The Pattern Scars (18 page)

She allowed me to rest on the stairs. I sat, breathed, edged myself down, sat still again. She burbled and popped her tongue, as if she was not sure whether to praise or scold me. By the time we reached the bottom my vision was a bit clearer; her red feathers looked pink. I stood with my forehead against the enormous mirror until my ragged breathing smoothed. I pulled back and caught my own eyes, and I made a sound like one of Borl’s puzzled whines. My eyes were dark. It was not just the remnants of Othersight: they were dark blue, nearly black. They were Chenn’s.

I hardly noticed myself walking, this time. Uja led me slowly, though she nipped my fingertips whenever I stood still. I thought,
She did it too—of course she did—Chenn used the Bloodsight and he taught her to—of course, of course.

I lifted my head, when we got to the kitchen door. Uja scratched at it with her claws. “Why do you never open this one?” I said, and opened it myself.

I smelled it first: a sweetness of fruit, butter, sugar. I had never smelled this particular sweetness here, and for a moment I expected to see Bardrem, elbow-deep in flour, and Rudicol sucking in his thin cheeks, preparing to shout. I saw Laedon instead, standing by a window. Its two panes had been unlatched and opened (though they could not open far, because of the iron bars). I stared at his eyes, which seemed to be staring at me, and then I looked down at the cake that was sitting on the sill beside him. It was perfect: brown, round, so hot that the air around it shimmered.

“Orlo told you to do this,” I said, loudly, because I did not believe it. I did not believe that Orlo had told him; I also did not believe that I had. I walked to the window with Uja clicking along behind me. Laedon’s gaze stayed on me as I drew closer, but I ignored him. I looked at the cake. I touched its apple-pitted top and drew my fingers swiftly back before they scalded. A few moments later I reached again. This time I dug my fingers in, heedless of the heat. I gouged out a piece that left a shallow, unsightly hole, and I put it in my mouth. It burned along my tongue and all the way down my throat, but before this burning numbed me, I tasted it. It was delicious.

“Othercake,” I said, and I laughed until I cried.

You would think that there couldn’t possibly be any more blood. But there was—so much more, in fact, that all these memories seem washed in crimson, just as that vision of Laedon was. If this were not my own story, I would roll my eyes and grumble something about exaggeration.

So—the
next
blood.

I was desperately impatient that day, waiting for Orlo. I had been unsure about talking to him when my bleeding began, but now I paced and paced, afire with the need to tell him about a cake. Of course, since I wanted this so badly, he did not come. Not that evening, nor that night. I woke at dawn and padded through the house with a candle, thinking he might have returned very late and decided not to wake me, but I found only Uja, perched on the highest branch of her cage with her head beneath her wing. I sat and waited for her to wake up. When she showed no signs of doing this on her own, I rattled the bars and called her name and gave some piercing whistles of my own. “See?” I said when she finally shook her head erect (all its feathers puffing, then subsiding). “It’s unpleasant, being woken up like that. If I could get in there with you and pull on your feathers, I’d do that, too.” She blinked at me, her head cocked, and I groaned. “I’m sorry. But Orlo didn’t come and I couldn’t sleep. Please come out?”

She did not move.

“Ah,” I said. “You
won’t
come out—which means Orlo’s on his way? Why haven’t you ever shown him that you can leave your cage on your own? Why do you not
like
him?”

I talked and talked, while she regarded me calmly. I talked about Orlo, and eventually about Chenn. My words about her were even quicker than the rest. “He taught her too. He was showing her about Bloodseeing—that’s why she didn’t want to tell me about the cuts on her arms—it was a forbidden art, and she was afraid to mention it to me, just as she was afraid to mention Prandel.”

The day passed. My meals appeared in the kitchen, as usual, but I did not see Laedon. “Where does he
go
?” I said to Uja when I returned to the lesson room in the late afternoon. “Is there a secret room here somewhere? Or maybe when he closes his eyes he becomes invisible.” I giggled—a silly sound, and it went on too long. I felt half-mad with waiting.

I paced and sat. I changed the cloths in my underthings more often than I needed to and washed them in a bucket in the kitchen. I stared out the second-storey windows, because although the streets beyond the house were hardly visible (the trees were tall, and the house was at the top of a hill), I might be able to see him—just a glimpse of him, opening the gate, coming up the path to me.

He did not come at sunset, nor in the hours after. “If he never came back again,” I whispered to Uja, “if something happened to him, we’d all die in here.” This thought had not occurred to me in daylight; now, in darkness, it made my head hum with fear.

I fell asleep, somehow. I had been pressing my forehead against the library window, staring at the moon, which hung fat and white among branch shadows. I was aching with solitude, and, with the stubborn contrariness of the young, I was making it worse—forcing myself through memory after memory of Bardrem, Yigranzi, Chenn, the Lady, the spindly courtyard tree. I was consumed, certain I would never know peace of any sort, ever again—and then I was asleep.

And
then
, with a start that drove me to my feet and backward, I was awake again.

A sound had woken me. I had not heard it, with my sleeping ears, but I had felt it, and I felt it still, as I stood shaking by the door: a violent, echoing crash. “Orlo?” A thread of a voice that he would only have heard if he had been beside me, which he obviously was not. I eased the library door open and peered into the hallway. The lamps I had lit earlier shone on emptiness. I waited for a moment—for more noise; for him, approaching, explaining—and then I crept out into the corridor.

By the time I reached the entrance hall I had convinced myself that I had heard nothing.
A dream
, I thought.
Maybe the beets I ate for supper are to blame. . . .
I was relieved enough that this thought of beets made me hungry. I walked to the kitchen, scuffing my slippers loudly on the floor so that I would be able to imagine I was not alone. I raised my hand to turn the knob—but the door was already open a crack. I pushed on it, just a little, and as I did I heard another sound.

Words, muffled but furious, unintelligible, snapped off with teeth and sucked-in breath.

And another sound: a rhythmic, dull pounding.

My heart began to pound too, but I pushed at the door a bit, and a bit more, until I could see.

Orlo was sitting on my stool. He was wearing a dark, striped shirt—only he wasn’t; he was wearing no shirt at all. His shoulders, chest, back and arms glistened with blood. There was a bucket on the floor beside him, and a cloth on the table, but he was not using them. He was hunched over, his head bent; he was slamming his fists against the table, one after the other. Borl was stretched out at his feet. In the brief silences between words and fists I heard the dog whimpering—a high, thin, unbroken question.

I whimpered too—I must have, for Borl sprang to his feet and ran at me, barking, spraying spit. Orlo did not look up. Borl lunged and bit the hand I had lifted to stave him off and I cried out, but still Orlo did not look up. “Orlo!”—I kicked, caught Borl in the ribs and sent him skittering back—“
Orlo
!”

He lurched to his feet. His shoulders were rounded and he had to crane to see me, and even then he did not truly seem to be seeing me, for his black eyes leapt and rolled like Laedon’s. “What?” he cried. “Who is Orlo? By Pattern and Path, who is Orlo, and who are you?”

Borl was beside him again, panting, gazing up into his face with one ear cocked toward me. “Orlo,” I said, and my voice trembled. “That’s you: Orlo. And I’m Nola—I’m
Nola
; why don’t you know . . .?”

He groped behind him for the stool and sat down. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Me . . .”
He shook his head, ran a bloodied hand over his hair. “Yes. And—” He blinked at me. “You. Ah.”

I took a step toward him. “What’s happened? What’s wrong with you—why are you bleeding?”

“I . . .” He was running his hands over his skin now, smearing. “Sometimes they fight me.”

“What?”

“When I try to take them—they . . .” His head snapped up. His eyes were focused, seeing me at last, but I felt no relief at this.

“Let me help you.” I walked to him. “Let me clean it off.”
Be busy, sound firm; maybe he won’t notice your fear. . . .

I dipped the cloth in the bucket. The water was so cold that I felt I had awoken a second time, just as abruptly as the first. I wrung the cloth out. When I set it on his back he flinched—muscles bunching, so beautiful, so close. I wiped, dipped, wrung, over and over, and yet I found no wound on him—just smooth, firm flesh.

“Where are you hurt?” I asked as I dabbed at the hollow below his shoulder blade.

He frowned. “Hurt? No, no—it’s not mine. Not my blood.”

He sat up, stretched so that his back arched, and I saw his chest clearly (as I had not when he had been standing). Despite the blood, I saw the scars: corded, puckered, some white-healed, others purple, still others fresh and red. They crisscrossed each other from his nipples to the clenched ridges of his belly. I hesitated only for a moment; continued rinsing and washing, as if I was perfectly calm, not shuddering all the way to the soles of my feet.

“So whose blood is it?”

He stared at me. I could tell that he was no longer confused. He could have answered me, but he did not—just stared, with a small, tight smile. I could have waited for him to answer. I should have. But I was so alarmed by his silence that I said, in a rush, “Is it Prandel’s?”

His smile disappeared and his eyes narrowed. “Prandel?”

“Oh, Orlo—please don’t tell me you forget him too,
again
?” I was relieved that I sounded angry, not afraid (though I was afraid; was cold with it). “Prandel! Prandel, who killed Chenn—why don’t you
remember
him?”

Another smile. This one was slow and broad and familiar, but it made me even colder. Water dripped from the cloth that hung from my fingers, and these drips made light pink tears of his blood.

“Yes,” he said. He reached for me, cupped my chin in both his hands. His thumbs rested, warm and gentle, on my lower lip. “Yes, that’s it. It’s happened, at last: I’ve killed Prandel.”

Sildio came to me a few hours after sundown, last night. He must have knocked, but I didn’t hear him; I was bent over my paper, of course.

“Mistress,” he said, and I started. “I’m sorry—I don’t usually like to disturb you—but I heard you and had to check. . . . Were you laughing, just now, or crying?”

I lifted my hands to my cheeks, which were dry. “I don’t know,” I said. My voice sounded very rough; when had I last spoken, had a drink?

“I worry, Mistress. You hardly sleep, and sometimes you don’t eat for an entire day.”

I stared down at my ink-stained fingers and cleared my throat. “I know. But I need to finish writing. If I don’t write as much as I can every day, it’ll be years before I’m done. And in any case, was it not you who wanted me to do this in the first place?”

He smiled. (He has a sweet, lopsided smile. I never used to understand why Grasni flushed every time she mentioned him; now I do.)

“It was.” He walked over to me. “But I didn’t say you should starve. Now hold out your hands.” I did, and he slipped an apple into my right, a piece of bread into my left.

“Sildio,” I said, “you’ll make me plump.”

We both laughed. Such a simple exchange, and such a simple sound, but they made me feel dizzy.

I must begin again, now, before I gape at sleeping bird, dog and baby all day.

The kitchen. Orlo’s clean, wet skin. His hand around my wrist, clamped like iron. And his voice, low and breathless, stirring the hair by my ear: “Nola. Let me show you one more thing.”