The Pattern Scars (23 page)

I stopped screaming and panted, instead. I gazed down at my blood, which looked darker than any shade of red, in the dimness. Snakes and ribbons; paths on my skin. I wondered briefly whether he would see my Paths in the same way as I had seen Laedon’s. Whether they would look like roads, or like things I’d never seen. Then I wondered nothing, for he was bending over the mirror, angling it so that I was in its gold, and his black eyes were fixed and Other.

I had never watched him Othersee. In all our lessons, all those months, I had never seen him do this. I watched him now. He was so still, every angle and hollow of him breathing lamplight. He was beautiful. Far away, seeing me as I had never even seen myself—and my heart pounded with more than pain, more than fear.

The first sensations are flutterings, deep beneath the wounds. Tiny creatures beating their wings, making my stomach lift and fall.
That’s him
, I think, and my pulse sends tingling waves to the ends of my fingers and toes and the roots of my hair. Very quickly the fluttering becomes a scraping, which eases its way along my bones and my veins. I moan a long, low note that does not change, and the vibration helps a little. He is pulling. Though his body does not move, he is drawing something within me, slow and hard. I fall to my side on the pallet. I fold into myself and arch out again, rubbing my cheek on the rough blanket. He is knotting, snipping, burning ends until they crumble like spent wicks. My vision is clouding. He blurs in the light and the gold swims up and around him. I clench my eyes shut and see nothing but orange-tinted darkness, but it does not matter: he is everywhere, inside and out. All the pain is one.
Take me
, I think, and it does, in a surge of deeper darkness.

When I opened my eyes I knew that it was much later, though I didn’t know how I was so certain of this. The lamp’s flame was flickering lower. I was numb, but also shuddering. I watched my legs buck and thrash on the blanket. My toes dug and curled. I felt nothing; I was here but gone.

Teldaru was slumped against the wall by the door. The chair was lying on its side between us. He was looking at me, almost without blinking.

“What . . .” My voice and my eyes—all I had from before. I had no idea how I found them. “What did you do? What did you change?”

He did not answer for so long that I thought,
He is paralyzed . . . he is dying . . .
But then a corner of his mouth lifted, and an eyebrow. “Mistress . . . Hasty,” he said. His voice was even rougher than mine, and as thin as smoke. “You’ll see. When I’m done.”

“Done?” I whispered, and I closed my eyes again so that I would not have to see his smile.

I felt no different. After the numbness had passed, there was fire—fever under my skin; I wondered why it did not blister—but a few days after that I was myself again. Everything was as it had been: Teldaru brought me my food and dealt with the bucket, and he did not speak to me, and I did not speak to him. All I could think when I looked at him was,
What have you done to me?
—but I never said this. I waited to wake one morning and discover that I was lame, or that my hair had all fallen out, or (and this seemed the likeliest, the longer I thought of it) that I was blind, but every morning I was just the same as ever. I almost convinced myself that I had imagined his “When I’m done.” Perhaps I had been dreaming; perhaps he was finished, and whatever he had tried to do to me had failed. I almost convinced myself. But when he appeared one day with the mirror, the ropes and the knife, I was not surprised.

“How do you feel?” he said, quite solicitously (after all the previous days of silence).

I glared at him.

“I need to know,” he went on, “because how you feel now may affect what I—”

“I feel fine. And how are you?”

I saw him frown, just for a moment, before his smile returned. “I am glad you are well. This means we are ready to continue.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and moved his feet back and forth, back and forth, lazily. “We will begin, as before, with a story.”

“About Zemiya?” I asked brightly, sitting up very tall with my hands clasped in my lap.

If I had hoped to annoy him again, it did not seem to work. “Yes,” he said smoothly. “And about Ranior and Mambura.”

I was so surprised that I spoke before I remembered that I should not show any true interest. “What?”

“Yes—Ranior, who united the quarrelsome tribes of Sarsenay, three hundred years ago, and raised this great keep above a cluster of huts—and Mambura, the island savage who slew him before himself being slain—”

“Everyone knows about this”—so many statues and paintings, books and poems, and the great midsummer procession.

“Well, then. A story about Ranior and Mambura—and Zemiya too, and Neluja, and their green islands and blue ocean. I went there with Haldrin’s family, you see. When I was eighteen.”

Teldaru was seasick. Haldrin was too, but only for the first day; Teldaru was rushing to the ship’s side up until the last morning of the journey. He hated the water—the pure, clear water that was as green as it was blue, in patches that stretched like ribbons around the ship. He had hated the water off Sarsenay, as well, which had been rough and grey—but this was worse. So calm, so beautiful, and yet still he retched until his ribs ached, while Haldrin made maddening, comforting noises beside him.

He felt much thinner when he alit on Belakaoan soil. He held himself very tall, though, amidst the drums and dancers, with their gem-encrusted hair and clothes. He thrust his shoulders back, because they were quite broad now, just as his chest was. And Zemiya noticed. She stood on a ledge that jutted from one of the painted, patterned black rock spurs that seemed to act as houses, here, and she looked him up and down with a slow and hungry smile. He looked back at her—such smooth, dark curves; and he could almost smell her—and smiled himself, triumphantly.

She had apparently forgotten to fear him. Perhaps her desire was too great for caution. He woke on the first night to her hands on him. Her hands and then her lips, warm and wet on his belly, trailing down as her fingers did. He was awake; this was glaringly obvious, though he kept very still. She lifted her head and he saw the white flashes of her teeth and eyes.

“You are more handsome than you were,” she said in that throaty, accented voice that made his people’s words into a new language. He lifted himself onto his elbows, about to say something commanding, even harsh, but she rose and gazed down at him. Her lips were still wet. He was wet—bathed in sweat that made his pale skin shine.

“Now it is time for me to show you
my
water,” she said, “and
my
fish”—and she disappeared beneath the jagged arch of door.

He commanded himself to stay where he was.

He rose and followed her.

He rushed along the tall, crooked hallway, past the room where Haldrin would be sleeping, down the twisting steps that led out into the night. She was a shadow among the black rock spires, but he never lost sight of her. The jewelled ribbons in her hair caught the moonlight. They winked down a slope that was covered in creepers and onto the black-rock beach. She climbed swiftly over the rock with her bare feet; he had to pick his way, feeling for pits and bumps. His slowness annoyed him—but better to be slow than to sprawl at those bare feet of hers like a clumsy child.

“There,” she said when he was finally standing beside her, on a rock that made him a head shorter than she was. “Look.”

Dark water. The Sarsenayan ship lifting and falling, the only familiar thing in emptiness. Flickers of fire in the distance that he could not measure with his eye or his mind. He said nothing, determined to betray no interest.

“Your awe makes you silent,” she said. He could hear the insolent grin in her voice. “I understand.”

He snorted. “What is there to say about so much water?”

“And what of its shining”—long, iridescent streamers, he saw, fluttering pink and green; tentacles, scales?—“and the flames?”

“What
of
the flames?”

“How thoughtful of you to ask. The flames are new islands—fire mountains . . . volcanoes, rising up from the sea. Belakao is always being born.” He felt her fingers tracing his eyebrow and then his cheekbone and then his jaw. “That is why we are so strong. Our land is always young.”

“Ha!” he said, leaning his head away from her hand. “But what of the wisdom of maturity? My land is ancient and wise and made of stone and wood, so you can
see
what it is you’re ruling. This,” he went on, waving an arm at the darkness, “is nothing.”

He looked up at her, waiting for a blow or a bite or at least some shrieking. He was dizzy with need.

She did not speak. She stared at him. Waves sloshed over the rock, and the volcanoes across the water sent tremors up through his feet, and the iridescent streamers flickered. He waited—but it was not Zemiya who spoke next.

“Zemiya-
moabene
.” Neluja said something else in her own language, but Teldaru hardly heard it; he was gaping at the bird beside her. A creature that stood as tall as her waist, with glossy feathers whose colours he could not see well, in the moon-dark. It gazed back at him, its head cocked. Its beak glinted like a blade.

“I will guess,” Zemiya said to him (having apparently ignored her sister’s words), “that your birds in Sarsenay are small and brown.”

He would have reached for her, as he had four years before, if it had not been for Neluja. Instead he hissed, “We could crush your island bones, if we wanted to. If the king didn’t need your gems and cloth and horrible fruit—if your father offered the same insults to him that you offer me, we would drive you and all your people into the sea; you would drown in your own hateful water.”

He was panting. The bird made a rough, low sound and Zemiya smiled at it and then at him, her eyes narrowed to slits.

“Yes? How interesting. Because I believe we Belakaoans know some other truth.” She looked away from him, at the shifting, flame-spotted distance. She was biting her full, dark lower lip.

“And what other truth is that?” he asked.

“Your people believe in words of future time. In the pictures you see for them.”

“Visions,” he said. “Prophecies—yes.”

“Well, we have a . . . prophecy here. A vision seen by an
ispa
long ago. It was of your country and mine.”

“Zemiya,” Neluja said, slowly and clearly, “what are you doing?”

Again her sister paid her no heed. “The greatest Belakaoan
moabe
of all history was Mambura, Flamebird of the Islands. Yours was Ranior. The . . . War Hound. They fought. They died together, in your country.” The sound of these words in her mouth made Teldaru dig his fingers into his palms. “The prophecy was: the cold stone country will only conquer the islands when bird and dog rise again. Only,” she said, speaking faster, “if another, new, great leader brings them together in battle will your Sarsenay prevail.” She smiled once more, while the real bird trilled a long, sweet note. “So you see: this will never happen.”

“No,” he said. “It could. If your seer saw it, it could.”

“I do not think so,” said Neluja quietly. Her hand was cupped over the bird’s head. She was looking at Zemiya. He wished there were light, so that he could see what was passing between their eyes.

“Maybe
ispu
Teldaru is right,” Zemiya said. “Maybe his small friend Haldrin will be the next great leader, and maybe he will wave his small magic hand and bring back these dead.”

“Maybe
I
will.” Teldaru spoke in a rush, and he stood taller—as tall as he could, on the rock that still made him shorter than her. “Maybe I will be the great leader.”

She tipped her head back and laughed. He saw her closed eyes and the line of her throat, her arched back and her breasts, pressing against thin, taut cloth. The bird clacked its dagger beak as if it, too, were laughing.

“Mambura and Ranior and Teldaru,” he said as she wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands. The names were right together; they filled him with such certainty and strength that he felt as if he were partly in the Otherworld, surrounded by what would be. “You won’t be laughing then.”