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—”
“No,” Chenn interrupted, “I want the mirror. And I want both of you to look.”
I sucked in my breath. Chenn had not yet glanced my way, but now she turned, and I felt pinned by blue-black and gold.
Yigranzi said, “It is never wise for Otherseers to allow the vision to be turned on themselves. It—”
“I am not a seer any more.” Chenn’s voice cracked again, and I thought that it sounded as new-raw as the cracks in Yigranzi’s lips looked. “Please: the mirror.”
Yigranzi went first. I’d watched her do this many times, over the last four years, and it still amazed me—not because she was quick and effortless about it, but because she was slow. I used to fidget while I waited, but recently I’d been watching with more care. She took care—but it was more than that. She was slow and careful, and she struggled.
“Why do you take so long?” I had asked her once. “It only takes me a moment to see a vision. And why do you twist up your face so much, like it’s hurting you?”
She had lifted one eyebrow. She had been thrusting copper combs into her hair, which, if not contained, stood up around her head like a thick, black-and-white bush. “The visions are clearer and easier when you’re a child—I’ve told you this—do you hear anything I say, Nola-girl? They rise up like breath—and usually only one of them for any one person. One, which you can look at and then away from. But”—another thrust, and copper tines disappearing—“then, if you’re a girl, you begin your monthly bleeding, and everything changes. The one, quick vision may still come up to meet you, but now it’s not as clear, and not alone. Layers, Nola. Layers of pictures, and you wondering which among them is truest.”
“So do boy seers always have the easy visions, since they never bleed?”
She made a huffing sound that I knew was a chuckle. “No. It is harder for them too, as they grow. Seeing either world is never easy when childhood’s gone.”
When Chenn arrived I had not yet begun my monthly bleeding. My Othersight was still swift and easy; all that happened after I used it was that I felt dizzy, and colours looked different. But I was twelve, and I knew that things would soon change for me—and so I watched Yigranzi with particular attention.
She ran her fingers around the mirror’s rim. Her eyes were on Chenn.
“Tell me what the Pattern holds for me,” said Chenn.
Yigranzi looked down at the mirror. She began to hum: a low, formless tune that was different every time. Her fingers slowed against the copper. Moments later they stopped, and so did the humming. She was motionless. Big, round snowflakes fell on the mirror and she did not brush them off. There were only a few patches of metal showing when she lifted her head.
Usually she was smiling a small, lips-together smile at this point, no matter what she had seen. This time she was not. Her eyes were all black; the pearl centres returned as she blinked. She was quiet for a long time, which was also strange. (She had told me that seers should say something as soon as the vision had passed, something slow and quiet that might have nothing to do with the vision itself, but that would be calming to both seer and seen.)
“Well?” Chenn bit her lip as soon as the word was out.
Yigranzi did smile now, but I could tell that she was trying to; that it was weak, held on only by her will.
“The Pattern is unclear,” she said. “There are many spirals, all of them twisted like—”
“Just tell me.”
Yigranzi’s smile vanished. “There was a wolf with the hands of a man. Its teeth were set with gems. It snarled and reached for you, and you turned to it—you knew it, but this did not matter, for it fastened its jaws around your thigh while it held you still with its hands.”
I had never heard her describe a vision so starkly. Chenn did not seem as alarmed as I felt. She nodded once, as if she understood what Yigranzi had told her, and said, “And what of the other, lesser pictures?”
“Unclear,” Yigranzi replied. “The twisting lines, all of them the colour of blood.”
One more nod, and then Chenn turned to me. “Please,” she said, “tell me your name, and take your turn.”
I straightened. I noticed only now that I was taller than she was. “Nola,” I said, trying not to sound too proud or too timid, and reached for the mirror. I wiped the snow off it with the hem of my cloak and sat down on the stone.
“Tell me what will come, for me,” I heard Chenn say.
I see right away. I am sure, as the copper mist eddies and parts, that there will be horrors—but there are not. Just Chenn sitting on a golden chair like a throne, only smaller than I imagine a real throne would be. She is bathed in sunlight; the gold shines, as do the beads of her light green gown. Her hair is as dark as her eyes and unbound, brushed glossy-smooth. She is looking off to her right, smiling at something or someone I cannot see. She lifts her hand and her mouth makes a word—a name, I know, even though I don’t hear it.
The glow begins to dim a bit, as the mirror’s hue returns. Later I try to tell myself that the copper shadows confused my Othersight; the shadows, and the beauty of the girl and her dress and her smile. “I never saw anything else,” I think later, or “I saw—but how could I have been expected to truly grasp what I saw? The vision was fading, after all. . . .”
It is her throat—white and smooth and utterly unremarkable except for the cloudy opal in its hollow. But as my Othersight begins to lose its strength, I see her throat open. It opens side-to-side, the two edges curling outward like lycus blossoms. There is no blood.
This is what I saw, and then I blinked, and all I saw was the shadow of my own face in the snow-dusted mirror.
“Nola?” Chenn said.
I looked up at her. A strand of long black hair had escaped from her headscarf and was looping over her shoulder.
“What did you see?”
I was already forgetting. Her eyes made me forget. “It was beautiful,” I said. Her smile wobbled because of my dizziness. The falling snow was the same colour as the beaded dress had been. “You were sitting on a golden throne, wearing a rich, green gown. There was an opal necklace, and maybe some rings. Your hair was all loose and shining. You were smiling at someone, and then you reached for him—I felt it was a ‘him,’ even though I couldn’t see. . . . You were happy,” I said. And that was all. I barely knew her, and yet I needed her to smile at me as she was. I needed her to be happy.
“Thank you,” she said. “That is a heartening vision.”
Yigranzi was frowning. “A wolf, a throne—take care, and remember that though neither is fixed in your Pattern, both are possible. Think, girl, and make no decision now. You remember: a seer must use patience in all things.”
“I am not a seer any more,” Chenn said, with more steadiness this time. She gazed around her—at the tree, the balconies and walls, the heavy grey sky. “I sense the truth of both visions, but the gold is stronger. Take me back to the Lady now, please.”
The Pattern thickened around us like the snow, and only Yigranzi knew to shiver.