The Pattern Scars (9 page)

“And what of the other girls who are dying?” Yigranzi was out of breath, just from standing up. “Why did this Prandel not stop with Chenn, if it was she he wanted?”

Orlo took a breath of his own, which was deep and smooth. “I believe that he only
started
with Chenn. That hunting her and killing her only made his hunger keener. So now”—slow words, and a slow smile—“I am hunting him.”

“I will come back.” This was the last thing Orlo said to me before he left, and it circled in my head like a melody whose beauty fades with persistence, but will not go away.

“He will come back,” I said to Bardrem, many days after that first meeting. Then, hastening to explain my eagerness, “To tell us if he’s found Prandel.”

“I hope he doesn’t find him,” Bardrem said. “I want to kill him, remember?”

I looked at the thin, gangle-limbed boy in front of me and thought of the man with the hunter’s smile and I said, “Yes, Bardrem,” as if he were three years old. To Yigranzi I said, “Orlo will find him, I know he will,” and, “It’s been two weeks: he’ll be back soon to say Prandel is dead.”

Yigranzi peered at me after I’d spoken, so intently that I wished I had said nothing. It was dark in her room, but I might as well have been standing before her in full sun. “Take care,” she said, too quietly. “You are old enough to feel the force of the wave but too young to see the water.”

“Riddles!” I cried. “Why do you give me riddles when I want something simple and simple things when I want mysteries?” I did not understand what this meant, even though I felt the truth of it, and I ran from her as tears hardened in my throat.

She and I must have spoken to each other again—I am sure of this, but have no memories with which to prove it. There must have been a few more lessons, a few more customers, a few more coins passed from her hand to mine. I long to remember, and I cling to the imagined certainties and the must-have-beens with a doggedness that would make her smile her gap-toothed smile. “Nola-girl,” (what would she have called the woman I’ve become?) “you can’t keep the tide on the sand; let it go. . . .”

But there it is: I remember running from her room, and the next thing I remember is running to it, a week or so later, drawn by a sound I had never heard before. It was not screaming, not shouting; not any noise ever made by one of the girls (even the few I’d heard birthing their babies, or ridding themselves of them). It was a choking, gurgling whine. I can hear it even now, though I still cannot describe it.

I threw open Yigranzi’s door and took two quick steps into her room. I looked first at her bed, blinking in sudden darkness (although it was bright midday outside, her shutters were closed). When my vision cleared I saw that she was not there but on the floor, twisted in a way that was all wrong, as if she were broken. Her back and face were both turned to me. Her bare heels drummed against a space of wood between two rugs, and it sounded like my heart.

I yelled over my shoulder, but people were already coming, drawn, as ever, by dread and excitement. They did not enter the room, though, or even cluster at the door as they usually did. They gathered in knots along the corridor and would not come closer, even when I screamed at them to help me.

Only Bardrem came, long moments later, when I was hoarse and gasping with tears. I was kneeling beside her, trying to roll her over or straighten her, but mostly gazing at her own closed eyes. She must have known me, for the high, terrible whining had stopped, though the gurgling continued.

“Here,” I heard Bardrem say, “I’ll hold her under her arms and you take her legs—just there—good—now
lift
.”

She was too twisted, and her hump was too big; we had to settle her on her side. I covered her with a blanket, which the beating of her feet soon dislodged.

“Yigranzi,” I said, “what is it, what happened?”

She clung to me with trembling, digging fingers, as if these things would give me my answer. She choked and coughed, and spittle ran from the corner of her mouth—but no words.

“Help her,” I said to the Lady, when she finally came. “Send for a seer from another brothel—an old one, because she might know healing, like Yigranzi does.”

The Lady looked away from Yigranzi’s straining, stranger’s face, at me. She did not look back at the bed again. “No,” she said, lifting a hand to curl a strand of lank hair behind her ear. Her rings winked colours and metal. “Her Pattern is ending and there is nothing we can do to stop it.”

Bardrem reached over and put his hand on my arm. He must have seen my anger, or felt the wave of words I was about to speak. “Nola,” he said, “it’s true. Look at her.”

I did not. I glared at the Lady, who seemed impossibly tall just then. She towered above me, her head nearly touching the bundles of herbs that hung from the beam.

“In any case, child,” she said, “the end of her Path means the widening of yours. You will take her place as Otherseer and we will all benefit. For now,” she continued, turning so that the velvet dragged into a tangle around her feet, “you may stay with her. Come to me when she is dead.”

I stayed. For three days I ate only because Bardrem told me to, and slept only for moments, sitting forward with my head beside Yigranzi’s on the pillow. Everything blurred: rug hues, volcano rock, a clay crab that somehow scuttled from mug to floor and up my bare leg. I did not flinch. I watched daylight and darkness on Yigranzi’s sunken, twitching cheeks, and on the eyelids that fluttered but still did not open.

“Look,” Bardrem said once, “the mirror—what’s it doing here?” It was on the table among the combs and pots of oils; it was bright, polished, wrong.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It shouldn’t be here”—only in the tree, or in the Lady’s receiving chamber, but how could this matter now?

I dripped water from a cloth onto Yigranzi’s lips, which trembled and cracked; the water useless, soaking the bed beneath her head, but I imagined she would drink it, anyway. I touched her face, her shoulder. I had never touched anyone so much before, but I had to show Yigranzi that I was there. I did not speak, though, to show her this—not until the dawn of the third day, when I bent and whispered, “I need you; don’t go.”

Later that third day the room was flooded with sun. “You must sleep,” Bardrem said. “You must eat. It’s hot in here, and it smells—come with me
now
.” I only hunched closer to Yigranzi. I heard him leave, and then I heard nothing but her breathing. It was just as loud as it had been before, but there were more spaces in it, so it seemed quieter. I put my hand on her hair, which was the last remnant of before: thick and crinkly, filling my palm.
Still here
, I thought with every one of her halting, slower breaths.
Still here
.

I was nodding asleep when Yigranzi thrashed once, violently. Her fingers raked my arm and I started awake. I leaned forward again, ready to comfort, to reach for water or a groping, beseeching hand. Then I saw her face, and froze.

Her eyes were open.

I lurched to my feet. My stool tipped over and my ankles caught and I fell. I sat on the floor as she sat up in the bed, effortlessly, her legs swinging over the side.

Her eyes were brown.

She was trying to speak; her lips and throat convulsed and she made a sound like
oh oh oh
, low and urgent.

Brown
, I thought.
Regular brown, with regular black centres—like Chenn’s, at the end. Like Chenn’s
. . .

Yigranzi stood. For a moment her back seemed straight; she was entirely different, some new woman formed from the bones of the old. She lifted a hand that did not waver and stretched it toward me. I scrambled back, raising my own arm as if she meant to strike me—but she did not. She only reached, her brown eyes wide and clear. “
Oh
,” she said again, and fell.

I crawled across the floor, clumsily, catching fingertips and toes in gaps in the rugs. I touched her shoulder and one warm, limp hand and said her name, over and over, to make up for all the words I should have spoken, on this day and others. I waited for the eyes to blink but they did not; waited for them to close on their own but they did not. I touched them gently with the pads of my thumbs, held them shut until they stayed that way.

I closed my own eyes and pressed my hands to my ears and rocked myself, alone.

I must breathe. I must lift my head from these pages and wriggle my stiff fingers and roll my shoulders until the knot between them loosens. The words that I thought would take time to choose and set down in order are coming so swiftly, crowding my head and the paper and making me forget everything else.

It is Sildio, now, who makes sure that I eat. He raps on my door a few hours past dawn and again at noon and once more at dusk. If I’m too absorbed in my writing to answer, and if he must leave the post he’s appointed for himself outside my door, he sets the food on a tray in the hallway. (It must be the hallway. If he left it on the floor of my room, one of the animals who shares this space with me would eat it before I could.) And if the food is still there when he returns he knocks again, much less politely.

But sometimes it’s so difficult to remember to look up beyond the page beneath my nose. I must remember. Because the tiny strip of sky can be so lovely. Like now, for example: it is dawn, and the clouds are several shades of pink.

Dawn now—and dawn in my story, too. (How neatly done! Bardrem would approve of this, though not of my desire to draw attention to it.)

Dawn, and courtyard, and one last, lonely girl.

Her name and her face are long gone but I still remember the vision I had of her. It was simple, lovely, uncoloured by copper. She had brought me a handful of barley, “Because the mirror is probably too grand a way to see my Pattern.”

It was there as soon as the barley had settled on the ground: a hillside so green that it seemed made of paint, not grass, and the girl walking up it. The slope was steep but she was moving easily, gracefully, tipping her face to the sun. She stopped just a few paces from the peak and raised her arms above her head and suddenly there were butterflies around her, their wings silver and blue and green and yellow, blurred with light and flying.

That was all. I told her, expecting impatience or even anger—some other girls would have cried, “Try again! Tell me what can be seen from the hilltop or I won’t pay you!”—but she smiled.

“My grandmother’s village was always full of butterflies in the early fall—my mother told me this. I have been thinking of going there, and now I am sure.” She unclasped a silver chain from around her neck. A single ruby hung from it.

“No,” I said as she was handing it to me, “this is far too precious. . . .”

She nodded. “It was to me, too, for a long time. Now I don’t need it any more. Take it—and thank you, Nola. Yours is about the only city face I’ll miss.”

I collected the barley, after she had left me, and set it in a pile by the mirror. The mirror in its cloth, the grain, the goblet in which wax and water swam; the tattered tree and its worn-smooth carvings. All mine, now that Yigranzi was gone. In the two weeks since her death many people had come to me—many more than I’d ever seen come before.