I’ve been having a dream—the same one for years and years. I am standing by my mother’s old, scarred table, but not in the house, nor even in a room. My surroundings change: sometimes desert, sometimes lush riverbank, other times a plain of waist-high grass. The table is always there, though, as are the paths: giant, red, wet-looking ones that hover above the ground and flow around me. These paths bring me people. They bob along, just specks at first, then shapes with some definition, and finally themselves: men and women, children, all of them familiar to me. Larally has been among them—the first person I ever Othersaw for; the first person I wounded. Grasni is there, floating, looking down at me. Selera, lazily plaiting her blonde hair. There are so many others whose names I have forgotten, but this does not matter. I know I have wronged each of them. They return to me, on their river-paths of blood, and I try to turn away from them, but the only other place I can look is down at the table. Potato slices there, and a bag of coins, and a row of severed fingertips that I know are my mother’s, and probably the other children’s, too: my siblings’, whose names I have also forgotten. The red rises, and arms reach out to wind around me, and I wake gasping and sobbing to be forgiven, and saved.
I had the dream again last night. It was not enough, this time, to thrash my twisted sheets away and take a few paces around my room. This morning I poked the almost-dead fire into a fitful glow; I cracked the thin layer of ice on my basin (quietly, so as not to wake the princess) and drank enough water to numb my throat—and I still had not shaken off the dream’s weight. So I went to the door and stepped through it. It was so early that Sildio was not on his stool. I walked by it and out into the dawn, and down to the main courtyard.
It was such a strange, headlong feeling: my feet bearing me over the patches of snow and the crinkly grass between. My lungs filling with sharp, cold air that was all around me, not just gusting in my window. Full winter is coming; I smelled it, felt it beneath my feet and on my skin.
It was the dream that sent me outside. It was winter. It was the press of all the words I’ve written, these past many months. And it was my stillness. For all these months I’ve been in my room. I’ve been still. This morning I needed to move.
The tower guard opened the gate for me. I wrapped my cloak more tightly around me, for it is always windy at the top of the road that leads down into the city. I did not know where I would go, but I suppose I expected to walk a ways. As it was, I took a few steps and then I turned back. Because I wanted to look at the castle from the outside, for once, and also because I heard the fountain.
This fountain is built into the castle wall. Its bowl (a half-bowl, really) is very large, with a lovely scalloped edge, but no one sits on it to gossip or cup their palms for a drink. This is the king’s fountain. The stone hands that channel the water are his hands: protector’s hands, worn smooth and white by centuries. I turned expecting to see only these things—the stone, the water—but there were others too. Lengths of cloth and ribbon, I saw as I stepped closer. Scraps of colour fluttering from the wall beside the fountain, held by nails that had been driven into the spaces between the red stones. I have seen such offerings before, around the fountains and sometimes the trees of the lower city. They are for mourning, for people beloved and lost. I had never seen them by this fountain. It was only when I was very close that I realized why they were here. For whom.
Layibe. A name, sewn into one of the broad pieces of cloth. The thread was silver, and caught the light that was spreading behind me. Red and purple ribbons, blue and gold cloth, and this name in ink, in thread.
Layibe. Haldrin’s little, lost daughter. The princess who was sleeping in a cradle in my room, guarded by a bird and a dog. The girl whose face also appears in that nightmare of mine, because I have wounded her, too.
I hardly remember going back into the castle. I only began to breathe again when I was at my desk, clutching my quill as if I would protect myself with it. Or harm myself—I don’t know—it seems like the same thing, sometimes.
And so I am still sitting here, gazing from my paper to the bright blue-white of the sky and sometimes down to the child who is sleeping in the cradle at my feet. My need to go forward—to write and then to ready myself for whatever comes after that—is so strong that I am frozen.
Move, Nola. Back to the king’s study—to all those eyes on you.
To Haldrin, breaking a long, long silence: “What have you seen, Nola? Why must I marry Princess Zemiya?”
You mustn’t. I’ve seen nothing. It’s Teldaru’s plan and I don’t understand it yet but I know that it will hurt many people.
I could not say this but, as I swallowed and blinked away all the faces except Haldrin’s, I knew that I could try to say something else that might be almost true. I had had no vision of Belakao or Zemiya; there were no true images that the curse could twist. I would only have to take care, choose words that would be vague.
“It is not certain,” I began. One man leaned forward and another leaned back. I felt their scrutiny, their waiting, and drew myself taller.
“Not certain?” Haldrin said. There was a tiny crease between his brows, just above the bridge of his nose.
“Of course it is certain,” Teldaru said from behind me. He sounded amused and perhaps a little impatient. “The Pattern is a maze of possibilities, but only the Belakaoans themselves believe that there is no—”
“That is nonsense,” I snapped over my shoulder. “You always teach that there are often many images; that an Otherseer must choose among all the—”
“Enough.” Haldrin did not shout, but his voice rang in my ears anyway. “This is not the time for a debate about the characteristics of Otherseeing. Nola—speak to me.”
I wish I could, I thought with a surge of despair and need that made me dizzy. “I am sorry, my king,” I said. I bowed my head, then lifted it again, and brushed a strand of hair away from my eyes. There was no vision, but there is so much I must tell you. . . . “One of the images was a volcano in the sea, it’s true, but another was a northern mountain range, and yet another—”
“Nola,” the king said, and I stopped speaking, my mouth open a bit. “Lift your arm again, as you did a moment ago.”
I did, and the sleeve of my blouse fell away from it. All the men stared at my arm. Haldrin looked only briefly before he raised his eyes to mine.
“You are bleeding.”
“Yes,” I said, flushing, dizzy again—so close to truth. “I was.” The bandage around my arm felt hot, as did the trail of blood that had escaped it, hours ago, and dried. The cloth was dark and damp, growing brittle against my skin. Teldaru cut me. He forced me to use the Bloodsight. “Teldaru took me into the city and I stumbled and cut myself.” The lies came so smoothly, though there was a place in my throat that ached when I told them.
“Yes—an old rusty brothel sign that had fallen and was lying in the street.” Teldaru stepped up beside me. He was shaking his head. “I had no desire to take her back to that neighbourhood, of course, but we were looking for a kind of plant I have only ever found in the lowtown markets.”
A brothel sign. I felt my flush drain away to pallor. A brothel, and Bardrem; a threat that Teldaru knew would still frighten me, after all these years. I would not be able to bear his triumph, so I kept my gaze on the king.
“Sit,” Haldrin said to me as he rose himself. He walked to the only empty chair and pulled it away from the table. “Rest here a little—unless you would like to go directly to your room?”
“She will stay,” Teldaru said. “These matters concern her, since she has seen what I have.”
Borl walked over to me, then, only a little unsteadily; he was already used to being blind. He laid his head in my lap. The king frowned again—at the gesture, and probably too at the blood that had dried and matted on the dog’s already dark fur.
“And what of Belakao, Master Teldaru?” said one of the other men, and Haldrin turned away from the dog and me and returned to his own seat.
“Lord Derris,” Teldaru said, “I thank you for reminding us of our purpose, here. I will tell you of my vision while Nola thinks on hers.”
I had seen Lord Derris before; he was the king’s cousin, and attended all the feasts and processions that I did. I had never heard him speak. He had a breathy rasp of a voice—from an arrow taken in the throat. I thought I saw the white-pink tip of a scar, below his beard. His eyes were blue, like Haldrin’s, but hard.
Teldaru walked over to the window. The sky was very dark, though I could not see any stars from here. “A volcano spilled its fire into the sea.” Even I went still, listening to him. “The water boiled and foamed and rose in waves that threatened to sweep toward land. Except that the land, too, rose. Trees and vines coiled down to the shore and out upon the ocean’s skin. Rocks tumbled and sank into a wall that wound its way beneath, toward the volcano. In this union of land and sea, the fire sank to smoke and the waves subsided and all the world was filled with stone and growing things.”
“A powerful vision,” the king said after a moment. It felt as if the room remembered to breathe, when he spoke. “But how do you know that it does not indicate that I am simply to forge a closer alliance with the new moabu?”
“No.” Teldaru’s hands were clenched around the windowsill; he was gazing out at the night. I thought, as I had before, He is beautiful. The thought was too quick, too fluid to stop. “It was a union, Haldrin. A joining of land and sea, stone and fire. It was you and Zemiya.”
“She is not young.”
“Forgive me, my king, but nor are you. But it will still be a fruitful union: I am sure of this.”
“Sarsenayans might not accept a Belakaoan queen.”
“Sarsenayans will be relieved to have a queen, and heirs to your throne. They do not understand why you have waited so long.”
King Haldrin picked up a quill. I noticed only now that the table was strewn with maps, some of their corners held down with books. He twirled the quill so that its curved end brushed a map—up and along the black arches of a mountain range, I saw.
“And why would Belakao give up one of its princesses?” Lord Derris said. The other three murmured in agreement.
Teldaru turned back to face the room. “She had no children with her first husband. She is a burden. She has no power except that to be gained by another marriage. And”—he walked to the table, nudged a book aside, traced a fingertip along what looked like the undulations of a shoreline—“as we already know, her brother the new moabu wants more from us than his father did.”
“His father was a reasonable man,” said someone I did not know.
“Ah,” Teldaru said, “but this Bantayo is not. He is not content with the treaties that bind our countries. He has made this clear from the moment his father died.”
“And now,” said yet another man, “he tells us that Lorselland is offering more.”
“But they will not offer him this.” Teldaru smiled. “Such a bond—it will go beyond any treaty imaginable. He would be a fool to refuse.”
“And what of me?” The king’s voice was mild, but the frown still wrinkled that place above his nose. “Tell me, Teldaru, since you are so certain: how should I feel about this?”
Teldaru’s smile changed a little, softened, as if they were both younger, and alone. It made me prickle with cold or warmth; I was not sure which. “The Pattern is clear, Hal,” he said quietly. “It will be a Path of power and joy, for you and for your people.”
No! No: it will be twisted and terrible because he is making it, my king. . . . I pushed my chair back, still sitting, my arms braced on the edge of the table. Borl whined and settled back on his haunches.
“What are you doing?” My words hung among them, heavy as rain about to fall. Teldaru’s eyes narrowed. I thought of Bardrem and spoke again anyway, in a rush of desperation—around the truth, as close to it as I could get. “Why do you speak of such things? And why,” I continued, glancing at each of the other men, “do you believe them? Because he is the Great Master Otherseer? Because he is Teldaru—only that?”
“You are unwell,” Teldaru said swiftly, starting toward me. “Your wound—perhaps there is a fever starting.”
“Or perhaps it is the return of my madness? That madness that possessed me when I arrived here six years ago; I’m sure you all remember, for he made much of it.” The truth so close, and Haldrin’s keen, kind eyes on me once more, but this would be all, for Teldaru was wrapping his hand around my good arm and pulling, and I was up.
“Come, now; I will walk you back to your room and fetch Mistress Ket, and then”—to the king—“I will return and we will discuss how to put our proposal to Moabu Bantayo.”
Haldrin put the quill down with a sharp, snapping sound. He was no longer looking at me, though the others were, with distaste and discomfort and maybe a bit of awe. “I am glad that you have decided for me,” he said to Teldaru, “for there is not much time. We have only just learned—and it is why we met, tonight: he is on his way here.”
Teldaru’s fingers dug even more deeply into my skin and I flinched. His face hardly changed but I felt his surprise, and something else too, which trembled after the first pressure was gone. “Here,” he said steadily. “To Sarsenay.”
“To Lorselland as well,” said Lord Derris. “He is a new king assessing his allies. We must impress him.”
“We will.” Teldaru turned his black eyes to me and I looked into them, defiant and lost. “Won’t we, Nola?”