The Pattern Scars (8 page)

He sat up, angling his head so that it would not knock against the slanted ceiling. “Oh, very well,” he said gruffly. “But only if I get to choose where.”

“Yes,” I said, too excited by his forgiveness to point out that he always chose, on the rare occasions when we left the brothel.

I did not like going out into the city. Most of the girls did; sometimes they argued over which of them would get to have a free day, when the fair came. (Once two of them returned from the fair with torn clothes and bloody scratches on their cheeks and arms: they had fought each other for a length of satin ribbon. The Lady took away the ribbon, and their wages for the month.) I had no desire to see such things. Until Chenn arrived, I had given little thought to the world beyond the courtyard.

It was a bright world Bardrem led me into, that day. I stood outside the brothel’s door and blinked at the sunlight, and at the stone and wood of houses and shops, all of them washed by rain. “Come on,” said Bardrem, who was already picking his way through the churned mud of the street. “Let’s go before someone sees us and claims there’s work to do.”

I followed him. At first I kept my eyes on the road, which was rutted with wheel tracks and footprints and scattered with deep, murky puddles. But Bardrem soon guided me from this path to another, which was cobbled, and I looked up as I walked. I did not recognize the houses here. They had two storeys and intricately carved shutters painted in colours so bright that I blinked again. There was more colour, too: tapestries and rugs hanging from high-up windows, drying in the sun.
At least I won’t see my mother here
, I thought, and remembered our table and our old, dirty rushes and the walls that had leaned in to squeeze my breath away.

Bardrem walked very fast. “Where are we going?” I called once, and he only waved at me over his shoulder. The street began to climb, and I gasped with exertion, bent over a knot in my side, but I was determined to keep up. I focused again on my feet (my shoes were sodden and stained; the Lady would be angry) and saw everything else peripherally: a black dog curled in a doorway; a line of people holding empty baskets, waiting outside a barred gate; two little girls rolling a ball between them. I wheezed up a flight of twisting stairs and ducked beneath a low archway—and then I straightened and stopped, because Bardrem had.

“Here,” he said. “Look.”

I thought,
But there’s nothing to look at
. After all the streets, all the houses and courtyards, we were standing at the foot of a wall. Its stones were reddish-gold and threaded with ivy. I was about to say something puzzled to him when he took my hand and placed it against a stone and said, “Look
up
.”

The wall stretched on and on, higher than any wall I’d ever seen. Its top seemed to hang against the sky. There were notches in it, there, and fluttering from these notches were banners of silver and green, stitched with patterns I could not make out.

I looked back at Bardrem. “The castle,” I said, and he nodded and smiled the smile he used when his mind was on words, not on what was before him.

“The castle,” he said, and laid his hand beside mine. “Just the north wall, but I can still feel it all—can’t you? The towers and the great halls and the people. The music and the feasting.”

A bird called and I looked for it, found it wheeling in the blue above the battlements. It was very far away, and I could not see its features, but it cried out again and I thought,
Eagle
, and caught my breath.

“There’s also truth in there,” I said. “About Chenn.”

Bardrem narrowed his eyes at me.

“About what happened to her before she came to us,” I continued, “and maybe even what happened to her after.”

“Maybe,” Bardrem said. “Maybe we should try to get in, try to ask someone.”

I shook my head. “Look at it—just at this part. We’ll never get in there. Perhaps we shouldn’t even want to.”

But I did. I felt the stone beneath my palm; I almost heard it, humming with danger and promise.

“Let’s go back,” I said, already turning away. “Now. People will be missing us.”

“Nola.” Bardrem spoke quietly; he sounded older than fifteen, suddenly. “It’s all right to want something you think you can’t have. It’s all right to say so, too.”

“No,” I said, to something, to everything, and pushed past him on the steep, sunny path.

It might seem as if the next part of my tale is something I created—or something real, but stitched onto the story in a place other than where it truly belongs. But it is true, and happened precisely in this way and at this time: The evening of the day of my walk with Bardrem, one of the girls came to my room. “Yigranzi wants you,” she said. “In the courtyard.”

I went. It was dusk; the spindly upper branches of the tree were burnished, the leaves bronze and gold over their spring green. The tree shadow was long, dancing a little on the ground in a wind I did not feel. There was a man standing with Yigranzi by the tree. He was tall, dressed in browns and blacks that made him hard to see until I was in front of him.

I try to remember now what it was I saw, that first time. Or rather—I remember precisely what I saw and try to convince myself to see more, all these years later. But I cannot. He was a tall man, dressed in a brown tunic and black cloak; a man with such a beautiful, sad face that I’m sure I stood and stared like a mouse before an owl.

“This is Master Orlo,” Yigranzi said. “He is an Otherseer from the castle, and he is here because of Chenn.”

He smiled at me, gently, sadly, and bent his head in the dying light—and that was all. That was all I saw.

The stubble on Orlo’s chin and cheeks glinted red, though the hair on his head was the colour of honey.

“Nola,” he said. His voice was quiet and grave. “Yigranzi tells me that you were Chenn’s friend. I am sorry you have lost her.”

His eyes were not quiet. They were the blue-black of Chenn’s, only the colour seemed to ripple, and their centres were a gold so bright that I looked away.

“Thank you,” I said, gazing at his mouth. His upper lip was thin and his lower one full, and the teeth behind them were even and white.

“I sent for you as soon as Orlo came to me,” Yigranzi said, “so that we could hear his tale together.” There was nothing strange about her words, but I heard hesitancy beneath them, giving them slow, blunt edges. “I offered to receive him in the Lady’s chamber but he refused.”

“Because I would rather stand by a seer’s tree than sit on an overstuffed chair,” he said, and I smiled. The chairs in the Lady’s chamber were all hard and lumpy.

“This tree must not be nearly so grand as the one at the castle.” Yigranzi was not smiling, so her words did not sound admiring.

Orlo did smile. “There are several at the castle, all very grand, but this one . . .”
He put his hand on the bark, flat, though his fingertips arched a bit. “This is a fine tree. So . . . delicately leafed.”

“Hmph,” said Yigranzi. She sat down slowly on the stone and twisted her head toward him. “Enough about trees, now. Tell us about Chenn.”

Orlo hesitated for a moment, his eyes cast down. He scuffed a foot, just as Bardrem often did. He said, “It is difficult . . .” and looked up at me. “It is a difficult tale to tell, because there are parts of it that cause me shame. But you must hear it.”

“Yes,” Yigranzi said, “we must.”

He nodded at her. There was no smile about him now. “I had just begun instructing child seers when Chenn was brought to the castle. This was nine years ago, and she was very young—four or five, I think.”

And how old are
you
?
I thought, then flushed, as if I had spoken aloud. He looked young, except for the lines around his eyes and in his forehead—though these could have been from Otherseeing, not age.
Chenn
, I reminded myself, and tried to imagine the child, and the tall, windy castle.

“She was the daughter of a wealthy family, pampered and strong-willed, but as her schooling progressed she grew in skill and character. There was always a gleam in her eye, though, no matter how weighty her visions or how difficult her lessons. Her fellow students adored her. As did one of her teachers, a seer named Master Prandel.” He frowned, squinted up at the leaves, which were just a dark green now, untouched by sun. “Here is my first shame—for I should have acted. I saw his desire, and she was just twelve, and I should have spoken to him, at least, or gone to Master Teldaru with what I knew . . . but I did not. I imagined that Prandel’s infatuation would pass, or I hoped that someone else would confront him, or some such cowardly thing.” Orlo shook his head, dragged a hand roughly through his hair, which stood on end afterward.

“I’m not sure when he acted on his desire. All I know is that she changed. She stopped laughing, grew quiet and pale and afraid of her own visions. And then, this past winter, she disappeared.”

He was staring at the bottom of the tree.
Maybe Yigranzi’s already told him that that was where we found her
, I thought, and the pain I saw on his face and in the slump of his shoulders made my own stir and sharpen.

“Prandel was not distraught, as the rest of us were—he was furious. Which made me furious. I faced him, though too late. He is a small, plump, weak man, and I admit that I did him some harm. Before I left him I took a lock of her hair, which he had hung next to his bed on a yellow ribbon. I had another student speak the Otherseeing words and I used Chenn’s hair to find her Pattern.”

“Really?” Yigranzi’s voice made me start, because its edges were no longer blunt. “You saw her using only a lock of her hair? That’s a thing that takes a great and practiced grasp of the Othersight.”

Orlo gave a slight shrug. “My gift has always been considerable, and my training was rigorous. Though the visions I saw that night were weak, of course, as they always are without the person in front of you. Weak, but enough. I saw faint images of naked limbs and small, dark rooms; girls and men . . .” He glanced at me, cleared his throat. “Enough to show me that her Path would lead her to a place like this one. But although the visions I saw were unpleasant, there was no danger in them. No”—another vehement shake of his head—“no danger, or I would have begun my search then. But I did not, and this is my other shame. I, of all people, should know that the Othersight is not always a complete view—just a glimpse, there and gone in a blink. But I chose not to think of this. I thought: Chenn is safely away from here, where she might have come to great harm. Prandel has been punished and is a changed man. Only I was wrong about this, too.” He gave a short, breathless laugh. “Because Prandel disappeared a few months after Chenn did. And he found her. Somehow he found her.”

“Small and plump?” It was the first time I had spoken to him, and I was pleased with my voice, which was firm and older-sounding. “I think that’s what he looked like—the man in my vision.”

“Your vision?” His night-dark eyes shimmered and this time I could not look away. “You have seen him? How?”

Yigranzi opened her mouth and I said, quickly, “Yigranzi and I used the mirror when Chenn’s body was still here. Right here.” I gestured at the place where Orlo was standing and he flinched, stared at the tree’s roots as if she were there again, her throat gaping. Then he stared at me.

“You looked into the Otherworld when she was dead.”

“Yes. Yigranzi and I. And I saw a man who was short and fat—or just round, somehow. But it was hard to tell, since . . .”

When I stopped speaking, neither Orlo nor Yigranzi noticed. They were gazing at each other; gold at pearl, far beyond me.

“A dangerous thing,” he said at last, “for one so young.”

“I’m thirteen,” I said, but they did not look at me. I thought,
I’ll swing from the tree, I’ll stand on my hands and sing Bardrem’s longest poem
—but I watched them instead, in silence.

“Yes,” Yigranzi said. “But it was necessary. Chenn was only just gone; it was necessary.” She rose, leaning on her stick. I saw Orlo eye her hump, which seemed to be lurching in its own direction. I wanted to say something that would make him stop, but I did not.