The Pattern Scars

by Caitlin Sweet

  “Nola.” Bardrem spoke quietly; he sounded older than fifteen, suddenly. “It’s all right to want something you think you can’t have. It’s all right to say so, too.”

  “No,” I said, to something, to everything, and pushed past him on the steep, sunny path.

  It might seem as if the next part of my tale is something I created—or something real, but stitched onto the story in a place other than where it truly belongs. But it is true, and happened precisely in this way and at this time: The evening of the day of my walk with Bardrem, one of the girls came to my room. “Yigranzi wants you,” she said. “In the courtyard.”

  I went. It was dusk; the spindly upper branches of the tree were burnished, the leaves bronze and gold over their spring green. The tree shadow was long, dancing a little on the ground in a wind I did not feel. There was a man standing with Yigranzi by the tree. He was tall, dressed in browns and blacks that made him hard to see until I was in front of him.

  I try to remember now what it was I saw, that first time. Or rather—I remember precisely what I saw and try to convince myself to see more, all these years later. But I cannot. He was a tall man, dressed in a brown tunic and black cloak; a man with such a beautiful, sad face that I’m sure I stood and stared like a mouse before an owl.

  “This is Master Orlo,” Yigranzi said. “He is an Otherseer from the castle, and he is here because of Chenn.”

  He smiled at me, gently, sadly, and bent his head in the dying light—and that was all. That was all I saw.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The stubble on Orlo’s chin and cheeks glinted red, though the hair on his head was the colour of honey.

  “Nola,” he said. His voice was quiet and grave. “Yigranzi tells me that you were Chenn’s friend. I am sorry you have lost her.”

  His eyes were not quiet. They were the blue-black of Chenn’s, only the colour seemed to ripple, and their centres were a gold so bright that I looked away.

  “Thank you,” I said, gazing at his mouth. His upper lip was thin and his lower one full, and the teeth behind them were even and white.

  “I sent for you as soon as Orlo came to me,” Yigranzi said, “so that we could hear his tale together.” There was nothing strange about her words, but I heard hesitancy beneath them, giving them slow, blunt edges. “I offered to receive him in the Lady’s chamber but he refused.”

  “Because I would rather stand by a seer’s tree than sit on an overstuffed chair,” he said, and I smiled. The chairs in the Lady’s chamber were all hard and lumpy.

  “This tree must not be nearly so grand as the one at the castle.” Yigranzi was not smiling, so her words did not sound admiring.

  Orlo did smile. “There are several at the castle, all very grand, but this one . . .”

  He put his hand on the bark, flat, though his fingertips arched a bit. “This is a fine tree. So . . . delicately leafed.”

  “Hmph,” said Yigranzi. She sat down slowly on the stone and twisted her head toward him. “Enough about trees, now. Tell us about Chenn.”

  Orlo hesitated for a moment, his eyes cast down. He scuffed a foot, just as Bardrem often did. He said, “It is difficult . . .” and looked up at me. “It is a difficult tale to tell, because there are parts of it that cause me shame. But you must hear it.”

  “Yes,” Yigranzi said, “we must.”

  He nodded at her. There was no smile about him now. “I had just begun instructing child seers when Chenn was brought to the castle. This was nine years ago, and she was very young—four or five, I think.”

  And how old are you? I thought, then flushed, as if I had spoken aloud. He looked young, except for the lines around his eyes and in his forehead—though these could have been from Otherseeing, not age. Chenn, I reminded myself, and tried to imagine the child, and the tall, windy castle.

  “She was the daughter of a wealthy family, pampered and strong-willed, but as her schooling progressed she grew in skill and character. There was always a gleam in her eye, though, no matter how weighty her visions or how difficult her lessons. Her fellow students adored her. As did one of her teachers, a seer named Master Prandel.” He frowned, squinted up at the leaves, which were just a dark green now, untouched by sun. “Here is my first shame—for I should have acted. I saw his desire, and she was just twelve, and I should have spoken to him, at least, or gone to Master Teldaru with what I knew . . . but I did not. I imagined that Prandel’s infatuation would pass, or I hoped that someone else would confront him, or some such cowardly thing.” Orlo shook his head, dragged a hand roughly through his hair, which stood on end afterward.

  “I’m not sure when he acted on his desire. All I know is that she changed. She stopped laughing, grew quiet and pale and afraid of her own visions. And then, this past winter, she disappeared.”

  He was staring at the bottom of the tree. Maybe Yigranzi’s already told him that that was where we found her, I thought, and the pain I saw on his face and in the slump of his shoulders made my own stir and sharpen.

  “Prandel was not distraught, as the rest of us were—he was furious. Which made me furious. I faced him, though too late. He is a small, plump, weak man, and I admit that I did him some harm. Before I left him I took a lock of her hair, which he had hung next to his bed on a yellow ribbon. I had another student speak the Otherseeing words and I used Chenn’s hair to find her Pattern.”

  “Really?” Yigranzi’s voice made me start, because its edges were no longer blunt. “You saw her using only a lock of her hair? That’s a thing that takes a great and practiced grasp of the Othersight.”

  Orlo gave a slight shrug. “My gift has always been considerable, and my training was rigorous. Though the visions I saw that night were weak, of course, as they always are without the person in front of you. Weak, but enough. I saw faint images of naked limbs and small, dark rooms; girls and men . . .” He glanced at me, cleared his throat. “Enough to show me that her Path would lead her to a place like this one. But although the visions I saw were unpleasant, there was no danger in them. No”—another vehement shake of his head—“no danger, or I would have begun my search then. But I did not, and this is my other shame. I, of all people, should know that the Othersight is not always a complete view—just a glimpse, there and gone in a blink. But I chose not to think of this. I thought: Chenn is safely away from here, where she might have come to great harm. Prandel has been punished and is a changed man. Only I was wrong about this, too.” He gave a short, breathless laugh. “Because Prandel disappeared a few months after Chenn did. And he found her. Somehow he found her.”

  “Small and plump?” It was the first time I had spoken to him, and I was pleased with my voice, which was firm and older-sounding. “I think that’s what he looked like—the man in my vision.”

  “Your vision?” His night-dark eyes shimmered and this time I could not look away. “You have seen him? How?”

  Yigranzi opened her mouth and I said, quickly, “Yigranzi and I used the mirror when Chenn’s body was still here. Right here.” I gestured at the place where Orlo was standing and he flinched, stared at the tree’s roots as if she were there again, her throat gaping. Then he stared at me.

  “You looked into the Otherworld when she was dead.”

  “Yes. Yigranzi and I. And I saw a man who was short and fat—or just round, somehow. But it was hard to tell, since . . .”

  When I stopped speaking, neither Orlo nor Yigranzi noticed. They were gazing at each other; gold at pearl, far beyond me.

  “A dangerous thing,” he said at last, “for one so young.”

  “I’m thirteen,” I said, but they did not look at me. I thought, I’ll swing from the tree, I’ll stand on my hands and sing Bardrem’s longest poem—but I watched them instead, in silence.

  “Yes,” Yigranzi said. “But it was necessary. Chenn was only just gone; it was necessary.” She rose, leaning on her stick. I saw Orlo eye her hump, which seemed to be lurching in its own direction. I wanted to say something that w
ould make him stop, but I did not.

  “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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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.