The Pattern Scars

by Caitlin Sweet

  “Prandel is a clever man. I fear that he knows I am hunting him. I fear he will follow me, someday. What if he were to follow me here?”

  I said, “Yes—that would be terrible—but if the doors were locked from the outside, surely that would be enough? If he couldn’t get into the house . . .?”

  “And what if he got into the garden and waited there? You would go out, during the day when I wasn’t here; you would go into the garden and he would be waiting for you. . . .” Orlo was so close to me that I could feel his breath. It smelled of something strong and sweet—mead, perhaps, or wine. I should have wanted to turn away, for the smell reminded me of the few men who had tried to kiss me and paw at me, in the hallways I had known before. Drunken, brothel men. Instead I imagined leaning up and in, catching Orlo’s breath between my own lips. This time the flush swept from my face to my ears and down my chest, and I did not care if he saw it.

  “I will keep you safe, Nola,” he said, very quietly. “If you wish to walk in the garden we will do it together—but when I am not here, you will be inside. You will stay inside. And only I will be able to get to you.”

  “Yes.” An answer, though he had not asked me a question. My voice was hoarse.

  “Good.” He stepped back. “Now, then. Did you go into the lesson room, on your journeys today?”

  “No. I saw that the door was open, but I . . . I wanted to wait for you.”

  He frowned. We had reached the door in question, which was firmly shut. “Strange,” he said, “I did not leave it open. I never do.” He gazed at his own hand on the knob and shrugged. “No matter. My great-aunt used to say that this was a house of mysteries, and she was always right about such things.”

  The bird, I thought as he pushed the door open. I glanced behind me and saw only hallway.

  “Come,” Orlo said, and I followed him into the room.

  In the entrance hall he had lit lamps; here he walked about lighting candles, which bristled from two enormous candelabra. I expected to see a riot of furniture and decorations—but this room was different from the others. It was larger than mine but seemed enormous, as it was nearly empty. The candelabras stood in each of the far corners. In the centre was something that I took at first to be the bowl of a fountain. It was round and shallow, set on a low stone plinth. I stepped toward it and the candlelight glinted, reflected—for the bowl itself was not stone, but metal. I drew closer yet, as Orlo watched me, and then I was above it, looking down into a pool of gold. Golden ripples, golden waves, facets and sky that opened up and drew me in and under.

  “You will see many things, in this mirror,” Orlo said, from across the gold.

  “This is a mirror?” I felt slow and dizzy at the same time. “It’s so big, and it’s made of real gold—isn’t it?—and I’ve never . . .” I swallowed, thinking of Yigranzi’s mirror, small and copper, warm from her knobbly-knuckled fingers. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “I know. You cannot imagine, Nola, how grateful I am that I will be the one to show you—that you will come into your true power here. Here.” He swept his arm out and I followed it with my eyes, looking over my shoulder when it pointed that way.

  There was a cage by the door. It, too, was gold, and its bars stretched nearly to the ceiling, where they were fused together in a shape as intricate as spider’s web. Inside the cage was what seemed to be a real tree trunk, its leafless branches short and widely spaced. The bird was perched on the highest branch. Its feathers looked like silk, in the candlelight, and its eyes like real amber, hard and translucent.

  “That is Uja,” Orlo said as he walked from the mirror to the cage. “Isn’t she a lovely creature?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes—I saw—” I meant to tell him that I had met her already—that she had woken me and led me to the kitchen—but as the words formed, Uja spread her wings wide and gave a piercing squawk.

  “Uja!” Orlo said sharply. “Quiet—you must not frighten our guest.”

  She lowered her wings slowly. Her head was cocked; she was looking at me steadily, unblinkingly.

  “You saw?” Orlo said, turning to me.

  “I meant . . . I meant I heard. I heard something from my bedroom, and it sounded like a bird, but I thought I must have dreamed it.” I did not understand my lie, but Uja appeared to: she straightened her head and cooed, just as she had before, when we had been alone.

  “She’s no dream, no—though she’s no ordinary bird, either. I use her to bring on the Othersight, and to show me someone’s Pattern with her talon-tracks and sometimes her beak.” He put a forefinger between her bars, reaching up toward one of her silver claws. She sidled along the branch, just far enough that he could not touch her, and he scowled. “When she’s not half in the Otherworld, however, she can be downright unpleasant. Perhaps she may be convinced to be friendlier with you.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. This time my reticence did not feel like a lie; it felt like a game, or a strange, harmless, shared secret.

  I looked away from Uja, at the wall on the other side of the door. (I think it was then that it struck me, belatedly, that there were no windows at all in this room.) The only piece of furniture was here: a sideboard with wooden drawers at the bottom and glass doors at the top. I saw shelves behind the doors, holding things I recognized: goblets and bowls, lidded glass containers full of different kinds of grain and different-coloured sticks of wax. I smiled at their familiarity—and then I glanced at the highest part of the sideboard and saw the knives.

  There were six of them, hanging in brackets above the shelves. They were arranged from smallest to largest. The largest was about as big as the one Bardrem had used to slice heads of cabbage and lettuce, but its blade was different: curved like one of Uja’s talons, and notched at either end. The smallest blade had so many notches that they looked like tiny teeth.

  “What are those for?” I asked, even though part of me did not want to know.

  Orlo clucked his tongue, and Uja, on her perch, made a sound very much like a dog’s growl. “Dear girl,” he said, “you’ve had no lessons yet and already you seek to know the deepest truths?” He was beside me, his arm nearly touching mine. I thought that I could feel heat rising from his skin and wanted to put my own cool fingers on him—wanted it so suddenly and strongly that I had to press my nails against my palms, instead.

  “Not yet,” he said, serious again. I had protested when Yigranzi had said these words to me, but I only nodded at him. His eyes, which always seemed to move, made me still. “But,” he went on, stepping back, smiling, “there is much that I can teach you now. Shall we begin?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  In the beginning, the lessons unfolded as they had at the brothel: with much talking and no doing. I hardly noticed, during those early weeks at the house, and I cared even less. For Orlo came to me at nightfall, or sometimes a few hours later, and he talked and talked as darkness held us close together, alone in the world. He spoke mostly of the history of Otherseeing, which should have grown dull. It did not. I watched him stride around the mirror (we never sat) or back and forth before one of the great garden trees, and every gesture, every quirk of lips or brows, made his words live. I remember him acting out the Betrayal of Seer Aldinior—all the parts, from the each of the foreign emissaries to the queen’s lady-in-waiting, who was actually a rebellious student seer in disguise. I remember laughing until I wept, and then—when the story turned tragic—weeping again so that the mirror’s metal and Uja’s feathers blurred.

  He told me to read about these things in the books he kept in the library (another huge room, all wood and leather), after he discovered—to his surprise—that I could read. But beautiful and mysterious as these books were, with their gilt pages and ancient paper smells, his words were better.

  I talked too, because he encouraged me to. He was mostly very patient with my castle questions, and asked me many questions of his own, which it seemed no one else ever had.

  These lesson-talks
are patchwork, now; I remember the bits, in their colours and textures, but they no longer exist individually. One long, breathless conversation that lasted all summer.

  “How many Otherseeing students are there at the castle?”

  “Only four, since Chenn left.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Ten, twelve, fourteen and eighteen. And before you ask, I will answer: two are boys and two are girls.”

  “And how many teachers?”

  “Two, and myself.”

  “And Master Teldaru—does he teach, too?”

  “He sometimes visits the classes, to observe. Now and then he speaks.”

  “How old is he?”

  “You should be able to answer that yourself, Nola. If he was five when he was taken to the castle, and he served King Lorandel for fourteen years, and if he has so far served King Haldrin for sixteen, then he is . . .?”

  “. . . thirty-five? But that seems too young; he is so—”

  “Yes, yes—his legend has lent him years beyond the ones he actually possesses, and he is said to be wise even beyond these. . . .”

  “You sound impatient. Do you like him?”

  “I like him very well—but if you do not stop asking questions about him, I shall have trouble liking you.”

  “You’re jealous!”

  “Perhaps a little. He and I are close in age—and no, I will not tell you how old I am!—and I have known him since we were both young. It is hard, sometimes, to be so close to greatness and to share none of it. But that is enough. You will meet him soon and have all the answers you desire. Until then you are mine.”

  “And what of the king?”

  “We were speaking of the properties of wine. What of the king?”

  “He must be of an age with Teldaru—and you. Do you know him well? He and Teldaru must be like brothers, and—”

  “Indeed, yes—they grew up side-by-side, and Teldaru is the elder by several years, and the king trusts him with his life—and they are both staggeringly handsome, though I am even more handsome, which makes them both sick with envy. Will this suffice, Mistress Overcurious Seer?”

  This was the day that he first brought his dog Borl to the house. I remember that Borl burst from the bushes right after Orlo said, “Mistress Overcurious Seer.” He dropped a rabbit at Orlo’s feet and stood waiting, his lean flanks heaving and his tongue lolling from mottled, brown-and-pink gums. I drew back from him; I had never liked dogs.

  The rabbit was small and brown and twitching. Orlo chuckled and said, “He pretends to be gentle, bringing them to me alive.” To the dog he said, “Well done!” Borl whined and rolled his long head on the grass.

  Orlo crouched and picked the rabbit up. He twisted its neck in his hands and there was a cracking sound. I had seen Rudicol and Bardrem do this many times and had not flinched, but for some reason this time was different. I sucked in my breath, as the creature’s neck broke.

  Orlo looked up at me. “Ah, Nola—so soft-hearted. You’ll be glad of Borl’s prowess when you’re eating rabbit stew. Though we’ll need a cook. I can manage soup and bread, but stew . . .” He rose, gazing thoughtfully at the shadows of the trees. “A cook,” he said again.

  He brought Laedon with him the next day. The talking part ended, then, and the doing began.

  At first I was excited.

  “There’s someone you should meet, Nola,” Orlo said. “Someone who will cook you real meals and help us with our lessons.”

  I uncurled myself from my favourite library chair. For a month I had sat in the one that looked like a throne, because even though its grandness made me feel a bit silly, there was no one else to see me. Recently, though, I had been using one that was low and round and fashioned from what seemed to be thick reeds—a strange thing that I thought must have been made in another country. But it had a deep, soft cushion, and I dozed in it as much as I read.

  “Oh?” I closed the book I was holding—a slender tome on the Otherseeing uses of sparrow bones during the reign of the Boy King. Someone else here,

  I thought, and this thought was followed by a flurry of others: It will not be us alone, any more, and I am sorry for this . . . I am not sorry—I’m lonely when he’s not here . . . a cook and a helper; by Pattern and Path, he’s brought me Bardrem. . . .

  The kitchen smelled of simmering wine and meat and rich, dark broth. The table was covered with knives and platters stacked with vegetables and bones. It looked like a kitchen, and smelled like one; I thought, Bardrem, one last, breathless time—even as Orlo called, “Laedon?”

  A very old man shuffled out of the shadows at the far end of the room. Maybe an old man: he was swathed in so many layers of cloth—coloured rags, really—that his body was shapeless. There was a tight leather cap on his head; wisps of yellow-white hair had escaped from it and were clinging to the stubbled hollows that were his cheeks. His eyes were white-filmed blue, and they wandered and rolled.

  “Laedon can hear us,” Orlo said. “Can’t you, Laedon? But he’s been mute for years, and blind for even longer.”

  “But he can still cook?” I said. Laedon’s head jerked in what might have been a nod, and I drew back, just as I did from the dog—who, I saw, was lying in front of the fire, gnawing on what looked to be a small skull.

  Orlo walked over to the iron pot that was hanging above the flames. “Oh, he can cook. Come and see for yourself.”

  I followed him, and the old man’s eyes swivelled to follow me, or the sound of me. Orlo held up a wooden spoon and I sipped from it. “Delicious,” I said loudly (because it was; it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted).

  “He is blind and mute, remember,” Orlo said, “not deaf. You do not need to raise your voice.”

  “All right.” I glanced at Laedon. I wondered how he could bear the heat of fire, clothing, heavy midsummer air.

  “He used to work in the castle kitchens—didn’t you, Lae?”

  A twitch of the lips, this time. I saw two blackened teeth.

  “He befriended me when I was new to the place, and missing home. His kitchen always reminded me of my tavern’s, though the two were really nothing alike. Perhaps you understand this, Nola?”

  I nodded. Orlo waved me over to my customary stool; I sat, and he put a bowl of stew in front of me. Even though I was ravenous I ate slowly, placing the spoon carefully in my mouth so that none of the liquid dripped. Some moments in this house were for teasing and jests; others felt like practice.

  “When Laedon lost his sight and then his voice,” Orlo said as I sipped and nibbled, “the castle kitchens grew too much for him. He worked in the seers’ kitchen, then. A smaller place, but his handiwork was much appreciated by the students. Recently even this job has seemed too difficult for him. How perfect, that I could bring him here.”

  “So no one will miss him?” I asked—for Orlo had told me that this house was a secret from the castle folk, just as I was.

  Orlo smiled a sad, gentle smile. “Likely not. I am the only one who’s paid him any mind, these last few years.”

  I looked at Laedon—stared, now that I was sure his swivelling eyes were sightless. “You said he would help us with our lessons. How?”

  Orlo stirred the stew, then knocked the spoon against the pot’s edge. “I will explain this to you when—”

  “Explain it now,” I said. “Or better yet: show me.”

  The broth wine, I thought; it has made me even freer with my words than usual. I kept my eyes steady on Orlo’s. He did not seem angry—though he had never been angry at me, and I did not know how it would look. He was silent for a long time. The only sounds were flame pops and the crunching of the skull between Borl’s jaws.

  “Now,” he said at last. “You are certain?”

  I pushed my stool back and stood up. My hair slid out from behind my ears. (Now that it was growing, it was as wayward as Bardrem’s.) “Yes. I’ve been here for a long time, and all I’ve done is read and talk to you. Which has been good,
” I continued hastily as his eyes narrowed, “wonderful, in fact—but I’m ready. I want to do something.”

  There was another moment of motionless quiet before he smiled slowly. Something in my chest pulled tight. “You remind me of myself,” he said. “How can I deny you?” He placed the spoon across the top of the pot and pointed at the table. “Choose something—an Otherseeing tool.”

  I said, “But the mirror, or the wax—”

  “You said now, Mistress Hasty Seer, and now it will be. Choose.”

  Bones on a plate, dried herbs in a bowl, wine in a squat earthen pitcher.

  “Remember,” Orlo said, “that some will bring on stronger visions than others.”

  “Yes. Things that were alive, and recently, will be strongest. . . .”

  “Things that have bled.” His voice was low.

  I wanted to look at him but did not; reached instead for the plate.

  “So it is strength you desire,” he said, more lightly. “An excellent choice. Laedon—come here to us.”

  The old man’s feet scuffed on the floor as he walked to Orlo’s side. He was shorter than Orlo, and looked quite round (I thought this must be the bulk of his clothing, since his cheeks were so gaunt).

  “You will Othersee for him,” Orlo said.

  “But . . . but he is mute. He cannot speak the words of invitation.”

  Orlo cocked his head to one side, just as Uja did when she was listening to me. “Remember Chenn,” he said.

  “Chenn? I do, but—”

  “Chenn dead beneath the tree, where you and Yigranzi found her. What did you do there?”

  “I . . . We both had visions. Of her.”

  “And did she speak any words of invitation?”

  “No—of course not.”

  “How did Yigranzi explain this to you?”

  The golden light; the deep, curling wound. “She said only that there were things I did not yet know—mysteries. I never asked her, afterward. I was too . . .