The Pattern Scars (59 page)

And then the king himself brought someone else.

“She is sick,” he said. He gestured to a nursemaid, who passed Layibe into my arms. “I thought to raise her myself, but I cannot—look at her—she is ill and miserable. And in any case, she is yours. The Pattern has seen fit to make this so.”

Layibe hardly seemed to be breathing. And she was so tiny, so thin—she should have been crawling by now, and laughing, and sitting up waving plump little fists. I brushed the curls away from her forehead, where a single vein throbbed. She rolled her milky eyes at me and made a mewling noise. I thought:
This poor, poor child; she, at least, should make you feel something.

But she did not.

Sildio rapped on my door, one morning in autumn. “Mistress,” he said. He still calls me this, when there is no one else to hear. “The
ispa
is here to see you.”

I sat for a moment, looking down at Layibe, who was asleep in her cradle. Then I rose and walked to the door and opened it.

“
Ispa
.” I had come to realize that my dead, flat voice sounded dignified. I stood back to let her enter. Uja waddled in behind her, her tail feathers swishing on the floor. Sildio stared at both of them.

“You must be glad to have her back,” I said, gesturing at Uja. I had had no intention of being pleasant. For more than a month I had thought only about shaking Neluja and screaming up into her face—but these had just been imaginings. Now that she was here, I could not summon any sort of strength.

Neluja gazed at the bird, and at me. Her bright yellow headscarf set off the polished darkness of her face, and its hollows and edges. Her dress was orange. She and Uja were so bright that I thought even Layibe might be able to see them.

“I am,” she said. “I feared for her a little, when she chose to go with him.”

“She chose . . .?” I would have laughed, if I could have. “He thought he had stolen her. Of course you and she were both too clever for that.” I hunkered down in front of Uja, who cocked her head at me. “Why? Why would you sit in his cage, all those years, when you could have been free?”

Neluja cupped her hand over Uja’s head. “
Isparra
flows through her as it does through us. We cannot expect always to understand it—just to feel it and watch it.”

I straightened. “Words!” I said, almost as I had to Yigranzi. It seemed there was strength in me, after all. “Such pretty, empty words! But no—the watching—that’s true. That’s something you do well.”

I could feel my face flushing. I tried to breathe, to cool and calm myself; if I began to feel anything, I might never stop.

“And what would you have had me do, at that hill?
Ispas
do not hold spears. We do not hurt; sometimes this means we also cannot help.”

“But before the Hill,” I said. “
Isparra
has shown you only darkness for years—you told me this. You told Haldrin this. If you had been able to do something, just once—if you had drowned Teldaru when he was on Belakao—if you had poisoned his wine when you first came here—your sister would still be alive. So many people would be, if you had acted.”

Her eyes were unbearably gentle. “You could not choose. And you cannot understand why others do not. But look, too,” she continued, stepping over to the cradle. She bent and put her hand on the side; she tipped it a bit, so that we could both see Layibe’s thin, sallow face. “See what happens when there is action, not acceptance.”

“No. No—your sister was so lovely, when this baby was in her—she wanted it, Haldrin did; I was only trying to spare them grief.”

My voice wobbled. Uja nibbled one of my palms; Borl licked the other. I snatched my hands away and thrust them under my arms.

“Now,” I said, more steadily, “you will tell me something wise about suffering. You will say that one person’s suffering is but a twig in the current of
isparra
.”

Neluja smiled. She was so different from Zemiya, but something in their smiles was the same. “Now that you have said it,” she said, “I will not.” She was serious again, already. “You have suffered too,
Ispa
Nola. Do not think this does not matter.”

I dug my fingertips into my skin. “I am no longer
Ispa
Nola,” I said. “As you know.”

“And would you be once more, if you could?”

I looked out my window at the strip of sky. There were no clouds in it. I could tell there was a wind, though; every few moments a strip of cloth fluttered into view. One of Haldrin’s mourning flags, blue and black, flying from the gatehouse tower.

“I used to imagine it all the time.” I swallowed. Sometimes my desire to speak my own words was as thick and solid in my throat as the curse used to be. “I would imagine him remaking my Paths. I would imagine Otherseeing—all the visions, all the words—and me being deserving of people’s awe and thanks and even their anger and tears. As long as it was truth.”

I turned my gaze back to her. “I was fourteen when I was lost,
Ispa
. I saw butterflies and a hillside, in my last vision, and I made a brothel girl happy. It will never be like that again.”

“No. But what if there were someone powerful enough to remake these last, cursed roads of yours?”

The lizard scuttled along her shoulder and upper arm, as I stared at her. I thought:
The white in her black eyes is as fluid as foam upon a wave.
It was an image Bardrem could have come up with—and I would have mocked it and he would have tossed his hair out of his eyes to glare at me, and stomped to his slanted room and slammed his crooked door. A few hours later he would have dropped sugared almonds into my lap in the kitchen while Rudicol wasn’t looking.

“I used to imagine it,” I said slowly. “I do not any more. And you would never do this. Why did you even ask?”

Neluja reached up and rubbed the lizard’s wedge-shaped head with her forefinger. “I simply wished to know,” she said, “before I left Sarsenay.”

“And why did you stay in the first place, when all your countrymen were gone?”

She shrugged slightly—a Sarsenayan motion, not a Belakaoan one. It made her look younger. “Because I was not ready to leave. Now I am.”

She bent once more and kissed Layibe’s forehead. Then she walked to the door.

“You have to go, really,” I said. If I kept talking, perhaps she would linger. I could not believe I wanted her to, but I did. “If you don’t, you’ll be here when the snow comes. And I think the winter will feel long, in King Derris’s court.”

She smiled again and lifted her hand to the latch. She looked sad, despite the smile. It was an expression I recognized, because I had worn it too, so many times. “Wait—
Ispa
—you said once that you’d seen me, in one of your visions. What was it you saw?”

She was silent for a long time. When her lips finally parted, I held up my hand. “No. I don’t really want to know. Sometimes it’s the knowing that brings the darkness in.”

“You are wise, Nola,” said Neluja, “and you are strong. These things are the rock beneath all the currents there are.”

She held out her hand to Uja. “Come,” she said. Uja trilled and fluffed her feathers but stayed beside me. “Uja?” Neluja said, and Uja whistled five descending notes. She still did not move.

Neluja said something to the bird in her own language—something low and tender. “It seems,” she said after she was done, “that Uja is not ready to leave yet, herself.”

“And you will let her stay?”

One last smile, this one wide and very, very like Zemiya’s. “She is Uja. She is
moabe
and
ispa
and even more than these. And it is for the best,” she added as she pulled the door open, “since birds and lizards are not friends.”

I almost laughed.

Sildio knocked on my door the day after Neluja left Sarsenay City. “Yes?” I called, a little crossly. I was tired. I had not left my room in weeks and even before that I had only gone down to the courtyard once or twice, at night so that no one would see me. Layibe had been too quiet, and I was trying to summon the strength to worry. Uja and Borl had been snapping and growling at each other, and it annoyed me that they might have been enjoying themselves. And now another knock—another visitor, perhaps, to interrupt my precarious solitude.

“Mistress,” Sildio called back in an odd, muffled voice, “there’s someone to see you—the new Otherseer the king summoned, weeks back.”

I stood up. I smoothed my skirts.
Why?
I thought.
Why would this Otherseer come to me? Surely not because King Derris commanded it. To gloat? To pity? It makes no difference—I will not be able to bear it. Black eyes that see the Otherworld, when my own no longer do.

I pulled the door open.

“Nola,” said Grasni. Grasni with short, full curls, in a dress that did not fit right. “Oh, Nola, I’m so sorry.” And she held out her arms to me as I began to cry.

Grasni reminded me that I was broken. She did not mean to: she wanted only to mend me.

“You must leave this room; I insist on this now. Look at it! A dog and an enormous bird and a baby and you—come with me. Immediately. All of you.”

“No.” My voice shook. It seemed to have been shaking ever since she had returned, weeks ago. “Not during the day. People will know who I am—and anyway, you have lessons to teach. Otherseeing to do. So, no.”

“Yes.” She slipped two butterfly pins into my hair. She had cut it, two days ago—lopped the entire braid off; we both shrieked when we saw it in her hand—and now it was an unruly thatch around my ears. “People will know who you are, and they should. You are Mistress Nola. And yes, I have things to do at the school, but you can walk there with me.”

“Oh, Grasni,” I said, “I don’t know.” But I did go with her. I held Layibe on my shoulder and Borl loped behind us. Uja waddled until we reached the door to the seers’ courtyard and then she took three ungainly strides and flew, high above the trees.

I hesitated. We had seen only a few guards so far, and I had managed to avoid their eyes, but the courtyard was full of students—they had almost all returned. Students who used to be mine.

“King Derris would not want me to go any further.”

Grasni scowled. I remembered the way her blotches of freckles used to lengthen and blend, when she did this. They still did.

“King Derris would prefer it if there were no lycus blossoms to distract us from sober contemplation of the Pattern. He would banish kittens, if he could, and disallow tasty foods. But he cannot do these things, and he will not be able to stop you from walking in a courtyard.”

“Grasni . . .”

She looked at me—not scowling, not smiling. Solemn, in a way that made me want to cry again.

“Just a few steps, Nola. Just out onto the path, where you can feel the wind.”

She took my arm and we walked.
Under the trees
, I thought—
just get me there.
The leaves were russet and crimson and gold, and they would hide me a little.

But someone saw us before we reached the trees. A child—Dren—cried out my name. He ran from the patch of grass where he was playing. When he threw himself against me I staggered backward and squeezed Layibe so hard that she yelped.

“Mistress!” he gasped into the folds of my dress. “The king told us
you couldn’t ever come back but I knew he wasn’t right, even though he’s the king. . . .”

I eased his clinging arms free. Tipped his head back with my hand beneath his chin and shook it a bit, so that his black curls danced. I tried to smile, and succeeded, but I could not speak.

“Dren,” Grasni said, “Mistress Nola will not visit you again if you knock her over. Step back, now. All the way—off you go, before I ask you to sort lesson books.”

He grinned at me and turned and dashed away. The other students who had gathered drifted off too. Some of them—the older ones—stared at me over their shoulders.
Of course they do
, I thought.
I should be relieved that they’re not screaming.

“That’s far enough,” I said.

“Very well,” said Grasni. “But soon you will go farther.”

I did not, though—not really. A few times I went down the steps to the main courtyard, and across it to the gate. Out the gate once, but only to the fountain. The shakiness in my voice and legs did not go away.