The Pattern Scars

by Caitlin Sweet

  “The Belakaoan merchants in the upper city drummed on their balconies and doors with their palms or pieces of wood—no wonder their Sarsenayan neighbours did nothing but stare at them, and at their dark new queen. Savages, all of them, and yet they live in mansions in the city, and one of them lives in the castle. Our own rich men are right to be dismayed.”

  I heard his smile.

  “There was feasting, of course. Queen Zemiya”—he said “Queen” as if it were profanity—“wore a red dress so heavily stitched with gems that it hardly moved. Gems in spiral shapes that reflected the lamps and torches so that she herself seemed to be aflame. Haldrin goggled at her like a besotted boy. I spoke the public words—the ones that are met with drunken cheers. And then there was drunken dancing, and I returned here. To you. And I watched you sleep.”

  His voice sounded fainter. I reached carefully for the darkness that was seeping in around me.

  “There was one thing about the feast,” he said. “A gift Neluja gave her sister, after I had spoken. A bracelet made of bones.”

  Such muffled words. The shadows were easing up over my ears.

  “Mambura’s bones, Nola. Do you hear me? The hero’s bones—and we shall use them.”

  I did not understand, but it did not matter. Bardrem, I thought, and I followed his name down into the dark.

  “Mambura’s bones.” The words circled and swam, in my sleep. They too were dreams. They were meaningless and fleeting and I would forget them when I woke.

  Except that when I did wake, Zemiya was standing above me. Her dress was orange and her hair-shells were yellow, and the bracelet that coiled from her wrist to her elbow was white. It was made of polished pieces that looked like beads, but weren’t. A few of them were strange and knobbly. Knuckles, I thought, and remembered Yigranzi. A few were long and slender and gently curved, so that they fit against the slope of her forearm. Some were absolutely smooth, while others were crisscrossed with lines that looked like hard, yellowed veins.

  “Mambura’s bones,” I heard in my head, one more time, and then I raised my eyes to look at the queen.

  “Nola. We are sorry we woke you.” Not Zemiya’s voice; Haldrin’s. He stepped into my vision and stood beside his wife. He smiled at me. She did not.

  “But we are also relieved to see you awake. And we must thank you.”

  Now you will tell me all the lies Teldaru has told you, I would have said, if there had been no curse, and if my jaw had not been strapped shut. I tried to raise my brows. Go on. Tell me.

  “Ispu Teldaru says you saved him,” Zemiya said. She did not sound thankful. Cold, I thought; suspicious—but these words did not quite describe her tone or her narrowed gaze.

  Haldrin said, “He says you may not remember it clearly, or even at all. Do you?”

  I shook my head. My hair scratched against the pillow. My braid was curled like a snake on the green coverlet, which was pulled up to my shoulders.

  “Then we will not remind you of it,” the king said. “It might be too unpleasant, and you must recover your strength. All you need to know now is that Sarsenay is grateful to you. I am grateful.”

  I shifted my legs and shoulders. Grateful? No. He killed Selera. We did. He killed Bardrem, I think. He would have killed me, except he needs me to help him kill yet more people—Belakaoans, on a battlefield you told him of, my Queen.

  “So we will leave you, and—”

  “Haldrin.” The name sounded wonderfully strange, in Zemiya’s voice. “She is itchy. Her skin, under the bindings that are around her chest.” This was not why I had moved, but as soon as she said the words they were true: I was hot and itchy and sore, and I squirmed a little more, beneath the cloth.

  “I will loosen them,” the queen continued, “and check her. My mother’s father taught us all such things; the ispa will be well attended to.”

  Haldrin frowned a bit. Zemiya reached out her arm—bare and brown and rounded with muscle—and laid her hand flat against his stomach, just above his belt. She smiled.

  “Go on, Husband.”

  He smiled back at her. “Very well,” he said, “but do not be too long.”

  Zemiya gazed at the door for a moment, after it had closed behind him. Then she turned and stepped over close to me and pulled the coverlet down to my hips. I peered down at myself and saw that I was wearing nothing but clean white cloth strips wrapped tight from my breasts to my waist.

  “Ispu Teldaru says you did not feel you had told your friends farewell with enough warmth.” She undid the knots one by one, watching my eyes, not her own fingers. “He says you took a horse from the castle stables and went after the carriages. One of them had already turned north, but the other was lying on its side by the tomb of your hero-dog.”

  The bone bracelet felt cold against my skin, and the air was cool too, after all the days I’d been bound. I felt my nipples pucker, and saw Zemiya’s gaze flick to them.

  “Ispa Selera was mad, Teldaru says.” The queen stared at my breasts, her head tilted to one side. She sees bruises, I thought, and then, in a rush of new dizziness, she sees scars. Please look longer, Zemiya; please see them and ask me why they’re there. Even if my voice cannot tell you, perhaps my eyes will.

  She looked from my breasts to my face. “She had already killed the carriage driver. She was standing above the ispu when you arrived. He was pinned beneath one of the carriage’s wheels. She was screaming. He had forced her to leave her city, and she would not have it. She would not be banished to a place so far from him. But since he had done this—since he had made her go—he would suffer. She shrieked these things, he says. She stood above him with a knife in her hand and she brought it down”—Zemiya bent so close that the folds of her dress brushed my hand—“and you took hold of a bough that was lying by the road and you hit her. One strong blow, and it sent her spinning, and the knife too, and the bough, which rolled beneath her hand and was in her hand when she rose to face you. She hated you, the ispu says. From the moment you came here to him, years ago, you and she were water and fire. So she came at you on that road like a rainmonth tide and you could not withstand her. By the time the ispu had freed himself from the wheel’s weight, you were just a patch of blood upon the ground. He took the knife from the grass and stabbed her in the back and in the chest, when she spun to face him. And so the worm-hearted woman died and the sun-hearted woman became a hero to her people. There, now,” she said, and sat down on the chair beside me in a billow of orange cloth, “does that help you remember? Or does it not, because no word of it is truth?”

  I made a low sound and she smiled a wide, cold smile. “But of course—you can’t speak.” The smile vanished. She stared at me, up and down—at my nakedness and my eyes. “What happened by that hill? And what is he to you?”

  I raised my hands and laid them beneath my breasts, where most of the marks were. As if this reminded her of what she was supposed to be doing, she rose and began retying the cloth strips, much more loosely. I touched my mottled skin (black and yellow-green, I saw, only now) and then I grasped one of her hands and held it to a scar.

  “Ah yes,” she said. She pushed my hand away and made another knot, right where it had been. “So it is like that.” She straightened, as I made strangled noises, and tugged the neck of her own dress down until I could see the dark swell of a breast, and the purple-black rim of its nipple. She pressed a finger to her skin and I saw a bubbled scar, pink and brown, about as long and thick as my thumb. “He cut me too, once,” she said. “With a broken shell. When we were young, in Belakao, and he was angry. My blood . . . excited him.” She stepped even further back, rearranging her dress. “I was strong enough to resist him. You, it seems, are not. Perhaps you think you love him?”

  I wanted to laugh that high, mad cackle of mine. I wanted to leap from the bed and seize her shoulders and cry, “Neluja would understand!” I did not—I did nothing at all, for the door swung open and Teldaru walked into the sunlight.

  “Z
emiya,” he said. His mouth and eyes went wide. “Oh dear—forgive me—Queen Zemiya.”

  “Haldrin calls me moabene,” she said. She looked very tall, just then, and very bright. She swept by him and left without another word or glance at us.

  “Did you see it?” He put his hands under my arms and eased me up in the bed; I sat and gasped at the pain and relief of this. “The bracelet,” he added impatiently. I wished I could scoff, The string of white bones that takes up half her arm? No, I didn’t notice. I nodded.

  “We need it, Nola. With Mambura’s bones we shall remake Mambura. The Flamebird will fly again.”

  Of course, I thought as he reached for the cloth that wrapped my head. I did try to laugh, then, but it sounded like one of Borl’s snuffles.

  “And I am going to be generous. A generous fool, perhaps, but I am going to entrust you with this. You will prove your worthiness, after all your attempts at betrayal. You will steal Mambura’s bones for me.”

  Time seemed to slow. His fingers hardly moved on the knot (which was behind my head). When he turned to me and smiled, it took minutes. His smile filled my eyes. His smooth golden cheek was almost touching mine.

  Until you remake my Paths, I will not kill you, I thought. So I will pretend, instead. I will be the woman you want, until I know as much as you do and the curse is undone—and then I will know how to break you.

  “Nola? Did you hear me?”

  The cloth fell away. I closed my eyes briefly, expecting anguish, but I felt only a wonderful, bruised looseness filling my cheeks and slipping between my teeth. I opened my eyes and smiled at him. “Yes,” I said.

  Book Three

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It was a game. It was only words and blood that soon dried (even Bardrem’s). I should say that I thrust all the horrors away because I was numb with shock, or because I could not bear to live with them. That I had to concentrate on my planning; on being Teldaru’s willing, grateful woman, and the Otherseer who had saved him. But it was not that, really. Because I enjoyed being that Otherseer—and being that woman was not nearly as difficult as it should have been. The blood dried, and I was a heroine, and people cheered for me and bowed to me, and handsome guards blushed when I smiled at them.

  A game. And even hating myself now seems like part of it.

  It was weeks before the heroic Mistress Nola could walk about the castle. Weeks of knitting bones and fading bruises and waiting.

  “We must be patient,” Teldaru said, several times. “Neluja cannot be here when you take the bracelet; she is too clever. We must wait for her to leave.”

  He himself seemed quite patient until one evening in the Great Hall, about a month after Selera’s death. He hardly touched his food, and he drank more wine than he usually did, when he was with the king. I watched him, as I ate. (I could eat tougher food now, at last, like potatoes and applies with the skins and bread not soaked in milk.) He was flushed, and his eyes were bright as they darted over the people gathered below our table.

  “Why does she not go?” he hissed.

  I angled my head so that I could see Neluja. She was sitting beside her sister, scooping potato bits up with one of the flat-bottomed spoons Belakaoans used. She plucked at a much smaller piece and held it for the lizard that clung to her shoulder. I watched its tiny black tongue flicker.

  “Why does he permit it?” Teldaru said. “Does he not see that, while an island queen is difficult enough for his people to accept, an island Otherseer is worse?”

  “You should want this,” I murmured. “Tension and anger. Shouldn’t you? Aren’t these things part of what’s to come?”

  I smiled to myself as he scowled. Fool, I thought. You’re a child who hasn’t got his way. And you’re jealous of her, or nervous—it doesn’t matter which. She unsettles you, and that unsettles you.

  “Perhaps she will be here on Ranior’s Pathday,” I said.

  He turned and stared at me. I smiled a little. I had developed a new smile, this past month—an alluring yet innocent one that was more in my eyes than on my lips. It allowed me to speak impudent or bold words that did not end up sounding impudent or bold. The old Nola had not had sufficient restraint for this.

  “I had hoped to have Mambura’s bones by then,” he said. He had leaned very close to me. His breath was warm and wine-scented. “There is something I want to show you, and I had hoped to do this directly after the rites at the Hill.”

  “Show me anyway.” I tried to look nonchalant, but my fork shook a bit in my hand. I imagined plunging the tines into the muscle that stood out on his forearm, and this steadied me.

  He chuckled. How easily I distracted him. “No. First you get me the bones. Then I will show you.”

  Neluja was still at the castle on Ranior’s Pathday, two weeks later. The morning was heavy with fog—a close, thick, end-of-summer fog that seemed wrong, somehow. It should have dissipated by late morning, or turned into rain, but it did not: it wrapped the city and the eastern road, and deadened the music and voices that should have rung clear into the sky.

  “The way is hidden,” Lord Derris said as our carriage jolted over a rut in the road. It was the first time I had made the journey to Ranior’s Hill in a carriage; the first time I had not walked and danced my way there surrounded by city folk, and friends. But I was a Mistress now, and Teldaru’s chosen one; I rode with him, the king and Lord Derris (Zemiya and Neluja were in a carriage somewhere behind ours). I could hear the people on the road—muffled voices shouting and singing—but they seemed far away. I tried to imagine their anticipation, their eagerness to see the carriage door open and the Master descend among them, ready to lead them up. Ready to gaze into the future of their land and tell them of it. I tried to imagine this, but could not: Lord Derris’ knees were knocking against mine, and the king was fumbling with his cloak pin, and Teldaru, beside me, had his head in his hands.

  “The way is dim,” Haldrin said, sucking on a pricked finger, “because it is foggy, cousin.”

  Derris scowled. “Of course. But the fog must itself be a fashioning of the Pattern, sent to confound or challenge us. Is this not so, Master Teldaru?”

  Teldaru did not move.

  “Master?” Lord Derris’ eyes were wide. I imagined how much wider they would go if I slid my hand over Teldaru’s thigh or up into his thick, red-gold hair.

  Still he did not lift his head.

  “Daru.” Haldrin leaned forward. He was frowning. “What is it? Are you unwell?”

  Teldaru sat up so quickly that both men started. “Lord Derris is right,” he said quietly. “The Pattern is clouded and strange. I see this.”

  “Even now?” Derris whispered. “Without the great mirror?”

  I wanted to roll my own eyes. I wanted to kick my heels against the seat or stretch out on the floor with my hands behind my head.

  “It is close,” Teldaru said. He was twisting his hands together. “The Otherworld; all the Paths, here and there. I feel them tugging at my feet, leading me toward a revelation that already shakes me, though I cannot yet see it clearly.”

  A revelation, I thought, and, He means to speak of the prophecy at last. I knew it; saw it so clearly (perhaps the Pattern was tugging at my feet?). I laughed. It was not loud—more of a snuffle than a guffaw—but all three men looked at me.

  “Mistress Nola?” Lord Derris said, his odd, breathy voice hissing over my name. “You find something amusing?”

  I turned from him to Teldaru, who was gazing at me with one brow raised. “No, my lords,” I said slowly, all solemnity, now, “it is just that I feel a little of what Master Teldaru does. It fills me with excitement. At such times I am but a child before the wonder of the Pattern.”

  Teldaru smiled, but his eyes were cold. And it was then that I knew, in a rush that made me dizzy: I would do something to surprise him, this day. Nothing he would be able to fault me for; just enough to annoy him. Unsettle him without being disobedient. I am so weary of your games, I thought as
I smiled back at him. It is time I played my own.

  The fog began to lift the moment I set my feet on the ground at the foot of Ranior’s Hill. This is what I heard people say afterward—that at my arrival the worlds stirred and changed. My heart raced, hearing this. And, even after all that has happened since, it still does. (Shame puts such a keen, nasty edge on pride.)

  While this might have been a satisfying way to begin a fanciful tale, I must say that I remember it like this: the fog did not burn away until we were about halfway up the hill. I stared at my feet, since they were all I could see well. Teldaru was somewhere ahead of me and the king and his family behind. Behind them was Lord Derris, no doubt still fretting about what all the fog could mean, and perturbed that the masses of good Sarsenayans behind him would not be able to see as they should. Instead they were stumbling and laughing, half-blind. I heard them, from my place near the head of the procession. I heard and thought of Grasni, then Selera, and I wished us all fourteen again.

  I was gasping with exertion, struggling up the steepest part of the slope, when I noticed that I could see the copper beads at the hem of Teldaru’s tunic glinting at me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Haldrin, who was holding Zemiya’s hand. A few minutes later I could see the shapes of the people behind them. By the time I reached the top the fog was more like mist, and the sky seemed to throb with light. The huge golden mirror that hung by Ranior’s monument was bright, though not yet blinding.

  Teldaru and I stood before it, waiting for the crowd to gather. As they did, the laughter faded. The people stood—the Otherseeing students, grandparents, children—and they waited in silence for Teldaru and me to look into the mirror. It was as tall as he was, suspended from its black iron frame. It would catch all the faces, and the sky; it would show us the future of Sarsenay.