Free The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet Page B

for water or a groping, beseeching hand. Then I saw her face, and froze.
    Her eyes were open.
    I lurched to my feet. My stool tipped over and my ankles caught and I fell. I sat on the floor as she sat up in the bed, effortlessly, her legs swinging over the side.
    Her eyes were brown.
    She was trying to speak; her lips and throat convulsed and she made a sound like
oh oh oh
, low and urgent.
    Brown
, I thought.
Regular brown, with regular black centres—like Chenn’s, at the end. Like Chenn’s
. . .
    Yigranzi stood. For a moment her back seemed straight; she was entirely different, some new woman formed from the bones of the old. She lifted a hand that did not waver and stretched it toward me. I scrambled back, raising my own arm as if she meant to strike me—but she did not. She only reached, her brown eyes wide and clear. “
Oh
,” she said again, and fell.
    I crawled across the floor, clumsily, catching fingertips and toes in gaps in the rugs. I touched her shoulder and one warm, limp hand and said her name, over and over, to make up for all the words I should have spoken, on this day and others. I waited for the eyes to blink but they did not; waited for them to close on their own but they did not. I touched them gently with the pads of my thumbs, held them shut until they stayed that way.
    I closed my own eyes and pressed my hands to my ears and rocked myself, alone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
    I must breathe. I must lift my head from these pages and wriggle my stiff fingers and roll my shoulders until the knot between them loosens. The words that I thought would take time to choose and set down in order are coming so swiftly, crowding my head and the paper and making me forget everything else.
    It is Sildio, now, who makes sure that I eat. He raps on my door a few hours past dawn and again at noon and once more at dusk. If I’m too absorbed in my writing to answer, and if he must leave the post he’s appointed for himself outside my door, he sets the food on a tray in the hallway. (It must be the hallway. If he left it on the floor of my room, one of the animals who shares this space with me would eat it before I could.) And if the food is still there when he returns he knocks again, much less politely.
    But sometimes it’s so difficult to remember to look up beyond the page beneath my nose. I must remember. Because the tiny strip of sky can be so lovely. Like now, for example: it is dawn, and the clouds are several shades of pink.
    Dawn now—and dawn in my story, too. (How neatly done! Bardrem would approve of this, though not of my desire to draw attention to it.)
    Dawn, and courtyard, and one last, lonely girl.

    Her name and her face are long gone but I still remember the vision I had of her. It was simple, lovely, uncoloured by copper. She had brought me a handful of barley, “Because the mirror is probably too grand a way to see my Pattern.”
    It was there as soon as the barley had settled on the ground: a hillside so green that it seemed made of paint, not grass, and the girl walking up it. The slope was steep but she was moving easily, gracefully, tipping her face to the sun. She stopped just a few paces from the peak and raised her arms above her head and suddenly there were butterflies around her, their wings silver and blue and green and yellow, blurred with light and flying.
    That was all. I told her, expecting impatience or even anger—some other girls would have cried, “Try again! Tell me what can be seen from the hilltop or I won’t pay you!”—but she smiled.
    “My grandmother’s village was always full of butterflies in the early fall—my mother told me this. I have been thinking of going there, and now I am sure.” She unclasped a silver chain from around her neck. A single ruby hung from it.
    “No,” I said as she was handing it to me, “this is far too precious. . . .”
    She nodded. “It was to me, too, for a long time. Now I don’t need it any more. Take it—and thank you, Nola. Yours