Selera did not cry for long. As I stood staring at her, she raised her head again and wrenched herself around on the stone until she was nearly upright, with her back to the sarcophagus. “Nola,” she panted as she twisted, “Nola; I should have known—you were always jealous of me—and may your Path burn your flesh from your bones, you . . .” Her words were so quick and shrill that I hardly understood them. Her teeth and lips were smeared with blood.
Teldaru set my case down by the door. “Now, Selera,” he said, “you mustn’t blame Nola for this. And you won’t, once you understand what we’ll all be doing.”
“And what will that be, O Great Teldaru?” I said, looking at him. “And will I understand it too?”
“Don’t be insolent.” A frown. “Of course you will. I was intending to save this until much later, when Haldrin and the island whore had been married for a while. I thought that patience would serve us best until we saw how their Path together began. But when I saw Zemiya again”—he licked his lips; I wondered whether he knew he had—“I needed to hurry. Needed to know if we could do this.”
“Grasni.” I spoke quietly, even though the thought of her had exploded into my head. “Where is she?”
He went to Selera and knelt beside her. Put two fingertips against her cheek and drew them slowly down, leaving smudges in the blood. She gazed at him and did not move. Her eyes looked as black as his.
“On her way to Narlenel,” he said. “As I told you she would be. Though,” he continued, holding his fingers to his mouth for a moment, then setting them back on her face, “I did consider having her help us. The decision caused me some vexation. But I concluded that you, Nola, might enjoy it more if it was Selera.”
“And what is ‘it?’” I said.
Selera was leaning her head against him; he turned his hand around so that he was cupping her cheek. “Laedon and Borl,” he said. “Tell Selera what you did to them, Nola.”
I laughed. “I can’t tell—remember? No, wait—let me try, like this”—I used the Bloodseeing on Laedon and killed him; I used it on Borl and brought him back from death—“I was a friend to both of them.” I laughed again and did not care that I sounded mad.
Selera bent so that one of her ears was against her shoulder. Teldaru pressed her head until it lifted again. “She undid Laedon’s Paths,” he told her. “With the Bloodseeing. I taught her to do this.” Selera’s eyes widened even more. “Yes,” he said, as if she had asked him a question, “I know—this is a surprise to you; another forbidden thing. It was hard, my sweet, silly girl, to keep the secret from you. And then, when Borl died and Nola remade his Paths, it was even harder to be silent. But I have done it. I was waiting for this.”
He rose and held out his hand to me. I stepped forward, my eyes darting. The torches are too high, I thought, though I could probably reach that one, if I stood on the sarcophagus lid—if I could just reach it, and if he had his back turned . . . I would know exactly where to hit him because I hit that guard once, with Chenn’s red glass bottle.
His hand closed over mine. “Nola and I will kill you,” he said to Selera. His fingers were trembling and I squeezed them savagely; he did not even flinch. He crouched in front of Selera, dragging me partway down with him. “And then Nola and I will bring you back. We will destroy you and remake you, and someday all the world will know it.”
There was a moment of stillness. Teldaru and I both looked at Selera, who was looking down at her bound hands. She raised them very slowly and then she lunged at him. She struck him in the chest three times before he caught her wrists. “It should have been me,” she hissed, and suddenly she was screaming, spitting blood-pink: “Why didn’t you choose me . . . it should have been me . . . I hate you, I hate you—”
The noise of his fist meeting her jaw was louder than her screams. She crumpled and slid down the side of the sarcophagus. She made no more sounds.
“Nola,” he said softly. “Is it your bleeding time?”
“Yes.” No point denying it, and why would I? He would only make me bleed another way.
“Good. You will wound Selera—”
“But she’s already wounded.”
“I am aware of this. You will wound her and we will go together into the Otherworld.”
“Do I not get to wound you too?” I said archly, trying to hide the tremor I felt in my throat.
He smiled. “Now why would I trust you to do that? No—luckily, I am already prepared.”
He pulled his cloak back from his legs and I saw that his left calf and ankle were dark and wet. Borl, I thought with a rush of dismay—of course—Borl bit him and he was bleeding all the way along the road, for all those hours, and I should have known. I was bleeding and so was he, and I could have slipped into his Otherworld and struck. But there’s a knife. He must have one, for Selera.
I smiled back at him. “Where is the dagger?”
He cocked his head. “Dagger? There isn’t one.”
“But,” I said when he did not continue, “how will I hurt her, then?”
He shrugged. “I’m sure you will think of something.”
I took a step backward. “No.” Another step, another “no,” and I spun and leapt for the door.
He caught me before I’d even managed to reach it. He seized me and threw me and I heard a crack that must have been my head against the wall. I was blind, scrabbling at his hands, which held my shoulders while the rest of him pressed my breath away.
“Remember,” he said, and his own breath was sweet on my face, “we are both bleeding. I could be inside your Otherself in a moment, and I could do more damage than any dagger. Remember that, Nola, and do what I tell you to do. Now.”
He stepped back and I fell to my knees. My vision returned in patches that grew and shrank and grew. I thought I might be sick but I swallowed until the feeling passed.
When I looked up he was standing by Selera. Her head was up; they were both watching me. She was smiling now—that quirk of her pretty lips that taunted and gloated and stung. I am mad, I thought as I lurched to my feet. I really am; he’s right again.
I crossed the floor to them. Mad, mad, mad—the only word, so many times repeated, each time a stone in a wall. Something to keep me apart, even when I knelt by Selera and gazed into her eyes, which were so green again, this close.
“You won’t,” she whispered. “You can’t.”
I bit her neck. I moved quickly and my teeth closed hard and I was already pulling away when she cried out. I spat onto the flagstones.
Teldaru was laughing. “Good! Oh, very good, Nola! And now—now . . .” He held the back of my hand to his lips, which tickled me when they moved. “Now you will lead. Lead, dear heart, and I will follow.”
I can try not to, I thought, but it was a faint thought and his words were much louder, laden with the power of the curse, and I believe I even wanted to, in the clear, cold madness that was upon me. I sought out her eyes, and it was the dark grey around the green that caught me—the rings that were the marks of her Othersight. They seemed to spin their own paths and I spun with them, around and around and in.
These roads look the same as Laedon’s did and I pause, surprised, on the yielding silver. Those hills too, and the canyons—all crimson and breathing as his were. But as I dig my toes into the wide road upon which I stand I see that it is gold as well as silver, and that it ripples like water, while Laedon’s was still, at least at first.
“Nola.” Teldaru is behind me. I see his shadow and I feel his hands—real or Other, maybe both—stroking my hair and back. “Choose,” he says, as he did before, and I do, because I have no choice, but also because the Bloodsight is flooding me with scarlet hunger. I pick a large road that curves off to my right. It lashes in my hands as I draw it in, thinking, as I did with Laedon’s: Come to me. It is harder to hold onto than his were, and I fumble and strain to keep my hands wrapped around it. It wriggles and falls and I drop to my knees, which sink into the moist ground.
“She is strong,” Teldaru says as he puts his arms around me and sets his hands over mine. We both grip and pull and the path slackens. It twitches once and then it loses its shape, flows over our hands and up our arms and straight into our veins. I feel Teldaru moan. I turn my head and I find his lips with mine—I do; I seek this out—and the kiss, real and Other, makes me even hungrier.
We consume the silver roads together, one by one at first and then in bunches. We are one body when we eat and when we touch. I have no mind: I am all skin and space, lengthening muscles and need. There is no more gold and soon no more silver, either, and the bone lattice thrusts through the hills until they crumble. Bones and blowing, drifting sand, and soon there is just the sand. Teldaru is as vast as I am; I cannot see his features when I twist around to find him, but I feel them beneath my fingertips and tongue.
“Nola”—his voice inside me but also far away—“we must return now; there is more to do.”
“No,” I say, and my own voice is like thunder. “I’m still hungry. . . .”
He laughs with his lips against my throat. “I know—and that is how you must be, if we are to bring her back. Come, now—we must make sure this part is done.”
The tomb swam up around me, its walls hardening every time I blinked. The torchlight was livid green, the stones splotched black, like bruises. I was lying on my side facing the sarcophagus. Teldaru was at its foot, holding a shape that looked gold and silver, just for a moment. Then I pressed my shaking hands against my eyes, and when I looked again it was just Selera’s white and her jewels, covered in the squiggling black fish of my after-vision.
I sat up and crawled to Teldaru. I felt the power of my Otherself pushing at my flesh and muscles and this was what propelled me, not any desire to know what he was holding. I was coursing with strength and numb with horror, and I crawled and knelt and saw.
Selera’s eyes were open. She was staring up at his face—dead, I thought with relief and another surge of horror, but then she blinked. It was a slow movement, as was the rise of her chest and the fall that seemed to come much later. “Alive,” I said aloud, or almost.
Teldaru lifted an arm and put it around me. He pulled me and I could not resist; he tucked me in against his side and held us both, Selera and me. “Yes,” he said, “but watch . . .”
Her eyes rolled. They found me and focused. Slid back to him, where they remained. She took another breath and I heard this one; it was wet and very long. He took my hand and placed it on her cheek, which was scalding. I had expected cold; I started and tried to pull my hand away but he held it there. The desert, I thought, the bones and the sand and the white-hot sky.
He bent slowly forward and kissed her forehead, then her lips. Her breath rattled one more time. Her eyes fixed on his face. Her skin went cold so suddenly I thought it must never have been hot. I had imagined it; I was imagining all of it. Except that I still hummed with power and hunger, and her neck was ragged and oozing where the marks of my teeth were.
He kissed her once more, deeply, as if she would respond. He must have felt my shudder, for he straightened, said, “You are troubled; we must be quick. Look at her and find a way back in.”
No, I thought—but how could I think this? We had to bring her back now, and I was ready; my body and vision were urging me as he was. I blinked away the black spots and focused on her face—but it was her neck that drew my gaze. The stark, wet pattern my mouth had made there. I narrowed my eyes and I was in and away, so quickly, with him laughing and warm behind me.
Selera’s living Otherworld was like Laedon’s; her dead one is nothing like Borl’s. Of course not, I think, he’s an animal—but I reel anyway. I throw my arms out—or I am fairly sure I do—but the space around me is so black that it is all I see. And there is nothing below my feet, which churn and stretch, searching or evading or maybe both.
“Be still,” Teldaru says from somewhere that sounds close. I relax my limbs and he is there, pulling me against him. I thrust at him but his arms are roots wrapped around me and I am a little relieved, because the darkness feels very deep.
“It’s too late,” I murmur. “She’s gone.”
“No.” He puts his hands on my face and tilts it and kisses me on my forehead, nose and chin. “Look for a colour,” he says against my lips. “There will be several; just find one.”
He turns me around so that he is behind me, as he was in the last vision. I close my eyes and open them and there is a difference: the Otherworld is eddying with shadows. Some look black and it is their motion I see: they bend and blow like smoke. Others, a little further away, seem lighter—grey or white—and as I concentrate on these a few begin to change. I see a glint of green and another that is bronze, and I throw myself forward. I do not expect to touch one of the flickers already, but the green one is in my hands. It is limp, and as hot as Selera’s cheek was, and I nearly drop it. Teldaru’s hands close over mine and we both hold tight.
“Now another,” he says, and suddenly I see all sorts of colours, where the green was: a tangle of ribbons, each of them a different shade, each of them motionless. Teldaru reaches past me; I see his arm, which is impossibly long. He grasps a handful of ribbons and brings his arm carefully back. He plaits them, or that is what it looks like, and as he touches one to the other they begin to twitch and glow. With every bright, crossed strand I see an image: a baby, the sun, a necklace, a mirror. There are so many, and they change with every one of my heartbeats.
“How do you know what to do with them?” I ask.
“I feel it,” he says. “They still remember. Add yours: you’ll see.”
I bend, holding the green strand toward the others. As soon as it touches them it jerks and snaps. My palms burn but I manage to wind it around a blue and an orange. Abruptly it slides from my grasp and finishes what I began, twining itself, weaving its own pattern. I laugh in disbelief and feel my strength again, and I reach for more, greedy and certain.
The darkness begins to brighten, or maybe it is just the dazzle of images. I can’t even name them now, because they come and go so quickly. The sky—I see sky, so it is not simply the pictures that are light. There is ground beneath me, rough and splintered. A red hill in front. Teldaru throws a braid of ribbons that melt into a road when they fall: a pulsing, silver road with a sheen of gold. I toss the knotted length that is in my hand and it, too, becomes a road. It slithers its way out over the earth, which is softening beneath my bare toes.
This is easy, at first. I am still so powerful, and it feels effortless, drawing in the faint, sagging ribbons and making them breathe. Easy, easy, I think as I watch them harden and slide away from me. Easy, as canyons open and mold and the distance puckers with hills.
Only then it is not easy any more. I am holding a blue cord when I feel a tug from deep within me. I gasp at the shock of it, and at the pain, which is as sharp as the metal Teldaru uses to cut me.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “you’ll hardly feel it if you keep going”—but I do feel it. Every time I touch a strand or see an image my insides tear. I remember how the strength flowed from my veins into Borl’s dead paths, but this is nothing like that was. I cry out and claw at my own skin but the pain is too much.
“Nola! Stay with me!” He is touching me. I can hardly feel him. “Nola!” The red is flooding with black—is it mine or hers?—and all the colours are gone. His hands are on my arms. He pushes me, and I do feel this, and the rush of wind as I fall.
The stone gathered itself around and beneath me. Real stone. Ranior’s Tomb. I was on my back and all my bones were broken—but they were not, because I was writhing and bending.
He will be angry, I thought. I was too tired to care. When his hands crept up over me, from knees to breasts, I expected them to gouge or twist. They did not. They lingered, and each stroke returned me to my body. His hands. My naked, aching skin.
I opened my eyes. His head was bent over my breasts. He looked very far away. My dress? I wondered through the thickness in my head, and then I realized that it was bunched up under my arms. Its folds were moving like waves. I wanted to close my eyes again, but the black shapes that played over Teldaru’s head and arms were mesmerizing.
His tongue was cool. I saw it making wet circles on my nipples—and his teeth, after, closing hard but also gently. I moaned. Selera? I thought—or maybe I said it aloud, because he lifted his head, murmured, “It’s all right. You did very well. You’ll do better next time.”
I forced myself to look for Selera. She was not where she had been—she was halfway to the door, and I wondered whether she had moved there herself or whether Teldaru had driven her there. (Teldaru and I, I thought, and shrank away from it.) Selera was broken, just as Laedon had been. Head and legs contorted; one arm beneath her, turned the wrong way. Not even my warped vision made me believe she was alive.
Teldaru’s body was on mine. His weight was crushing; he was hardly supporting himself. He held my face between his hands and I was too weak to pull it away. His black eyes were spotted with red and flashes of silver that looked like lightning branches. They stayed open, even when he kissed me. Even when he nudged my knees open with his and leaned down more heavily yet. And then he was inside me and I was moaning again, twisting around his stillness. When he finally shifted it was just an easing away and a smooth, slow return—just this, over and over. I bit my lip to keep from making any more sounds. I squeezed my eyes shut and he forced them open with his thumbs and forefingers. He gazed at me until he gave one last, gentle thrust, and a shudder ran through us both. Then his eyes dipped shut and he sagged off me, onto the cool red stones.
I gasped for breath and it scalded my throat. I heard a noise that I discovered, moments later, was my own whimpering. There was something else, though—a low, regular grumble. I rolled over (wincing, throbbing) and he was there, his face level with my breasts. His breath was warm on my skin, and it was his breath that was so noisy. I craned so that I could see his face. His eyelids were fluttering but mostly closed. I lay back and listened to him snore once, twice, three times. Then I moved.
It seemed to take a very long time to sit, but once I succeeded the rest was easier. I was on my knees, rocking forward on my fists; I was in a crouch, my dress falling, arranging itself back over my body. I felt a warmth that I knew was blood but did not want to waste my strength finding the strips of cloth that used to be wadded between my legs. I lurched to my feet and stared down at him, through the wobbling of my after-vision.
Kill him. A torch will do, if you hit him hard enough.
Teldaru sucked in a different-sounding snore and went silent for a moment that seemed to last far too long. He’s dead now, I thought giddily, but then he breathed again and rolled from his side to his belly.
Kill him and the curse will never break.
I stood over him, gazing at his slack lips and his cheek, with its fuzz of hair that I knew was red-gold, but that looked greenish now. His limbs were like a child’s, sprawled and careless.
If you can’t kill him, run.
No point—you know this. You cannot leave him: you were a fool ever to think you could.
Run anyway. Do something.
I stumbled around him and over Selera’s body. I paused by the door just long enough to pick up my case; I pushed the door open and this time no one stopped me. I plunged down into the darkness and set a shaking hand to the walls.
Please, please lead me like you did before; be stronger than the curse; show me the Path that will take me away. . . . The Pattern hummed around me. I followed it even more swiftly than I had the last time, my fingers gliding along the spaces between the carvings. Each step gave me strength. I was nearly running by the time I reached the upper door. My blood pounded in my ears as I gripped the bolt and slammed it free. It’s working; I’m out, I’m away—this time somehow, truly away. . . .
I did not close the door behind me. I took a few steps that carried me beyond the hill, to where the path was. A few more lengthening paces, and then something hit me in the chest and I toppled backward. I yelled and flailed but the weight was still on me—and it was warm and hairy, and it smelled like rotten meat.
“Borl!” I gasped, and the pain ebbed a little more as I laughed. “Off, boy—off, Borl; let me up!”
He was gone, too abruptly, deposited in a whining heap beside me by a shadow that turned swiftly to me. Hands hauled me to my feet; a face loomed, so close and speckled with dark vision-blotches that I did not recognize it. Not until I heard the voice.
“What is going on?” said Bardrem. “Tell me, Nola, before I—”
“No,” I said, twisting in his grip, “not now—we must go, quickly—we must go.”
He held me still. He had to be seeing me—the blood on my face, and whatever was in my eyes. “Why?” he said in a low, even more urgent voice. “Tell me—I won’t go anywhere until you tell me why he hurt you. I followed you—I waited all that time and I was angry and then I saw you, and I saw him catch you and then kick the dog . . . the dog made me come—I don’t know if I would have, I was that angry. But he hurt you.” Bardrem touched my cheeks with his palms and I flinched. “Where is he?” Bardrem asked, very quietly. “Who is he?”
“Ah yes,” said Teldaru from behind us. “I was wearing my hood, wasn’t I? You didn’t see my face.”
There was no hood now. He walked over to us; stopped about five paces away. Borl growled and cowered. Bardrem drew himself up—I saw this and remembered Yigranzi’s thin, bare tree, and I wanted to touch him but could not.
“Orlo,” Bardrem said.
Teldaru smiled. “Kitchen boy. Will you try to kill me now?”
He was holding an unlit torch. Bardrem was holding nothing.
“It is a good scar,” Teldaru said, gesturing with the wood. “The one I gave you. Have you bedded many girls because of it? My own scars have been very useful that way—haven’t they, Nola?”
Teldaru’s teeth gleamed.
Bardrem launched himself forward—a blur, a wind that pushed me back a step. He sent Teldaru back too, and both of them fell. For a moment Bardrem was astride him, pummelling and grunting. But then Teldaru heaved Bardrem off in a single effortless thrust, and he was grinding his knees into Bardrem’s chest, and the torch was rising and descending and making a sound that was louder than Bardrem’s cries, or my own. I saw Bardrem’s skin, pale in the starlight but dark, too, with shadows and blood. The blood spread across his face with every blow. It sprayed over my hands and arms when I wrapped them around Teldaru and pulled at him, as hard as I could. He threw me off with a grunt and stood, and now the torch’s arc was higher and it landed on Bardrem’s chest and his back when he tried to roll away from it. I knelt, my muscles bunched and ready for the spring that would carry me to Teldaru again. I would be stronger. I would claw at his eyes and sink my teeth into his flesh—but no. He was turning to me. Bardrem was motionless, bent wrong. His fair hair was black, where it met his neck. Teldaru’s face was also streaked with black. He lifted the back of his hand and wiped it across his cheek, and the blood smeared and thinned in the shape of his knuckles.
“Go on.” His breathing was ragged. His eyes looked silver, and they held me on my knees. “Try to run from me again. I won’t chase you. Go.”
I shook my head. I should have said, or even thought, No—I won’t leave Bardrem, even if you have killed him. What I did say was, “My feet will keep leading me back here, won’t they? No matter where I try to turn. You’ll laugh and laugh.”
He lifted the piece of wood slowly, with both his hands. “Something very much like that, yes. I’m sorry, Nola—truly.”
The first blow caught me on my right side. I sprawled, straightened, crawled away from him and onto the path, as if this would be a safe place; as if I would simply pull myself home now. The numbness in my side was spreading to my legs, which dragged behind me. I saw Borl on the path, his belly pressed against the stones. I heard his whining, even though my own whimpering was high and loud. The next blow took me in the back and I crumpled flat. My mouth was full of pebbles and dirt and blood. Teldaru’s footsteps crunched so close that, even with my eyes squeezed shut, I knew he was nearly touching me. I waited. The pain lapped at me, from fingers and toes inward, to my chest, and from my chest out again. I imagined the waves slipping off me, vanishing lines of darkness that left crab shells on the sand.
“Nola,” he said, low and tender, and then the pain bloomed white and I was gone.
