The Pattern Scars (53 page)

“Bardrem,” I said, low and harsh, “you almost have it; you are close”—I
was
holding his hand, kneading it—“but if you get any nearer I will never be as I was when I was a girl—I will be changed. . . .”

“So it’s yourself you fear for, after all.” He shrugged. “You are already changed. Go, Nola. Leave.” He was free of my hands and I was small, shrinking away from his disgust and my own.

“No,” I said, but I did leave, stumbling and slipping up the steps.

I was more composed when I walked again into the kitchen. I had learned this—to be poised, because anything else would elicit gossip or questions I could not answer, even if I wanted to.

“Well?” Dellena said as I passed. “How was Bardo? Was he gracious, at least?”

“He called me Mistress Nola,” I said, smiling a rictus smile, and then I was away into the morning.

The day after I spoke to Bardrem the city was in flames again.
Moabu
Bantayo had decided to trade only with Lorselland, Lord Derris told me—weeks ago, he added, glaring at me as if I should have known (which I should have). And last night the richest Belakaoan merchant in the city had been murdered by his stable boy, who had, under questioning, revealed that a group of Sarsenayan merchants had paid him gold to do it, and promised him more when it was done. The boy was now in a cell; before they could join him, several of the Sarsenayan merchants had died at the hands of their own Belakaoan servants. Hours after this, Sarsenay was burning.

“King Bantayo is a fool if he thinks our people will suffer indignity quietly,” Lord Derris rasped.

“Not quietly, no,” Haldrin said, leaning forward at the library table, “but with murder and fire? Surely we are more civilized than this.”

Lord Derris was still frowning. “Sometimes the Pattern can make calm only from chaos—is that not right, Master Teldaru?”

“Yes,” Teldaru said, though he was looking at me. “This is so.”

“If only Derris were king,” Teldaru said to me later, as we were walking toward the school. “The battle would be nearly upon us. But no—no—it is better this way, for we have more time, you and I. More time, though we must hurry now, even so.”

He was speaking very quickly, and the words were slurred. His chin and cheeks were covered with stubble. I felt a stirring of hope, followed, as ever, by dread—
If he’s too weak, how will he mend me? And if he is
dead
—if Bardrem gets to him, how will I go on as I am, crippled, lesser?

“Tonight.” Teldaru took my face in his hands. His own face was dappled with sun and branch shadows that trembled and bristled with buds that had not been there yesterday. The wind smelled even more strongly of spring—but now, too, of burning.

“Ranior tonight, O Seer-Who-Will-Be-Queen. Ranior tonight and every night until he breathes—for no, we do not have much time at all, in fact.”

I imagined Bardrem everywhere, as I had before. Among the throngs of people in the main courtyard—the soldiers in their lines, and the servants, the stable boys, the guards. And even though there were hardly any people in the city (everyone hiding behind the walls that stood, unblackened), I imagined him there too, disappearing around corners and into alleyways, somehow, impossibly, a boy again. Night after night Teldaru and I slipped to the house, through sooty, heavy air, and I was more and more tired every time, from the War Hound’s remaking, and from thinking Bardrem was nearby, even when he was not.

Only he was.

“Mistress.” Leylen, one dawn a month after the fires had begun—a month of fires throughout the city, and no one ever caught setting them; a month of Bantayo raging at us in letters that went on for pages. “Mistress, I’ve something to give you.”

Her voice was strange; I could tell this, though I was not yet fully awake. I had been asleep for maybe an hour. It was all I ever got, these days, and it was not so much sleep as it was a dizzy blur of images: gobbets of flesh and clean, sharp, red bones.

“Mistress! Here, in my hand . . .”

It was a little, folded piece of paper. I felt it in my palm and remembered, so suddenly that it made me dizzy, how Bardrem used to leave me notes just like this in the brothel, under my rug or in one of my shoes.

I sat up. Leylen was blushing, turning the end of her braid around between her fingers. “He was handsome—Bardo, the one who gave me that. Said he’d known you long ago. Said he didn’t want Master Teldaru to find out—a secret longing, he said.” She bit her lip and glanced at me.

“Thank you, Leylen.” My voice was steady. “You may go.”

“But I must help dress you soon . . . and your hair—”

“Go, Leylen. I’ll dress myself today.”

And then I was alone.

I unfolded the paper. My hands were not steady.

Two cloaks and two hoods

House

Fence

Lock

Every night the same

I will understand, Nola.

I touched the letters as if I would be able to feel them. His quill and ink; his marks, which I did not actually understand until minutes after I’d first read them. A note like so many others, which I had found in unexpected places.

I refolded it; I would only gaze at it foolishly otherwise, and be late for my class. I slid the paper under my wardrobe. The other one was there too—the one he had left for me the same night Orlo had lured me away from the brothel. I did not look at it again later, when I returned to my room. I could still feel the words, though—then, and after midnight, when Teldaru and I slipped out the postern gate and down into the city.

I will understand, Nola
: words as rounded and urgent as veins beneath my skin.

Three months. Three months after I had met Bardrem in his room. Three months after I had lifted Ranior’s skull from the mirror’s golden bowl. Princess Layibe three months old. The city still burning fitfully, a night-pattern of flickering orange and rising smoke.

It was early summer, and
Moabu
Bantayo was coming to Sarsenay.

“We have no time,” Teldaru said.

I had never seen him look so stricken. “You did not plan for this,” I said. “You did not foresee it”—and he turned to me, his black eyes narrowed.

“Are you mocking me?”

I smiled—for him, and for the people who might be watching us from the tables below. “No, no—how could I, now that I understand so much? I am only asking; wondering. . . .”

He gazed at me a moment longer. His fingers were drumming against the underside of the table. “We will take them away tonight,” he said at last. I arched one of my brows, while my chest tightened so suddenly that I feared I would gasp.

“I wanted to wait until he was finished,” Teldaru continued, “but now we must move more quickly. We will take them to the Hill tonight, and hope that it will not hurt him.”

He came to my room much later than usual. I was half-asleep when Borl shook himself and whined. I sat up and then the knock came, light but insistent.

He did not speak to me at all as we walked to the house.
Bardrem
, I thought, as I always did now, but it was just a word; there had been no other note or glimpse, and I had lost the sharp hope I had had before.

There was a wagon and a single, stolid horse in the street in front of the house. “Up,” Teldaru said to me. The word sounded harsh, after all the silence. I climbed to the long wooden seat. Borl scrambled after me and slid, and I held him around the middle to steady him. I looked back into the wagon, which was open, and saw a jumble of sacks and garden tools.

Teldaru climbed up beside me and lifted the reins. He laughed as he flicked them. “Imagine! Two ancient heroes lying unattended in the back of a wagon, and no one the wiser!”

I wanted to look over my shoulder again but did not. I wondered, as we clattered over the cobbled street toward the east gate, how Teldaru had managed to get them down the stairs—Mambura, who was tall and bulky with muscle, and Ranior, who had only just grown a layer of skin, and whose own muscles did not yet seem solid.

I wondered too, when the gatehouse guard stepped out to meet us, whether Teldaru would fail to be convincing this time. But as soon as the man saw who was sitting with the reins in his beringed hands, he bowed and smiled nervously and I knew we were as good as out already.

“Mistress Nola and I are taking plant specimens,” Teldaru said, nodding over his shoulder at the sacks, and the trowels and shovels that lay near them.

The guard peered into the back of the wagon.
Just poke at the cloth with your sword
, I thought.
Just ask him why we’re plant-collecting in the middle of the night.
Except that Teldaru would probably have had an answer.

“Mistress Nola,” the guard said after he had stepped down, “I . . . that is, my family was near enough to you on Ranior’s Hill last Pathday to see you.”
The smile is for me
, I thought then, and I smiled back at him, glad that the darkness would hide my flush. When we were out on the road beyond the city, Teldaru chuckled and said, “Nearly one year later! The legend of Nola. . . and yet there is so much more greatness to come.”

When we arrived at the Hill, I saw that Mambura and Ranior were strapped onto litters. Teldaru hauled Mambura’s off the wagon; I knew it was him, even though he was wrapped in cloth, because he was so big, and the lines of him so firm. I winced when the litter hit the ground, and Teldaru laughed again and reached a hand out to tug on my braid. He did not let me help him. He pulled the litter down the stairs and along the dark, damp corridors. He set it down just inside the door of the tomb and went immediately back into the corridor.

I sat by Mambura and waited. I imagined what would happen if Bardrem appeared now. I pictured Teldaru returning, and myself standing and crying, “Kill him!” I pictured Bardrem and me doing it together, with knives or fists or feet. “It was like a terrible, terrible dream that I feared would have no end,” I would say when it was over. “I could not speak or act because he had cursed me.” And I would gaze at Bardrem with my eyes that could see both worlds, and kiss him with my mouth that could say anything.

But no—
that
was the dream.

Teldaru dragged the second litter up into the chamber. He laid it down by Mambura’s and untied the ropes that held the cloth in place. Mambura’s blind eyes stared at the dome of ceiling. Ranior had no eyes yet: only two slick hollows above the fleshy wrinkle that was his new nose.

“Why have we brought them here?” I said. “It’s so much farther away than the house.”

Teldaru drew his fingers along Ranior’s smooth, yellow brow and then rubbed them against his thumb. I could almost feel the clinging wetness myself.

“The battle will take place nearby, sooner than we may think. We will finish Ranior here, to be certain we are ready. And in any case, this place is his. He died here; it is only right that he be remade here, too.”

He took his knife from his boot with one hand, and held his other hand out to me. “So come, now. We must continue.”

We got back to the city at dawn—later than usual, and Leylen was waiting for me.

“Mistress, where’ve you been?” she asked, and I gestured vaguely, said, “Master Teldaru and I were together outside the city, gathering plants.”

I noticed, through the haze of my exhaustion, that she was shifting from foot to foot. I noticed that she was holding a piece of folded paper—which I read when I had sent her away.

Not the house tonight

But the Hill—that fabled place

Death there for the Hound

Laming for the Cook

But Otherseers, at night—

What is there for them?

I slid the paper under the wardrobe. I crawled beneath my sheet but did not sleep.

A Sarsenayan boy raped a Belakaoan girl—a thing that had happened before, while the city burned, but not to the daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant whose wares were bought by castle women. One of the girl’s brothers killed the Sarsenayan boy.

Bantayo’s ships landed on Sarsenay’s eastern shore. There were four ships. “For now,” said Teldaru to me. The island men were only a few weeks away.