“Eyul?” She raised her voice now. He imagined her, inside, turning her face towards him. He imagined the sun lighting her features.
“Yes?”
“Do you have trouble sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
Metrishet. The desert grew hot around him. He stood, the light driving long nails through his eyes. He watched her tent so long that he wondered if she still listened. “I’ll see you at nightfall.”
She answered. “At nightfall, then.”
He climbed into his tent at last, leaving his Knife in the sand. Today he would not sleep as an assassin.
Chapter Seventeen
Mesema and Eldra prepared for sleep. They laid their mats side by side and ran bone-picks through one another’s hair. It felt strange, after so long away from home, to braid Eldra’s curls when they were so close to the colour and feel of Dirini’s, and it was stranger yet to sit idle, doing girlish things, when the pattern waited. It felt so odd to fiddle with hair-beads while deceiving an emperor.
“What about Arigu?” whispered Mesema.
“He didn’t come for me, and if he had, I’d have told him I still had the Woman visiting.”
They giggled as the sun burned its way through the tent.
“What is he like?” asked Mesema. No amount of worry could keep her from being curious.
“He’s mostly nice, when it’s just the two of us,” said Eldra, tilting her head to Mesema’s fingers. “Gentle.”
Mesema remembered Arigu’s hands on her arms, how he hadn’t squeezed or poked when he’d looked for the pattern-marks. She thought about the chief coming to her mother in the longhouse, how his eyes went soft at the sight of her. “Sometimes strong men are soft in private.”
“And sometimes soft men are rough.”
Mesema thought of Banreh. “I suppose.” She secured a bead at the end of Eldra’s last braid.
“There,” said Eldra, turning to face her. “Now we are both beautiful.”
“You’re the pretty one, Eldra.” Mesema picked up her quilted bag and placed the pick inside. It also held bracelets and hairclips, the kinds of things she would wear on her wedding day. Would her husband like them? She didn’t expect to know, nor would she ask. She wouldn’t be able to talk with him as she could talk with Banreh. She couldn’t tell him about reading the wind, or about the resin, carefully hidden in the bottom of her trunk.
She was learning that her life in Nooria would be about hiding: hiding the truth and, in turn, hiding from the emperor, and the pattern. Thoughts of the pattern had dogged her all day, just as the heat surrounded and suffocated her, but no matter what she tried to think about instead, a shape or path kept entering her mind. She was learning how to hold her tongue, but she didn’t know how to keep her thoughts from turning.
“Have you ever seen a pattern like the one that came through the sands?” she asked Eldra.
“No, but I’ve heard of them.” Eldra leaned forwards, almost bumping noses with Mesema. “I wanted to go to that church.”
“Well, you couldn’t,” said Mesema.
“When you’re a princess, you’ll command them to take me back.”
“If I can spare you.” They giggled together under the bright canvas.
Mesema yawned. Sleep dragged at her, but her mind wouldn’t stop. Just as notes made no song without the touch of a musician, shapes and lines made no spell without the touch of a mage. A thought came to her, and the sweat on her back went cold. “I don’t think that church is a good place to go,” she said, dropping onto her mat. “We should forget it.”
“What shall I make of myself, then?” asked Eldra, her voice sharp for the first time.
Mesema rolled to look at her. “Listen. If you had gone to the church, what would you have made of that, with no food and no water?”
Eldra sighed and turned her back.
“Let’s go to sleep.” But in truth Mesema couldn’t close her eyes. She tried to decide whether a pattern could enforce a man’s will. How had it been created? Each shape seemed simple in itself, but together they created something beyond her ken.
Mesema rolled onto her stomach. She wanted to forget the pattern. She was meant to have a child. Her duty lay in that simple and difficult task. It didn’t matter what the prince looked like, or how he treated her: when the Bright One came over the moon, she would lie with him. There were more frightening things than making a child. For the first time, she was not frightened of her prince.
She did fear his brother, the emperor. She wondered how long it would be before he died of his illness. But as much as he frightened her, she couldn’t make herself wish for his death.
At last she drifted off to sleep, sung along by the sounds of sand and the familiar neighing of the horses. She dreamed of home, of the songs by the fireside and the women with their needles. She dreamed that the women embroidered her receiving cloth, a circle of white as big as the longhouse, in blue and yellow and purple; they employed the costliest dyes for the baby emperor. And when Mesema tied off her thread and looked at their work, she recognised the shapes and twisting paths of the sand pattern.
She screamed-no; she woke to a scream: Eldra was sitting beside her, tears running down her face, fingernails scraping at her own skin.
Pattern-marks ran across her chest, a spiderweb of color marked with moons and half-stars.
Outside, men were shouting. Weapons hissed out of their sheaths. Sand spilled under fast-moving boots.
Mesema thought quickly. “Gather yourself together, Eldra!” She reached out and slapped Eldra’s cheek. Eldra fell silent, her eyes dazed and bloodshot. “Good,” Mesema said, buttoning her friend’s nightdress with shaking hands.
“What’s happening in there?” Arigu’s voice.
“A nightmare,” Mesema called out, hoping he wouldn’t hear the squeak in her voice. If it were Banreh, he would know instantly that she lied.
Eldra grabbed Mesema’s wrists. “What are you doing?” she whispered.
“I don’t know what they’ll do to you if they find out,” said Mesema, too low for the general to hear.
“I’m dying anyway.” Tears gathered in Eldra’s eyes. “I heard what he told you. The pattern kills.”
Arigu’s shadow rose and flickered over the canvas. Mesema thought he had turned away and was surveying the camp. She covered her eyes with one hand. The Hidden God truly did not live in the desert. What terrible fate had befallen Eldra, without the guiding hands of rain and shade? And she herself-? Mesema gasped and ripped open her own nightdress, but she saw only the blue marks of her veins beneath pale skin. “Why-?”
“My bad luck.” Eldra tried to smile.
Mesema hugged Eldra, her throat burning with sorrow. Eldra patted her back. “I’m going to heaven.” But no matter where she was going, her hand trembled.
Mesema held on, her eyes squeezed shut. She wanted to go back to the morning, when they had picked the prettiest beads for their hair, back to when they had eaten figs in the light of dawn, before the pattern came, but there was no going back, no going home, and there was no saving Eldra. She looked back at Arigu’s shadow, but he’d moved on. “I’ll take you to your church,” she whispered.
“No. You will go to your prince-”
“No!” Nooria was a place of evil. She knew it now for certain.
“You must promise me-listen!-you will go to your prince and help him stop this pattern.” Tears continued unabated down Eldra’s cheeks, but her voice came steady and sure. “Promise me.”
A promise to the dying held the sanctity of a promise made to the gods. Mesema sniffed and wiped her cheeks. She had been unkind when Eldra was scared and alone. Even after that, try as she might, she hadn’t liked her as much as she could have. And then there was Banreh. Mesema owed Eldra a kindness. She tried to swallow,
