ou knew it already.” He was smiling, now. He’d sunk sideways a little as he’d listened to her, and his cheek was propped up on one fist. The couch behind him was very soft, and he’d found himself – without meaning to – leaning over onto one of the soft embroidered cushions. The smell of tea still lingered in the air, warm and bitter and floral underneath the strange ozone tang of casting.
His eyes were raw and wont to shut; still, he watched her across the ward, nodding.
He tried to think the first time he’d ever touched silk. He thought he must’ve never touched it in life, or else now he couldn’t remember. He’d often visited the tailor and the clothier; it wasn’t often he could find something to fit him, even in those stores meant for natt. He remembered touching rough wool with his old hands, or cotton. He barely remembered seeing silk at the clothiers he went to; in Sharkswell and Voedale, even in such places as he went in West-and-Long, they didn’t carry suchlike.
His mind snatched at a story – half-hazy with the drink, then – a mischievous little girl riding the baskets between houses over flooded streets. His smile softened and tilted, wry.
Perhaps he’d touched the silk on a galdor’s clothes once, on the job or off; he’d never’ve known to be fascinated or frightened by it. Or to wonder what it hid, or to think it hid anything at all but ging or flesh. “I never knew much of silk until this life,” he murmured, “and it surprised me, how strong it was.”
Silk goes its own way. He thought again of the weights in his hands, and the cotton under his pencil. He tried to imagine drawing the spell circles on silk and balked.
Lovely and distant and slippery. He thought he would’ve described her that way, the first time, curtseying deep and fluid and backing up slowly to fetch more silks for Diana. Not slippery in the way of a perceptive field; not even slippery like sage under the fingers.
It was Ava Weaver he knew her as then, he supposed. Worn spiderweb-thin by his casting, the thought fascinated and frightened him. He thought of her slipping out of one skin and into another; he thought how the face he sat across from now was different than the one he’d known then, altered by time and knowledge and her own shaping of it.
And he thought of himself, running his hands over the seafoam-green silk, looking from behind Anatole’s face at Ava’s; and Silk, looking at Anatole through Ava’s face.
The thought unfurled inside him; it was slippery, hard to hold onto, and rippled into other, stranger thoughts.
He blinked; his eyelids were sagging. The room wasn’t moving anymore, but he felt hollowed-out, as if he’d just been sick. He couldn’t quite stop smiling at Silk. He knew not to ask why she’d chosen the name for him – he knew, he knew, he knew – and he imagined it bleeding through him like water steeping with tea, filling every inch of him. The only face he looked out of was Risha’s; the only face he saw was Silk’s.
He knew himself for half-delirious with exhaustion from the cast. With the fabric spread out on the table between them, he still felt like he’d forgot something. “Ah,” he said, pushing himself up, clearing his throat. “The silk. The – the last of the stitching.”
He scooted to the edge of the couch; he frowned at first, brow furrowed, then found the glint of his glasses’ frame jutting up from between two cushions. He settled them on his nose, then stood up very carefully, peering over them to where she had left the spools.
“I’ve rested, I’ve rested. I’ve a little more left in me,” he said, laughing softly again. “Shall we?”