The Pattern Scars

by Caitlin Sweet

  “How dare you,” I whispered to the Chenn and Yigranzi who were in front of me. I pushed past one, then the other; I ran over the walkway and into the shadows of the walls. I did not truly know why I was running, which only made me hurry more.

  Chenn came to my room that night. She knocked on my door as she usually did—four short raps followed by a scrabbling of fingers that sounded like tickling, or an animal digging. I did not answer. I lay on my bed, sunk in a loneliness that felt warm.

  “Nola,” she called. “Nola—I’m going to the receiving chamber now, but I’ll be back at dawn. I want to talk to you. Please?”

  I did not answer.

  She left—I heard her footsteps in the hall, soft and quick. I thought: Going somewhere else, like always. I stared up into the dark air, and at the even darker patches that I knew were the ceiling beams. I almost hoped she wouldn’t come back, so that I would be able to hold onto my anger or my hurt or whatever it was that made me feel suffocated and protected at the same time. Almost hoped—because when the silence stretched on and the sky in my open window paled to grey and she still did not come, the loneliness in me turned cold.

  If I had let her in, when she knocked. If I had gone to find her. If, if—but no. I did not find her. He did.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I had just managed to fall asleep when the screaming began. I was so accustomed to this sound that at first I only burrowed deeper into the bed, pulling the blanket up over my ears to shut it out. This did not work because several girls were screaming now, all at slightly different pitches. I felt the shuddering of the floor and thought, So many people running—must be something very nasty. But I did not move until Bardrem called my name from the corridor in a breaking, broken voice.

  “What is it?” I was aware of the cold as I stared at him, air like wind, the last of winter, burrowing beneath my skin.

  “Chenn,” he said—and I pushed him out of the way, flew on feet I could not feel to the door where everyone had gathered.

  “She is not here,” the Lady said to me as all the girls fell back, letting me through. “We will find her and Yigranzi will tend to her.” These words made me hope, for the space of time it took for me to step into the room—but then I saw.

  I had seen blood before. I had imagined, before this, that I had seen a great deal of blood. This, though: dark pools, livid sprays on walls and even ceiling, every surface patterned wet. Too much for one person—perhaps some animals'? I thought dizzily, but when I looked at the dripping mess of Chenn’s bed I knew this was not true.

  I left, while the others stood and gawked. Ran again, as Bardrem and Yigranzi called out behind me. Bardrem had finally been getting taller this past winter, but even his newly lengthened legs could not keep pace with mine. I ran around corners and down the rickety flight of stairs by the kitchen and out into the daylight that had turned to gold.

  It was the gold that made me stop, at the walkway. The hue of my vision—the one with Chenn sitting on the throne—and Chenn was sitting, but with her back against the tree.

  “Chenn?” Just a whisper, so I was not surprised when Chenn did not look up. I walked. The wood was cold and smooth against my bare feet. The light was thick; I peered through it, saw only clean, graceful lines—the slope of Chenn’s shoulders and her crossed legs and the fall of her long, dark hair. Her head was bent forward, a little. Sleeping, I thought, because I had made myself forget the room behind me in the glow of what was in front. I heard Yigranzi call my name again but did not pause. There was only Chenn.

  I knelt beside her. “Chenn,” I said. “Chenn, Chenn,” and reached for her shoulder. The cloth of her sleeping shift was soft and white. Her skin was shining, damp, and I thought of dew. I gave a gentle shake, and another, and Chenn’s head lolled slowly, slowly.

  At first I saw only her eyes, which were open wide. They were light green with black centres. Green without gold. Normal eyes—and this was so shocking that I looked away from them, and down.

  The wound was as it had been in my vision: the lips of a lycus blossom, curled outward. This was no Otherseeing, though, not a thing glimpsed swiftly, which would fade to nothing as I blinked. I stared at the pale, glistening hole of Chenn’s throat. There was a sudden sound in my ears, like the wings of hundreds of birds all trying to fly at once. When it passed I heard my own blood, pulsing alive, alive within me.

  “He washed her,” Bardrem said. He was crouching on Chenn’s other side, clutching her hand in both of his. “He cut her and let her bleed dry and then he washed her.”

  I could hardly see him through the haze of gold; I could hardly hear him through the clamour of my heartbeat.

  Yigranzi’s shadow fell across Chenn’s lap and up over her face. I looked at Yigranzi’s fingers, which were swollen and gnarled and grasping the rounded top of her walking stick. “The mirror,” Yigranzi said. Only now did I notice it, lying on the ground near Bardrem’s knees. It was shining as I had never seen it shine before, copper fire on the dull, black earth. Its wrapping cloth was spread smooth and flat beneath.

  “We must look,” Yigranzi said.

  I tried to find words. I felt my voice stir in my throat; felt how whole my throat was, closed and filled with breath—so unlike Chenn’s. “But,” I began, “she is dead—she can’t ask us to Othersee, so—”

  “Sometimes,” Yigranzi said, “fresh blood is enough. Blood and flesh.”

  “But her Pattern is done—there is nothing to see.”

  “Except how it was set. If we are quick enough, we might catch a trace. But we must be quick, and Bardrem must speak the words.”

  “We’ll look together?” Yigranzi finally turned her eyes to me. “We shouldn’t,” I said, “you told me that two seers looking at a single Pattern at the same time could hurt—could be confusing and strange. . . .”

  Yigranzi leaned down and picked the mirror up in her twisted hand.

  She’s becoming a tree, I thought; a stray, fleeting idea that I remembered only later.

  “You’ve always wanted to know the hidden things, Nola-girl. So come here by me now, and learn.”

  I expect darkness. There is light, instead: a stark silver-white that is everywhere and nowhere, curved and flat. I am within it but also above—for there are shapes, and they are far beneath me. I am Nola, I think, to keep the light from burning me to smoke. I am Nola, and for now I am a bird. I hover, though there is no wind, no breath—only a crushing stillness.

  All of a sudden I am lower, or maybe the shapes below have risen toward me. One is Chenn. I cannot see her face, since the other figure is bending over her, but I see her hair, spread out around her like a spill of ink upon the white. She is naked, and I can barely make out her skin. Chenn, I think, it’s me; I’ll listen to you this time; show me who he is. . . .

  His head is golden-brown. The rest of him is blurred, strangely shaped, but he looks short and round. I thrust closer, through the air that seeks to crush me.

  Someone is holding onto me; hands around my wings. Yigranzi, let go: I’m nearly there. I cry out silently and the brown-gold head lifts. Feathers, not hair, and a hooked beak trailing crimson, and Chenn’s throat crimson too—only it is not Chenn any more. The eyes that stare above the bloody wound are mine.

  I try to scream and I try to fly but he has me; he reaches down with talons and up with beak, and his hunger turns the sky to gold. I stop imagining I can or even want to struggle.

  Yes, I think—blinded, weightless, ready—but then the hands around me tighten and pull, and Yigranzi calls my name so loudly that the gold shudders.

  “Nola!”—again and again, as shards fall: sky, beak, skin and blood, until nothing remains but me.

  I woke in my bed. It was dark except for the flickering of the single, squat candle that sat in a bronze dish atop the washstand. This weak light bruised my eyes, my temples; the aching I always felt after a vision, only more powerful. I rolled my head on the pillow and swallowed over a surge of nausea.


  Yigranzi was sitting beside my bed. Her chin was bent to her breast, and for a moment she looked like Chenn—but for a moment only, for when I gasped out her name she lifted her head and smiled at me. “My girl, my girl,” she said, like a lullaby, “you’re back again.”

  “How long?” My voice echoed in my head and down my arms. I could almost see it throbbing out from beneath my fingernails; a bright, branching pattern in the darkness.

  “Two days and nights,” Yigranzi said. “I thought you were lost; thought the Otherworld had kept you.”

  “I saw—” I began. She leaned over and put her fingers on my lips.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Not if it will hurt”—but I told her anyway, in a long string of words like one of Bardrem’s, with no room for breath. When I was done she rose and shuffled to the washstand to get me a mug of water.

  “I did not see Chenn at all,” she said as I drank (and choked a bit; so thirsty). She looked up at my window, pursing her lips in the way that meant she wished to say more but knew she shouldn’t.

  “What, then?” I asked, though I already knew.

  “You.” Her eyes were on me again, their black trembling with candle flame. “You in a desert of white sand, sinking up to your waist and then your neck. I could feel him there”—she was whispering now, her face so close to mine that her words brushed against my cheek—“but I could not see him. He was beneath you; he was everywhere, but I could not see him.”

  “So I am in danger,” I said, “the same as Chenn.”

  Yigranzi held my hands as if they were shards of glass—so lightly, when in my vision she had gripped me, saved me. I waited for her to say, “That is one Path, yes, but not the only one” or “Perhaps, but say ‘might be’ instead of ‘am.’”

  I waited, but she said nothing more.

  It rained for months after Chenn’s murder: a steady, relentless downpour that washed away the fuzz of new grass and turned the courtyard to quagmire. Or so I assumed—for I never tried to go there. Yigranzi had Bardrem bring the Otherseeing tools inside and saw the few men and girls who came to her in the Lady’s public chamber. Yigranzi did not ask me to help her, in part because there were hardly any customers, but mostly, I think, because she could tell how afraid I still was. This fear kept me away from the mirror and the coins I could have made; kept me curled on my bed for hours at a time, listening to the rain that would not stop.

  Bardrem tried to help. He wrote me nonsense rhymes, dragged me to the kitchen and juggled turnips, spun himself until his eyes crossed, trying to make me laugh. He put bread and cheese in my hands and glared down at me with his hands on his hips until I ate. When all his attempts at levity failed he came to my room and sat at the end of my bed. Sometimes he spoke, but usually he just watched me drift in and out of sleep. One afternoon he came in and stood beside the bed. I waited for him to sit down, but he did not. I glanced at him, then sat up myself (my limbs so heavy, trapped by mud).

  “What is it?” I said thickly. I hardly seemed to speak any more.

  He bit his lip. There was a strand of hair stuck in the corner of his mouth but he did not notice it. “The girls are talking; they heard it from the Lady. . . .”

  “What?” I said. My annoyance felt sharp, like blood returned to a numb limb.

  “Seers at the other brothels are being killed. Three so far, that the Lady’s heard of. Some of the regular girls, too—a few of them.”

  I thought, I suppose I’ll never leave my room at all, now. I said, “And no one’s seen him?”

  He shook his head. “Guesses, only: a suspicious man who was short and fat; another who was tall and thin . . .” He took a noisy breath, clenched his hands. “I hope he comes back here, Nola,” he said, so quickly and smoothly that I could tell he’d heard the words before, in his head. “I hope he comes back—I’ll know him as soon as I see him, and I’ll kill him—I will, I’ll kill him before he can hurt you.”

  “And how will you do that?” I said, as dryly as I could, trying to keep the tremor in my belly and legs from touching my voice.

  He lifted the fold of shirt that fell over his belt. A small leather scabbard hung there, with a worn, wooden hilt sticking out of it. “It’s not big,” he said, “but that means I can always carry it. And it’s the sharpest one in the kitchen.”

  “A kitchen knife,” I said, making the tremor into a laugh. “That will be perfect, if he happens to be a potato, or a medium-sized haunch of beef.” I bit my own lip, to stop these words I did not even mean, and I looked away from his open mouth and his round, stricken eyes. I lay down again, this time with my back to him, and covered my face with my arm so that I would not have to see him or hear the rain. When I rolled over, after minutes or maybe hours, he was gone.

  The rain stopped a few days later, and I woke wrapped in silence. I listened to it for a moment, then stood up and pushed the shutters open. Sunlight washed over my face, and a smell of earth and drying stone. I thought, Enough of this room. I splashed water on my hands and cheeks, slipped on a brown dress that was very nearly too small for me, and went to find Bardrem.

  It was midday, between the noon and evening meals, and he was in the tiny closet that was his bedchamber. It was next to the kitchen, and stank of everything that had ever been cooked there—most recently, apparently, cabbage. He stared at me with his hands behind his head and said nothing.

  “Let’s go somewhere.” My voice sounded too bright, and my smile felt taut, but it did not matter: I was full of restlessness and remorse. “Somewhere outside.”

  His eyebrows arched. “Outside.”

  “I know—I don’t usually like going anywhere—but please, Bardrem. It rained for so long and now it’s a beautiful day, and if there’s trouble that’ll be fine, because you can bring your knife. I’d like that; it’ll make me feel safe.”

  He sat up, angling his head so that it would not knock against the slanted ceiling. “Oh, very well,” he said gruffly. “But only if I get to choose where.”

  “Yes,” I said, too excited by his forgiveness to point out that he always chose, on the rare occasions when we left the brothel.

  I did not like going out into the city. Most of the girls did; sometimes they argued over which of them would get to have a free day, when the fair came. (Once two of them returned from the fair with torn clothes and bloody scratches on their cheeks and arms: they had fought each other for a length of satin ribbon. The Lady took away the ribbon, and their wages for the month.) I had no desire to see such things. Until Chenn arrived, I had given little thought to the world beyond the courtyard.

  It was a bright world Bardrem led me into, that day. I stood outside the brothel’s door and blinked at the sunlight, and at the stone and wood of houses and shops, all of them washed by rain. “Come on,” said Bardrem, who was already picking his way through the churned mud of the street. “Let’s go before someone sees us and claims there’s work to do.”

  I followed him. At first I kept my eyes on the road, which was rutted with wheel tracks and footprints and scattered with deep, murky puddles. But Bardrem soon guided me from this path to another, which was cobbled, and I looked up as I walked. I did not recognize the houses here. They had two storeys and intricately carved shutters painted in colours so bright that I blinked again. There was more colour, too: tapestries and rugs hanging from high-up windows, drying in the sun. At least I won’t see my mother here, I thought, and remembered our table and our old, dirty rushes and the walls that had leaned in to squeeze my breath away.

  Bardrem walked very fast. “Where are we going?” I called once, and he only waved at me over his shoulder. The street began to climb, and I gasped with exertion, bent over a knot in my side, but I was determined to keep up. I focused again on my feet (my shoes were sodden and stained; the Lady would be angry) and saw everything else peripherally: a black dog curled in a doorway; a line of people holding empty baskets, waiting outside a barred gate; two little girls rolling a ball between them. I wheezed up
a flight of twisting stairs and ducked beneath a low archway—and then I straightened and stopped, because Bardrem had.

  “Here,” he said. “Look.”

  I thought, But there’s nothing to look at. After all the streets, all the houses and courtyards, we were standing at the foot of a wall. Its stones were reddish-gold and threaded with ivy. I was about to say something puzzled to him when he took my hand and placed it against a stone and said, “Look up.”

  The wall stretched on and on, higher than any wall I’d ever seen. Its top seemed to hang against the sky. There were notches in it, there, and fluttering from these notches were banners of silver and green, stitched with patterns I could not make out.

  I looked back at Bardrem. “The castle,” I said, and he nodded and smiled the smile he used when his mind was on words, not on what was before him.

  “The castle,” he said, and laid his hand beside mine. “Just the north wall, but I can still feel it all—can’t you? The towers and the great halls and the people. The music and the feasting.”

  A bird called and I looked for it, found it wheeling in the blue above the battlements. It was very far away, and I could not see its features, but it cried out again and I thought, Eagle, and caught my breath.

  “There’s also truth in there,” I said. “About Chenn.”

  Bardrem narrowed his eyes at me.

  “About what happened to her before she came to us,” I continued, “and maybe even what happened to her after.”

  “Maybe,” Bardrem said. “Maybe we should try to get in, try to ask someone.”

  I shook my head. “Look at it—just at this part. We’ll never get in there. Perhaps we shouldn’t even want to.”

  But I did. I felt the stone beneath my palm; I almost heard it, humming with danger and promise.

  “Let’s go back,” I said, already turning away. “Now. People will be missing us.”