Free The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet

dead.”
    “Yes. Yigranzi and I. And I saw a man who was short and fat—or just round, somehow. But it was hard to tell, since . . .”
    When I stopped speaking, neither Orlo nor Yigranzi noticed. They were gazing at each other; gold at pearl, far beyond me.
    “A dangerous thing,” he said at last, “for one so young.”
    “I’m thirteen,” I said, but they did not look at me. I thought,
I’ll swing from the tree, I’ll stand on my hands and sing Bardrem’s longest poem
—but I watched them instead, in silence.
    “Yes,” Yigranzi said. “But it was necessary. Chenn was only just gone; it was necessary.” She rose, leaning on her stick. I saw Orlo eye her hump, which seemed to be lurching in its own direction. I wanted to say something that would make him stop, but I did not.
    “And what of the other girls who are dying?” Yigranzi was out of breath, just from standing up. “Why did this Prandel not stop with Chenn, if it was she he wanted?”
    Orlo took a breath of his own, which was deep and smooth. “I believe that he only
started
with Chenn. That hunting her and killing her only made his hunger keener. So now”—slow words, and a slow smile—“I am hunting him.”

    “I will come back.” This was the last thing Orlo said to me before he left, and it circled in my head like a melody whose beauty fades with persistence, but will not go away.
    “He will come back,” I said to Bardrem, many days after that first meeting. Then, hastening to explain my eagerness, “To tell us if he’s found Prandel.”
    “I hope he doesn’t find him,” Bardrem said. “I want to kill him, remember?”
    I looked at the thin, gangle-limbed boy in front of me and thought of the man with the hunter’s smile and I said, “Yes, Bardrem,” as if he were three years old. To Yigranzi I said, “Orlo will find him, I know he will,” and, “It’s been two weeks: he’ll be back soon to say Prandel is dead.”
    Yigranzi peered at me after I’d spoken, so intently that I wished I had said nothing. It was dark in her room, but I might as well have been standing before her in full sun. “Take care,” she said, too quietly. “You are old enough to feel the force of the wave but too young to see the water.”
    “Riddles!” I cried. “Why do you give me riddles when I want something simple and simple things when I want mysteries?” I did not understand what this meant, even though I felt the truth of it, and I ran from her as tears hardened in my throat.
    She and I must have spoken to each other again—I am sure of this, but have no memories with which to prove it. There must have been a few more lessons, a few more customers, a few more coins passed from her hand to mine. I long to remember, and I cling to the imagined certainties and the must-have-beens with a doggedness that would make her smile her gap-toothed smile. “Nola-girl,” (what would she have called the woman I’ve become?) “you can’t keep the tide on the sand; let it go. . . .”
    But there it is: I remember running from her room, and the next thing I remember is running to it, a week or so later, drawn by a sound I had never heard before. It was not screaming, not shouting; not any noise ever made by one of the girls (even the few I’d heard birthing their babies, or ridding themselves of them). It was a choking, gurgling whine. I can hear it even now, though I still cannot describe it.
    I threw open Yigranzi’s door and took two quick steps into her room. I looked first at her bed, blinking in sudden darkness (although it was bright midday outside, her shutters were closed). When my vision cleared I saw that she was not there but on the floor, twisted in a way that was all wrong, as if she were broken. Her back and face were both turned to me. Her bare heels drummed against a space of wood between two rugs, and it sounded like my heart.
    I yelled over my shoulder, but people were already coming, drawn, as ever, by dread and excitement. They