The Pattern Scars Read online

  I was on the floor, my legs twisted beneath me. The girl—the real one—was gaping down at me. “What?” Bardrem’s voice, but I could not see him. All I saw were the girl’s wide eyes and the cream-coloured, lace-trimmed cloth that had slipped off her shoulder.

  “Snakes.” I didn’t wait to breathe or think; just spoke the words that were as thick as my tongue in my mouth. “You’re having a baby but instead it’s snakes and you’re bleeding from everywhere, especially where the milk should be—”

  The girl screamed. She screamed only once, but it was piercing and pure—almost like music—and moments later there were footsteps in the corridor outside.

  Yigranzi was wearing a long, shapeless robe with splotches of rainbow colour on it. The girls gathering behind her were wearing their own night clothes: dresses cut to mid-thigh; dresses made of long strips of cloth that whispered apart to reveal kohl-patterned skin. I saw all these things with a clarity that hurt me like a headache.

  “Go. All of you.”

  There were no more girls, after Yigranzi said this—except for the one, of course, who had wrapped her arms around herself. She was shaking so violently that her sleeping gown slipped all the way off her shoulders. I could see her nipples through the knot of her arms. They were dark but did not look anything like blood.

  “I said go.” This to Bardrem, who was still standing by the washstand. The jug on the floor by his feet had fallen over. He glanced from Yigranzi to me and Yigranzi stepped toward him, her arm raised, her hand a fist. He left in a flurry of limbs and hair, and then there were only three of us left in the room.

  “Child.” Yigranzi had turned to the shivering girl. She reached out her dark, round-knuckled hand and put it gently on the girl’s bare shoulder. The girl made a low, ragged, animal sound. She clawed at Yigranzi’s hand with both of her own, which were white and slender, and I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to clutch or to push away.

  “Sit, child,” Yigranzi said in a quiet voice I had never heard before. “Sit and talk to me. I will pour you some wine, and there is a blanket there—”

  The girl spun and ran. A trailing bit of lace caught on the door latch and ripped away from the dress. I stared at the lace, after the girl was gone. I was desperately thirsty and very dizzy; the lace, which I had thought before was cream-coloured, now looked blue with livid yellow spots.

  “Nola.” How many voices did Yigranzi have, waiting in her throat? This one was flat and empty, as if it wasn’t made of sound at all. “I will go after her to see what may be done. You will stay here. I will lock you in tonight and tomorrow, and perhaps for many days after. You will see no one and speak to no one. When I decide that there is seeing and speaking to be done, I will come for you.”

  I was looking at the floor when Yigranzi left, so I saw only the swirl of her sleeping robe and the tips of her soft leather shoes (which were a light green that made me thirstier). The door closed and the key turned. A few moments later, I went to the washstand and picked up the fallen jug. The rug beneath it was soaking, but there was no water left to drink. No water except what was in the bowl, thickened with wax. I stared into the bowl, and even though I was shaking now, and Yigranzi’s new, cold voice was still in my ears, I felt a stirring of something that almost made me want to smile.

  Yigranzi came for me three days later.

  “Follow me,” she said while I was struggling up off the bed, sucking in the scents of baking bread and sweat and perfumed oil that were rolling in my open door. I followed, feeling feeble and awkward. It was midday and the hallways were empty and silent. Yigranzi led me into one I’d not yet been in; it had higher ceilings and dark, rich, worm-eaten wood paneling around the doors and up the walls. She stopped before one of these doors. I heard the sobbing before she even opened it.

  The girl who had come to me was lying on a bed. Three other girls sat around her, stroking her hair, her arms. Her dress is red, I thought, and so are the sheets—but then my vision-memory returned and I knew that all this darkness was blood—and as soon as I knew it I smelled it, heavy and rank-sweet. Her skin was even paler than before. Several of my mother’s babies had died, and I had washed most of them, after. Their flesh had looked like this—white stone, white eggshell; something tender and hard.

  “Her name was Larally,” Yigranzi said from behind me. “She was from a town to the east called Nordes.”

  The girls stopped their noises when Yigranzi spoke. They blinked up at us as if they’d just awoken. One of them—black-haired, with a wine-coloured birthmark under her left eye—reached across the bed and gripped her friend’s wrist. It was me they stared at now, their lips slightly parted, their eyes round. I had never been regarded with fear before. I had never been regarded with much of anything, before I came here.

  “I saw her belly,” I whispered. “In my vision. There was going to be a baby.” The girl’s belly was a hollowed-out space beneath her blood-wet shift. Her hipbones stuck up like knife hilts. “Where is it? Did it get born too soon? Is that what my vision was about—it coming too soon?”

  Yigranzi was staring at me too. I almost expected the dead girl’s eyes to pop open; this thought made me want to giggle, all of a sudden, which made no sense at all. “Where’s the baby?” Yigranzi said slowly. “I wonder. On the midden heap behind the kitchen, maybe, or burned, or buried at the edge of the courtyard. It wouldn’t have been very big—which is likely why she thought it would come out easily. Why she had someone take it out for her, with long hooks that probably hadn’t been cleaned since the last time they were used. Because you know, Nola, that when the girls don’t take the bleeding draughts the Lady mixes for them, or when the draughts don’t work, they use hooks.”

  I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but I understood her anger. “It was the Pattern,” I said, the words cracking as they left my mouth. “It was meant to happen to her.”

  Yigranzi smiled, her lips pressed so tightly together that they seemed to disappear. “You’re sure of this, even though you have no idea what your Othersight showed you. But you’re sure of the Pattern. You and so many other grown seers, too. Such a perfect thing, this certainty. Lets you say things that are always right and claim that the wrong belongs to someone else.” She took me by the shoulders and dug her fingertips into my skin so hard that my whole chest went numb. “You’ll stop being so sure, Nola, if you stay here with me. If you do. Because hear me and know this for certain: if you ever do a thing like this again I will walk you back out into the street myself. I will, though it will make me sick at heart to do it.”

  It was her last words that finally started me crying. Her kindness, and then, belatedly but even stronger because of it, the girl on the bed—Larally of Nordes, who had been fifteen. I cried in great, gulping sobs until Yigranzi’s fingers loosened and her arms came around me. “Don’t make me go,” I said. My head was pressed sideways against her breasts, which were very soft beneath the rough cloth of her dress.

  “Hush, Nola,” she said, “hush.” And she rocked me, like the child I almost was.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A gentlewoman just came to me. It’s quite late, and Sildio has gone to his room for the night. She knocked, and swept past me the moment I opened the door. The moonlight trickling through my window shone off the jewels she wore at her throat and on her fingers. She stared at the dog, the baby, the bird, and then she stared at me. There was fear and hope in her eyes, and some revulsion, too. I knew what she wanted.

  “I will not Othersee for you,” I said, before she could command me to. “The king has decreed that I will not Othersee for anyone.”

  “I know,” she said. Her voice was very low. She walked up close to me, with a surge of firwater perfume that made my nostrils tingle. “But I hoped you yourself would make an exception for me. I am . . .”—and then she gave me her name, and the name of her cousin, who was some sort of lord.

  I try not to listen to such details. Yigranzi taught me this. She used to
say, “All you need to know, before you call the Othersight to you, is what you can see with your own vision: people’s clothing, their hands, their eyes. Some of them will talk too much and others not at all—so only look, and be quiet, and this will begin to show you what they are, even before the mirror does.”

  I told the woman that I could make no exceptions; that, even though I was still a young woman, I was finished with the Otherworld.

  She shook her head. When she spoke again her voice was louder, shriller. “But you are Mistress Nola!”

  You’re right! I wanted to cry. I knew I’d forgotten something!—but she might not have understood that my scorn had been directed mostly at myself. That it had little to do with her tightly clasped hands—with their winking gems and thick loops of gold—or her awe, or her need.

  And so I’m alone again. These pages lie around me, scattered because I’ve written some of them so quickly that I’ve simply dropped them, in my haste to continue to the next ones. My hand hurts. My whole arm hurts, in fact, and my neck; they’re stiffer than they are on a freezing winter’s morning when I’ve slept in an awkward, twisted-up way. I’ve gone through pots and pots of ink and most of the paper Sildio brought me earlier today (at least I think it was today). I’ll sleep soon. But there’s more I need to write before I do.

  Funny, how it’s the starting-off words that come to me most easily, all in a row, as if they were waiting—like those visions that rise up from mirror or water almost as soon as you look. The ones after are more stubborn, but the beginning ones are usually so clear. These, this time:

  I was very good, after Larally.

  I was—truly. There were four years of quiet, which I can hardly remember. By “quiet” I do not mean tranquility. There were fights—among the girls, or between the girls and the men, or once, among several groups of men—that ended in injury or even death. Screams in mid-afternoon stillness; blood on the snow of the courtyard. I remember staring at the spirals of droplets until they blurred; the Otherworld was so close, but invisible until someone said, “Tell me.” Which, thankfully, no one did.

  But the blood was not mine, and it was not spilled because of me. I felt safe. This feeling, and its constancy, may be why these four years are so indistinct to me now. That, and the too-sharp horror of what came after.

  I grew quickly—every part of me pointy, or long and lanky. Everything except my hair, which Yigranzi continued to crop every three weeks, with her little bronze scissors. For a few years I was much taller than Bardrem, something I mentioned as often as I could.

  “Step aside, Bardrem: I’ll get that tankard down for you.”

  “The problem is that you don’t like carrots. I do, and just look how they’ve helped me grow!”

  “Could you please get me the mirror? I’m having trouble reaching it; I think my legs are just too long now. . . .”

  He never failed to flush, or mock-growl, or disappear behind the hair he still had not cut.

  He would often sit on the ground near the stone and write while Yigranzi taught me. The poems usually had nothing to do with us, but I do remember one that did. It was more like a list:

  Wax and water

  Scattered corn

  Wine in droplets

  Pattern-born.

  “Yigranzi would like this one,” I said. I spoke lightly, even though the words had sent a shiver through me. “She says the Pattern isn’t set, and it seems like that’s what your poem’s saying, too.”

  He shrugged. “I just liked the way the words sounded.”

  Sometimes he claimed that poetry was the most difficult thing to do (“Even more difficult than carving up a spitted pig?” “Nola . . .”); other times, he treated it like something simple. His inconsistency annoyed me, but I envied it too.

  He was scribbling by the stone on the day Chenn came.

  There had been other new girls, in the years since I’d arrived. A few of them had claimed to have the Othersight, and more wanted to make their living on men and their coins. They were all brought to Yigranzi. The ones who wanted to be seers worried me, at first. I would watch them as they leaned over the mirror and raised their eyes to Bardrem (never to me; Yigranzi always insisted that seers should not submit themselves to the Othersight, whether their own or someone else’s). I would tense, waiting for their eyes to wash black. Some did; more did not. Soon, though, I realized that even the ones who could Othersee were no threat to my own position.

  “You see the Pattern,” Yigranzi would say to them, “and this gift will maybe grant you success and joy. I know of another seer who needs an apprentice—at the brothel by the western wall, near the Deer Fountain. . . .”

  “Teldaru has many apprentices,” I said to her one day after she’d sent another away (this one a boy with long, thick, red hair that Bardrem stared at fixedly).

  “Teldaru is a royal seer,” she replied. “He serves king, castle and land—a task too big for any single person, even him. Me, I serve only the Lady and this place.” She paused, smiled down at the tiny glass vials she was arranging on a board. “And anyhow,” she continued, “I’m too old for more children and teaching and all that excitement. There’s enough of that now, Nola-girl.”

  Chenn, though. Chenn. Waiting for me, gazing at me with her gold-flecked eyes.

  The day was unremarkable; it was snowing, and everything was white, flat, featureless. Even the tree seemed barely solid, despite its bark and bits of hanging cloth, and its one brown, curled, clinging leaf. The girl was mostly unremarkable, too. She was wearing a dark grey cloak and a headscarf, pulled low over her forehead. But her eyes gazed out from beneath the dull cloth like jewels. They were a dark blue that was nearly black; the gold flecks were sprinkled through the darkness so thickly that they glinted, no matter which way she held her head.

  “Yigranzi,” the Lady said in her sharp, impatient voice. “Look. Look at her eyes. She claims she has no Othersight, but surely with eyes like that she has already looked long upon the Pattern.”

  I was fascinated by the girl, but I looked at the Lady, whom I had never seen in the courtyard before (usually she summoned Yigranzi and me to her chamber). The blue dress seemed more worn, in the daylight, and her belt and rings more tarnished. Her face, I saw with a start, was etched with deep lines where her white powder had gathered like snow.

  “It is hard to tell,” Yigranzi said. “Some people simply have strange eyes; nothing to do with peering at the Pattern.”

  She was peering, though, studying the girl, her cracked lips pursed.

  “Test her,” the Lady said. “I need to be certain of who and what she is before I’ll consider taking her on.”

  Yigranzi’s brows went up. “Taking her on?” Another pause, while the girl shifted from foot to foot and turned her beautiful eyes to the top of the tree. Bardrem, I noticed, was sitting very still, his writing stick poised, forgotten, above the paper in his lap.

  “Very well,” Yigranzi said briskly, “I will test her—but Bardrem must leave, as must you, Lady.”

  After another hard look at the girl, the Lady nodded. “Bring her back to me as soon as you are done, no matter what the result.” She walked away from us. She held the front of her dress up, but the back of it dragged a new path through the snow.

  “Bardrem.”

  He scowled. “But you might need—”

  “Bardrem.”

  He rose, tossed his hair back over his shoulder. “If you need me,” he said, “I will be finishing this poem in my room.”

  There was a silence after his snow-scuffing footsteps faded. “So,” Yigranzi said at last, making the short word very long. She was tapping her front tooth with her little finger. “What is your name?”

  “Chenn.” The girl’s voice was soft and rough, as if she had been shouting too much. She and Yigranzi were gazing at each other with an intensity that I saw but did not understand.

  “Not the name of a girl who sells herself to men,” Yigranzi said. “Not nearly pretty enough
. The Lady will have you change it, if you stay.”

  “No. I am only Chenn.” Soft, steady defiance; I tried to note how this sounded, thought I might use it myself, sometime.

  “You have the Othersight.”

  “Yes,” Chenn said. “I thank you for telling the Lady what you told her. About my eyes.”

  “When Otherseers seek to hide their gift there is always a reason. I will not ask you yours. But here, girl—why hide it here?”

  Chenn wrapped her arms around herself, beneath her grey cloak. Snow was gathering on her eyelashes and dissolving when she blinked. “Because I will need money, if I’m going to leave this city and stay away. And I’m a comely enough girl—someone . . . people have told me so.” A tremor in her voice, a few quicker blinks.

  Yigranzi shook her head. “Hmph,” she said. Her shoulders were hunched, maybe because of the cold, or because she was unsettled by the girl. Her hump looked even bigger than it usually did, beneath her orange and yellow cloak. “Well. We’ll stay here a few more moments; the Lady will expect the test to take longer. The test, and then the Otherseeing, which we will also spare you.”

  “But you look at all the other girls who come, don’t you? You do. So you must look at me, too. I’ll be treated no differently, if I’m to be one of them. And I’ve decided . . .” She paused, ran her tongue over her lips, catching snow. “I’ve decided that if my Pattern is dark, I will take another path.”

  I had never seen Yigranzi struggle for words as she was now, her mouth open and moving soundlessly. “Nola,” she finally said, “get the barley, and—”