The Pattern Scars (41 page)

He bent slowly forward and kissed her forehead, then her lips. Her breath rattled one more time. Her eyes fixed on his face. Her skin went cold so suddenly I thought it must never have been hot. I had imagined it; I was imagining all of it. Except that I still hummed with power and hunger, and her neck was ragged and oozing where the marks of my teeth were.

He kissed her once more, deeply, as if she would respond. He must have felt my shudder, for he straightened, said, “You are troubled; we must be quick. Look at her and find a way back in.”

No
, I thought—but how could I think this? We had to bring her back now, and I was ready; my body and vision were urging me as he was. I blinked away the black spots and focused on her face—but it was her neck that drew my gaze. The stark, wet pattern my mouth had made there. I narrowed my eyes and I was in and away, so quickly, with him laughing and warm behind me.

Selera’s living Otherworld was like Laedon’s; her dead one is nothing like Borl’s.
Of course not
, I think,
he’s an animal
—but I reel anyway. I throw my arms out—or I am fairly sure I do—but the space around me is so black that it is all I see. And there is nothing below my feet, which churn and stretch, searching or evading or maybe both.

“Be still,” Teldaru says from somewhere that sounds close. I relax my limbs and he is there, pulling me against him. I thrust at him but his arms are roots wrapped around me and I am a little relieved, because the darkness feels very deep.

“It’s too late,” I murmur. “She’s gone.”

“No.” He puts his hands on my face and tilts it and kisses me on my forehead, nose and chin. “Look for a colour,” he says against my lips. “There will be several; just find one.”

He turns me around so that he is behind me, as he was in the last vision. I close my eyes and open them and there
is
a difference: the Otherworld is eddying with shadows. Some look black and it is their motion I see: they bend and blow like smoke. Others, a little further away, seem lighter—grey or white—and as I concentrate on these a few begin to change. I see a glint of green and another that is bronze, and I throw myself forward. I do not expect to touch one of the flickers already, but the green one is in my hands. It is limp, and as hot as Selera’s cheek was, and I nearly drop it. Teldaru’s hands close over mine and we both hold tight.

“Now another,” he says, and suddenly I see all sorts of colours, where the green was: a tangle of ribbons, each of them a different shade, each of them motionless. Teldaru reaches past me; I see his arm, which is impossibly long. He grasps a handful of ribbons and brings his arm carefully back. He plaits them, or that is what it looks like, and as he touches one to the other they begin to twitch and glow. With every bright, crossed strand I see an image: a baby, the sun, a necklace, a mirror. There are so many, and they change with every one of my heartbeats.

“How do you know what to do with them?” I ask.

“I feel it,” he says. “They still remember. Add yours: you’ll see.”

I bend, holding the green strand toward the others. As soon as it touches them it jerks and snaps. My palms burn but I manage to wind it around a blue and an orange. Abruptly it slides from my grasp and finishes what I began, twining itself, weaving its own pattern. I laugh in disbelief and feel my strength again, and I reach for more, greedy and certain.

The darkness begins to brighten, or maybe it is just the dazzle of images. I can’t even name them now, because they come and go so quickly. The sky—I see sky, so it is not simply the pictures that are light. There is ground beneath me, rough and splintered. A red hill in front. Teldaru throws a braid of ribbons that melt into a road when they fall: a pulsing, silver road with a sheen of gold. I toss the knotted length that is in my hand and it, too, becomes a road. It slithers its way out over the earth, which is softening beneath my bare toes.

This is easy, at first. I am still so powerful, and it feels effortless, drawing in the faint, sagging ribbons and making them breathe.
Easy, easy
, I think as I watch them harden and slide away from me. Easy, as canyons open and mold and the distance puckers with hills.

Only then it is not easy any more. I am holding a blue cord when I feel a tug from deep within me. I gasp at the shock of it, and at the pain, which is as sharp as the metal Teldaru uses to cut me.

“Don’t worry,” he says, “you’ll hardly feel it if you keep going”—but I do feel it. Every time I touch a strand or see an image my insides tear. I remember how the strength flowed from my veins into Borl’s dead paths, but this is nothing like that was. I cry out and claw at my own skin but the pain is too much.

“Nola! Stay with me!” He is touching me. I can hardly feel him. “
Nola!
” The red is flooding with black—is it mine or hers?—and all the colours are gone. His hands are on my arms. He pushes me, and I do feel this, and the rush of wind as I fall.

The stone gathered itself around and beneath me. Real stone. Ranior’s Tomb. I was on my back and all my bones were broken—but they were not, because I was writhing and bending.

He will be angry
, I thought. I was too tired to care. When his hands crept up over me, from knees to breasts, I expected them to gouge or twist. They did not. They lingered, and each stroke returned me to my body. His hands. My naked, aching skin.

I opened my eyes. His head was bent over my breasts. He looked very far away.
My dress?
I wondered through the thickness in my head, and then I realized that it was bunched up under my arms. Its folds were moving like waves. I wanted to close my eyes again, but the black shapes that played over Teldaru’s head and arms were mesmerizing.

His tongue was cool. I saw it making wet circles on my nipples—and his teeth, after, closing hard but also gently. I moaned.
Selera?
I thought—or maybe I said it aloud, because he lifted his head, murmured, “It’s all right. You did very well. You’ll do better next time.”

I forced myself to look for Selera. She was not where she had been—she was halfway to the door, and I wondered whether she had moved there herself or whether Teldaru had driven her there. (
Teldaru and I
, I thought, and shrank away from it.) Selera was broken, just as Laedon had been. Head and legs contorted; one arm beneath her, turned the wrong way. Not even my warped vision made me believe she was alive.

Teldaru’s body was on mine. His weight was crushing; he was hardly supporting himself. He held my face between his hands and I was too weak to pull it away. His black eyes were spotted with red and flashes of silver that looked like lightning branches. They stayed open, even when he kissed me. Even when he nudged my knees open with his and leaned down more heavily yet. And then he was inside me and I was moaning again, twisting around his stillness. When he finally shifted it was just an easing away and a smooth, slow return—just this, over and over. I bit my lip to keep from making any more sounds. I squeezed my eyes shut and he forced them open with his thumbs and forefingers. He gazed at me until he gave one last, gentle thrust, and a shudder ran through us both. Then his eyes dipped shut and he sagged off me, onto the cool red stones.

I gasped for breath and it scalded my throat. I heard a noise that I discovered, moments later, was my own whimpering. There was something else, though—a low, regular grumble. I rolled over (wincing, throbbing) and he was there, his face level with my breasts. His breath was warm on my skin, and it was his breath that was so noisy. I craned so that I could see his face. His eyelids were fluttering but mostly closed. I lay back and listened to him snore once, twice, three times. Then I moved.

It seemed to take a very long time to sit, but once I succeeded the rest was easier. I was on my knees, rocking forward on my fists; I was in a crouch, my dress falling, arranging itself back over my body. I felt a warmth that I knew was blood but did not want to waste my strength finding the strips of cloth that used to be wadded between my legs. I lurched to my feet and stared down at him, through the wobbling of my after-vision.

Kill him. A torch will do, if you hit him hard enough.

Teldaru sucked in a different-sounding snore and went silent for a moment that seemed to last far too long.
He’s dead
now, I thought giddily, but then he breathed again and rolled from his side to his belly.

Kill him and the curse will never break.

I stood over him, gazing at his slack lips and his cheek, with its fuzz of hair that I knew was red-gold, but that looked greenish now. His limbs were like a child’s, sprawled and careless.

If you can’t kill him, run.

No point—you know this. You cannot leave him: you were a fool ever to think you could.

Run anyway. Do
something
.

I stumbled around him and over Selera’s body. I paused by the door just long enough to pick up my case; I pushed the door open and this time no one stopped me. I plunged down into the darkness and set a shaking hand to the walls.

Please, please lead me like you did before; be stronger than the curse; show me the Path that will take me away. . . .
The Pattern hummed around me. I followed it even more swiftly than I had the last time, my fingers gliding along the spaces between the carvings. Each step gave me strength. I was nearly running by the time I reached the upper door. My blood pounded in my ears as I gripped the bolt and slammed it free.
It’s working; I’m out, I’m away
—this time somehow, truly away
. . . .

I did not close the door behind me. I took a few steps that carried me beyond the hill, to where the path was. A few more lengthening paces, and then something hit me in the chest and I toppled backward. I yelled and flailed but the weight was still on me—and it was warm and hairy, and it smelled like rotten meat.

“Borl!” I gasped, and the pain ebbed a little more as I laughed. “Off, boy—off, Borl; let me up!”

He was gone, too abruptly, deposited in a whining heap beside me by a shadow that turned swiftly to me. Hands hauled me to my feet; a face loomed, so close and speckled with dark vision-blotches that I did not recognize it. Not until I heard the voice.

“What is going on?” said Bardrem. “Tell me, Nola, before I—”

“No,” I said, twisting in his grip, “not now—we must go, quickly—
we must go
.”

He held me still. He had to be seeing me—the blood on my face, and whatever was in my eyes. “Why?” he said in a low, even more urgent voice. “Tell me—I won’t go anywhere until you tell me why he hurt you. I followed you—I waited all that time and I was angry and then I saw you, and I saw him catch you and then kick the dog . . . the dog made me come—I don’t know if I would have, I was that angry. But he hurt you.” Bardrem touched my cheeks with his palms and I flinched. “Where is he?” Bardrem asked, very quietly. “
Who
is he?”

“Ah yes,” said Teldaru from behind us. “I was wearing my hood, wasn’t I? You didn’t see my face.”

There was no hood now. He walked over to us; stopped about five paces away. Borl growled and cowered. Bardrem drew himself up—I saw this and remembered Yigranzi’s thin, bare tree, and I wanted to touch him but could not.

“Orlo,” Bardrem said.

Teldaru smiled. “Kitchen boy. Will you try to kill me now?”

He was holding an unlit torch. Bardrem was holding nothing.

“It is a good scar,” Teldaru said, gesturing with the wood. “The one I gave you. Have you bedded many girls because of it? My own scars have been very useful that way—haven’t they, Nola?”

Teldaru’s teeth gleamed.

Bardrem launched himself forward—a blur, a wind that pushed me back a step. He sent Teldaru back too, and both of them fell. For a moment Bardrem was astride him, pummelling and grunting. But then Teldaru heaved Bardrem off in a single effortless thrust, and he was grinding his knees into Bardrem’s chest, and the torch was rising and descending and making a sound that was louder than Bardrem’s cries, or my own. I saw Bardrem’s skin, pale in the starlight but dark, too, with shadows and blood. The blood spread across his face with every blow. It sprayed over my hands and arms when I wrapped them around Teldaru and pulled at him, as hard as I could. He threw me off with a grunt and stood, and now the torch’s arc was higher and it landed on Bardrem’s chest and his back when he tried to roll away from it. I knelt, my muscles bunched and ready for the spring that would carry me to Teldaru again. I would be stronger. I would claw at his eyes and sink my teeth into his flesh—but no. He was turning to me. Bardrem was motionless, bent wrong. His fair hair was black, where it met his neck. Teldaru’s face was also streaked with black. He lifted the back of his hand and wiped it across his cheek, and the blood smeared and thinned in the shape of his knuckles.

“Go on.” His breathing was ragged. His eyes looked silver, and they held me on my knees. “Try to run from me again. I won’t chase you. Go.”