like she did. I had no idea how she wrote until I read this. It upset me, at first. These words of hers aren’t quite as her spoken ones were. They’re more like poetry—more like Bardrem’s. They both might have laughed, if they heard that. But as I read more, I heard more of her that I knew, and then it was the knowing her that hurt.

She described my dress as a cloud of orange-ish dust, in these pages. I laughed out loud when I read this, and Sildio rolled over in bed and asked me why I was laughing, but by then I was crying.

I should just get to it, now that I’m finally here. She would expect me to.

I might try one thing she did: setting down a few words that will nudge me along. Mine will be:

I met her in the grove at sunset.

Dren needed to talk to me, when the class was done. I was impatient, but he thought nothing of it, as I’m often impatient. By the time I saw him off the sky was orange and red.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. She was sitting under the smallest tree. “Maybe we can go into the city tomorrow.”

She smiled up at me. Her hair was full of the clips I’d put in earlier that day, but she was wearing a different dress. This one was lovely: wine-coloured, with a bit of lace along the collar. But she always knew how to choose her dresses, as she reminded me every time she saw the ones I’d chosen for myself.

“No,” she said. “We’ll go now. We’ll need a lantern.”

I didn’t think to be afraid or even worried. I’d spent months trying to get her out of her room, and now that she was, all I felt was relief.

We walked out of the castle. Borl was with us, of course. Uja too, somewhere above. And Layibe, who was big enough now to sit on Nola’s hip, but who still looked sickly and weak. Her hair was beautiful, though: thick and dark.

“What did you want to tell me?” I said as we walked.

“Soon,” she said. “When we’re there.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

“Nola!”

“Grasni!”

I hadn’t seen her so happy since we were girls. I didn’t care where we were going.

We stopped outside an iron fence. I peered between the bars and saw what was behind them. And even though I’d never been to this house, I knew which house it was.

I asked her why we were there. She didn’t answer. Uja flew down and opened the gate, and then the door to the house. They were so practiced about it all—the bird and the dog and Nola. I started to feel sick before the door even opened.

She’s described the smell better than I could. I nearly vomited. By the time we climbed the stairs I’d controlled myself.
It’s like the tannery
, I thought.
The one I lived next to as a girl.

But when she opened the next door I fell to my knees. The smell was even stronger, but it was the bodies too, that I’d heard about and thought I’d been able to imagine. I hadn’t, though. The two blackened ones were hardly recognizable as men. And the woman was even more horrifying because she was Selera—a rotten, sagging Selera, wearing a dress the beautiful Selera would have adored.

These were bad enough. But then I looked at the cage and saw who was in it, and I ran out of the room and down the hall. I fell again, by a door with a blue glass knob.

Nola sat beside me.

“When did you remake him?” I asked.

“Last spring,” she said.

“When you were so sick.”

“Yes. I had to do it, Grasni. I wasn’t done with him. But I haven’t been back here in a year—not in all the time I’ve been writing.”

“So why have you brought me here now?”

She had tears in her eyes, which looked blacker than ever. “Because I’m finished writing and I know what I have to do. And I have to tell you, because you’re my wondrous friend.”

“And what are you going to do, Nola? Derris already tried to burn them. You know that won’t work.” I wasn’t sure why I was so angry. Maybe just because she’d hidden this great, terrible thing from me. Maybe because I already knew her answer would be more terrible yet.

“I know, yes. They won’t die unless I do.”

She took my hand and I shook it away. “I know, you know—we both do. Just tell me what you’re going to
do
, since that’s the thing I’m not sure of yet.”

She took my hand again. “I’m going to die.”

This time I didn’t run. I rose and walked down the stairs and out the front door. I stood by the closed gate, where Uja was perched. It was night now, and her feathers looked much darker than they usually did.

I heard Nola’s feet crunching on the glass rocks of the path but I didn’t turn. “Come back in,” she said. “There’s much more to talk about.”

“I won’t go back in there.”

“Then walk with me. There’s somewhere else to go, anyway.”

“Does it smell?” I asked.

She squeezed her eyes shut, for a moment. Then she opened them and said, “Please come with me.”

We walked streets and alleys I’d never seen before. She talked a great deal, probably because I didn’t. I remember only a few of the things she said, but I remember what her voice sounded like in the silent streets. She said she wished I could have known Bardrem so that I could have mocked his poetry (even though she said I would probably have loved it). She talked about a vision she’d had of Haldrin—he’d been crying, and his tears had turned the ground below him to flowers. She said that Selera’s dress—the one she’d worn on her last day in the castle—was the most wonderful thing ever made of cloth and thread, and that it had made Selera even more unbearable.

Nola stopped walking in front of a jumble of stones in the lower city. As soon as I stood still my feet disappeared in mud up to my ankles.

“I thought you said this other place wouldn’t smell,” I said.

She laughed a clear, pure Nola laugh and began picking her way over the rubble. “It must have been destroyed during all the fighting,” she said. “I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised.”

“Where are we?” I said.

“Just a little farther.” Not answering my questions, as always. Walking ahead, holding her skirts up like a girl in a river—except that she was holding a child, as well.

We came to an open space where the moonlight was very bright. Around us were the remains of walls—stone and wood—and in front of us was a tree. One small tree with thin branches and four small leaves.

“I know where we are,” I said. “You’ve told me about it. This is Yigranzi’s tree.”

Nola was already sitting with her back against its trunk. She put Layibe down, because the earth here was mossy, not muddy. Uja landed on the topmost branch and set the whole tree quivering. Borl lay down with his head in Nola’s lap.

“Sit with us,” she said to me. “This is the place.”

She was a Mistress, suddenly, and a woman, and a friend, and yet she was already moving away from all of these, and me. I sat down with my knees touching hers.

“Don’t,” I said. “Let’s go back to the castle. You can sleep—I’ll ask Dellena for a draught for you—one of the sweet ones that she only sells for gold pieces. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

“I’d rather talk now,” she said.

And we did, a little. She asked me about Sildio and I blushed and she saw it, even though it was dark. “I knew you’d be happy,” she said.

“But remember: we agree with the Belakaoans now—the Pattern isn’t set. What you saw in that vision didn’t have to be true.”

She smiled at me. “I knew you’d be happy.”

“We could go away,” I said a bit later. “I know you’re not sure if it’s possible, yet—but we could try. We could go somewhere remote, if you wanted—to the eastern mountains, or maybe to a town in Lorselland—my brother could tell us where. . . .”

She just looked at me. Didn’t even need to shake her head.

“All right, then, how’s this: you remade the heroes and Layibe, and you say you can’t make them die—but what about me? Why can’t I try to unmake their Paths for good?”

“Grasni,” she said, as patiently as if I had been Dren, “remember how you felt when you looked on
my
Paths? No. It would be horrible. It would change you, and it probably wouldn’t even work.”

I could say nothing, to this.

We were both quiet, as the sky began to lighten. I slept a little, though I didn’t want to, and so did she. Both of our heads nodded and jerked up again, as they had in Mistress Ket’s history class. I must have slept more deeply than that, though, because the last time my eyes flew open it was dawn, and Nola was not sitting any more.

She was standing with one hand on the tree. Her other hand was running over its bark. As I watched, she moved all the way around the tree, sometimes kneeling and sometimes standing on the tips of her toes. And then she stopped. She dug about where two branches met and when she pulled her hand away she was holding something. A piece of paper, folded into a tiny, thick, lopsided shape. I watched her unfold it and look down at it. I watched her cry.

When she came back to me her eyes were dry and the paper was nowhere to be seen.

“It’s time,” she said.

“No.” A useless word, but I needed it.

She knelt in front of me. “I don’t know what they’ll all look like, after I’m gone. It could be quite horrible. You’ll have to be gentle with King Derris, when you take him to them.”

“I’ll try. But I might have to hit him once or twice, too.”

She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around me. We held each other very tightly. A bird began to sing (not Uja, who was still sitting on the top branch with her head under her wing).

Nola stood up, after we had pulled apart. She walked around the tree and out along a wooden pathway that I hadn’t seen, in the dark. She walked along it to where the stones had fallen and crushed it, and then she came back. She picked Layibe up and set her in my lap.

“Hold her,” she said, and bit her lip. It was this motion, more than all her words, that made me believe her.

She whistled. Uja shook her head free of her wing and glided to the ground. Nola sat where she had during the night. She laid her fingers on Uja’s blue head and the bird made a thrumming sound deep in her throat.

Nola raised her arms so that the sleeves of her dress fell away from them. Borl whined and wagged his tail and she lowered one hand to scratch around his ears and under his jaw.

She smiled at me as she held her arms straight again. Then she closed her eyes.

Uja drew her beak along the inside of Nola’s right forearm, all the way down to her wrist. Her skin parted. Blood ran in rivulets that thickened into streams. Uja walked very gracefully to Nola’s left arm. She gasped this time, and her fingers twitched. Her eyes opened and looked up at the leaves, which were a bright, new green in the light. And that was how she stayed.

I didn’t notice that Layibe had stopped breathing until I bent down to her. Borl was quiet too, stretched out long with his muzzle on his paws. I touched his side when I went to kneel by Nola, just to make sure he wasn’t merely sleeping. And he wasn’t, of course.

Her eyes were wide and brown. I pressed my thumbs against their lids until they closed. I knelt there with her—with all of them—until the sun was high. Then I rose and walked back over the stones until I came to the street. The castle’s flags led me home again.