The Pattern Scars

by Caitlin Sweet

  “Tell me. Tell me what will come, for me . . .”

  He doesn’t sound like a boy, and he doesn’t look like one. His face smudges in the mirror, and then all its lines dissolve. It oozes together again, so slowly that each pore must be taking its own turn—but soon it is done, and he’s back, but he’s a man. His hair is darker and cropped close to his head. His lips are thinner. Even as I strain to hold his face still it recedes, so swiftly that it feels as if I am falling backward. There are stones behind him: row upon row of them, all tall, all bent into terrible, bulbous shapes. He stands among them and cries a long, raw, ragged-ended cry. Looking at me—but not at the child-me: the mirror-me, who (I see, glancing down) is wearing a cream-coloured dress. There is a thick red-brown braid hanging over my left shoulder. I wrench my gaze to him again—this isn’t right; how can I be with him among these stones?—and he shouts again. Maybe it’s my name? I try to turn away from him but cannot, because we are both Otherselves, in another place that doesn’t exist for us but is part of our Pattern anyway. His mouth twists and he rubs tears away with his palms, viciously. Just then a bird rises from the stones: a glorious scarlet bird with a blue head and a green and yellow tail. Blood is coming from his eyes now, and from mine; I feel it on my arms, warmer and thicker than tears. If I could look down and see the pattern of the drops; if I could just do this perhaps I’d be able to find a way back through the copper-tinted sky. I try to look, but I’m frozen, watching him bleed and weep, and suddenly a scream rises in me, as quick and bright as the bird was, but even it gets trapped—

  “Nola! Nola, come back. . . .”

  I was lying down, but this time Yigranzi, not my mother, hovered above me. She had looped her cool, dry, hard fingers through mine and was squeezing them so tightly that the pain returned my breath to me. I gasped and coughed.

  “What did you see?” Bardrem’s voice—his boy’s voice, awed and high. “Your eyes went black and silver: I saw them. What did you see?”

  “Bardrem,” Yigranzi began. That was all I heard her say. I stared at him (he was holding his fair hair back from his eyes, and his lips were slightly open and very red) and I turned my head and vomited, and then I saw nothing at all any more, not even darkness.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I woke up in a bed. A bed, not a thin, smelly pallet on the floor. I rolled to one side and then the other atop the mattress (rough linen stuffed with straw that prickled my bare skin) and listened to the creaking of the wooden frame beneath it.

  I woke up alone, in silence. No babies wailing; no older children pressed up against my back, quivering with fear or fever. No mother. I stared at the walls, which were wood, and a deep, deep red. I had never seen a painted room before, and it made my heart race, for a moment. Perhaps I was dreaming, or dead? But when I squeezed my eyelids shut and opened them again the dark red walls were still there, as was the door in the one opposite the bed. There was a window, square and very small and set high enough up in the wall that I would have to stand on my bed to see out. I did not do this—not yet. It was enough to look at the sunlight, and the latticed pattern of a shutter I could not see, wavering like water on the red paint.

  It was dark when the door opened. I had not moved—not because I was afraid of what I might find, but because I was still sure I would discover that it was all a fashioning of my mind that would vanish the moment my feet touched the rag rug on the floor. “You’re awake.” The woman was wearing her blue dress with the silver belt; its oval links shone in the light of the candelabra she held in one of her hands (each of her fingers had a ring, I noticed).

  “Yes,” I said, thinking, despite my awe, It’s obvious that I’m awake; what a silly thing to say.

  “Sit up, child. Let me look at you.”

  I obeyed her—and right away I could tell that I was different. My skin—all of it bare beneath the woollen blanket that I now held against my waist—was clean. I could see this, in the candle-glow, but I could also sense it: there was a lightness about me, a burnish that made me feel like a smooth piece of metal. And my hair was gone. There was no weight of it against my back, and when I lifted my hands to my head I felt only thick, dense stubble. For a moment I remembered the braid I had seen in my vision, but then I ground my fingertips against my skull and forced the memory away.

  “Better,” said the woman. She set the candelabra down on the low washstand that was the only other piece of furniture in the room. The little flame-lights danced on the surface of the water in the basin. Clean water, waiting for me.

  “So you’ll stay—which is well and good, since Yigranzi is old and ugly and men have little desire to pay money for her to look at them in her mirror. You, though . . .” She crossed her arms, leaned her head forward, thinned out her lips as she regarded me. “You’re young, at least. And you may grow pretty enough to draw the coins from men’s pouches. Though you’ll never be one of my girls. You will not lie with men for money, and you will not mix with the girls. A seer’s place is apart—and if you forget this you’ll be flogged. It’s not your flesh that matters, after all, and I won’t fear you as all the others will.”

  She paused—for breath, I imagined. I had never heard one person speak so many words together.

  “Have you anything to say before I leave you?”

  I was safe: I knew this now. And flogging had never frightened me. I pulled my naked shoulders back and gazed straight up into her eyes. “I’m hungry.”

  Her brows rose. I was beginning to enjoy having this effect on adults. “Impudent girl,” she said, almost lazily. “You will get your dinner. No doubt it will be the finest meal you’ve ever eaten in all your life. Was there anything more?”

  “My mother.” I hadn’t known I was going to say these words, and this unexpectedness—and the sudden quaver in my voice—made me flush. I twisted the blanket in my hands, which were so clean—even the nails—that I hardly recognized them. “Is she gone?”

  The woman nodded. “The moment the copper pieces were in her hands.”

  “Did she speak of me?” The quaver was gone from my words, but I could still feel it in my chest, which both confused and angered me.

  “No.” She picked the candelabra up again. The links of her belt made a soft, singing noise as she moved to the door. She looked back at me. “She was a horrible woman. You should be thankful that the Pattern has brought you here.”

  “Yes,” I said, and then I was alone again, in deeper darkness than before, hugging myself as tears I did not understand fell upon my new, clean bed.

  The girls were afraid of me. They stepped quickly aside if I was coming toward them in one of the brothel’s narrow hallways. If they were alone they lowered their eyes, and if they weren’t they fell silent, though they would murmur and hiss when I had passed. Many of the ones who did glance at me would put their hands to their own long hair. (Mine was cut every few weeks to keep me undesirable to the clients—though as Bardrem said once, “Some of them like boys, you know; you’d still better look behind you, especially in the dark.”)

  At first I didn’t see many of the men. I spent most of my time with Yigranzi, either in the courtyard or—when it grew too chilly for her there—in her room, which was as small as mine but filled with wondrous things: sea shells hung on dyed string, and masks carved out of enormous leaves, and candelabras made of volcano rocks moulded into the shapes of snakes and fish. The rest of my time I spent in the kitchen, where Rudicol the thin cook shouted himself hoarse and Bardrem slipped me pieces of seasoned meat and sometimes even apples and pears: food intended for the men, not for me.

  The men I did see, in those first months, were the ones who sought out Yigranzi. She always sent me away when she saw them coming, but I’d peek at them, either on the walkway or after. I’d turn, look over my shoulder, and Yigranzi would call, “Nola! Go!” even when she wasn’t facing me. These men, I saw, were all different. One was tall and red-bearded, and for a moment I thought he was my father—or the person my mother ha
d always told me was my father. But then I drew level with him and saw that he was younger, his eyes wide and darting beneath his red brows, and although I was relieved that he was not my father I was a little sorry, too, for I’d always liked his wink and the flash of his silver-capped tooth.

  Another of the men was short and so fat that his belly rippled beneath the green silk tunic he wore. His breath whistled and a sour smell wafted from him. I stared at the silk, and at the gold chain that was nearly vanishing beneath one of his chins, and thought, This is what a rich man looks like?

  “Why do rich men come to you?” I asked Yigranzi one day. It was autumn; three of the tree’s leaves were scarlet, one was yellow, and the rest had already fallen.

  “For the same two reasons all men come,” she replied, “and women, too. Two reasons; you’ll learn this. To hear what they think they already know about what the Pattern holds for them, or to be surprised.”

  “What if they don’t like what you see?”

  She smiled her smile of holes and took the mirror from my lap. (She had not let me look for a vision in it since that first day—and I had not wanted to—but she said I should get used to the feel of it.)

  “Many don’t. Many bluster and stamp, and some grab hold of you and shake you until you’re dizzy. So you have to learn calm. To wait for their anger to pass, if it’s all-of-a-sudden anger, or to speak quietly before it can grow. You have to tell them: The Pattern is not set. I see the truth of you, before and now, and the maybe of your future. But nothing is set; it is only waiting.”

  I shook my head. “No—the Pattern is set—that’s what everyone says.”

  Yigranzi was silent for a bit, as she folded the mirror into a square blue cloth stitched with golden spirals. When she was done she placed the bundle inside the tree, then turned back to me.

  “In Sarsenay they think this, yes. Not where I come from. There we know that what seers find in men is truth, but also that it does not have to be.”

  I shook my head again and must have scowled, because Yigranzi laughed and said, “You’ll grasp it someday, Sarsenayan or not,” which only made me scowl more.

  Most of the things she said to me were simple. “You must eat well before you use your Othersight—but nothing rich or heavy, because sometimes the strength of your vision will make you vomit. As you’ve already found out, no?” (She had never asked me to tell her about my first vision, though with Bardrem it had become a half-jest: “Tell me now. No? Very well—now? Or maybe now?”)

  “In times of great difficulty for all—wars or plagues or famines—people want to know about their children. At other times they mostly want to know about themselves.”

  “When your monthly bleeding begins, your Otherseeing will grow stronger, especially when you have visions for other women. Blood gives power.”

  Although she did not allow me to use her mirror again, in those first months, she did teach me different ways to Othersee. There was wax, melted and poured into a bowl of cold water, and kitchen scraps (Bardrem brought them and sulked when he was not permitted to stay): crumbled-up stale bread and chicken bones, thrown into wind. “Once someone has asked you to Othersee for them, anything that forms a pattern will help you. Each way has a different strength, and each seer reacts differently to them.”

  “And when will I try these ways?” I asked, wriggling on the brightly patterned hide stool by her bed.

  “Later,” she said, “when you have learned more.”

  “But I want to try now—the wax one, because it’s pretty.”

  “No, Nola. Not yet.”

  “Teldaru went to the castle two days after he found out he had the Othersight! The king didn’t make him wait. All you do is show me. You don’t let me do anything!”

  She gazed at me with her eyes that were always black-and-pearl. She had not told me what it was like to see normally, with these eyes, even though I had asked. She had told me so little—only the simple things, the ones I probably would have found out on my own anyway. I glared back at her, not fidgeting any more.

  “Two months ago,” she said slowly, in a strange voice that had nothing of Sarsenay in it; only depth and lilt that sounded wild and very old, “you were living in filth. Two months ago you were eight years old and likely to die of sickness or at your own mother’s hand—eight years old and lucky if you saw nine. And now here you sit, forgetting your ‘before’ and even your ‘now’ because you’re as tempted by your ‘later’ as anyone else who walks into this courtyard to find me.”

  I felt my lip wobbling and bit it to keep it still. I didn’t want her to notice but of course she did.

  “Nola. Child.” Her usual voice, and a smile. “I was fifteen when I came to Sarsenay. A strange land and stranger people, and me alone. I remember what it is to want and to need, and to forget everything else.” She rose from her bed and then bent to touch my cheek. She had never touched me before. I think now that no one had ever done so with any tenderness—and that was partly why I flinched away from her hand. As she went to the other side of the room, I stared at her carpets, which were small, nubbly with wool ends, and woven in every colour, even ones I couldn’t name.

  “Be patient,” she said. I heard water pouring into a cup—probably her ceramic one, which was short and squat and had an orange background with a black crab painted on it. I liked this one because the crab’s claws looked like they were lifting off the pottery; like they might pinch your lips or your nose. “The Othersight is difficult to have, and you are still young, and there will be time to do, after you have learned. Be patient, Nola, yes?”

  I lifted my eyes from the rugs and looked at her. “Yes,” I said, and I believe that I meant it. I believe that I did intend to try for patience, restraint, obedience.

  I was young, though, and I failed.

  It began with a poem.

  A girl lives here who needs your eye

  To look at her and then to scry

  So tell me yes and I’ll tell her

  No one will have to know.

  It took me several minutes to read this poem, because I was simply slow (my father had taught me to read a little, years ago; my mother laughed at us and then got angry), and because it was written in tiny letters on a piece of paper that fit in my palm. Also, it was smoky in the kitchen, even though the window shutters and door were open to the autumn air.

  I had just finished squinting at this scrap of paper when Bardrem dropped another one into my lap. I glared at him but he was already gone, whirling from countertop to cookpot with trays of carrots and potatoes while Rudicol yelled, “My granddam moves faster than you, boy, and I don’t even have to flog her!”

  The words on this second bit of paper were not a poem. They said: “My poems are usually very serious. That one was like a joke—but what it said was real. Wait for me after. Bardrem.”

  I peered again at the poem, frowning. I thought I understood it, except that it didn’t seem possible. (My heart was already beating faster than usual, in a place that felt very high up, closer to my throat than to my chest.)

  “Who is she?” I asked him later. It was about midnight; my room was dark except for the flickering of a single candle. I had fallen asleep waiting for him and was now trying to shake the heaviness from my head and limbs without seeming to.

  He shrugged. “Just a girl. I think she’s fifteen.”

  “Why doesn’t she want to go to Yigranzi?”

  Another shrug, and eyes cast toward the ceiling from beneath a swatch of fair hair. “Because . . . I don’t know. I think she might not like her. Because of where she’s from, what she looks like. Something like that.”

  “Oh.” I blinked and ran the back of my hand across my eyes, trying to make it look as though I was itchy rather than tired. Bardrem had begun pacing from one end of the room to the other, whirling at each turn as if he were still in the kitchen.

  “I shouldn’t. Yigranzi’s told me not to. I don’t know enough—I haven’t practised since that time
with you, and the mirror was so strong—”

  “So don’t use the mirror. Try another way. You know some, don’t you?”

  My heartbeat was so close to my throat that I thought I might not be able to speak—but I did, said, “Wax on water . . .”

  “Good.” He was already at the door. “I’ll go get some for you. And I’ll get her, too.”

  “No—wait—” But he was already gone, and it was too late.

  The wax was wine-coloured and the girl looked young. Fifteen? I thought, staring at her blond plaits (rows of them, all tied at the ends with blue ribbons), and at her scowl.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” she said. Her voice was a surprise: low and dark. “You’re not Otherseeing yet, are you?”

  “No.” I tried to keep my own voice calm, as Yigranzi had told me to. “But I need to look at you, before. I need to see you with my own eyes first.” I felt silly saying these words, because I hadn’t thought of them and because I didn’t really believe them. All I saw now was a girl with squinty green eyes and thinned-out lips and a sleeping gown that was too big for her.

  “Ready,” Bardrem said. He was at the washstand; the pitcher was on the floor, though the bowl was still where it usually was, full, waiting to serve this new purpose. I went to stand beside him. He was holding a little clay pot above the candle flame. The pot was swimming with wax.

  “Stand here,” I said. The girl obeyed. I was not sure whether I wanted to smile or tremble. I took the pot from Bardrem, who stepped away, out of my sight. I tipped, poured; the wax fell in slow, fat drops that darkened and spread as soon as they touched the water.

  “Now,” I heard Bardrem hiss, and the girl cleared her throat.

  “Tell . . .” she began, then faltered. “Tell me my future”—louder, almost angrily.

  Words, wax, water—and my vision staining wine at the edges.

  The girl is there—her shadow in the wax-blotched water, but also her Otherself, solid and see-through. She is naked. Her nipples are very dark; I think, Wax, but then see how wet the darkness is. One drip, and another, and I think, knowing this is truth: Blood. The belly beneath her breasts is swollen in a way I recognize. Blood spatters onto flesh, making new patterns, lines like snakes. There are snakes everywhere, suddenly: crimson ones emerging scale by scale from the girl’s distended bellybutton. Their tongues fork fresh blood, which sprays toward me. I hear myself cry out once, and again as I wrench my gaze away from the bowl.