[Mature] Underneath and Inside

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

Y
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?”

[Ava Weaver]

Evening, 7 Intas, 2720
Woven Delights, The Painted Ladies

She smiled when he spoke of the strength of it. It surprised her, too, once, the strength of it, for all its delicacy. There are many ways, she might have said, it can be damaged; but only a fool does not know how to work over a length and begin again.

The eyes through which he looked at her were dark, sunk back into his face, the tender skin around them as if bruised. He smiled, despite it – because of it, she thought, and she was smiling too, for all the strangeness of it. She felt herself bruised as well; she felt it all across her skin, and underneath it, too, as if she had smoothed silk over it, but done nothing for the ache – only covered it up, a little longer, for all that they both knew, now, that there were there.

“The stitching,” Silk said with a softer smile, warmth in the lines of her face and the crinkling of her eyes.

She had thought not to mention it; she had thought that he might sleep, left on the couch, or else that he would go, stumble off into the night to find a carriage towards Uptown, when he was far enough away. She had not planned to remind him; this work she could do alone, and she did not long for sleep, for she did not know what it would be like, when it came. There were times when even a long day and draining, tiring work could not help; she thought she knew what she would dream of, the old familiar nightmare she would have. She thought that all she could do was to put it off.

She should have known better than to think he would forget. He found his glasses; he came over to the thread, squinting down at it through them.

“Yes,” Silk said, smiling at him still. She never made the mistake of thinking of them as him: the eyes, the hands, the face with all lines, the hair threaded with silver and white. She knew who he was, beneath; she knew what he wore. She knew something too, of the blurring of boundaries, of becoming. There was no end to such fears; there was only learning to live with them.

They drew the plot down from the table, onto their laps on the floor. Silk hesitated only a moment before she took the edges of the cloth in her hand, careful not to touch the stitches. She folded the silk over it, and the cotton beneath; she held up the length of it, and took her lantern and shone it through, studying the whole of it.

The silk, Silk thought, would hide it well from the outside; even if the walls were stripped and searched, she did not think this would be found. Not, she thought, unless knew what to look for – but in that case, they were already lost.

Silk settled the edge into her lap, and he settled the other edge into his. They threaded the needles once more, and they began to sew. She passed the needle through the three layers, smooth and even, small tight stitches one by one. The breeze as if from nowhere rippled the fabrics on the wall; the lantern light pooled over them, and her eyes ached as if from the strain. The room smelled of bitter tea, of lamplight, of something else she could not place, for all she held it in the hairs on the back of her neck. Opposite her, his face was a grim mask of concentration, and his hands as stiff as she felt.

Still, they worked at it – her on one side and him on the other. They turned the edge together; they went, slowly, knowing not to rush. In time, she knew, they would meet in the middle, and the night’s work would be done, with all its heavy cost. The silk gleamed beneath her hands, and she kept stitching.