We went to the house every night. Our cloaks were always dark and our hoods were always pulled up to hide our faces, but once the violence in the city had abated, there were hardly any people on the streets to see us.
The anger was simmering, now. Even through the fog of my exhaustion I heard things: a delegation of Belakaoan merchants had come to the king to petition for the release of their countrymen; the king had let some go, but not the ones who had wounded or killed (though the Sarsenayans who had done the same also languished in their cells). Moabu Bantayo wrote to King Haldrin, expressing his outrage at the sacrilege involved in the theft of the hero’s bones, and at the laxity of the punishment exacted upon the thief. Bantayo told Haldrin that he hoped Ranior’s bones would be seized and scattered and broken by birds, so that Haldrin might comprehend the Belakaoans’ sense of violation.
Teldaru gloated as he informed me of these things. “This is the true beginning,” he said, “for now my plan has its own breath, in the world.”
I heard his words—and indeed everyone’s—through weariness that was like a weight of water on my ears. I spent my days teaching—more than I had before, since Mistress Ket’s health had begun to fail—and my evenings Otherseeing for everyone who came to me. I remember how vivid the images were—as if the only thing about me that was truly awake was my Othersight—and how dark and blurred my words were, and how I could not care. I returned to my room, once the last person had left the seers’ courtyard or the Otherseeing chamber on the first floor of the school, and I slept for a few hours, and then I woke, every night, to Borl’s tongue on my hand and Teldaru’s knuckles against my door.
“You do not seem yourself, Mistress,” Leylen said to me one morning. She left me each evening as I was going to bed and came back just after dawn, and so she had no idea that I did not actually stay in my bed.
“The Otherworld is with me all the time, since Ranior’s Hill,” I said, and she nodded as if she understood, and said nothing more about it.
Teldaru and I left the castle through a postern gate set in the southern wall—so even the night guards did not see us. We were shadows.
“I looked for you last night,” Haldrin said to Teldaru at the morning meal, one day. “You weren’t in any of your usual places.”
“No,” Teldaru said, “Nola and I—we sometimes go . . .” He trailed off and looked at me with a crooked smile that was so gentle and full of desire that I flushed what must have been a dramatic shade of pink. Haldrin glanced at me and cleared his throat.
Zemiya has spoken to him, I thought, or Teldaru has; the king thinks we are lovers. I imagined—fruitlessly, for the thousandth time—being able to stand up and tell the king everything. I imagined screaming curses, instead. I imagined speaking all sorts of words, but none of them—not even the true ones—could have described what Teldaru and I did, in the big, dark house in the city.
Teldaru took a knife from his belt—not Bardrem’s knife, but the one with the sapphires and rubies, which I had killed Laedon with. Teldaru jabbed at the tip of his forefinger and we both watched blood bead and tremble there. He stepped so close to the bed that his thighs were touching the mattress by Laedon’s head (for Laedon was lying on the bed now). The blood fell—very slowly, it seemed. It clung to the old man’s misshapen brow for a moment before it eased its way down his face and onto the sheet beneath him.
Teldaru’s eyes were wide and fixed. There was no gold in them any more: only black, or something deeper than that. His lips were parted. I thought, He is still beautiful. And then I thought, as I had before, You could kill him, Nola, now—because while he seemed to be holding tightly to the knife, he was also in the Otherworld, and I might be able to wrest the weapon from him and use it before he could return. But no: I might not do it right—and if I did, how would my Paths return to what they had been? I felt sick with shame. I did not move.
He bent toward Laedon, whose face was turned away from him. Laedon blinked. He blinked again, and Teldaru made a sound, deep in his throat, and Laedon’s head rolled on the pillow.
I stumbled away from the bed. I was at the window, my fingernails gouging wood, my heart hammering so loudly that if Teldaru made other sounds, I did not hear them. Laedon was looking at him. He was looking, his eyes clear and focused, as I had never seen them when he lived—and as I watched, their blue flooded black. His whole body rolled, and he was facing Teldaru, and me. The sheet slipped off his chest and tangled between his thighs. His shirt was loose and unlaced, and I caught a glimpse of yellow-grey skin, pitted with tendons and muscles that looked like they were in the wrong places.
Teldaru sagged forward, and the knife fell to the floor. His forearms and elbows were on the bed, holding him up. His shoulder blades jutted behind him like blunt, unformed wings.
Laedon sat up. His muscles twisted and strained. Every slow movement was an echo of some other effortless, remembered one. His legs slid over the edge of the bed. His claw hands were upturned; his fingers twitched. His eyes were steady and still, fixed on Teldaru’s bent head. And then they shifted and sought and found me.
His mouth was slack. His whole body was, now. Only his eyes lived. It’s just Teldaru behind them, I told myself—but this did not seem right: there was still blue in the black. Laedon was here, and he saw me.
I straightened so that I was no longer leaning against the window. When he comes toward you, I thought, do not run; he will be slow and ungainly and you will have time to move away. But he did not come toward me. He sat staring at me for a moment more, and then he fell to his left, so quickly that it would have been comical, under other circumstances. At the same time Teldaru turned and eased himself down until he was sitting with his back against the bed. He licked his lips. His eyes were closed; his shoulders and arms were rigid. I had seen him like this before, in the tiny, windowless room that had been my cell, when I first came to the castle. No doubt I had looked like this before, in this very room. Spent; wrung by Bloodseeing.
“Water,” Teldaru rasped, and I went to the pitcher and poured some into a thick clay mug. I wondered briefly whether it would taste the way the air smelled. My hands shook a bit as I held the mug to his mouth.
“If it costs you so much simply to make him sit up,” I said, “what kind of effort will you need to make him stand? And when it is Mambura or Ranior, how will you make them hold swords—and use swords? Because this is how you intend these heroes to do battle, yes? You will control them.”
Teldaru raised his finger—the one he had pricked—and put it in his mouth. “We,” he said slowly, around his finger. “We will control them; we will be them. You will be the island Bird. I will be the Hound.”
He got to his feet. His strength was already returning; he moved smoothly, if more carefully than usual. He pushed Laedon onto his back and arranged him so his head was on the pillow again. Teldaru drew the sheet up over Laedon’s sunken chest.
“And what will happen, after we do this?” I said—as if it were even possible. As if I wouldn’t have stopped him long before then.
“I will be greater than either of them,” Teldaru said. “I will rule. And you with me.”
I wanted to laugh, as he reached out a hand, but instead I forced myself to step forward and take it. I held his fingers very tightly. I will ruin you, I thought, yet again, and I smiled into the darkness of his eyes.
Selera’s bones lay on a piece of red velvet. Teldaru arranged them, from nubby toes up to pitted ivory skull. She was hundreds of parts but also whole.
“We must choose,” he said to me one night. “We do not have all of Mambura’s bones, so we cannot use all of hers.” He was stroking the brownish clump of stuff that was her hair, which he had laid on its own, smaller piece of velvet.
He picked an arm, and her hips. He worked his wrist into the space between the hipbones and grinned at me. “Now you,” he said.
I chose quickly—three ribs—the most graceful, unhorrifying things on the red velvet. I held all three of them in one hand. They were smooth and pocked with tiny holes, neither warm nor cool. Borl whined; his eyes darted as if he could see my face, and the things in my hand.
“Good,” Teldaru said, and turned.
We went upstairs. “It must happen here,” he said as he pushed the door to the mirror room open. “The Otherworld is here, always.”
And so is Uja, I thought. I had not seen her since he brought me back to this house; I had only heard her, singing long, lovely phrases that I was sure were for me. So now my heart pounded as I stepped into the room and looked for her—and she was there, on one of the lower branches of her cage-tree. Her amber eyes were level with mine. I expected another song, or at least a whistle, but she sat silently and very still. She did not even blink. She gazed at me as if she did not know me, and did not look at Borl at all. I waited for him to growl at her, as he always used to, but even he was quiet, though the muscles of his back were rigid beneath my hand.
Teldaru spread the red velvet out on the floor between the cabinet and the mirror. The knives were the same; the gold was the same. I wondered for a moment whether the woman whose white-streaked braid was coiled in the kitchen had ever stood here, staring at the knives and at the beauty of his face and beginning to be afraid.
He arranged the bones on the cloth and sat back on his heels. There were so few bones.
It won’t work, I thought. “And now what will we do?” I sounded eager; I was eager, and heavy with dismay.
“I think you know.” The lamplight flickered on the golden facets and on his skin—all so smooth, so bright.
I smiled, keeping my face turned to him even as I sank down into a crouch. I did not recall deciding to do this; it was the Pattern moving in me. I took hold of the knife hilt that jutted from his boot and pulled the blade free. I rose. I grasped his left hand and set it next to mine. Our palms were turned up; they looked ruddy, fleshy in the light. I drew the knife’s edge across his palm and then mine in one quick, steady motion. Neither of us flinched.
“There,” I said as our blood welled black, together.
The darkness is stifling and still. There are no ribbons of colour, as there were in Borl’s dead Otherworld. There is nothing but Teldaru, behind me. He feels cool—his breath, and the words that prickle my skin.
“Wait. Be patient. Watch.”
Time passes. Usually I do not feel this, sunk in a vision, but now I know: it has been minutes, hours, and I cannot breathe in the dark, and there is nothing to see. I am exhausted, and I have done nothing, yet.
“There.” It is my voice. My hands reach, at last, for a deeper shadow. A black spark hangs somewhere in front of me. I move my hands carefully until I see the spark bob, and then I curl all my fingers around it. Cold spreads up my arms and into the space behind my eyes. I see my fingers loosen, and Teldaru’s closing over them, drawing them together again. The spark warms. Light pulses—wan and white, and after yet more time, silver. Teldaru’s hands open and so do mine, and the spark rises and floats away from me, trailing silver through the black. It is more and more distant, just a speck, and the path it has left is green now. I watch it, and I am holding it: it is coming from me, or it ends with me—I cannot tell which, but I am spinning slowly, clinging and gasping because I am so tired.
“I can’t,” I say somehow, and Teldaru slips his hands around my waist as the Otherworld falls away beneath me.
I coughed, and this hurt my chest and filled my eyes with tears. When they were gone I saw one of the ribs arcing gently about a hand’s breadth away from me. The black after-splotches wriggled over the bone, so that it seemed to be wobbling. It was no different. I could tell, even with the splotches—the bone was pitted and bare and just as it had been before.
“Didn’t work.” My voice was a croak.
“Did.” Teldaru’s was the same as mine. His hand twitched on my hip. He was lying behind me, of course.
I lifted my head and his hand was there, propping it up, letting me see more clearly. The rib was bare, but it was not dry: it glistened with a sheen that looked orange, with my after-vision. And the bone was dark, not yellow. Dark red, I saw a bit later, when I was sitting up and my gaze was clear. The other bones lay around this one, and they were certainly the same as they had been.
“You see,” said Teldaru, and Uja keened, long and low.
So that was how Selera began again—with dampness and deep red and a single, curving bone. Every night for two months we remade more of her. I know it was two months because my bleeding came twice. I was relieved when it did, since it kept me from needing a knife, to enter the Otherworld—and I was already covered with tiny scars. My belly, under my arms and breasts—it took many, many cuts to bring Selera back.
We tore at the darkness of her Otherworld; used our living blood to fashion scarlet sand and dull grey sky. All the bones on the cloth glistened with fat and flesh. There was always a moment of dizzy triumph as I looked down on what the old, dead Paths had become: fingernails and earlobe, a fuzz of hair and the wet glint of an eye. The moment would pass, of course, and my pulse would slow, and I would stare with horror at what we were making and think, I will not be excited next time; I will not catch my breath when Teldaru whispers, “Ready, love?” But I did.
I did not understand, and I could not keep from asking him questions, even though I knew that the curse would keep me from making these questions intelligible. “How does it work? How can we do all this with just these few bits of her?”
He smiled, of course—delighted to be asked, and to instruct. “Everything is in each part. Each part is whole. A man can be remade from a single hair, or a spine. An eyelash would be enough—but it is harder. The oldest, smallest Paths are well hidden. They are easier to find in the larger bones, the newer ones—and that is why we are using some of those.”
“But how do they know to knit?”
“They remember.”
And they did. I hoped that one night I would open my eyes and see Selera’s nose embedded in her belly, or a nipple protruding from her forehead, but this did not happen. Blotches of fat adhered to bones that had not been there before. All her bones, old and new, were hidden by white and red stuff that wobbled or stretched taut, and everything was in the right place.
“Let me see it,” I said one night. He had brought a pillow for her head, which by then was covered in a layer of moist yellow skin and patches of wispy hair. There was no velvet any more; just a piece of thick, folded linen, because she oozed and stained whatever was beneath or around her. “Let me watch you so that I can see how things join.”
Teldaru shook his head. “I need you in the Otherworld with me. There is no time for lessons now. We must remake her, and then Mambura and Ranior, as quickly as we can—for after the queen’s child is born there will be change. We must be ready for it.”
“Just once,” I said, as if I had not heard him. “Let me watch you once—surely that would not delay us much.”
He brushed my cheek with his knuckles, which were smeared with blood—Selera’s, I knew, for it was black, not crimson. “No, my love,” he said, and brushed my nipple then, until it hardened beneath the undershift I wore here. “I need you with me, always.”
We gathered the scarlet sand and spun it into lattice. We caught at ribbons of colour that flitted among the lattice and hills and up against the sky, and we made them into rolling green—but she was still dead. She will stay this way, I thought as I lay spent, staring at the fresh gleam of her lips or the arch of an eyebrow. Even as I watched her Paths stretch away from me over the greening hills I thought this—because they were black Paths, trails of soot or ashes, and the ends I held did not move. Maybe Laedon will be the only one, I thought; maybe Selera and Mambura and Ranior will simply lie on the floor like meat and we will fail and there will be no battle.
But at the end of that second month, a Path shivered between my fingers. It shivered and then it lashed, and I saw that the one Teldaru was holding was lashing too. The two roads rippled upon the green, and they flooded slowly silver, from our fingertips outward, to the farthest edge of sky. I cried out, for the silver came from me, and it tore at me as it left my veins. Teldaru laughed. He plucked up another road, and so did I, and I was laughing now, throbbing with pain and hunger. Every Path we touched turned silver. The red sky glowed brighter, and bruise-purple vines swarmed and knotted on the hills.
“Go back,” I heard Teldaru say. I saw him raise his hands, which were still tangled with silver, and felt them push me, hard. I was on the wooden floor, panting and whimpering, and Uja was singing, somewhere above the pounding of my blood. Teldaru was beside me, his eyes Otherseeing black, his shoulders hunched and straining. I struggled to my knees, scrabbling at my eyes to clear away the after-vision shapes. Selera was lying as she had been: her limbs straight, her face turned to the ceiling. Her nose was sunken and her lips were black. All her skin, from forehead to toes, was mottled white and brown. Her hair was too thin and short and filthy to look blonde. As she had been—except for her eyes. They were open, as always, but they were not green: they were black. And they were blinking.
I pushed myself backward and my feet scraped along the floor. Her head moved, as if she had heard me. It rolled on the pillow and she looked at me, or Teldaru did—maybe both of them did, out of her living eyes. Her lips twitched and pulled back over her teeth. She smiled, and Teldaru smiled, and I ran from them, retching and blind.
The smell clung to me, no matter how often I bathed. I hardly noticed it at the house any more, but at the castle it wafted up at me from my own hair and skin. When winter came, the stench seemed stronger because of all the layers of clothing I wore, and the smoky dampness of the rooms. I spent as much time as I could outside, walking the snow-crusted paths beneath the trees, but I had lessons to teach, and people to Othersee for, and anyway, the cold did not seem to help. The only relief it gave me was solitude.
“Something is rotten here,” the queen said one night at dinner. She leaned forward, both hands on the gentle swell of her belly. Her eyes flicked from Teldaru’s face to mine.
“Your sense of smell is heightened,” Haldrin said. “Perhaps the meat is old and only you can tell.” He cleared his throat. I knew that he was lying, and I felt sick with shame and rage.
“No.” Teldaru leaned forward too, and placed his hand lightly on mine. I stared at the piece of raisin bread I was holding. I could not lift it, now that he was touching me, and I no longer wanted to.
“I am showing Mistress Nola the deepest mysteries of our gift. I am leading her along the Paths of the dead.”
There was a servant reaching over my shoulder with a ladle full of soup. He dropped the ladle, after Teldaru spoke, and the soup spilled onto my lap and over our joined hands. Lovely, I thought, trying not to moan at the burning. Now I’ll stink of dead chicken as well as dead people.
“This is forbidden,” Lord Derris said. I could hardly hear his voice above the din of other voices in the Hall, and yet the words seemed very clear.
“Simply walking the Paths is not,” said Teldaru. “Dangerous, yes, and exhausting, but not forbidden unless you seek to change them. My own Master feared these roads and showed me nothing of them, so that when I found them on my own, the danger was even greater. So I am showing Mistress Nola. Guiding her.” He stroked my knuckles with his fingertips.
“Take care.” Haldrin spoke so quietly that I almost could not hear him, either.
“Of course,” said Teldaru. I felt my lips twist into something like a smile, and I bowed my head.
Brilliant, I thought. The Great Master will lead them so close to the truth that they will not see it.
Perhaps the servant went off and told other servants; perhaps Lord Derris told some of his pious friends. However it happened, I became even more popular and revered. In the evenings, when I did not teach, I sat in the Otherseeing chamber as a succession of people came to me—mostly nobles who gave me coins, but often servants too, or soldiers, who thought I was showing them great favour when I looked into their Otherworlds and did not ask for payment.
I thought, You poor fools; my words are as rank as my skin. And yet even the smell of me, it seemed, was cause for awe. Most of them recoiled at first, when they sat down facing me. I watched their hands and nostrils twitch, and then I watched them lean in closer. I saw their wonder and revulsion and need, and I hated them more than I hated the lies I had to tell them.