The Pattern Scars (6 page)

But for now there is only me.

Or rather: Chenn, Bardrem and me, sitting cross-legged on Chenn’s bed.

Chenn was cutting my hair. Yigranzi’s fingers were too swollen now to use the little bronze scissors.

“Listen,” Bardrem said, smoothing his piece of paper out on the coverlet. “I think it’s nearly done.” He cleared his throat.

It was one of his longer poems—though they all seemed to be longer, recently, and more about battles than about the shape of rain or the songs of night birds, as they used to be. This one was, in fact, about a battle—one fought centuries ago by an ancestor of King Haldrin’s, Ranior, great War Hound of Sarsenay, when there had been no peace. The poem’s lines were thick with word-pictures, and there was scarcely any room for Bardrem to breathe. I closed my eyes, hoping he would think I was listening, rather than resting.

“Blood-drenched sunrise,” I heard, and “the Plains of Lodrigesse, stretched like sea beneath the stars of Sarsenay.” Mostly I heard the
snick snick
of the scissors, and Chenn’s hands brushing the cloth where the hair was falling.

“So?”

I opened my eyes. Bardrem was standing; he sometimes leapt to his feet and paced during a recitation. His hand was on the wood of the bed across the room from Chenn’s.

“So,” I repeated, as if I had something to add.

“It was very grand,” Chenn said in her steady, calm way. “I liked the part about the armies looking like swarming beetles on the plain. And it was very exciting when the island king’s throat was torn out by Ranior’s dogs—and of course Ranior himself was very strong and handsome. How did you say it? ‘Hair of beaten gold and shoulders that bore up all the world.’ Lovely.”

Bardrem flushed a little, around his cheekbones. I wondered whether this was because of Chenn’s words or because of Chenn herself.

“Good,” he said. “I was happy with those parts too.” He paused, gazed down at the paper. “Do you think King Haldrin would like it? After all, he’s still young—surely he’d appreciate the work of someone also young. A grand work like this one.”

“I don’t know.” Chenn was dabbing at my neck with a piece of damp cloth so that the tiny cut hairs would not cling and itch. “He’s not a very grand sort of person. Several times I’ve heard him say that . . .”

Her words trailed and echoed. I turned. She was staring at nothing, holding the cloth in midair. She looked made of ice or stone.

“You’ve been to the
castle
?” Bardrem said. His voice broke on the last word, as it so often did in those days, making him sound both man and girl. “Is that where you were before—at the castle? That’s good—wonderful!—you can take me there when my poem’s done; you can tell the king how well I’d serve him, how many more works I’d write for him—”

“No,” Chenn said.

I saw her far-gaze and heard her determination, but as a new silence fell, the words in my own head only grew louder.

“So,” I said at last, my attempt at nonchalance undone by a quaver, “did you know Teldaru too?”

Chenn stood up. The scissors and cloth slipped from her hands to the floor. “I will not speak of this,” she said. Her eyes leapt from Bardrem’s face to mine. “Not ever. And for your own sakes, you will not ask me to.”

“But why?” Bardrem’s entire face was flushed now, and the paper shook a bit in his hand. “Why must we not speak of it, and why did you leave, and—”

“Chenn,” a new voice said. There was a girl in the doorway—the girl who had been the newest, before Chenn came. She did not look at Bardrem or me. “The Lady bids you come to the receiving chamber.”

Chenn shook her head. “I . . . I cannot. It’s my bleeding week—the Lady knows this.”

The girl smiled a false, quick smile. “She does. But it’s the silk merchant asking for you—the one who’s promised her a lower price on his wares. He knows you’re bleeding, and he doesn’t care.”

For a moment Chenn’s face seemed to tremble—her lips, her cheeks and chin—and she closed her eyes. Then she said, firmly, “Very well,” and opened them again. “Tell her I am coming. And leave me—all of you.”

Bardrem gripped my wrist when we were in the corridor. “Did you
hear
that?” he hissed.

“Of course,” I said, but he was not listening.

“We have to find out how long she was there, and who else she knew—but did you
hear
that? She knew King Haldrin!”

“She didn’t want to tell us, so we shouldn’t press her.” My words came out sounding priggish because my desire to agree with him was so great.

“But the castle, Nola! I would never have to chop another potato or be struck by another man who’s drunk and unhappy with the girl he chose and claims the soup is what’s made him angry . . . I’d learn my true craft at the feet of the king’s poet, and then someday
I’d
be the king’s poet.”

He was still squeezing my wrist; I wrenched it free. “She left there for a reason and she doesn’t want to go back. And don’t talk of another life when this one is all you’ll ever have.”

I walked quickly so that he would not see my sudden tears, and so that I might outpace my confusion. Familiar halls, with their cracking plaster and smoke-darkened wood; my room with its rug and the bed that had seemed so luxurious, the first few times I’d awoken in it. And now this other place—only a word, but one I could see and feel, like the fire in the kitchen when a gale was blowing outside. “Castle:” a high place, closer to sunlight, where girls wore real jewels and were loved by men who did not pay them. Where a young seer could study in a real school, surrounded by safety and luxury and others like herself.

Despite my curiosity, I spoke to Chenn of the castle only once, and only by accident. We were in the courtyard. It was spring—the tree’s twelve leaves were a bright, glossy yellow-green, and there was a scattering of new grass in the mud—and I had just had a lovely vision of a man sleeping with a book in the crook of his arm. The actual man had been pleased with this, and had paid me more than he’d said he would. When Chenn came to me, after he had gone, I was humming, putting the mirror away in its cloth.

The day was warm, one of those early spring days that feels like summer. She stood by the tree and watched me, and when I was done she smiled at me. I had learned that she, like almost everyone else I had ever met, had two smiles: one that she used when she did not really want to be smiling, and one that appeared when she was actually happy. That afternoon she smiled her happy smile, and the day grew even brighter.

“I just got my month’s pay,” she said. “I have almost enough now. One more month like this and I’ll be able to leave.”

“Oh.” The air had darkened again, though Chenn’s smile remained. “Where will you go?”

She had been as secretive about this as she had about her previous life, but today she raised her arms above her head and made a happy, stretching noise and said, “South, where it’s summer all the time.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but my words vanished—because I had seen the insides of her forearms, and the two long, puckered scars there.

“What are those?”

She lowered her arms and crossed them across her chest. “What?” Bardrem often pointed out that both Chenn and I were terrible liars, and said that he would be hard-pressed to choose the worse one. Now she clutched her dress sleeves over her wrists and would not meet my gaze. Her cheeks had gone very pale, which made her hair and eyes look even darker.

“The scars,” I said, standing up to face her. “The lines”—from elbow crooks to wrists, the light purple of wounds only recently healed.

“An accident I had before I came here,” she said quickly.

I snorted. “An accident? But there are two of them, exactly the same—did you happen to drop the same knife twice, or—”

“Nola.” Yigranzi was standing at the end of the walkway closest to Chenn and me. I had not heard her come, even though she now used a walking stick that made a soft, hollow sound on the boards. She was so bent that she had to crane upward to look at us.

“Nola,” she said again, her voice as strong as ever, “do not press her.”

“I will!” I cried. “I
will
press her, because she was hurt—and this isn’t the only secret—she used to live at the castle! That too . . .” My breath caught in my throat. I thought I had spoken too swiftly again, betrayed a confidence—but when I looked at Yigranzi I saw no surprise on her face.

“You know about the castle,” I said, slowly now. “And about the scars, too?”

Yigranzi nodded. “Chenn and I have spoken a little of these things. I did not want you to know too much—I do not—for Nola-girl, there is ugliness in the world that you do not need to see. Not yet.”

“Ugliness?” I was shouting, my voice cracking almost as Bardrem’s did. “You think I don’t already see ugliness? I see men kill each other; I see girls with sores, girls dying and bleeding—I see visions worse than these!” The shouting was hurting my ears and my throat; I lowered my voice a bit, though I kept it ablaze with anger. “Do not try to shield me from things: I need to know. I need to, because you are my friend”—this to Chenn, who looked so sad that I lost my breath again. In the moment of quiet that followed I saw it, as clear as if it were really happening before me: Chenn and Yigranzi sitting in Yigranzi’s room of coloured cloth and shells. Chenn drinking from the cup with the crab on its side. Talking; both of them talking, but Chenn more. Tracing her old cuts with her fingers. Telling.

“How dare you,” I whispered to the Chenn and Yigranzi who were in front of me. I pushed past one, then the other; I ran over the walkway and into the shadows of the walls. I did not truly know why I was running, which only made me hurry more.

Chenn came to my room that night. She knocked on my door as she usually did—four short raps followed by a scrabbling of fingers that sounded like tickling, or an animal digging. I did not answer. I lay on my bed, sunk in a loneliness that felt warm.

“Nola,” she called. “Nola—I’m going to the receiving chamber now, but I’ll be back at dawn. I want to talk to you. Please?”

I did not answer.

She left—I heard her footsteps in the hall, soft and quick. I thought:
Going somewhere else, like always.
I stared up into the dark air, and at the even darker patches that I knew were the ceiling beams. I almost hoped she wouldn’t come back, so that I would be able to hold onto my anger or my hurt or whatever it was that made me feel suffocated and protected at the same time.
Almost
hoped—because when the silence stretched on and the sky in my open window paled to grey and she still did not come, the loneliness in me turned cold.

If I had let her in, when she knocked. If I had gone to find her. If, if—but no. I did not find her. He did.

I had just managed to fall asleep when the screaming began. I was so accustomed to this sound that at first I only burrowed deeper into the bed, pulling the blanket up over my ears to shut it out. This did not work because several girls were screaming now, all at slightly different pitches. I felt the shuddering of the floor and thought,
So many people running—must be something very nasty
. But I did not move until Bardrem called my name from the corridor in a breaking, broken voice.

“What is it?” I was aware of the cold as I stared at him, air like wind, the last of winter, burrowing beneath my skin.

“Chenn,” he said—and I pushed him out of the way, flew on feet I could not feel to the door where everyone had gathered.

“She is not here,” the Lady said to me as all the girls fell back, letting me through. “We will find her and Yigranzi will tend to her.” These words made me hope, for the space of time it took for me to step into the room—but then I saw.

I had seen blood before. I had imagined, before this, that I had seen a great deal of blood. This, though: dark pools, livid sprays on walls and even ceiling, every surface patterned wet.
Too much for one person—perhaps some animals'?
I thought dizzily, but when I looked at the dripping mess of Chenn’s bed I knew this was not true.

I left, while the others stood and gawked. Ran again, as Bardrem and Yigranzi called out behind me. Bardrem had finally been getting taller this past winter, but even his newly lengthened legs could not keep pace with mine. I ran around corners and down the rickety flight of stairs by the kitchen and out into the daylight that had turned to gold.