The Pattern Scars

A tale was always told, in the lower city and in the castle (and I know, because I’ve lived in both places): When Teldaru, who was later seer to King Haldrin, was a boy of five, a powerful and much-hated lord ordered him to fetch a flagon of wine. The boy did the lord’s bidding, for he had no choice, being a child, and the son of the tavern keeper, and of no account. The lord was already drunk, but he swallowed most of the wine in a few gulps. He set the flagon down unsteadily and it tottered and fell. “Wretch!” he cried at Teldaru, who was still standing there by the table. “You’ve brought me a faulty cup. And now look—such a mess—only a seer could make sense of it. . . .” The man narrowed his eyes at the dark spatter upon the wood, then shifted them back to the boy. “Make right your clumsiness,” he slurred. “Entertain me. Read my future in this pattern and I will withhold the order to have you flogged.”

Teldaru stood up on his tiptoes and peered across the tabletop. He frowned. “I see a breaking wave,” he declared in his high, clear voice as the others around the table and in the room fell silent, “with you standing beneath it. Your face is still and purple.” It is said that the midday sun, which had been spilling into the tavern, dimmed, and an owl hooted, as if it believed night had fallen. Some claim that stars shone, in the sudden dimness, and that one even fell, to signal a prophecy confirmed.

The lord gaped at the child as the darkness made way again for daylight. After a moment he rose, knocking over his stool, and all his men rose too, their mail shirts hissing and their scabbards clattering against benches. “Kill him,” he said, waving a hand at Teldaru, but no one moved to obey him. He stumbled backwards and fell down unconscious. Three days later he drowned in his mistress’s bath. Two days after that, the king (Haldrin’s father, then) installed Teldaru by the Otherseers’ pool in the castle wood.

“And how did it happen first for you?” people would ask me, thinking of the boy and the lord and the wine. I heard this question in the brothel where I spent my girlhood, and by the seers’ pool where I left my girlhood behind. For a long time I answered this way: When I was eight, I came upon a woman weeping beside the fountain where I liked to soak my feet on the hottest summer days. She grasped my hands and cried, “He has left and gone—and oh, what will become of me? Tell me; tell me, child, for my own eyes are closed. . . .” As she spoke, my gaze strayed to the water, which was spraying in fat droplets from the fountain’s white stone mouth. And I saw her likeness in the air—only she was laughing, holding a baby above her so that it laughed too. Such an image: golden but made of all the other colours; thin and faceted as a dragonfly’s wing.

“There will be a child,” I told her, and the vision rippled and fell like the water. “You will laugh together.” The words were like the vision itself: heavy and light at once. There was a humming in my head.

She embraced me (her tears made a warm trail across my neck) and said, “Such a hopeful thing you’ve seen,” as if she didn’t quite believe me but wanted to be kind. A year later I saw her again by the fountain, holding a red-headed babe on her hip—and she embraced me again and gave me my first silver coin.

This was what I said to the people who asked about my first vision. A less grand tale than Teldaru’s, but the gold of it shimmered every time I told it, and the red-haired baby made me smile. And it
had
happened—just not first, as I claimed. So I suppose I was a liar even before the curse.

The true answer to the question was: My mother was crying again. The newest baby was crying. “He’s left,” my mother sobbed, “he’s gone.” The same words over and over, as she chopped a potato on the scarred, stained table. “He’s left—he’s gone” until the potato was a collection of slivers peeling away from the knife. “Quiet!” This word was a scream. Her head was turned to the kicking, red-faced baby. The knife slipped. She made another noise, like the grunt of an animal. Blood pulsed over the table and onto the ancient, yellowed rushes on the floor. She stared, then raised her head to me and whispered, “Nola.” Her eyes were wide. “Nola.” I could not move from my little stool by the door. “Help me. Tell me what will become of me, for my own eyes are closed.”

I was gazing at the pattern of blood and potato peelings as I heard her words. After a moment I saw a darkness seeping up around her legs, and up around the baby’s cradle, and over the pallets where the other children huddled. The darkness thickened until no one was there at all. When it began to ebb I thought I might remember to breathe again, but I couldn’t, because there was still emptiness where everyone had been. The room was the same as ever, but also vast, and there was a feeling in my chest that was new, like a weight of stones.

“Nola!”

I was lying on the floor. My mother’s face swam above me. She was holding her hand in the air, and I noticed from a faraway place that it was already wrapped in a piece of cloth, blood-soaked now but likely filthy even before. The baby’s wails sounded louder than they had. “Child.” Her eyes were sharp and narrow, now. “Did you see something?
Tell me
”—and I did somehow, in a voice that didn’t sound like mine at all.

She took me to the brothel the next day, and sold me to the old seer there for a bag of copper pieces. I never saw her or my siblings again.

So I’d ask anyone: Which answer satisfies more? Gold-drenched water and a chortling baby, or darkness, and stones instead of breath? I knew as soon as that first person asked me the question. For several years I replied falsely, but by choice. My listeners believed me, also because they chose to. There was no curse, for those first few years; just innocence, and a gift I hoped might someday bring me joy.

I was filthy. I had always been filthy, but only realized it now. I was ten years old: ten years of ash and soot, and muck from the sunken patch of ground in front of my door—all of this buried in my skin and matted in my long hair.

“The hair will have to go,” said the tall, clean woman who was standing in front me. The woman was wearing a gown of blue velvet belted with silver links. My fingers itched to touch the cloth (heavy and warm, I imagined, and smooth in the worn-away patches) and the metal (cool and hard), and I curled my ragged nails into my palms. “I won’t have my ladies crawling with bugs because of her.”

“Of course, milady,” said my mother from behind me, “I thought of that, would have done it myself before I brought her here, but she made a fuss, bawled and shrieked until I left her alone—though she’s usually a good girl, milady,” she added breathlessly, her voice false and sweet, “a good, biddable, obedient girl, that’s sure.”

I never bawled or shrieked
, I thought,
and you never even mentioned cutting my hair
. I longed to say this but did not, in case the blue-gowned woman should send me out of this room of curtains and carpets and back into the street.

“What is your name?” A new voice; another woman, rising from a low stool by the fireplace. This one was old and bent, her back a lump of flesh that made her look like she was carrying something—a bolt of cloth, or a baby. Her skin was very dark, and I thought that it must be even filthier than my own. “What is your name?” the woman said again, the words a low, thick lilt. Her eyes looked all black, with centres that shone like pearl (I had seen a pearl once, hanging at the throat of a rich woman). Othersighted eyes. I had encountered such eyes only in tales, and I shivered deep in my belly as these real ones gazed at me.

“Nola,” I said—and then, more loudly, “
Nola
,” because the baby had begun to cry again, snuffling and coughing tangled with tears.

“I am Yigranzi,” said the old woman. She stepped closer and gripped my chin in her fingers, which were hard and dry. Her skin was not dirty, I saw, just dark brown with a sheen of something darker (not quite purple). I thought that maybe it had been polished by an island sun, or a future sun—some light never known in Sarsenay.

“And do you have the Othersight, Nola?” Yigranzi asked.

“She does,” my mother cried, “she does, for when I asked her to tell me my future—though I wasn’t asking her truly, of course, just saying, but that was enough—her eyes went very big and black, somewhat like yours, milady, and she fell to the floor and when she woke up she said—”

“Nola.” Yigranzi was not looking at my mother. Her eyes were steady on me, and her voice was hard but not harsh. “Do you have the Othersight?”

“I . . . I’m not sure.” The vision of night and disappearing had been yesterday; today I feared hope.

“Test her,” said the tall woman. “Immediately. If she is Othersighted and you’ll take her on, I need her clean—now.”

“Very well,” said Yigranzi, and, to me, “Come,” and we left the room, though not by the door that led to the street. Another door, so low that even humpbacked Yigranzi had to stoop, and a dimness beyond it that smelled of soap and rotting meat—and after a few steps, an opening that was larger and wavering with daylight. For a moment I believed that the doorframe itself was moving in the wall, but then I stepped closer to it and saw that there was a curtain made of ribbons hanging across it. Even though they were frayed and faded and nearly as filthy as my own clothes, I thought they were very beautiful. I wanted to stand still and let them trace ticklish patterns on my skin—but instead I followed Yigranzi into the thin sunlight beyond the door.

Four walls of greyish stone with yellowed ivy clinging; two storeys, and wooden-railed balconies all around, and at the centre of this a courtyard. I saw this in a glance and turned my gaze up to the second-floor balconies. Women were leaning on the wood, staring down at me; women and girls too, who looked no older than I was. They were silent and motionless and none of them was smiling. Their dresses were reds, oranges, purples, and their arms (some as pale as mine, others as dark as Yigranzi’s, and shades in between, as well) were ringed with slender bands of copper and silver. I had only ever imagined cloth in such colours, and the metal I had seen had always been grey, dented into dullness. I stared back at each of them and stood up very tall, as if this would make me clean and pretty.

“Come,” Yigranzi said again, gesturing to the courtyard. It was small and empty except for a wooden walkway and the mud beneath it; a short, twisted tree with two branches and twelve dark green leaves (I counted them); and beneath the tree a low, flat stone. “Sit,” Yigranzi said, and I did. The stone was cool. When I laid my hands on its sides I found that they were worn-away smooth; the paths of many other fingers, gripping or stroking in anticipation.

Yigranzi knelt by the tree. Only now did I see the hole in its trunk. Its edges and top were rounded, the wood there lighter than the rest of the bark, and lined with carvings. Zigzags and spirals, rows of waves and circles connected by marks as vague yet distinct as veins below skin.
The Pattern
, I thought, and tried to dig my fingers into the stone, which was already warm from me. The Pattern that was all lives and one, all times and one; the Pattern that only seers could glimpse. . . .

As Yigranzi reached into the hole her hands and shoulders brushed pieces of cloth that hung from nails above the carvings. Some pieces were no bigger than a thumbnail, while others fluttered—I thought—like flags that cats might carry, if cats could carry flags. I could see designs on these larger ones—stitching in gold or silver thread that still glinted, even though the cloth around it had been bleached pale by sunlight and rain. Some of the stitches held locks of hair, teeth, little pouches that bulged with things I could not see. Offerings or pleas:
Show me his future . . . show me my own. . . .

“What was it that brought your vision on?” Yigranzi had shifted to face me and was leaning back on her heels. There was a round piece of copper in her lap; she was running her right forefinger around its rim in a way that seemed both purposeful and idle.

“My mother’s blood,” I said. “She was cutting potatoes.”

“Her blood.” Yigranzi’s white-speckled eyebrows rose, which made lines in her forehead. “Ah. A dangerous pattern. There’s power in it, to use or be used by. This”—she set the copper on my knees—“is not so dangerous, but will still seem strong to you. Have you ever gazed at your own face in a pool of water, or in a piece of metal—a mirror, like this one?”

I shook my head.

“You’ve never seen yourself at all, then?”

I shook my head again. Suddenly, with the mirror heavy against my thighs, I thought that I did not want to see. I raised my hands to my cheeks and cupped them there.

“Then your experience of the Othersight, if you do have it, will be very pure.”

I pressed my hands inward until I felt my lips purse. “I don’t want to see myself,” I said, my voice strange because of the pursing.

Yigranzi smiled, so faintly and quickly that I (who was not accustomed to smiles) was not sure there had been one at all. “It is not yourself you’ll be looking at. Never yourself—always others, the ones whose faces will also be in the mirror. And this time,” she added, getting to her feet slowly, her hump swaying—or so I imagined—“that person will be Bardrem. Bardrem!”