The Pattern Scars

by Caitlin Sweet

  “No,” Chenn interrupted, “I want the mirror. And I want both of you to look.”

  I sucked in my breath. Chenn had not yet glanced my way, but now she turned, and I felt pinned by blue-black and gold.

  Yigranzi said, “It is never wise for Otherseers to allow the vision to be turned on themselves. It—”

  “I am not a seer any more.” Chenn’s voice cracked again, and I thought that it sounded as new-raw as the cracks in Yigranzi’s lips looked. “Please: the mirror.”

  Yigranzi went first. I’d watched her do this many times, over the last four years, and it still amazed me—not because she was quick and effortless about it, but because she was slow. I used to fidget while I waited, but recently I’d been watching with more care. She took care—but it was more than that. She was slow and careful, and she struggled.

  “Why do you take so long?” I had asked her once. “It only takes me a moment to see a vision. And why do you twist up your face so much, like it’s hurting you?”

  She had lifted one eyebrow. She had been thrusting copper combs into her hair, which, if not contained, stood up around her head like a thick, black-and-white bush. “The visions are clearer and easier when you’re a child—I’ve told you this—do you hear anything I say, Nola-girl? They rise up like breath—and usually only one of them for any one person. One, which you can look at and then away from. But”—another thrust, and copper tines disappearing—“then, if you’re a girl, you begin your monthly bleeding, and everything changes. The one, quick vision may still come up to meet you, but now it’s not as clear, and not alone. Layers, Nola. Layers of pictures, and you wondering which among them is truest.”

  “So do boy seers always have the easy visions, since they never bleed?”

  She made a huffing sound that I knew was a chuckle. “No. It is harder for them too, as they grow. Seeing either world is never easy when childhood’s gone.”

  When Chenn arrived I had not yet begun my monthly bleeding. My Othersight was still swift and easy; all that happened after I used it was that I felt dizzy, and colours looked different. But I was twelve, and I knew that things would soon change for me—and so I watched Yigranzi with particular attention.

  She ran her fingers around the mirror’s rim. Her eyes were on Chenn.

  “Tell me what the Pattern holds for me,” said Chenn.

  Yigranzi looked down at the mirror. She began to hum: a low, formless tune that was different every time. Her fingers slowed against the copper. Moments later they stopped, and so did the humming. She was motionless. Big, round snowflakes fell on the mirror and she did not brush them off. There were only a few patches of metal showing when she lifted her head.

  Usually she was smiling a small, lips-together smile at this point, no matter what she had seen. This time she was not. Her eyes were all black; the pearl centres returned as she blinked. She was quiet for a long time, which was also strange. (She had told me that seers should say something as soon as the vision had passed, something slow and quiet that might have nothing to do with the vision itself, but that would be calming to both seer and seen.)

  “Well?” Chenn bit her lip as soon as the word was out.

  Yigranzi did smile now, but I could tell that she was trying to; that it was weak, held on only by her will.

  “The Pattern is unclear,” she said. “There are many spirals, all of them twisted like—”

  “Just tell me.”

  Yigranzi’s smile vanished. “There was a wolf with the hands of a man. Its teeth were set with gems. It snarled and reached for you, and you turned to it—you knew it, but this did not matter, for it fastened its jaws around your thigh while it held you still with its hands.”

  I had never heard her describe a vision so starkly. Chenn did not seem as alarmed as I felt. She nodded once, as if she understood what Yigranzi had told her, and said, “And what of the other, lesser pictures?”

  “Unclear,” Yigranzi replied. “The twisting lines, all of them the colour of blood.”

  One more nod, and then Chenn turned to me. “Please,” she said, “tell me your name, and take your turn.”

  I straightened. I noticed only now that I was taller than she was. “Nola,” I said, trying not to sound too proud or too timid, and reached for the mirror. I wiped the snow off it with the hem of my cloak and sat down on the stone.

  “Tell me what will come, for me,” I heard Chenn say.

  I see right away. I am sure, as the copper mist eddies and parts, that there will be horrors—but there are not. Just Chenn sitting on a golden chair like a throne, only smaller than I imagine a real throne would be. She is bathed in sunlight; the gold shines, as do the beads of her light green gown. Her hair is as dark as her eyes and unbound, brushed glossy-smooth. She is looking off to her right, smiling at something or someone I cannot see. She lifts her hand and her mouth makes a word—a name, I know, even though I don’t hear it.

  The glow begins to dim a bit, as the mirror’s hue returns. Later I try to tell myself that the copper shadows confused my Othersight; the shadows, and the beauty of the girl and her dress and her smile. “I never saw anything else,” I think later, or “I saw—but how could I have been expected to truly grasp what I saw? The vision was fading, after all. . . .”

  It is her throat—white and smooth and utterly unremarkable except for the cloudy opal in its hollow. But as my Othersight begins to lose its strength, I see her throat open. It opens side-to-side, the two edges curling outward like lycus blossoms. There is no blood.

  This is what I saw, and then I blinked, and all I saw was the shadow of my own face in the snow-dusted mirror.

  “Nola?” Chenn said.

  I looked up at her. A strand of long black hair had escaped from her headscarf and was looping over her shoulder.

  “What did you see?”

  I was already forgetting. Her eyes made me forget. “It was beautiful,” I said. Her smile wobbled because of my dizziness. The falling snow was the same colour as the beaded dress had been. “You were sitting on a golden throne, wearing a rich, green gown. There was an opal necklace, and maybe some rings. Your hair was all loose and shining. You were smiling at someone, and then you reached for him—I felt it was a ‘him,’ even though I couldn’t see. . . . You were happy,” I said. And that was all. I barely knew her, and yet I needed her to smile at me as she was. I needed her to be happy.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That is a heartening vision.”

  Yigranzi was frowning. “A wolf, a throne—take care, and remember that though neither is fixed in your Pattern, both are possible. Think, girl, and make no decision now. You remember: a seer must use patience in all things.”

  “I am not a seer any more,” Chenn said, with more steadiness this time. She gazed around her—at the tree, the balconies and walls, the heavy grey sky. “I sense the truth of both visions, but the gold is stronger. Take me back to the Lady now, please.”

  The Pattern thickened around us like the snow, and only Yigranzi knew to shiver.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bardrem used to make lists. Words he thought of but could not yet make into poems; words that he needed to see together, rather than only hearing in his head. Sometimes he left these lists in strange places so that he would stumble upon them later, when the look and sound of them might seem new and surprise him. Rudicol would shout at him, when he found the little folded pieces of paper in seldom-used pots or spaces between the hearthstones. He would tear them into tiny pieces; several times he thrust them into the cookfire; once he threw one into a pot of soup, then scalded his fingers plucking it out again, and shouted until we thought his eyes would spring from his head. For a while after one of these episodes, Bardrem would write the words in or with the food itself. A boiled potato would have “belly” and “ire” carved in it; salted round beans would spell “conquered” and “moon” upon a plate.

  He’d leave me notes, too—in one of my shoes, or underneath the rag carpet, or wedged into a ho
le in the courtyard tree. I sometimes wouldn’t find the notes for days or even months. He needed to put himself onto little pieces of paper, and he needed to know that someone would find them. It’s beginning to be the same for me now, though my pages are bigger and (at last, this morning) arranged in a neat stack. I write these words for myself, but I think as I do that others might read them, too. Grasni and Sildio at least, and maybe some of my old students, when they’re grown—and oh, what a giddy rush of pride and selflessness and simple, yearning joy I feel, imagining this.

  But for now there is only me.

  Or rather: Chenn, Bardrem and me, sitting cross-legged on Chenn’s bed.

  Chenn was cutting my hair. Yigranzi’s fingers were too swollen now to use the little bronze scissors.

  “Listen,” Bardrem said, smoothing his piece of paper out on the coverlet. “I think it’s nearly done.” He cleared his throat.

  It was one of his longer poems—though they all seemed to be longer, recently, and more about battles than about the shape of rain or the songs of night birds, as they used to be. This one was, in fact, about a battle—one fought centuries ago by an ancestor of King Haldrin’s, Ranior, great War Hound of Sarsenay, when there had been no peace. The poem’s lines were thick with word-pictures, and there was scarcely any room for Bardrem to breathe. I closed my eyes, hoping he would think I was listening, rather than resting.

  “Blood-drenched sunrise,” I heard, and “the Plains of Lodrigesse, stretched like sea beneath the stars of Sarsenay.” Mostly I heard the snick snick of the scissors, and Chenn’s hands brushing the cloth where the hair was falling.

  “So?”

  I opened my eyes. Bardrem was standing; he sometimes leapt to his feet and paced during a recitation. His hand was on the wood of the bed across the room from Chenn’s.

  “So,” I repeated, as if I had something to add.

  “It was very grand,” Chenn said in her steady, calm way. “I liked the part about the armies looking like swarming beetles on the plain. And it was very exciting when the island king’s throat was torn out by Ranior’s dogs—and of course Ranior himself was very strong and handsome. How did you say it? ‘Hair of beaten gold and shoulders that bore up all the world.’ Lovely.”

  Bardrem flushed a little, around his cheekbones. I wondered whether this was because of Chenn’s words or because of Chenn herself.

  “Good,” he said. “I was happy with those parts too.” He paused, gazed down at the paper. “Do you think King Haldrin would like it? After all, he’s still young—surely he’d appreciate the work of someone also young. A grand work like this one.”

  “I don’t know.” Chenn was dabbing at my neck with a piece of damp cloth so that the tiny cut hairs would not cling and itch. “He’s not a very grand sort of person. Several times I’ve heard him say that . . .”

  Her words trailed and echoed. I turned. She was staring at nothing, holding the cloth in midair. She looked made of ice or stone.

  “You’ve been to the castle?” Bardrem said. His voice broke on the last word, as it so often did in those days, making him sound both man and girl. “Is that where you were before—at the castle? That’s good—wonderful!—you can take me there when my poem’s done; you can tell the king how well I’d serve him, how many more works I’d write for him—”

  “No,” Chenn said.

  I saw her far-gaze and heard her determination, but as a new silence fell, the words in my own head only grew louder.

  “So,” I said at last, my attempt at nonchalance undone by a quaver, “did you know Teldaru too?”

  Chenn stood up. The scissors and cloth slipped from her hands to the floor. “I will not speak of this,” she said. Her eyes leapt from Bardrem’s face to mine. “Not ever. And for your own sakes, you will not ask me to.”

  “But why?” Bardrem’s entire face was flushed now, and the paper shook a bit in his hand. “Why must we not speak of it, and why did you leave, and—”

  “Chenn,” a new voice said. There was a girl in the doorway—the girl who had been the newest, before Chenn came. She did not look at Bardrem or me. “The Lady bids you come to the receiving chamber.”

  Chenn shook her head. “I . . . I cannot. It’s my bleeding week—the Lady knows this.”

  The girl smiled a false, quick smile. “She does. But it’s the silk merchant asking for you—the one who’s promised her a lower price on his wares. He knows you’re bleeding, and he doesn’t care.”

  For a moment Chenn’s face seemed to tremble—her lips, her cheeks and chin—and she closed her eyes. Then she said, firmly, “Very well,” and opened them again. “Tell her I am coming. And leave me—all of you.”

  Bardrem gripped my wrist when we were in the corridor. “Did you hear that?” he hissed.

  “Of course,” I said, but he was not listening.

  “We have to find out how long she was there, and who else she knew—but did you hear that? She knew King Haldrin!”

  “She didn’t want to tell us, so we shouldn’t press her.” My words came out sounding priggish because my desire to agree with him was so great.

  “But the castle, Nola! I would never have to chop another potato or be struck by another man who’s drunk and unhappy with the girl he chose and claims the soup is what’s made him angry . . . I’d learn my true craft at the feet of the king’s poet, and then someday I’d be the king’s poet.”

  He was still squeezing my wrist; I wrenched it free. “She left there for a reason and she doesn’t want to go back. And don’t talk of another life when this one is all you’ll ever have.”

  I walked quickly so that he would not see my sudden tears, and so that I might outpace my confusion. Familiar halls, with their cracking plaster and smoke-darkened wood; my room with its rug and the bed that had seemed so luxurious, the first few times I’d awoken in it. And now this other place—only a word, but one I could see and feel, like the fire in the kitchen when a gale was blowing outside. “Castle:” a high place, closer to sunlight, where girls wore real jewels and were loved by men who did not pay them. Where a young seer could study in a real school, surrounded by safety and luxury and others like herself.

  Despite my curiosity, I spoke to Chenn of the castle only once, and only by accident. We were in the courtyard. It was spring—the tree’s twelve leaves were a bright, glossy yellow-green, and there was a scattering of new grass in the mud—and I had just had a lovely vision of a man sleeping with a book in the crook of his arm. The actual man had been pleased with this, and had paid me more than he’d said he would. When Chenn came to me, after he had gone, I was humming, putting the mirror away in its cloth.

  The day was warm, one of those early spring days that feels like summer. She stood by the tree and watched me, and when I was done she smiled at me. I had learned that she, like almost everyone else I had ever met, had two smiles: one that she used when she did not really want to be smiling, and one that appeared when she was actually happy. That afternoon she smiled her happy smile, and the day grew even brighter.

  “I just got my month’s pay,” she said. “I have almost enough now. One more month like this and I’ll be able to leave.”

  “Oh.” The air had darkened again, though Chenn’s smile remained. “Where will you go?”

  She had been as secretive about this as she had about her previous life, but today she raised her arms above her head and made a happy, stretching noise and said, “South, where it’s summer all the time.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but my words vanished—because I had seen the insides of her forearms, and the two long, puckered scars there.

  “What are those?”

  She lowered her arms and crossed them across her chest. “What?” Bardrem often pointed out that both Chenn and I were terrible liars, and said that he would be hard-pressed to choose the worse one. Now she clutched her dress sleeves over her wrists and would not meet my gaze. Her cheeks had gone very pale, which made her hair and eyes look even darker.
>
  “The scars,” I said, standing up to face her. “The lines”—from elbow crooks to wrists, the light purple of wounds only recently healed.

  “An accident I had before I came here,” she said quickly.

  I snorted. “An accident? But there are two of them, exactly the same—did you happen to drop the same knife twice, or—”

  “Nola.” Yigranzi was standing at the end of the walkway closest to Chenn and me. I had not heard her come, even though she now used a walking stick that made a soft, hollow sound on the boards. She was so bent that she had to crane upward to look at us.

  “Nola,” she said again, her voice as strong as ever, “do not press her.”

  “I will!” I cried. “I will press her, because she was hurt—and this isn’t the only secret—she used to live at the castle! That too . . .” My breath caught in my throat. I thought I had spoken too swiftly again, betrayed a confidence—but when I looked at Yigranzi I saw no surprise on her face.

  “You know about the castle,” I said, slowly now. “And about the scars, too?”

  Yigranzi nodded. “Chenn and I have spoken a little of these things. I did not want you to know too much—I do not—for Nola-girl, there is ugliness in the world that you do not need to see. Not yet.”

  “Ugliness?” I was shouting, my voice cracking almost as Bardrem’s did. “You think I don’t already see ugliness? I see men kill each other; I see girls with sores, girls dying and bleeding—I see visions worse than these!” The shouting was hurting my ears and my throat; I lowered my voice a bit, though I kept it ablaze with anger. “Do not try to shield me from things: I need to know. I need to, because you are my friend”—this to Chenn, who looked so sad that I lost my breath again. In the moment of quiet that followed I saw it, as clear as if it were really happening before me: Chenn and Yigranzi sitting in Yigranzi’s room of coloured cloth and shells. Chenn drinking from the cup with the crab on its side. Talking; both of them talking, but Chenn more. Tracing her old cuts with her fingers. Telling.