together with no goodbyes.
“I don’t know.” Her voice trembled, and she kept her eyes down.
“Has someone died?” Mesema didn’t know why she asked it, but as the words came she knew them to be true. She felt the pattern closing in, stronger now.
Lana kept her head down, but the tears fell in a steady rain. Mesema felt her eyes prickle. It couldn’t be Sahree; the high mage would not concern himself with a mere servant, nor would Beyon react so to her death. Nevertheless a sudden grief welled in her, blurring the lamplight that gleamed on her plate. She pushed it away.
“I’m sorry.” She put her hand on Lana’s, her fingers pale against the dusk of the woman’s skin.
Lana pulled her hand back. “I had a son, Pelar. They will be together now.”
For a moment they watched the floor together. From nowhere, maybe from memory, Mesema felt the tug of a cold wind, and with it a longing for the wideness of sky and the endless grass of home. Nothing here gave the eye peace; the walls, the ceiling, the floors, they were all worked and scrolled, all intricacy and convolution, like the essence of a lie without the substance.
“What happened?” She wanted to insist, but the words sounded faint, as if spoken into a vast cavern.
Lana ignored her, and Mesema wanted to take her by the shoulders, to demand an answer, but it would be useless. She put the remains of the pomegranate on the silver dish and rose to her feet. She walked past scrollwork and gold leaf, carvings and tapestries, until she saw darkness through the curved lattice of a wooden screen and found, beyond it, a balcony overlooking the courtyard.
The soldiers below were joking and shouting among themselves, relaxing in the torchlight, reminding her of the Riders back home, but when they saw her they fell silent and scattered from view. From up here she could see the courtyard’s stones formed a diamond pattern of black and brown. Its far end pointed towards the city, a confusion of roofs and awnings illuminated by orange bonfires. Each fire was tended by a lone silhouette. Mesema shivered.
She ran her fingertip along the stone railing. Perhaps the rough surface would rub the mark away, but even without looking, she knew it clung to her still, telling her of Beyon’s distant movements.
A wind blew up around her, hot as fire-stones and smelling of char. A flag atop one of the towers cracked and strained against its fittings. She pushed her hair from her eyes and looked at the Bright One, stepping near the top of the moon. Just a few more days-a week, perhaps. She put it from her mind.
Then she saw it: the highest tower in the palace, the topmost window gaping. Though the night was dark, the room beyond the window appeared darker still.
Something held her gaze- there! Something or someone was hidden there. She could almost remember, and the lost memory pulled at her, the half-formed image-something of both softness and cruelty. Beyon knew who or what crouched there alone, removed from the rest of the palace. Perhaps he had put it there.
Mesema rubbed her fingertip, trying to bring forth those things she had touched in Beyon, but she had lost this piece of his past, as she had lost so many others. She knew only that it felt like grief. She didn’t know what the pattern meant for her or Beyon. She didn’t know whether Arigu’s games would change the empire, or what role Banreh would have in that, if he lived. She didn’t know what had happened to Sahree.
But she could find out what was in that tower.
She left the balcony and passed the scrollwork, the tapestries, and the tasselled cushions. The floor mosaic caught her eye: the pattern seemed to flow, a slow rotation, with only one line constant, unmoving, like a single certainty, a thread, drawing her. She passed Lana, who did not even raise her head, and as she followed the line Lana made no move to stop her; she gave no sign of having seen her. A silence pressed on the room, so profound that even breathing came hard.
The line left the mosaic swirl and crossed two plush rugs, dividing their patterns. Mesema followed it to the doorway, never raising her eyes. Almost in a dream she pushed open the doors and passed between two guardsmen dressed in splendid colors; neither man so much as twitched.
The line led on, along the centre of the corridor. Mesema pursued it, and silence followed in her wake.
The magnificence of the palace should have taken away her breath, but Mesema saw it only from the corner of her eye; the line filled her purpose, a simple constant amongst the lies and confusion, and where it led, none blocked her way. She moved as if she were invisible: as long as she watched the line, no one would watch her. A simple truth.
She passed courtiers, servants, guards, and then more guards, and silk and woven tapestries gave way to bare stone. A spiral stairway took her up, turn after turn promising the sky, and the line grew as broad as a river, as black as pitch, until, suddenly, it was nothing but a crack in the flagstone beneath her slippered feet.
Mesema found herself at the top of the stair, before her not the sky but a door, open just an inch, just enough for her fingers. She pushed it.
Sarmin pulled, and with slow certainty she came, not drawn against her will, but because of it. Sarmin watched the door. Pale fingers, nails painted like blood, glistening with moisture, and then she stood there.
“Hello.” He smiled. He hoped it was the right thing to do. “Hello.”
She looks so young.
“I’m Sarmin,” he said.
“Mesema.” She glanced around the room then her eyes returned to his. “I don’t remember why you’re here.” A strange thing to say, and a strange way to say it. She spoke the words with hard corners on the vowels. The oddness of it made him laugh.
“I’m Beyon’s brother.”
“His brother?”
Her lips made a circle. Everything about her made him glad. “His brother.” It didn’t sound like an explanation, but it was. She walked into the room. Sarmin watched her, wondering if he looked foolish. She sat upon the bed, so close that if they both reached out, their fingers would touch. He could smell soap on her, and fruit.
He cleared his throat. “I had other brothers, but they died.” “I’m sorry.” And she was, he could see it in her eyes, a sparkle of tears. No one had ever said they were sorry, not for his brothers. “They were… killed?” She knew they had been. She paused because the words were ugly in her mouth. He could see it. “My brother was also killed.”
Sarmin nodded.
“It was wrong.”
“It was.” He blinked to keep his eyes clear. He didn’t want to cry. But it was wrong. “I worry for Beyon. He’s sick. I don’t want him to die, too.” The notion that he might keep secrets from her was silly.
Mesema looked away. She pressed her cheek to her shoulder and held her hand towards him, fingers extended. A pattern-mark challenged him from a fingertip. No-not my princess. In the darkness of his mind he recalled the Pattern Master’s mocking voice.
Sarmin took her hand. Her skin felt cool, but fire passed between them. Mine. He turned her fingers in his and knew this to be another reason why men fought: the touch of her skin and the way her hair fell over her cheek as she looked at their joined hands. He would not let the Pattern Master have his bride. He spoke over the pounding of his heart. “I can take this mark away,” he said.
She pulled her hand back and fixed him with strange blue eyes. “It copied itself from Beyon when I touched him. My finger was bleeding.” She looked past him, at the carvings on his headboard. “When I touched him again, he remembered things-good things and bad things.”
Sarmin thought of Grada, how she had rushed back into herself. What Mesema described was different and accidental, but somehow the same. “You held Beyon to Beyon. The Pattern Master tries to lift him away, to leave only meat, but you held him within himself.”
“Leave the mark,” she said, with no hesitation.
Something in that stung him. “You love him? Beyon?” An ache opened in Sarmin’s chest, a hollowness. She was to be mine: the horsegirl brought from the grass clans. She had been his only gift in a million lonely years. Beyon’s now.
But she shook her head, her eyes fixed on the broken window. “Not him.”
Someone else, then. “The- The Master will come soon,” he said. “The pattern is almost made.” And I will die in this room.
“What will you do?” Again her eyes settled on his.
