I woke to find Teldaru weeping against my chest. Later I wondered whether I had imagined it, since my eyes and head had still been swimming with fever, and since he was his calm, smiling self when I truly did wake. It’s strange, but I am more certain of it now than I was immediately after. He was there. His head was lying between my breasts and he was sobbing like a child.
My jaw was broken, and my nose, and several of my ribs. The healer kept me asleep with herb concoctions for many days. When I was no longer fully asleep I dreamed (but I know I did not dream him). I dreamed of my mother and the dirty pallet I had slept on with the babies, in her house. I dreamed of the Lady’s silver belt and worn blue velvet dress. I dreamed that I was awake and swinging my bare legs over the bed, ready to rise and walk out the door.
Then I did open my eyes and he was there, weeping, and the pain under my skin was too real, too sudden, and I was away again, falling into an Otherworld where I had never been before.
I tried to flee the pain but it was too big. I woke over and over, for longer and longer stretches, and lay listening to my own wordless droning. My eyes were horribly dry, and everything I saw seemed edged in blue flame. The window (not my old one) and the shutters. Someone’s hands—whose? Teldaru’s? Selera’s?—on a bowl. I waited to see her braid swinging and thought that it would probably look beautiful with the blue around it—but as I waited I realized that she would not be beside me, ever, though I did not know how I knew.
One day the blue shimmer was fainter. I rolled my head on the pillow. The pain in my jaw was a dull throb; I did not need to moan. One of the shutters was open, and there was a wedge of sunlight on my bed. I looked at the green coverlet and the knobby shapes of my knees. At Teldaru, who was sitting on a chair near my feet, his legs in sun, his lowered head in shadow.
I remembered, as I watched him sleep. The layers of dream fell away until all that remained were true images. I did moan, then. Borl laid his muzzle on my arm; he was beside me, stretched out long and straight. You were hurt too, I thought. You were hurt because I was. He whined; Teldaru’s head came up and his black eyes opened.
“Nola,” he said. He smiled his tender smile—the one that made me feel safe and treasured, even as I thought, I should have killed you.
“I feared that I would lose you,” he said. He leaned forward so that his knuckles touched the coverlet. I felt Borl stiffen and growl, so low in his throat that it was just vibration, not sound. “But the Pattern has led you back, and I thank it.”
I do not, I wanted to say, and Are you lying or are you mad? I’ll never know what words would actually have emerged, for I choked on my own voice. Teldaru clucked his tongue.
“Hush, love. You will not be able to speak yet.”
I lifted one of my hands. It felt heavy, and it shook, but I managed to move it to my head. There was a piece of cloth there, looped under my jaw and up over my cheeks and ears. I could not find the knot. When I touched the cloth, the skin beneath it, which had merely been throbbing, began to burn. I could have tried to growl at him anyway, through my clenched teeth and the flesh that felt torn between them. I was silent.
He rose and crossed the room, out of my sight. I heard water being wrung from cloth and was instantly, achingly thirsty. He came up beside me and thrust the whining Borl out of his way with his foot. He set a basin on the bed and a cloth on my forehead. It was so cold that I closed my eyes again. I heard him dip the cloth and raise it, and then there were droplets on my lips, slipping between them and also down the sides of my neck.
“I will have one of Dellena’s kitchen boys bring you soup later,” Teldaru said. “Perhaps tomorrow you’ll be able to manage something soft—some skinned fruit or bread soaked in milk. Or something a little more exotic, left over from the wedding feast.”
He was watching my eyes. When they widened, he smiled. “You’ve been asleep for a long time, dearest.”
He walked back to his chair. He pulled it closer to me and sat, leaning his forearms on the edge of the bed. His clasped hands rested on my right side, very lightly, but now I felt the bandage that was wrapped around my ribs, too. It was as if every place he or I touched woke my body to what had happened to it.
“They were married two days ago. Such loveliness—Selera would have revelled in it—shall I describe it to you?”
I hate you, I thought. Hate you hate you. The words sounded blurred even in my head; I was sleepy again, leaden and dizzy at the same time. I tried to keep my hot, dry eyes on him.
“The rites were held at Ranior’s Hill, as they always are. But imagine, Nola, how much more meaningful it was for me than it was for any of my predecessors! To be standing beneath the earth, in the tomb of the War Hound—at the heart of our land, where you and I had so recently channelled the Pattern’s might. . . .
It was clean,” he continued briskly. “Servants had spent days scrubbing the corridors and the tomb itself. All the stone gleamed. Torchlight filled every passage. Lord Derris was weeping with wonder before I even spoke.”
I was so tired, and I did not want to listen to him—but I did listen, and thought, How much of this story is a lie?
“I suppose you will want to know what Zemiya was wearing,” he said, and chuckled. If I could have, I would have curled into a ball and pulled the coverlet over my head. I felt a surge of nausea and wondered briefly what would happen if I needed to vomit.
“She wore Belakaoan gowns, both to the Hill and afterward, at the castle. I had thought she might wear a Sarsenayan one—I had hoped it, for she would have looked ridiculous, with her brown skin and thick, muscled limbs. But she wore a green and yellow island dress beneath Ranior’s Hill. The cloth was covered in tiny shells. They clacked every time she moved, and the ones in her hair did too. At least her sister wore no decoration.”
I tried to imagine Neluja standing tall and straight by the image of the War Hound—by the stone of his sarcophagus—and could not.
“I spoke the words of binding, over the King’s Mirror.”
A small one—very old, made of bronze, not gold. It was used only for marriage and birth rites, and I had never seen it; only been told of it by Mistress Ket, who also told us some of the words. “The Path you walk together will run straight and smooth through the wilderness.” Teldaru had spoken these words in his deep, solemn voice. Haldrin and Zemiya had held the edge of the mirror and he had put his hands on theirs—dark and light—and said that they would walk a straight, smooth road together.
“Zemiya’s fingers were clenched tight, but they trembled a bit anyway. She was afraid. The proud, sea-born princess who lived among volcanoes was afraid of a chamber made of Sarsenayan stone, or afraid of me—of the Pattern she saw in my gaze—I do not know, but it pleased me. And then we came out into the sunlight, and the king and queen mounted the horses that had been brought for them. They rode, and Lord Derris and Neluja and I came behind in the carriage. There were people lining the road—more than had been there at dawn when we had first passed that way. People on the country road and people on the city one. Some of them threw petals and ribbons and bright strips of Belakaoan cloth. The poor ones cheered. The rich ones were silent.”
I am not sure why I thought of Bardrem, just then. Perhaps Teldaru’s mention of the city’s rich and poor reminded me. I saw the brothel, the girls who arrived there, bruised and dirty, and the silk-robed men who paid them. Bardrem sitting on the courtyard stone, the long ends of his hair brushing the paper on his lap. Bardrem lying on his belly, broken and blood-soaked. I turned my head away from Teldaru and closed my eyes, but I was still dizzy, and I still heard him.
“The Belakaoan merchants in the upper city drummed on their balconies and doors with their palms or pieces of wood—no wonder their Sarsenayan neighbours did nothing but stare at them, and at their dark new queen. Savages, all of them, and yet they live in mansions in the city, and one of them lives in the castle. Our own rich men are right to be dismayed.”
I heard his smile.
“There was feasting, of course. Queen Zemiya”—he said “Queen” as if it were profanity—“wore a red dress so heavily stitched with gems that it hardly moved. Gems in spiral shapes that reflected the lamps and torches so that she herself seemed to be aflame. Haldrin goggled at her like a besotted boy. I spoke the public words—the ones that are met with drunken cheers. And then there was drunken dancing, and I returned here. To you. And I watched you sleep.”
His voice sounded fainter. I reached carefully for the darkness that was seeping in around me.
“There was one thing about the feast,” he said. “A gift Neluja gave her sister, after I had spoken. A bracelet made of bones.”
Such muffled words. The shadows were easing up over my ears.
“Mambura’s bones, Nola. Do you hear me? The hero’s bones—and we shall use them.”
I did not understand, but it did not matter. Bardrem, I thought, and I followed his name down into the dark.
“Mambura’s bones.” The words circled and swam, in my sleep. They too were dreams. They were meaningless and fleeting and I would forget them when I woke.
Except that when I did wake, Zemiya was standing above me. Her dress was orange and her hair-shells were yellow, and the bracelet that coiled from her wrist to her elbow was white. It was made of polished pieces that looked like beads, but weren’t. A few of them were strange and knobbly. Knuckles, I thought, and remembered Yigranzi. A few were long and slender and gently curved, so that they fit against the slope of her forearm. Some were absolutely smooth, while others were crisscrossed with lines that looked like hard, yellowed veins.
“Mambura’s bones,” I heard in my head, one more time, and then I raised my eyes to look at the queen.
“Nola. We are sorry we woke you.” Not Zemiya’s voice; Haldrin’s. He stepped into my vision and stood beside his wife. He smiled at me. She did not.
“But we are also relieved to see you awake. And we must thank you.”
Now you will tell me all the lies Teldaru has told you, I would have said, if there had been no curse, and if my jaw had not been strapped shut. I tried to raise my brows. Go on. Tell me.
“Ispu Teldaru says you saved him,” Zemiya said. She did not sound thankful. Cold, I thought; suspicious—but these words did not quite describe her tone or her narrowed gaze.
Haldrin said, “He says you may not remember it clearly, or even at all. Do you?”
I shook my head. My hair scratched against the pillow. My braid was curled like a snake on the green coverlet, which was pulled up to my shoulders.
“Then we will not remind you of it,” the king said. “It might be too unpleasant, and you must recover your strength. All you need to know now is that Sarsenay is grateful to you. I am grateful.”
I shifted my legs and shoulders. Grateful? No. He killed Selera. We did. He killed Bardrem, I think. He would have killed me, except he needs me to help him kill yet more people—Belakaoans, on a battlefield you told him of, my Queen.
“So we will leave you, and—”
“Haldrin.” The name sounded wonderfully strange, in Zemiya’s voice. “She is itchy. Her skin, under the bindings that are around her chest.” This was not why I had moved, but as soon as she said the words they were true: I was hot and itchy and sore, and I squirmed a little more, beneath the cloth.
“I will loosen them,” the queen continued, “and check her. My mother’s father taught us all such things; the ispa will be well attended to.”
Haldrin frowned a bit. Zemiya reached out her arm—bare and brown and rounded with muscle—and laid her hand flat against his stomach, just above his belt. She smiled.
“Go on, Husband.”
He smiled back at her. “Very well,” he said, “but do not be too long.”
Zemiya gazed at the door for a moment, after it had closed behind him. Then she turned and stepped over close to me and pulled the coverlet down to my hips. I peered down at myself and saw that I was wearing nothing but clean white cloth strips wrapped tight from my breasts to my waist.
“Ispu Teldaru says you did not feel you had told your friends farewell with enough warmth.” She undid the knots one by one, watching my eyes, not her own fingers. “He says you took a horse from the castle stables and went after the carriages. One of them had already turned north, but the other was lying on its side by the tomb of your hero-dog.”
The bone bracelet felt cold against my skin, and the air was cool too, after all the days I’d been bound. I felt my nipples pucker, and saw Zemiya’s gaze flick to them.
“Ispa Selera was mad, Teldaru says.” The queen stared at my breasts, her head tilted to one side. She sees bruises, I thought, and then, in a rush of new dizziness, she sees scars. Please look longer, Zemiya; please see them and ask me why they’re there. Even if my voice cannot tell you, perhaps my eyes will.
She looked from my breasts to my face. “She had already killed the carriage driver. She was standing above the ispu when you arrived. He was pinned beneath one of the carriage’s wheels. She was screaming. He had forced her to leave her city, and she would not have it. She would not be banished to a place so far from him. But since he had done this—since he had made her go—he would suffer. She shrieked these things, he says. She stood above him with a knife in her hand and she brought it down”—Zemiya bent so close that the folds of her dress brushed my hand—“and you took hold of a bough that was lying by the road and you hit her. One strong blow, and it sent her spinning, and the knife too, and the bough, which rolled beneath her hand and was in her hand when she rose to face you. She hated you, the ispu says. From the moment you came here to him, years ago, you and she were water and fire. So she came at you on that road like a rainmonth tide and you could not withstand her. By the time the ispu had freed himself from the wheel’s weight, you were just a patch of blood upon the ground. He took the knife from the grass and stabbed her in the back and in the chest, when she spun to face him. And so the worm-hearted woman died and the sun-hearted woman became a hero to her people. There, now,” she said, and sat down on the chair beside me in a billow of orange cloth, “does that help you remember? Or does it not, because no word of it is truth?”
I made a low sound and she smiled a wide, cold smile. “But of course—you can’t speak.” The smile vanished. She stared at me, up and down—at my nakedness and my eyes. “What happened by that hill? And what is he to you?”
I raised my hands and laid them beneath my breasts, where most of the marks were. As if this reminded her of what she was supposed to be doing, she rose and began retying the cloth strips, much more loosely. I touched my mottled skin (black and yellow-green, I saw, only now) and then I grasped one of her hands and held it to a scar.
“Ah yes,” she said. She pushed my hand away and made another knot, right where it had been. “So it is like that.” She straightened, as I made strangled noises, and tugged the neck of her own dress down until I could see the dark swell of a breast, and the purple-black rim of its nipple. She pressed a finger to her skin and I saw a bubbled scar, pink and brown, about as long and thick as my thumb. “He cut me too, once,” she said. “With a broken shell. When we were young, in Belakao, and he was angry. My blood . . . excited him.” She stepped even further back, rearranging her dress. “I was strong enough to resist him. You, it seems, are not. Perhaps you think you love him?”
I wanted to laugh that high, mad cackle of mine. I wanted to leap from the bed and seize her shoulders and cry, “Neluja would understand!” I did not—I did nothing at all, for the door swung open and Teldaru walked into the sunlight.
“Zemiya,” he said. His mouth and eyes went wide. “Oh dear—forgive me—Queen Zemiya.”
“Haldrin calls me moabene,” she said. She looked very tall, just then, and very bright. She swept by him and left without another word or glance at us.
“Did you see it?” He put his hands under my arms and eased me up in the bed; I sat and gasped at the pain and relief of this. “The bracelet,” he added impatiently. I wished I could scoff, The string of white bones that takes up half her arm? No, I didn’t notice. I nodded.
“We need it, Nola. With Mambura’s bones we shall remake Mambura. The Flamebird will fly again.”
Of course, I thought as he reached for the cloth that wrapped my head. I did try to laugh, then, but it sounded like one of Borl’s snuffles.
“And I am going to be generous. A generous fool, perhaps, but I am going to entrust you with this. You will prove your worthiness, after all your attempts at betrayal. You will steal Mambura’s bones for me.”
Time seemed to slow. His fingers hardly moved on the knot (which was behind my head). When he turned to me and smiled, it took minutes. His smile filled my eyes. His smooth golden cheek was almost touching mine.
Until you remake my Paths, I will not kill you, I thought. So I will pretend, instead. I will be the woman you want, until I know as much as you do and the curse is undone—and then I will know how to break you.
“Nola? Did you hear me?”
The cloth fell away. I closed my eyes briefly, expecting anguish, but I felt only a wonderful, bruised looseness filling my cheeks and slipping between my teeth. I opened my eyes and smiled at him. “Yes,” I said.