I made his bones. I made his muscles and tendons and all the glistening, heavy parts they bound. I made his nose and cheeks and eyes and the red-gold stubble of his hair. I made roads and hills and sky.
Near the end I finally grew impatient. The snow was melting in air that smelled of flowers. I was so restless that several times I went to the house during the day. It was dangerous, for there were often people who might see me, at the gate. Me, and the bird whose island brightness would have told them who I was, if my own face had not. (Sildio says that tales are being told, now, of the bird and me. Tales of Ranior’s Hill and castle courtyards and city streets; words to thrill or frighten children.)
Once I saw a group of girls, standing at the fence. They whispered and giggled. One of them darted forward and touched a wrought iron bar (the mourning cloth was long gone), and everyone shrieked, and they ran off down the street.
I finished him in sunlight. I tried to keep myself from going—wanted it to be night, when I was done, since this would feel more apt. But I could not keep still, in the castle. I paced my little room’s length and width and I paced the corridor outside it until Sildio cried that I was making him dizzy. “Go out, Mistress!” he said. “Go for a good long walk that will calm you.”
So I did. I told Borl to stay with Layibe and then I whistled to Uja and I walked straight out the castle gate.
Today, I thought with every footfall. It will be today.
I hauled at him until he was sitting up. I put my arms beneath his and tugged him backward across the floor and into the golden cage. I closed the door and locked it with the key that hung by the knife cabinet. I knelt. I slid the tip of the tiniest knife beneath my thumbnail. I watched the blood well beneath the nail and then into the webs in my skin: my Pattern, like ripples in a pool. I raised my eyes to his, which were closed.
I sink into the yielding ground of his Otherworld—his and mine, for I created it. There is only one Path that is still motionless. I bend and grasp it; open myself up so that my strength bleeds into it. It fills and shudders and turns from black to silver. This is all I need to do, but I linger. I lift my arms and laugh my power and my hunger into the sweep of his living sky.
I was still kneeling. I scrabbled at my eyes, trying to make the after-spots dissolve more quickly.
I saw the outline of him first: the broad shoulders, the stubbly curve of his head. Next came the shadows of his brows and the hollows of cheeks and collarbone. Next, his eyes.
They opened as I watched. They were brown, with a translucent sheen of white. They wandered, sightless and wide, and blinked. Uja sang a long, low note, behind me.
I leaned forward and wrapped my hands around the bars of the cage. “Welcome back, love,” I said.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
I was very ill.
I went to the house night after night. I crouched by the cage and stared at Teldaru until I, too, felt blind. I walked the halls and sat in the kitchen; sometimes I clutched the dark braid that still lay upon the table, with its white streak and red ribbon. I shook so violently that I had to open my mouth to keep my teeth from clacking against each other and sinking into my tongue. I could not stop shaking, even at the castle.
“You are only feeling it now,” Grasni said as she cupped her hands around mine to still them. “Everything that happened to you—it’s like a slow poison, but it will soon be gone.” She squeezed my hands and tried to smile.
There had been a warm fragrant rain, the last time I went to the house, but I was so cold that I could hardly walk. Uja swooped down several times, clucking and twittering. Once she tugged at a strand of my hair as she wheeled by me, and the pain made me feel steadier, but only briefly.
It had been three weeks since I finished remaking Teldaru. I had been keeping count with the fingernail clippings in the kitchen, nudging them into a line of tiny arcs on the table. It took me a very long time to get from the mirror room to the kitchen, that last day, and once there my hands did not obey me; they swept the rows of nails off the table. Uja squawked at me. “I know,” I said, through my chattering teeth, “but I’ll be better soon.”
The rain was still falling when I left the house. It seemed thicker now; I could not see the houses around me—just the cobbles directly beneath my feet. I wished vaguely for Borl, but he stayed with Layibe, when I left the castle. I stumbled into someone, who yelled and thrust me away. I fell. The rain was so heavy; it pushed at me, until I slumped onto my side. I pulled my knees up beneath my chin. I thought: I’ll never fall asleep. I’ll go find Bardrem; surely Rudicol won’t still have him working. But I did not move. I lay in the rain and disappeared.
I woke up in a bed. I was soaked in sweat. I tried to toss the covers off but my limbs would not shift at all. Someone murmured, quite close to me, but my ears were not working either. In and out, hot and cold. Once I felt Borl’s nose pushing against my palm. Once I heard Uja singing. In my eyes, though, there was nothing but darkness.
“Nola. Come, now—look at me. I see you trying to.”
Grasni’s face leapt in and out of focus above me. Her freckles looked like inkblots in the firelight. She looked thinner. She looked afraid.
“Grasni.” My voice felt as hot as my skin used to.
“Oh,” she said, and bent her head. Her tears made blotches on the coverlet.
It was Sildio who had found me in the rain. He had worried when I was not in my room in the morning. When I was not back by the noon meal he took Borl outside, to the head of the courtyard stairs.
“Find her,” Sildio had said. And Borl had.
King Derris declared that it was somehow meaningful that the Pattern continued to cause me suffering. He also commanded Grasni to spend less time with me. When she refused, he told her he would summon another, more appropriate Otherseer, but the students were so distressed by this news that he allowed her to stay. (A few students were children of wealthy families who were generous with their gifts to the kingdom.)
I heard all this as my body recovered. It did not recover fully, however; even months later I could not walk the length of the corridor without gasping for breath. My legs ached and my head often did too, so badly that Layibe’s softest whimpers sounded like metal scraping metal. But my body was better.
Nothing else was.
“You don’t laugh any more,” Grasni said. It was early summer. The queen I had never seen was apparently already huge with child.
“I hadn’t noticed,” I said.
She frowned. “I am a very witty person. If I cannot make you laugh, nothing will.”
I did not speak. I was tying ribbons into Layibe’s hair—red Belakaoan ones stitched with blue shells. Her eyes followed the sounds my hands made as they picked the ribbons up and drew them tight around her curls.
“Nola,” Grasni said in a lower, softer voice, “would it help you to speak to me of . . . everything? I haven’t asked you to—I thought you’d do it yourself, if you needed to—but I want you to know that I’ll listen. I want to, if it helps you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You’re a wondrous friend. But it will not help—speaking. It isn’t what I need. Don’t worry,” I added as she opened her mouth, “I’ll be sure to tell you when I know what I do need.”
A few days later she arrived in the middle of the afternoon. Sildio knocked on my door and they both came in, and I sat up in bed.
“You should be at the school,” I said.
She was smiling. She shifted the sheaf of papers she was holding from one arm to the other. “I know—I’m only here for a moment. But Sildio’s had an idea, and we’re here to tell you . . .”
He nodded. He was smiling too.
“What, then?” I said.
He went out into the hall and returned carrying a tall, narrow desk. He set it beneath my tall, narrow window and went back into the hall. This time he came back with a stool, which he slid under the desk.
“You are going to force me to do lessons,” I said.
Grasni laughed. “Not exactly.” She put the papers down on the desk. Sildio produced an inkpot and quill from his pouch and placed them beside the papers.
“It was his . . . that is, Sildio thought . . .”
“Perhaps Sildio could speak for himself,” I said—and suddenly I was back in a different, smaller room, with a bucket in the corner, and King Haldrin was pulling a chair close to my filthy bed. “She will tell me herself,” he was saying to Teldaru.
“I thought,” Sildio said, “that since you can’t speak of what’s troubling you, you might to write it instead. It might be easier, and more secret, if that’s what you need.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think—”
“Nola.” Grasni was using her sternest voice, which usually made me smile. I did not, this time. “You must get it out of you. It’s bile—poison, remember? Vomit it out, then, right here. Bleed it onto paper. Promise you’ll try, at least. Promise.”
There were patches of crimson on her face and neck. She stared at me, and Sildio did too, until I sighed and got to my feet.
“Very well,” I said, “I’ll try.”
And so I have.
It is spring. A year since Borl found me in the rain. A year—or nearly—of sitting at this desk. Armfuls of paper and rivers and rivers of ink (all of it taken from the school).
And yet the poison is still not out. It never will be, while I live.
I have not returned to the house, this past year, but its walls rise around me anyway. When I look into Layibe’s wide eyes I see Selera’s too, and Mambura’s, and Ranior’s. Teldaru’s. There are pictures, somewhere behind their eyes. There is feeling, somewhere beneath their blistered, too-thin flesh.
I have known for a long while what I have to do. I have ignored the knowledge, or denied it. Now that the story’s written, though, I’m certain: it has only one true ending.
Very soon I will put down this quill. It is late afternoon. Grasni will be teaching her lesson on Otherseeing tools (the rows of grain; the sticks of coloured wax melting in warm, clutching fingers). I will put Layibe on my hip and go to the seers’ courtyard. I will walk beneath the lycus blossoms and into the school and up those worn, sloping steps. Grasni will be surprised when I appear in the classroom door. She might be excited too, for a bit, because I haven’t been anywhere but my room for so long.
I will smile at her, and at the students, who will also be surprised.
“When you’re finished,” I’ll say to her, “come find me in the grove. There’s something I need to tell you, and somewhere I need to take you, in the city.”
I will do these things, now that my tale is done.
EPILOGUE
It was spring when Nola finished her writing. It’s the end of autumn now. It’s taken me too long to do this, even though I knew I’d have to. Even though I’ve wanted to.
Just reading what she wrote took me two months. I carried the pages with me—as many as I could without dropping any—and read them in the courtyard and in my room, which is the same one she had when we were students. King Derris tried to put me somewhere larger and grander in the keep, back when I first returned to the city, but I refused. I like this room. I always did.
I won’t be able to write like she did. I had no idea how she wrote until I read this. It upset me, at first. These words of hers aren’t quite as her spoken ones were. They’re more like poetry—more like Bardrem’s. They both might have laughed, if they heard that. But as I read more, I heard more of her that I knew, and then it was the knowing her that hurt.
She described my dress as a cloud of orange-ish dust, in these pages. I laughed out loud when I read this, and Sildio rolled over in bed and asked me why I was laughing, but by then I was crying.
I should just get to it, now that I’m finally here. She would expect me to.
I might try one thing she did: setting down a few words that will nudge me along. Mine will be:
I met her in the grove at sunset.
Dren needed to talk to me, when the class was done. I was impatient, but he thought nothing of it, as I’m often impatient. By the time I saw him off the sky was orange and red.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her. She was sitting under the smallest tree. “Maybe we can go into the city tomorrow.”
She smiled up at me. Her hair was full of the clips I’d put in earlier that day, but she was wearing a different dress. This one was lovely: wine-coloured, with a bit of lace along the collar. But she always knew how to choose her dresses, as she reminded me every time she saw the ones I’d chosen for myself.
“No,” she said. “We’ll go now. We’ll need a lantern.”
I didn’t think to be afraid or even worried. I’d spent months trying to get her out of her room, and now that she was, all I felt was relief.
We walked out of the castle. Borl was with us, of course. Uja too, somewhere above. And Layibe, who was big enough now to sit on Nola’s hip, but who still looked sickly and weak. Her hair was beautiful, though: thick and dark.
“What did you want to tell me?” I said as we walked.
“Soon,” she said. “When we’re there.”
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
“Nola!”
“Grasni!”
I hadn’t seen her so happy since we were girls. I didn’t care where we were going.
We stopped outside an iron fence. I peered between the bars and saw what was behind them. And even though I’d never been to this house, I knew which house it was.
I asked her why we were there. She didn’t answer. Uja flew down and opened the gate, and then the door to the house. They were so practiced about it all—the bird and the dog and Nola. I started to feel sick before the door even opened.
She’s described the smell better than I could. I nearly vomited. By the time we climbed the stairs I’d controlled myself. It’s like the tannery, I thought. The one I lived next to as a girl.
But when she opened the next door I fell to my knees. The smell was even stronger, but it was the bodies too, that I’d heard about and thought I’d been able to imagine. I hadn’t, though. The two blackened ones were hardly recognizable as men. And the woman was even more horrifying because she was Selera—a rotten, sagging Selera, wearing a dress the beautiful Selera would have adored.
These were bad enough. But then I looked at the cage and saw who was in it, and I ran out of the room and down the hall. I fell again, by a door with a blue glass knob.
Nola sat beside me.
“When did you remake him?” I asked.
“Last spring,” she said.
“When you were so sick.”
“Yes. I had to do it, Grasni. I wasn’t done with him. But I haven’t been back here in a year—not in all the time I’ve been writing.”
“So why have you brought me here now?”
She had tears in her eyes, which looked blacker than ever. “Because I’m finished writing and I know what I have to do. And I have to tell you, because you’re my wondrous friend.”
“And what are you going to do, Nola? Derris already tried to burn them. You know that won’t work.” I wasn’t sure why I was so angry. Maybe just because she’d hidden this great, terrible thing from me. Maybe because I already knew her answer would be more terrible yet.
“I know, yes. They won’t die unless I do.”
She took my hand and I shook it away. “I know, you know—we both do. Just tell me what you’re going to do, since that’s the thing I’m not sure of yet.”
She took my hand again. “I’m going to die.”
This time I didn’t run. I rose and walked down the stairs and out the front door. I stood by the closed gate, where Uja was perched. It was night now, and her feathers looked much darker than they usually did.
I heard Nola’s feet crunching on the glass rocks of the path but I didn’t turn. “Come back in,” she said. “There’s much more to talk about.”
“I won’t go back in there.”
&
nbsp; “Then walk with me. There’s somewhere else to go, anyway.”
“Does it smell?” I asked.
She squeezed her eyes shut, for a moment. Then she opened them and said, “Please come with me.”
We walked streets and alleys I’d never seen before. She talked a great deal, probably because I didn’t. I remember only a few of the things she said, but I remember what her voice sounded like in the silent streets. She said she wished I could have known Bardrem so that I could have mocked his poetry (even though she said I would probably have loved it). She talked about a vision she’d had of Haldrin—he’d been crying, and his tears had turned the ground below him to flowers. She said that Selera’s dress—the one she’d worn on her last day in the castle—was the most wonderful thing ever made of cloth and thread, and that it had made Selera even more unbearable.
Nola stopped walking in front of a jumble of stones in the lower city. As soon as I stood still my feet disappeared in mud up to my ankles.
“I thought you said this other place wouldn’t smell,” I said.
She laughed a clear, pure Nola laugh and began picking her way over the rubble. “It must have been destroyed during all the fighting,” she said. “I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised.”
“Where are we?” I said.
“Just a little farther.” Not answering my questions, as always. Walking ahead, holding her skirts up like a girl in a river—except that she was holding a child, as well.
We came to an open space where the moonlight was very bright. Around us were the remains of walls—stone and wood—and in front of us was a tree. One small tree with thin branches and four small leaves.
“I know where we are,” I said. “You’ve told me about it. This is Yigranzi’s tree.”
Nola was already sitting with her back against its trunk. She put Layibe down, because the earth here was mossy, not muddy. Uja landed on the topmost branch and set the whole tree quivering. Borl lay down with his head in Nola’s lap.
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