“When we get to the palace, I’ll have the mages protect you as they do me.”
They fell silent for a time. She thought about Eldra, first with the marks across her skin, and then lying on the desert sand with an arrow sprouting from her chest. She thought of herself, standing over the emperor with a knife.
“Your Majesty, why are you helping me?”
He smiled. “You have spirit. I wish I had known you before.”
“Before the pattern touched me?”
He shook his head. “In Mirra’s garden-when you touched me-my robes fell open. Isn’t that when you saw the pattern?” She stared at him, a dark idea taking form in her mind. Banreh had spoken of the emperor as if he were sick, as if he were going to die.
“You really do see things in the wind? And all this time I thought you played Settu with me. The way you always hinted at the pattern-”
“The pattern… was inside your robe?”
“But you are exactly as you seem. How do you do that?” He stood and untied his sash. Mesema thought she should turn her head, or tell him to stop, but a terrible fascination won her over. A truth hid behind his silks, ready to be revealed, and she wanted to see. The knot came loose and the purple silk fell to the floor of the tent.
“See.” He lifted her chin with one hand. She saw.
His flesh showed line upon line of red and blue, the larger shapes followed by smaller and yet smaller again, so that looking at his skin, she felt as though she gazed into the distance. His arms, too, were banded by pattern-shapes. In the centre of his chest, where a crescent moon floated above a series of smaller circles and polygons, she could see a smear of her own blood.
“I touched you, there,” she said. “I cut my finger on a little air-ship.” Would her skin look like this also?
“I have been patterned for years,” he said, “and I am still alive.” The crescent moon drew her eyes, the twin to the one on her finger. Blue outlined with red, her blood a brown smear across it, it seemed to stretch with each breath the emperor took. Stretch, and reach towards her.
She touched her finger to it, moon to moon.
Sarmin felt it again, a brightness between the pattern-threads. He moved towards it, feeling the silence around him. The others hung back, silent, waiting, though for what, he didn’t know. Closer to the brightness he felt many barriers, lines that stopped and twisted the pattern-threads and made them wrong. He studied the ugliness until he found a way to slip through.
The emperor drew in his breath, long and hard. “I remember,’ he said, “so many things.”
Mesema saw them too, the boys running in the throne room and hiding in the women’s wing. She heard the Old Wives singing and nibbled the honeycakes the cooks slipped into Beyon’s pocket. She could feel the taste of them on her tongue. She saw Emperor Tahal, laughing and reaching for her to sit on his lap. She saw her brothers, dead. She never stopped seeing them. She screamed and beat her fists upon the throne. She pushed her mother down the dais steps, seeing the hurt and confusion in her eyes. A gutted nobleman lay prone before her, his blood soaking into a silk runner. Then another, and another. Tuvaini spoke in her ear, soft and urgent, making her stomach twist. Then he left her, and the dark throne room echoed with her finger-taps. Light came and with it children, running across the courtyard, chasing a dog, laughing-but not her children. Never hers.
And the dreams carried her away from the palace. She spied on a caravan, watching a girl with wheaten curls. She thrust her knife at the vizier. She laughed at an assassin, knowing he was trapped.
I was an emperor.
She gasped and pulled her finger away. “Memories.”
“It can’t take mine. There are protections woven all around me.” His hand shook as he replaced his robe.
“But there were things you had forgotten until I touched you.” That, too, she had seen.
“I hadn’t forgotten them, not really.” He sat down, grasping at his purple sash. “It’s more that I stopped feeling them.”
“Your Majesty,” she said, meeting his copper gaze, “listen. We are both trapped in the pattern-web.”
“In that case you should call me Beyon.”
Was he joking with her? She tried his name in her mouth.“ Beyon.
What shall we do? We have to stop it.” She thought of her promise to Eldra, not forgotten even when the feather lay beneath heavy wools in her trunk. He laughed. “What shall we do? You are ever brave, Zabrina, Windreader.” She didn’t feel brave, but she tilted her chin at him anyway. “I am Felt. We carry on.”
“Well, Zabrina, Felt, Windreader,” he said, moving to the door flap, “why don’t you have something to eat before you get some rest? We’ll reach the city soon enough, and then we can… do something.”
He didn’t sound convincing, but Mesema nodded before falling into her obeisance. He remained the emperor, and she would obey.
Sarmin had found a way through, only to discover new barriers before him, barriers made of moving ghosts: Pelar. Lana singing a melody in the women’s wing. His father, grunting with pain as he lifted himself from the throne. Every time Sarmin tried to move forwards, a new image from the past blocked his way. On the other side he heard voices. Beyon’s, and a woman’s. The woman’s accent was soft and sibilant. He wanted to stay and listen.
A voice purred in Sarmin’s ear, unexpected, smooth as the silk on his bed. “You move in my place, Stranger.”
Sarmin kept his mind still.
“The emperor is troublesome, isn’t he?” The Master took a conversational tone. “So many protections to move through. Nevertheless, he is mine. Not yours.” The last reverberated with anger.
Fury beat its wings in Sarmin’s chest. The Pattern Master didn’t sense it, or didn’t care.
“Beyon will serve me, alive or dead, broken or no. It is too late for him. And you…’
Sarmin felt himself falling.
“You do not belong.”
Sarmin fell past the whispers and calls of the Many, through the dawntinted desert sky and the dark places suspended in the pattern, between the gods painted on the ceiling and through the purple light of his room, and onto the pillows and comforters of his royal bed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Eyul stared at the dim canvas roof of the tent. Near midnight, close to the city, they’d stopped and tried to sleep, in an attempt to reacquaint themselves with city-time. Soon they would walk the stone streets in the burning sunlight, conduct their business when it should be time for making love, and sleep when the cool breezes rushed across the sand. Sleep when the stars formed their patterns in the sky, pointing to other destinations, and to the time when they would not be together.
Amalya slept beside him, her breathing even and easy. The Tower comforted her; she harboured no suspicions against Govnan. She had faith that everything would work as it should, and that Beyon would be saved; otherwise, he hoped, she’d have run away with him as he’d asked. He thought once more about the west, and what was said to exist there: an ocean full of fish, islands peppered with fruit trees, and space. Specks of land lost in seas wider than deserts, places where a person might stop and think, even for the rest of his life.
Everything would change after today, with Govnan, with Beyon, and with Amalya. Whatever decisions he made regarding Govnan, things would be different.
Unless Beyon had turned-then everything was already too late.
He rolled to face her. “Are you still awake?” A question for children whispering under the covers.
Amalya pulled her blankets up around her shoulders. “Mmm.”