I had never watched him Othersee. In all our lessons, all those months, I had never seen him do this. I watched him now. He was so still, every angle and hollow of him breathing lamplight. He was beautiful. Far away, seeing me as I had never even seen myself—and my heart pounded with more than pain, more than fear.
The first sensations are flutterings, deep beneath the wounds. Tiny creatures beating their wings, making my stomach lift and fall. That’s him, I think, and my pulse sends tingling waves to the ends of my fingers and toes and the roots of my hair. Very quickly the fluttering becomes a scraping, which eases its way along my bones and my veins. I moan a long, low note that does not change, and the vibration helps a little. He is pulling. Though his body does not move, he is drawing something within me, slow and hard. I fall to my side on the pallet. I fold into myself and arch out again, rubbing my cheek on the rough blanket. He is knotting, snipping, burning ends until they crumble like spent wicks. My vision is clouding. He blurs in the light and the gold swims up and around him. I clench my eyes shut and see nothing but orange-tinted darkness, but it does not matter: he is everywhere, inside and out. All the pain is one. Take me, I think, and it does, in a surge of deeper darkness.
When I opened my eyes I knew that it was much later, though I didn’t know how I was so certain of this. The lamp’s flame was flickering lower. I was numb, but also shuddering. I watched my legs buck and thrash on the blanket. My toes dug and curled. I felt nothing; I was here but gone.
Teldaru was slumped against the wall by the door. The chair was lying on its side between us. He was looking at me, almost without blinking.
“What . . .” My voice and my eyes—all I had from before. I had no idea how I found them. “What did you do? What did you change?”
He did not answer for so long that I thought, He is paralyzed . . . he is dying . . .
But then a corner of his mouth lifted, and an eyebrow. “Mistress . . . Hasty,” he said. His voice was even rougher than mine, and as thin as smoke. “You’ll see. When I’m done.”
“Done?” I whispered, and I closed my eyes again so that I would not have to see his smile.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I felt no different. After the numbness had passed, there was fire—fever under my skin; I wondered why it did not blister—but a few days after that I was myself again. Everything was as it had been: Teldaru brought me my food and dealt with the bucket, and he did not speak to me, and I did not speak to him. All I could think when I looked at him was, What have you done to me?—but I never said this. I waited to wake one morning and discover that I was lame, or that my hair had all fallen out, or (and this seemed the likeliest, the longer I thought of it) that I was blind, but every morning I was just the same as ever. I almost convinced myself that I had imagined his “When I’m done.” Perhaps I had been dreaming; perhaps he was finished, and whatever he had tried to do to me had failed. I almost convinced myself. But when he appeared one day with the mirror, the ropes and the knife, I was not surprised.
“How do you feel?” he said, quite solicitously (after all the previous days of silence).
I glared at him.
“I need to know,” he went on, “because how you feel now may affect what I—”
“I feel fine. And how are you?”
I saw him frown, just for a moment, before his smile returned. “I am glad you are well. This means we are ready to continue.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and moved his feet back and forth, back and forth, lazily. “We will begin, as before, with a story.”
“About Zemiya?” I asked brightly, sitting up very tall with my hands clasped in my lap.
If I had hoped to annoy him again, it did not seem to work. “Yes,” he said smoothly. “And about Ranior and Mambura.”
I was so surprised that I spoke before I remembered that I should not show any true interest. “What?”
“Yes—Ranior, who united the quarrelsome tribes of Sarsenay, three hundred years ago, and raised this great keep above a cluster of huts—and Mambura, the island savage who slew him before himself being slain—”
“Everyone knows about this”—so many statues and paintings, books and poems, and the great midsummer procession.
“Well, then. A story about Ranior and Mambura—and Zemiya too, and Neluja, and their green islands and blue ocean. I went there with Haldrin’s family, you see. When I was eighteen.”
Teldaru was seasick. Haldrin was too, but only for the first day; Teldaru was rushing to the ship’s side up until the last morning of the journey. He hated the water—the pure, clear water that was as green as it was blue, in patches that stretched like ribbons around the ship. He had hated the water off Sarsenay, as well, which had been rough and grey—but this was worse. So calm, so beautiful, and yet still he retched until his ribs ached, while Haldrin made maddening, comforting noises beside him.
He felt much thinner when he alit on Belakaoan soil. He held himself very tall, though, amidst the drums and dancers, with their gem-encrusted hair and clothes. He thrust his shoulders back, because they were quite broad now, just as his chest was. And Zemiya noticed. She stood on a ledge that jutted from one of the painted, patterned black rock spurs that seemed to act as houses, here, and she looked him up and down with a slow and hungry smile. He looked back at her—such smooth, dark curves; and he could almost smell her—and smiled himself, triumphantly.
She had apparently forgotten to fear him. Perhaps her desire was too great for caution. He woke on the first night to her hands on him. Her hands and then her lips, warm and wet on his belly, trailing down as her fingers did. He was awake; this was glaringly obvious, though he kept very still. She lifted her head and he saw the white flashes of her teeth and eyes.
“You are more handsome than you were,” she said in that throaty, accented voice that made his people’s words into a new language. He lifted himself onto his elbows, about to say something commanding, even harsh, but she rose and gazed down at him. Her lips were still wet. He was wet—bathed in sweat that made his pale skin shine.
“Now it is time for me to show you my water,” she said, “and my fish”—and she disappeared beneath the jagged arch of door.
He commanded himself to stay where he was.
He rose and followed her.
He rushed along the tall, crooked hallway, past the room where Haldrin would be sleeping, down the twisting steps that led out into the night. She was a shadow among the black rock spires, but he never lost sight of her. The jewelled ribbons in her hair caught the moonlight. They winked down a slope that was covered in creepers and onto the black-rock beach. She climbed swiftly over the rock with her bare feet; he had to pick his way, feeling for pits and bumps. His slowness annoyed him—but better to be slow than to sprawl at those bare feet of hers like a clumsy child.
“There,” she said when he was finally standing beside her, on a rock that made him a head shorter than she was. “Look.”
Dark water. The Sarsenayan ship lifting and falling, the only familiar thing in emptiness. Flickers of fire in the distance that he could not measure with his eye or his mind. He said nothing, determined to betray no interest.
“Your awe makes you silent,” she said. He could hear the insolent grin in her voice. “I understand.”
He snorted. “What is there to say about so much water?”
“And what of its shining”—long, iridescent streamers, he saw, fluttering pink and green; tentacles, scales?—“and the flames?”
“What of the flames?”
“How thoughtful of you to ask. The flames are new islands—fire mountains . . . volcanoes, rising up from the sea. Belakao is always being born.” He felt her fingers tracing his eyebrow and then his cheekbone and then his jaw. “That is why we are so strong. Our land is always young.”
“Ha!” he said, leaning his head away from her hand. “But what of the wisdom of maturity? My land is ancient and wise and made of stone and wood, so you can see what it is you’re ru
ling. This,” he went on, waving an arm at the darkness, “is nothing.”
He looked up at her, waiting for a blow or a bite or at least some shrieking. He was dizzy with need.
She did not speak. She stared at him. Waves sloshed over the rock, and the volcanoes across the water sent tremors up through his feet, and the iridescent streamers flickered. He waited—but it was not Zemiya who spoke next.
“Zemiya-moabene.” Neluja said something else in her own language, but Teldaru hardly heard it; he was gaping at the bird beside her. A creature that stood as tall as her waist, with glossy feathers whose colours he could not see well, in the moon-dark. It gazed back at him, its head cocked. Its beak glinted like a blade.
“I will guess,” Zemiya said to him (having apparently ignored her sister’s words), “that your birds in Sarsenay are small and brown.”
He would have reached for her, as he had four years before, if it had not been for Neluja. Instead he hissed, “We could crush your island bones, if we wanted to. If the king didn’t need your gems and cloth and horrible fruit—if your father offered the same insults to him that you offer me, we would drive you and all your people into the sea; you would drown in your own hateful water.”
He was panting. The bird made a rough, low sound and Zemiya smiled at it and then at him, her eyes narrowed to slits.
“Yes? How interesting. Because I believe we Belakaoans know some other truth.” She looked away from him, at the shifting, flame-spotted distance. She was biting her full, dark lower lip.
“And what other truth is that?” he asked.
“Your people believe in words of future time. In the pictures you see for them.”
“Visions,” he said. “Prophecies—yes.”
“Well, we have a . . . prophecy here. A vision seen by an ispa long ago. It was of your country and mine.”
“Zemiya,” Neluja said, slowly and clearly, “what are you doing?”
Again her sister paid her no heed. “The greatest Belakaoan moabe of all history was Mambura, Flamebird of the Islands. Yours was Ranior. The . . . War Hound. They fought. They died together, in your country.” The sound of these words in her mouth made Teldaru dig his fingers into his palms. “The prophecy was: the cold stone country will only conquer the islands when bird and dog rise again. Only,” she said, speaking faster, “if another, new, great leader brings them together in battle will your Sarsenay prevail.” She smiled once more, while the real bird trilled a long, sweet note. “So you see: this will never happen.”
“No,” he said. “It could. If your seer saw it, it could.”
“I do not think so,” said Neluja quietly. Her hand was cupped over the bird’s head. She was looking at Zemiya. He wished there were light, so that he could see what was passing between their eyes.
“Maybe ispu Teldaru is right,” Zemiya said. “Maybe his small friend Haldrin will be the next great leader, and maybe he will wave his small magic hand and bring back these dead.”
“Maybe I will.” Teldaru spoke in a rush, and he stood taller—as tall as he could, on the rock that still made him shorter than her. “Maybe I will be the great leader.”
She tipped her head back and laughed. He saw her closed eyes and the line of her throat, her arched back and her breasts, pressing against thin, taut cloth. The bird clacked its dagger beak as if it, too, were laughing.
“Mambura and Ranior and Teldaru,” he said as she wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands. The names were right together; they filled him with such certainty and strength that he felt as if he were partly in the Otherworld, surrounded by what would be. “You won’t be laughing then.”
“She was lying,” I said. “She made it up just so she could mock you.”
“No.” His eyes seemed more golden than black, as if they had changed to match the knife that waited upon the mirror. “Listen.”
“No,” Zemiya said, “I will no doubt be weeping, begging you for mercy while your Dog bares his teeth at our Flamebird and my people flee and scream. Yes, I’m sure that is how it will happen, Great Teldaru.”
“Zemiya.” He had never heard Neluja speak with such force. “Do not play with words of isparra. Do not—” And then her own words were Belakaoan, thick and rich and angry.
The sisters argued, Zemiya gesturing, Neluja glaring down at her, twisting her hands in the loose fabric of her dress. Teldaru was gazing at her hands, thinking how long her fingers were, when the bird leaned forward and bit him.
He had been bitten by dogs before, and by cats, and by a chicken that Laedon had told him to kill. He had also been cut by knives, in Laedon’s kitchen and in the lower city, when he had been a poor boy serving rich, drunk men. The bird’s beak cut him like those knives had, except even more smoothly. The flesh of his forearm parted. He watched his blood well and flow. He blinked and then he felt the pain, and he lunged at the bird with a strangled cry.
“No!” Zemiya was between him and the creature. She held his shoulders, and her arms were dark, rounded muscle. “Uja has marked you for isparra and now my sister must look.” She was gazing past him at Neluja, her eyes bright with excitement or maybe triumph.
“Look?” he shouted. “What do you mean?”—because he did not yet know about Bloodseeing. Because this was the first time.
“I must look at you as ispa.” Neluja was where Zemiya had been, though she did not touch him. He thought, Run! but did not.
“You mean you will Othersee?” he said. “You can’t!” Relief, as warm as the blood. “You can’t do that unless I tell you to.”
She lifted his arm. Put her finger in his blood and drew it over the skin above his elbow, which was still clean. She made spirals and waves with fingertip dots between. “I can,” she said, and raised her eyes to his.
Werwick had looked at Teldaru’s Pattern when the boy had first been brought to the castle; Othersighted children were always examined like this when they arrived. But Teldaru had asked him to, and had felt nothing—only watched in fascination as the old man’s eyes turned an even darker black and bulged, along with a vein in his forehead. Afterward Werwick had drunk an entire pitcher of water and said, in a quavering voice, “I see greatness. The child must stay.”
But now, staring into the black-and-pearl of Neluja’s Otherworldly eyes, he felt a tremor in his gut—a swell like anger or desire that moved without his control. He bit his lip until he tasted blood—blood everywhere, in his mouth and on his skin and dripping onto the black stone beneath them. The bird Uja was moving its wings in a gentle, sweeping way that made him want to glance at it, but he could not. Neluja was all.
She cried out. Took two steps back and stumbled to her knees on the rock.
“Neluja?” Zemiya said. “Ispana Neluja . . .” She bent over her sister, frowning, stroking her forehead. Teldaru sat down heavily. He felt breathless and sick and did not understand—and then Neluja spoke in a torrent of words he also did not understand, while the bird clacked and cackled.
“What?” he said roughly. “What?”—high and loud, above the other noise.
Three pairs of eyes on him. A quiet of waves and his own ragged breathing. He stood slowly and looked at them. He was finally taller, finally strong, and they shrank from him just as Werwick had, all those years ago.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” he said. “Mambura and Ranior and Teldaru.”
Zemiya swallowed. “I don’t believe it,” she said.
He laughed.
“I don’t believe it, either.” I knew there would be pain, soon, and I wanted to provoke him, wanted to keep him talking. He rose, ropes and mirror and knife in his hands.
“But you will,” he said, smiling. “You will, when you help me remake the Patterns of Mambura and Ranior.”
I gaped but made no sound.
“Ah,” he said, shaking his head, “I have leapt ahead again, when there is much to do first. To do now.” He was in front of me, looping, tying, tightening. He undid the laces of my bodice and stepped back to look
at me.
“You are mad,” I whispered.
He bent and kissed both my breasts—and then he raised the knife.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I kept bleeding, after that second time. I slipped in and out of consciousness, aware sometimes that the pain was just as burning and numbing as it had been the first time; aware that Teldaru was sitting where he had been before, sprawled, staring at me. Aware of little else. I was heavy, which was new. I could hardly move at all, even after Teldaru had gone and the numbness had mostly passed. I lay and half-slept and was too deeply weary to wonder what was wrong.
I woke fully when he started to shake me. A day later, maybe, when he came with my food? “Nola!” Shouting and shaking, and then he rolled me over and gave a ragged, fearful cry.
There was much coming and going, after that. Teldaru, and someone with cool, slender hands and a blonde braid that swung beside my head. They put cloths on me—on my forehead and below my breasts, where he had cut me. Poultices, too, which were so hot that I yelled. Bandages wrapped so tightly around my ribs that I thought I would suffocate. They tipped my head up and I drank warm, bitter concoctions that tasted like the mud beneath the courtyard tree would have tasted—and I squeezed my eyes shut and saw Bardrem’s feet in the mud, and Yigranzi’s lumpy fingers polishing her mirror, and snow falling on Chenn’s head—so cold on my feverish skin and on my tongue.
And then one day I woke and everything was clear again.
“So.” Teldaru was sitting beside me. I could see his crossed legs and his hands clasped over his knee. I felt much better and could have turned my head to look at his face, but I did not. “I just had an extremely awkward exchange with the king. He heard about all the commotion, somehow, and came to ask about it—tried to come in to see you, in fact. I convinced him that you were finally resting peacefully and should be left alone.” A pause. My belly grumbled loudly, as if it had no idea that the rest of me was upset. “I also told him that you had broken one of your food bowls, which I had foolishly left you alone with. That you sliced yourself open and nearly bled to death.”
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