The Pattern Scars (60 page)

Grasni stopped suggesting walks, but she kept coming to me. She brought me sweets and fruit from Dellena, and books I did not read. She talked to me of innocent things (the early frost, the knots that formed in her hair the instant after she combed it), and sometimes she just sat beside me and was quiet. I wanted to talk to her of other things. I wanted to tell her everything, from my mother dropping the bag of coins into the Lady’s hand to me stirring a pot choked with Selera’s flesh and hair and bones. I wanted to ask, “Do you still love Sildio?” and “How is Mistress Ket?” I wanted to know the answers. But I hardly spoke, now that I was free to.

Until one cold, early morning, just as Grasni was rising to go.

“Sildio told me what happened to Mambura and Ranior. What about the rest? What happened to them, after Ranior’s Hill?” This answer I needed to have, suddenly, though I was not sure why.

She frowned—with concern, not anger. “King Haldrin is in the royal catacombs, of course,” she said slowly. “Bardrem was buried in the commoners’ grave outside the north wall of the city. I said that he should get a finer burial than that, seeing as he’d led King Haldrin to the Hill, and others thought so too, but the new king wouldn’t do it.”

She stopped speaking. Looked at me almost pleadingly.

“And Teldaru?”

She cleared her throat. “King Derris had him burned on a pyre outside the city. He ordered the ashes put in a box and locked in the house with the other—with . . .”

I had only seen her struggle for words once before, on the night she came to ask me to Othersee for her. “With Mambura,” I said, “and Ranior. With Selera. Laedon will be dead—really dead, this time—because Teldaru remade him alone. But the others are still there because I remade them, or helped to.” I took a breath. “Derris knows they cannot die unless I do. He will not have them anywhere near the castle. So Teldaru, too, is at the house . . . yes—it’s perfect—it was already a tomb.”

I truly did not know why I was saying these things, and now. They had been in me, I suppose—waiting to surprise me as my lies used to do.

“I heard that he tried to burn them too,” Grasni said in a rush. “It didn’t work. Their skin melted a bit, but that was all. And they kept blinking. So he called for the flames to be doused and had them taken away. I shouldn’t be telling you this, though—it must be terribly hard . . .”

“No.” I smiled at her. “Or yes—but don’t worry.”

Grasni was quiet, but I could see that she wanted to say more. “Nola,” she said at last, “when I first came back—when I said I was sorry—you know what I meant, don’t you? That I was sorry for running from you, when I saw your Paths. For telling Mistress Ket. For not understanding anything.”

I shook my head. “How could you have understood? It was a horror. Better not to understand, ever. But yes. I know what you meant.”

She paused at the door and I hurried her out, murmuring that Sildio would be wondering what was taking her so long, and laughing when she blushed. I leaned against the door when she was gone. I looked at the small, guttering fire in my hearth, and the shadows it threw on the sleeping dog and the sleeping baby.

The bird, however, was awake.

“Uja,” I said, “we’re going out.”

The northern gate was far less grand than any of the others. No banners flew from its squat guard towers, and its doors hung crookedly on their hinges. I stood with my hand on one of the door’s splintered edges, looking out at winter light and hard winter ground, rising in hillocks on either side of the road. I knew what the hillocks covered. My mother was probably beneath them, and some of her babies, and Larally, whom I still saw in dreams. All of Sarsenay City’s dead commoners, together and nameless.

I left the city. Part of me expected to blink and see the castle before me again—Teldaru bringing me back with the curse, even though he was dead. After all, other parts of the curse had endured. But I walked and kept walking, dizzy with space and the air that bit me every time Uja wheeled close. I stopped when I saw a patch of earth that had been recently turned. It was hard and cold under my feet, and clay-russet except for one spot, which was bright pink. I crouched close to it and saw a piece of redfruit, peeled and carved into the shape of a long, tapering shell. I touched it and felt sugar, rough beneath my nail. I curled all my nails into my palms.

Who left this for you, Bardrem?
I thought, and then just,
Bardrem, Bardrem
, over and over. I tried to remember all his ages and names, all the words he’d hidden on paper and carved into roast potatoes—but the trying only made him feel more lost to me. Tears burned in my chest but I did not cry them. Uja ran her beak through my hair and cooed and I unclenched my hands and pushed her away. She waddled back onto the road and waited. After I joined her there she flew again, just ahead, marking the way back.

That night I wrenched myself around in my sheets and dreamed in searing vision-strokes that I forgot whenever I woke up. I slept and woke and slept again—until the middle of the night, when I started up with my breath caught in my throat as if I had been about to scream. Borl and Layibe were sleeping. Uja was hunkered down by the hearth, blinking at me.

“Uja,” I said, “I’m so sorry about earlier. If you’re angry, you don’t have to come—but there’s somewhere else I have to go.”

I used the postern gate—of course I did, for it was night, and the hood of my cloak was pulled over my face, and my feet knew the way without my mind telling them anything. Uja took to the air as soon as we were beyond the castle walls, and I was alone (except for Borl), and
then
my mind had to say to my feet:
Go on.

So much of the city had burned; I had not seen this clearly enough, on all the nights Teldaru and I had walked together. I passed roofless houses and shops, buildings that had collapsed to their foundations. Blackened, shattered stone and twisted metal. All of it his doing, and mine. The lantern bobbed in my hand.

The house looked the same, except that the fence was draped in strips of mourning blue and black. Uja was perched on the gate; she glided down to the cobbles when she saw me and set her beak to the lock. It opened with a click. The gate squealed a bit, and I glanced back over my shoulder, but the street was empty.

Uja gazed at me, when we were standing by the door. “Well?” I said. “What is it? Why are you waiting?” I knew why, of course; I hardly even needed to look into the gentle amber of her eyes. I did, though. I smiled at her. “This is good. This is what I must do. Please help me—you’re so good at helping me.”

She unlocked this door too, and we slipped inside.

The smell was so rank that my stomach heaved. It was worse than before—or perhaps the last time I was here I was simply accustomed to it. I rubbed my streaming eyes and held the lantern high. Everything was as it had been. There was a box, though—a small one made of black wood, sitting on the floor just inside the door.
They wouldn’t take him any further
, I thought.
They shoved him in and slammed the door shut
.

The others, though, had been taken upstairs. I wondered whether this had happened in daylight; whether people had gathered to watch as soldiers carried Mambura and Ranior up the glass-pebbled path. They were in the mirror room now: Mambura lying beside the knife cabinet and Ranior beside the cage. Their skin was black and covered in livid pink bubbles. Ranior’s hair must have burned away, for both their skulls were bare. I tried to envision this, too: the monstrous heroes on a pyre, their flesh charring and rippling but not melting; their eyes blinking from within the flames. King Derris shouting to stop—to pull them out and bring them here, where their accursed second lives began. I thought:
They die if I do, and yet when they were consumed by fire I felt nothing. It does not seem fair.

Selera was sitting against the wall across from the door. She looked so lovely and clean, compared to the other two. Someone had arranged her green dress carefully over her legs. Her hair even looked brushed—though maybe I was just imagining this. She blinked. Her milky green eyes glittered.

Laedon was not here and he was not in the other rooms. Perhaps they had burned him too, after I told the king, in those first blurry days after Ranior’s Hill, that he would truly be dead, since Teldaru was. Perhaps they had watched his skin dissolve, as skin should, in fire, and felt weak with relief and disgust.

I set the black box down on the floor. I gazed at it for a moment before I slid its lid off.

I had imagined I was only going to look, and think,
Well, there he is
, and be done with it. But when I saw the white and grey grit that had been Teldaru, looking was not enough. I sifted it through my fingers. I scraped through it so that it lodged under my nails.

Teldaru
, I thought,
Teldaru
—over and over—and every time I heard his name in my head I felt a stronger surge of rage.
It should have been me who tore your throat out. Me who sank a dagger into your chest. But it could not be—and in the end I did not even get to look into your eyes as you died.

My fingers found bone. I drew it up in a shower of ash. Just a knob—a knuckle, perhaps, because I knew such things now. I held it in my palm. I stared at it so intently that the edges of my vision smudged, as if I was entering the Otherworld.

Just a small, white, pitted piece of bone, but it would be enough.

I curled my fingers closed and smiled.

I did not tell Grasni that I was remaking Teldaru. She would not have allowed it. She would have locked me in my room until she had burned the house to the ground herself. And she would have been right to do these things. I knew this, as I walked through the sleeping city. I knew how wrong I was and it frightened me, in daylight, and as I walked in the dark. But when I was in the mirror room, and when I made those quick, small cuts on my arm or thigh or even my breast, I felt only hunger.

I took my time, with him. I was careful. Winter passed in gusts of snow and wind I hardly noticed. I heard that the queen would have a baby in the summer and for a moment I thought the queen was Zemiya, still, and that she and Haldrin would be so happy.