The Pattern Scars (63 page)

There is more I could write. About Mistress Nola’s belated fame, especially. The stories! She’d laugh at some of them, which are ridiculously grand. About bodies laid to rest in earth, and an island bird who flew away from a stone city. But I won’t.

I don’t even wish the last words on these pages to be mine. They should be Bardrem’s. He must have scrawled them when he was a boy, on a piece of paper that he folded into a lopsided shape and wedged deep into the branches of a tree. The paper is yellow now, stained with brown blotches—like the rings deep within the bark, Nola might say. The words are blurred but still readable. I’ve already spoken them aloud to Sildio, and to the baby who has just started to kick inside me. I know these words without looking, but I hold the paper in my hands anyway.

Nola, o Nola, so lovely, so bold

When will your eyes fall on me?

I am cook, I am poet

And you will yet know it

And then our tale, too, shall be told.

Caitlin Sweet’s first fantasy novel,
A Telling of Stars
, was published by Penguin Canada in 2003. Her second,
The Silences of Home
, was published in 2005. Her one and only short story, “To Play the Game of Men,” was included in Daw’s
Ages of Wonder
anthology in 2009. She lives with her family in a magic bungalow in Toronto. On the Web, you’ll find her at: www.caitlinsweet.com.

Martin Springett has been an illustrator of fantasy book covers and children’s books since 1984 when he illustrated the covers for Guy Gavriel Kay’s classic fantasy trilogy
The Fionavar
Tapestry
. Caitlin Sweet’s first novel,
A Telling of Stars
, featured Martin’s cover art. He has won the Aurora Award for fantasy illustration, and the Ruth Schwartz Award in the children’s picture book field. He is also a musician, and has recorded a CD of music inspired by Guy Kay’s works called
Bright Weaving
. Martin created his first authored and illustrated book,
Jousting with Jesters
in 2006, and in 2011, Fitzhenry and Whiteside released
Breakfast on a Dragon’s Tail.
You can find him at
www.martinspringett.com.