[Mature] Underneath and Inside

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

I
t had taken him the better part of a month to draw it up.

It’d been the seventeenth, rain-slick and with a paper bag of smoked fish still tucked into his coat. He’d come for the linings of suits, for the lovely black and white silk of Diana’s Clock’s Eve dress. Off and on he’d seen Grace Carre, manning the desk or bustling about the shop; off and on he’d bowed to the last straggling evening patrons, if they were galdori, or given them cursory sneering glances if not. Often enough he had snuck in the back.

The last time he’d seen her had been the seventeenth, and the shop had sung with black and white and frosty winter colors, rolls of lace patterned like snowflakes, hanging lights. Cotton with printed motifs of clock-hands.

Their pens had traced it out in glossy ink, one after another; he had not spoken it, for fear of what a wandering tongue and errant ley lines could do, but he had listened as she found her way through the sounds.

It was the only way he could think to learn an alphabet, and fast. It was how he’d done it, in his head if not with his mouth.

He’d been too terrified, back then, to say the words out loud – he still wasn’t sure he’d the knack of it, speaking them without casting – but he’d sat for long hours, sounding them out in his head. He’d sat at the back of courses at Brunnhold, whenever he could, his notebook spread out in his lap. He’d listened to professors recite the words; he hadn’t known their meaning then, but he’d copied out the letters as well as he could, then compared them to what was in the text-books. Corrected himself, started over.

It was funny how the letters started to sound themselves out in your head, after not too long at all. You got used to seeing them and hearing them at once, and they got tangled up, just like Estuan; eventually, you’d look at a page and just read it. Funny enough, he remembered struggling with Estuan, too.

Funny enough.

It was one of Anatole’s old perceptive books they were using, at the start. He suspected it wouldn’t hurt if she knew to recognize a spell here, a spell there, even if she didn’t know the grammar. He knew she knew the worth of things that paid off slow, bit by bit; he also knew the world they lived in. A little of both never hurt.

That had been the last time they’d seen each other.

It’d been a quiet week at Stainthorpe; he’d had more time to think. He’d been back in Vienda for a couple of weeks, now. Before that, there’d been no time – his journals had been full of sketches, errant papers folded up in the pages of his warding grim, but he had only just started work on the stencil after Clock’s Eve.

It had been, before that, like two separate worlds; he hadn’t yet begun to stitch them together. There had been the ward on one hand, and Ava on the other.

As he folded up the great piece of drafting paper, careful not to tear at the pattern he’d cut into it, he forced himself not to think. There was no thinking; there had been no thinking since Clock’s Eve. There had been no thinking since he’d asked, that night of the seventeenth, between the closing of the books and the cold crisp night air.

It had surprised him that she’d been thinking about it – hard enough to have already had something in mind, and he thought he might’ve known what – though perhaps it shouldn’t’ve. Maybe it was that there hadn’t been much talk about any of it, at all, since they’d started.

Maybe it was the bold line that always got drawn – somewhere between the moments, smelling of bohea and lavender, when they would talk of other things, no less precious or deep; and the drawing and the speaking of the monite. He’d found himself wondering about her, even as he’d made up the stencil and researched the ward. He’d wondered, in moments when he was tired enough for the line to blur, simply what she was doing.

The sky was already dark. Snow whirled down madly through the streetlamps; it was settling on him like lint, for all the folder with the stencil was tucked carefully inside his coat. It was a thick blanket over the streets by the time he got out of the carriage at the Painted Ladies and walked the rest of the way to the shop.

The bell jangled as he stepped inside, kicking the snow off his shoes.

“Good evening,” he said, easily enough; he unwound his scarf from his neck, folded it over his arm.

He stood straight-backed and high-chinned as he took a few more steps in, a neutral, faintly sneering expression on his face. He was here, after all, for the order of that maroon silk Diana liked so much. He knew better than to break character before the curtain was drawn.

[Ava Weaver]

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

T
here were times when it grew too hard to think of such heavy things.

Clock’s Eve every year was a whirl of colors; Ava had sold out her stocks of black and white silks among her galdori customers, but humans and wicks purchased the brightest fabrics she had – vivid wools, for the most part, to stand out against the cold. Whoever couldn’t afford a sweater bought a scarf, or even a scrap, a bit of fabric for collars or cuffs, to turn one’s daily wear into something vivid bright.

Ava herself had worn purple, a vivid deep wool as thick with the color as she could find it, bright enough to show the color in even the haze of blue phosphor lights. She had closed the shop early, and gone out into the streets for dancing, for spiced mulled wine, to laugh through the prickling tingle of cold cheeks and fingers half-numb in worn gloves.

The night had dissolved into bright colors, flashing fireworks distant overhead, unexpected warmth in familiar and unfamiliar places, and Ava surrendered to it, and let herself be lost, for just a little while. If she forgot herself, it was in places where no one could see but those to whom it did not matter; she dissolved, undone, and knew nothing of plans or pain.

The weeks before had been busier than even she could bear, and she had never been more grateful for Grais; the shop was open from long before the winter-late dawn, so that even those who worked long hours could find the time, and closed long past the winter-early dusk, when the last of the customers had gone and no one else was still to come. After that there was the last of the fabric to cut, orders to ready, books to balance.

At the end of it all, Ava would climb the stairs, and read, lips moving silently in the cupped light, and sometimes not so silently. Her dreams were full of it, of jagged letters and harsh sounds; they spilled off the edge of the page and crept beneath her fingernails, slipped into her bloodstream and washed, swirling, down into the heart of her.

On the night of Clock’s Eve, she didn’t dream; on the nights to come, if she dreamt, it was of other things, of flashing colors and brighter lights, of that which she had forgotten and that which she still remembered.

For two days after the celebration, the shop had stayed closed, the doors shut and the lights off. Grais she had given off the whole of the first week of the year, paid, from the extra money they had made in the busy weeks beforehand.

Some of that time Ava had slept; she had woken to the dawn and let it sweep over her, and slept until the sun was high overhead, and the grumbling of her stomach could not be ignored. Some of that time she had read; with her hair damp from bathing, brushing it out, she had sat in front of the book and sounded out the words, one by one, in the bright light of day when they could not harm her.

Life settled back into its rhythms, as it always did. She had known to expect him; she had not known how long it would take, precisely, but she had known he would come. She had thought about it before he had asked; she had thought about it since he had first made the offer, although then it had been in a dark place inside her, which seemed to shun words, and knew only fear.

Since then, slowly, piece by piece, she had drawn it out. It, too, she had considered in the light of day, when her hands were busy with cool, slippery silk or thick, warm wool, when her eyes were full of colors and patterns, and her voice echoing with laughter. She had looked around herself, then, and she had thought it over, and she had decided – perhaps it had been one night as she repeated a phrase, and another, and he sounded the syllables out, with space between them – perhaps it had been afterward, when he told her of poetry written by Mugrobi passives – perhaps it had been just before he asked, when he was straight-faced and reeking of fish, and she had decided already not to ask, whatever might come of it.

The door came open, and the bell chimed softly above it. It was dark, already, and the flow of customers had died down to a trickle.

“Good evening, sir,” Ava said, coming out from behind the counter; she smiled, warm and welcoming, and dipped a deep, smooth curtsy. Tonight she wore a dress of mint-green, with a white lace collar, bodice and cuffs, tailored neatly at the waist, and with a pointed hem, soft white fabric filling the spaces at the sides where it rose up; tonight she wore pale pink lipstick and dark kohl extending the edges of both eyes out along her face.

It wasn’t long before the door was closed – an order placed, this time for maroon silk – the curtains drawn – and Ava was pouring tea for the both of them, sitting on the couch in the back room. She slid his cup to him, stirring a lump of sugar into hers, and looked across the soft, softly lip space. She smiled, and let him choose.

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

I
t wasn’t quite like taking off a suit anymore. Some stayed behind, always; it was a laoso business, this – so she’d warned him, once, long ago – how bits of the mask stuck to your face, or maybe how your face changed to fit it. The shape of it meant something different where different folk were concerned; it meant nothing at all, to some, and everything to others. But it was always there, and the feel of it was terrible as any mirror or any man’s eyes.

Even still, he felt the curtain drop; he slipped into something else, just as fitting as the mask, if no less familiar. Becoming more familiar, maybe.

He’d taken his shoes off this time at the back room door, because there was still a little damp on them from the snow. He’d set them neatly by with mostly steady hands; he padded to the couch opposite her. He unbuttoned his coat and slid the calfskin portfolio out, setting it aside on one of the cushions.

He had pulled his coat off, one cold-stiff arm at a time, as she’d poured the tea with accustomed grace.

He sat, watching her add a lump of sugar to her cup. He was already smiling, warm but crooked and sad; she stirred silently, the delicate spoon never clinking. When he took his own cup, he met her smile with it, holding it firm and deliberate.

“May She deliver us this year from nightfall,” he said quietly, but with feeling.

He held her gaze. In the corner of his eye, he saw the careful motion of her hand: the delicate tilt of her wrist as she set the teaspoon aside. Just so, without a drip on the tray or the smooth wooden table.

No doubt, there.

He’d never said it before on Clock’s Eve; he’d never cared, in life. Now, who’d’ve said it to him? He hadn’t been sure he’d say it here, in this quiet, warm place, with Ava crisp green and white against the yellow cushions.

He wasn’t sure what to say, for all the rest of what they’d spoken of. Even for the Uptown dramas he’d brought her, all us and them. The jokes, studies on bee eating; the littler strangenesses of living like this. For what she’d given back to him: the day-to-day business of the shop, the humans he knew enough about – in sketches, if not in names – to ache with missing them, even though he’d never met them and could only do harm to them.

The things she knew from what must’ve been a hundred books worn out cover to cover, too. The things he’d shared with her – poetry, mostly, such learned things as had held his tallyboy focus – to keep up with a tenth of it.

I’ve brought the stencil, he could’ve said, but it stuck in his throat. He didn’t look at the hanging cloth, just yet; he didn’t wonder.

“How was Clock’s Eve?” he asked, sitting back with his tea. It was too hot to drink just yet; he crossed his legs and set the saucer and cup in his lap, fingertips on the rim.

He wasn’t sure he’d ever asked it so straight and bold, for all they’d come at it from different angles, the two of them, for all they’d embroidered round the edges of it with talk of other things.

He thought he was ready, if she turned the question on him, though the thought had almost stood in the way of asking. He wouldn’t’ve asked if he hadn’t been, he told himself. He’d the sense already – for a long time – of being silent where he should’ve spoken.

[Ava Weaver]

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

I
t had snowed the day before; there had been moments when the world outside the window had been all gleaming white, swirls of it drifting through the air and obscuring all else. The smell of it was in the air again; clouds drifted overhead, and for all their color couldn’t been seen in the dark, Ava knew them gray and heavy with the promises of storms to come.

Today it had not snowed, for all the streets were damp still with the remnants of the day before, the ice half-melted, unaware of what was to come.

“May all Her clocks turn,” Ava said, softly, for even here it did not do to speak so too loudly. These words were all the more precious for being whispered, for being shared on the tips of breaths in quiet places, for the knowledge that to hear such was as much a crime as to speak them.

A year ago, she might have thought the sight of him here a nightmare. Would the crooked, uncertain edge of his smile have given her pause, then? It hadn’t; she hadn’t dared to let it. She knew now to dream of other things, though sometimes her sleeping self seemed to need the reminder still.

The faintest edge of a breeze from nowhere which could be seen whisked softly through the hangings, stirred the more delicate, sending ripples through them against the wall. The steam between them drifted, bohea dark.

They talk, often enough. She is learning to ask, though she knows better than to break the habit of sitting and listening with her whole self. She focuses, still, on listening, but sometimes when questions drift over her mind she spins them out to him. Perhaps there is no one with whom such trust is possible, but she reaches for it with him all the same. Sometimes it is only why; sometimes she reaches inside and asks him to clarify, tells him that she does not understand. Sometimes she has other questions, more specific.

It is easier because they have grown towards it together.

He listens - sometimes with his legs slightly apart, feet flat against the ground, and sometimes with them crossed, tucked beneath his knees. Sometimes she imagines herself spinning thread for him with her words, as if together they could stitch something new for him to wear. Perhaps it would never fit; perhaps it, too, would be larger than he is now, six and a half feet tall, and bulky with life. Perhaps not. He asks, too, sometimes; he reaches out to reshape a seam, to request a new color. Most of the time he does not, and he lets her hands do their work, as if she knows where to go.

Clock’s Eve, he asked, and Ava smiled.

“Much needed,” Ava said, letting the fondness creep in unrestrained at the edges of her smile and eyes. She thought of all that he knew about her, and all that he didn’t know. She wasn’t afraid, anymore, of finding that fear of his.

“And beautiful, too,” Ava said. “I went out, to see the fireworks and the dancing, and to dance, too, myself.” To be a firework, Ava thought, although she didn’t go as far as to say it. “It was cold - very cold - and the air smelled of burning and spilt wine, but there was laughter enough for warmth.”

Ava wasn’t sure what she might say if she went on. For all he knew already, she thought it best not to be explicit. Her curls were still neat after the long day, spilling down her back, with one or tucked tucked forward over her shoulder, as if they had fallen there naturally. There were no wrinkles to be found in her skirt.

“I closed the shop for two days afterwards, for the first time in a year,” Ava added, smiling fondly at the remembrance there, too. She had often closed one day a week - not the last weeks of Ophus, but other times. She generally worked anyway, on such days; it was not so this time, although there was other work, too, all the same.

“And yours?” Ava asked, smiling at him. She didn’t know what she expected him to say, but she knew to ask.

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

T
hey talked more loudly, after. He tucked it away somewhere underneath his heart, or inside a panel on whatever served for a heart these days. Maybe somewhere in the knot. For sometime later, at some flooding party, even though he knew he dared not untie it or shake it out or find it there until it was safe. Even though he knew he’d weeks more to come where every day he was him, at home and at Stainthorpe and at dinner and everywhere but his bed. But he knew it was there, too, to come back to; it wasn’t going anywhere.

She was smiling, and he smiled back. He settled in with the cushions behind him; he hadn’t been sure if he should ask, but now he was achingly grateful he had, come what may.

As she went on, he took a sip of tea, just cool enough. He settled it back in his lap and cupped it, and some of the warmth in it – and in her voice – leaked out through his field. It steeped in the mona around him, earthy and deep for its edge of bitterness.

To dance, he thought, and didn’t dare say. You, he thought, danced.

He couldn’t quite picture it, but he tried anyway – dark curls spilling over her shoulders, the hems of her coat and her warm wool skirt whirling with the steps. Not the kind of dancing that was like a deep curtsey, or like the pouring of tea; the kind of dancing where they pulled you into the circle, laughing, where you swung off on someone’s arm and held on at the hip as you spun, and you breathed until the air ached in your lungs.

Laughter enough for warmth. He didn’t say anything there, either, though his smile curled a little; he blinked and took a sip of tea, and was surprised at the depth of what he felt.

He couldn’t remember all of their conversation in Roalis; he remembered – for her, perhaps, I’m an escape – he thought of her dancing among the lamps, not Ava or Silk, he wasn’t sure who, laughing at the pop of fireworks, caught in someone’s arms. He smiled softly as he set his cup down in the saucer in his lap and looked back up at her.

Closed for two days, for the first time in a year? he might’ve asked, too. He shouldn’t’ve been surprised; he felt silly for just how surprised he felt. Somebody’s got to hang the samples, he thought, then – no, somebody’s got to work the books, somebody’s got to cut the cloth – to fold the paper – to tie the strings, to send the messages…

He was still smiling, when she turned the question on him, and he knew better than to spill out some mung, vague answer. He felt a prickle of shame, but everything else he felt drowned it out.

“Strange,” he said at first.

I drank, he didn’t think he needed to say; I drank, and I drank, and I drank. I have to drink at these parties, and I can never seem to kick it. “Most of the day I spent being him. We had a party at the house, in the gallery on the second floor; we spent the day setting it up, and I spent most of the evening mingling with the guests. But –”

He shook his head, shifting in his seat.

“A duel broke out,” he went on. “Everybody flocked to the doors, to the windows, watching. I had to time it, because I was the host. It was exciting at first, and then…”

He paused, sucking at a tooth. “It was ghoulish,” he said honestly, shaking his head. “Utterly ghoulish.”

He still smiled when he looked back up at her; there was no reason to do otherwise, here and now.

He went on a little about the days since; he spoke of the time he’d spent digging into the Heshath cycle on quiet, snowy days, the windows crusted with frost, and of the lull and then the mess at Stainthorpe Hall, and the wonder of it all beginning to make sense to him.

“I’ve worked on the stencil, too,” he said finally, touching the calfskin with his fingertips. “For the ward. I should show you the sketches, first.”

He leaned to set his cup and saucer down, and then paused. “I’m worried,” he added more softly. “I can come to the mona without doubt; I know I can, now, and I will. But I don’t know what it’s going to mean, to have a ward in this place. I’ve thought about it, too. I don’t know you were wrong, back then.”

[Ava Weaver]

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

Ava saw it in the little flicker of his eyebrows – surprise, she thought, not disapproval. It amused her a little to think of it. She wondered if he had ever understood what it would be like to be a tradesman. She understood something of his growing up, now, not just from the scars he’d told her about, the flail that had cut his lip and the knife that had cut his side, and the fists that had battered him, from head to toe. She would never have thought he did not understand hard work; she would never have called what he had done before less than brutal.

Nor, Ava knew, would she call it otherwise now.

When I was still a man, Ava thought, remembering the phrase, repeated thrice. Clockwise, anticlockwise, and clockwise again, Ava thought, thinking of Shrikeweed’s careful habit. She, too, had felt something of the power of threes. The girl, the maiden, the crone: Ava remembered her too, one woman with three faces or else three women, all mingled together in the minds of men. That was a story her mother had told her, and she had told to her cousins, not understanding, thinking it only a tale; she remembered laughing bright-eyed as the girl, smiling with her eyelids fluttering as the maiden, and hunched over as the crone.

Ava listened, intently, her gaze on him, as he spoke of the day. He sucked at a tooth, and called it utterly ghoulish, and Ava nodded, slowly. “Would you tell me about it?” She asked, quietly, because she thought she understood him and not the rest of it, and she wanted to know. She wouldn’t drag him on further from there; she didn’t ask about Diana, or what he might have had to drink, or too much which might be painful to share. But she found that she wanted to know, and she found that she could ask, and so she did.

Perhaps they were both relieved when he went on to the rest, to poetry and snowy days and politics. There too, Ava listened, intent; since Shrikeweed had come, he had opened up to her more about his work, as if he no longer felt – she wasn’t sure, quite, what it was he had felt before, what constraint, but she had felt it ease, over time. Perhaps it was she who had changed, who had mellowed in her understanding.

She spoke to him, sometimes, too, of arrangements with other businesses, of agreements or disagreements with tailors or merchants. At first he had only listened, and that had been enough, and she had been glad to spill it out; she never had, before, and she began to understand the power of what she could offer, and to be grateful, too, to receive it. She wondered at how easy it would be to lean, to relax into it, but she knew better than to go too far, even with him.

Ava followed his fingertips to the calfskin. Her tea had run low, and his too; she poured them each a second cup, more steam rising into the small space between them. She stirred another lump of sugar into the tea, slowly and steadily, and gently set the spoon beside.

“I want to see it,” Ava said, looking at him, “at least.” She was quiet, her hands coming back together in her lap, her back straight, and the cup of tea set off to the side, delicate flowers gleaming in the soft light.

“I don’t know either,” Ava said. He knew, already, but she spoke the words aloud, for there was no better way to give fear power than to refuse to speak of it. “I was afraid, when you suggested it, of the idea. I don’t know if I could bring myself to rely on it.” She did not mention that the safehouse beneath the floor lay empty – had lain empty, ever since Dentis – but the weight of that, too, tore at her, as if the absence itself was somewhere inside her. If only, something inside her whispered; if only.

Ava paused, then, thinking, and she looked at him. “What are your concerns?” She asked, evenly.

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

S
he’d been thoughtful with the asking.

It’d still been hard, for all he’d been willing. For all he’d known that this, for all it’d rent him, was just a drop in the bucket of everything she knew about Them. He hadn’t insulted her by hesitating. Still, she’d been quiet through the pauses – her gaze intent, but not hard – and he’d thought she understood, no matter what she thought of it.

Some of the fascination crept into his voice, at first. He’d described the way the towhead lad had cast his adrenaline spell through paralysis; he’d described the flash of glittering sand that had half-blinded the older perceptivist, for all he still didn’t know what it was. And then, with a tightness in his throat, he’d described the clauses the perceptivist folded his opponent up in: he described the redness in the lad’s face, and the tears. And the laughter from all the pale, copper-haired faces in the dark windows.

He hadn’t thought he would finish; he wasn’t smiling, not by half, when he did. And he thought she was happy to let him wind on into gentler things. Some of the pain eased as the tea drained lower in the teacups, even if it never really went away.

Best, he supposed, it never went away.

Watching her pour the second round, he hadn’t known what she’d make of his words. He’d thought for a moment she’d call him a coward. If she’d got through it, then he could, too.

But she called him no such thing, with her eyes or with her words. She stirred in another lump of sugar, soundless, and he began to open his book. He fetched out his spectacles and settled them on his nose.

I understand, he thought to say, but it would’ve been a lie. She’d told him it’d frightened her, her voice steady as her hand, and he didn’t want to lie to her in return. I know something of being afraid of such things, he’d rather’ve said; he thought he’d said as much already.

His notebook was a mess of scribbles and arrows, monite tangling right to left, top to bottom, jagged dark marks. Carefully he flipped to the right page before he moved round the table, settling himself on the edge of the couch beside her. The spread he offered her was a little neater: it was a pattern of overlapping circles, annotated at the edges with small pockets of writing. At the edge of the page was a poor drawing of a knot at the end of a string.

“I don’t think you’ll have to rely on it,” he began instead, “not exactly.”

He thought she must’ve been as familiar by now with his hand in Monite as in Estuan; stranger than that, he was beginning to grow familiar with hers. “It’s not a counterspell,” he went on. “It’s a modification on Jhyett Hrcks’ warning ward. Usually, it’s drawn in chalk or ink – or anything else – on the ground. When the plot is drawn, the caster exhorts the mona around it to – to activate, let’s say,” he frowned, “when a spell is cast.

“In this case, that’s what the knot is for. If there’s some way of leaving a thread hanging out – something, just enough.” He took his teacup and saucer back off the table, holding them in his lap. “So that if you leave a man like Shrikeweed alone, and you come back, and the knot is undone…” His lip twitched. “There should also be a scrambling effect, if I’ve worked the counterspell clause in right; not enough to announce its presence, but – enough.

“It should work once. It’ll unravel, then, and must be restitched and recast.”

He was suddenly sharply conscious of her in his field, close by; he swallowed, glancing down at the tea things, at the calfskin portfolio on his bundled-up coat on the couch opposite. He took a slow sip of tea, the porcelain clicking delicately as he lowered it back to his lap.

He could see her in the corner of his eye, a spill of dark curls over one shoulder.

He studied the flowers painted across the porcelain, the soft lamplight playing over his hands. “Is it the magic,” he asked quietly, “that makes them cruel? I’ve heard it said so all my life.”

[Ava Weaver]

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

Ava listened, intent, and thought curiously of the waste of it. To have such power, and to spend it so profligately, seemed to her the basest foolishness. She listened, all the same, and she saw the twisting of his face as he went on. She felt no pity for either of the duelists, though something in her whispered a warning at the look on his face.

To have it - to be secure enough in the having to spend it so - it sounded to Ava like a particularly foolish dream, the sort children had alongside pirate ship captains and carnival dancers. She marked the notion of the spells, too, wrote them down somewhere inside herself to look for in the grimoire, for she thought she should like to name them for herself.

He began in the order she had asked, and if she thought he was delaying, she gave no sign of it, and did not begrudge him the doing. She lowered her gaze to the fine, thick pages of the notebook, strong enough to withstand the pen crossing over itself with strength.

The letters she knew by now, in his writing and printed, too. The words she could sound out, reliably, though perhaps still slowly. The meanings escaped her; her and there she saw a word she knew, tucked amidst the rest, the sort of words which repeated themselves in every spell, which offered little in the way of understanding.

Did she need to understand? Ava wondered why she searched for it, for some corner of it to hold and to know: this, this is a part of it which I found for myself. He was beginning to explain already, and she lifted her gaze from the page which told her so little, and watched him instead.

Ava’s eyebrows lifted as he went on. She could feel his field all around her; the more time she spent in it, the more she could feel the differences, though she did not have the words for them.

“I see,” Ava said, thoughtful. She lifted her dark gaze to him. “It registers casting?” Ava asked; the questions spilled out of her, steady and even, as she grasped the end of the thread and began to wind. “If a person acting as a witness enters the room, or a clairvoyant caster reaches from afar to find someone inside, would that trigger the ward? What if they’re beneath, or in the shop outside? What if they enter while holding the upkeep?”

“Is it only quantitative it should work against? Or casting of a certain type? Or any casting at all?” Ava’s gaze went back to the page, searching the circles and the letters as if she could find some answer there.

Ava paused, thinking it over once more. She looked at him again. “Would any casting trigger it?” She asked. “Even by the ward’s caster?”

She did not ask - they had not spoken of it, yet, the other experiment which he had proposed. She thought they both understood what it entailed. It seems to her strange to create a trap that he would set off, if they -

Perhaps, Ava thought, he had another place in mind. She could not say she wouldn’t like that; the thought of him doing such a thing in this place still ached, however she tried to banish it. Perhaps he had given up on it entirely. That was a relief, but a sour one; it felt like cowardice, and she wasn’t sure on whose part it fell.

The practicalities came first, for both of them.

He went on, then. Ava listened, intent, sitting next to him still. He was not looking at her, now, but at the delicate, hand-painted porcelain cup, with its soft dark tea inside.

“I don’t think so,” Ava said, looking at him. She didn’t speak of the cruelties of man; she didn’t mention her uncle and mother, who had sold her with nothing arcane in the bargain, the only tools wielded against them those of desperation, which had been strong enough.

“I think it’s the power,” Ava said. Her fingers had settled on the handle of the cup; she drew them away and let them rest in her lap instead, her back very straight and her gaze settled on a wrinkle of silk against the far wall, a delicate little buckle amidst the smoothness.

“Not the magic itself,” Ava said, “but the ability to wield it and all that they have build upon its back - our backs - which lets them forget what it’s like to be without.” She turned and looked at him, held until he looked at her too. She thought of all the stories she had told, all the lives she had brought to him here in this quiet place, of his tears and angry hopelessness, a long fall ago, and how he had clung to her hands.

“As long as one knows,” Ava said, gentle, but as direct as he had been, and unflinching beside, “I don’t think there’s a need to fear it.”

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

Y
es.” He’d paused, his fingertips perched on the rim of the cup, peering over at the open spread in her hands.

He’d never been more aware of the mona shivering around them, explaining it. He thought he remembered what it used to be like, the woobly tingling against his skin, making his hair stand on end. He wondered if it was the same for her, now. He wondered if she could tell the difference between shifts, between wooblies, like the difference between silk and wool, like the difference between fine wool and rough wool under practiced shears.

He balked at the thought of asking; he wasn’t even sure how to ask. “Any casting should trigger it,” he’d explained first. “It won’t give you any idea of what’s being cast. But it should be sensitive to any monic activity – held upkeep, the target of a spell…”

Some of what she’d brought up, he’d not considered. The thought of a caster holding upkeep long enough to evade notice had, he thought, rather evaded his own notice; he could only speculate there. Some, he had:

He’d long thought on the possibility of scrying, and even stitched in clauses to account for it; his fingertip had traced one, and then a leybridge he thought she might recognize tangled up in arrows.

“A witness should set it off, and it might even scramble the ley channel enough to jog the scryer off. There’s no way to be – certain of that, of course.”

When he’d eased back, he’d met her eye. His lips had pressed thin, though he wasn’t frowning anymore, not exactly. “It should, yes,” he said softly. “Even the ward’s caster. I can try to work in an exclusion clause, but it seemed – fair, that way. No poetry here without you knowing it, no matter the caster.”

And I don’t think there’s enough room here anyway, he thought to say, for Ugoulo’s connection. Or the plot I modified for a human recipient.

It wasn’t far back in the journal. Six, seven, ten pages at most, from this page underneath her fingertips.

He thought, too, of pushing the couches back against the walls, of pushing the table back, of drawing all over these floors in chalk. He couldn’t bring himself to look down at them, at the space at his feet where once there’d been a dark patch of tea and a scattering of busted porcelain. And what if he missed a spot, in the cleaning? What if they had to do it over and over again, until not even scrubbing the floors until all four of their hands were raw was good enough? What then? A carpet, such as any brigk could pull up?

Maybe all this had been a whirlwind in his mind, when he’d asked; in the silence after, he could barely believe what had come out of his mouth.

He didn’t look at her rightaway when she spoke. His breathing was calm and even, his field indectal, and his hand was steady when he took another sip of tea. He listened, nodding slowly. Still, he didn’t look at her, not until he could feel the weight of her eyes on him. On our backs, she said; he breathed in and out, deeply. He thought of the bay windows with their bright winter displays.

He glanced up, and she held his gaze. “No,” he said after a long moment. “I suppose not.”

He didn’t think he ought to say what some humans thought of wicks, too; he didn’t think he had to. He’d never gone for that blather in life, and she didn’t seem the sort, either.

All the same, he knew the fear somewhere in his bones, underneath the part that thinks. He remembered how Caina used to flinch away from Jaeli; she’d never quite got used to it, not even at the end. He remembered some of the things she used to say about it, about them, about what was natural and what wasn’t, when he wasn’t around. More of us than all the vroo put together, Alan’d whispered to him when they were just lads. So what in the hell is it?

“The mona are in everything,” he said, standing, setting the teacup aside; quiet without his shoes, he stepped around the table, reaching for the calfskin. “I don’t think they serve galdori, or even wicks. Gollies seem to think not, even if they act like they do. I don’t think it matters to them in whose service they’re willed.”

He brought it over, and he didn’t think of when the edges of his field must’ve lapped back over her. He took his seat, offering her the portfolio.

“Have you ever seen backlash?” he asked, looking at her again keenly.

[Ava Weaver]

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

I
t was, Ava told herself, much the same as studying monite. The goal was to know more than anyone could think she might, to grasp, however fleetingly, at any advantage. To know whether she was being spied on, looked through, influenced, or whether someone else beneath the floor boards might be.

There was no more powerful tool for a safehouse than knowing whether you were being watched. More than just whether was best - knowing who it was that watched, and where and why - but whether was power, in its own right.

She understood now, much more than she had before, what to be afraid of. In some ways it had helped; in other ways it had made it worse. Instead of abstract whispered fears and bald-remembered stories there were real spells, and the fearful things they could do - and this, Ava had thought grimly, more than once, was a grimoire for teenagers.

All the same, it wasn’t as bad as whispered about. There were no spells to make another person your puppet, to see their every hidden thought, to turn their mind to your will. Not here, at least, Ava thought; not yet. Fear and ignorance were powerful weapons both; the rest of the goal was taking those away, or at least balancing them with direction. It was best to know what to fear; fear in the dark was as bad as panic, was a paralytic from which there was little escape.

The knowing, he believed, would be almost certain; the disruption less so. Ava understood, and she thought she could bear the rest, to know.

He did not answer the question she had not asked; she wondered if he waited for her to ask, and she wondered, too, whether she should do so. Not yet, she thought; tonight, she knew now, she would learn more about what she could manage.

So it is for any tool, Ava thought, when he spoke of the mona, whether it has a mind of its own or not. No, she thought, turning it over in her thoughts. Tools needed to be wielded properly; scissors would cut for anyone, but work better with proper technique, and when used on the right material.

She was a gladder tool for the turning of the clocks than she had ever been before. Ava looked at that, squarely, and found it made her smile; it was only a faint movement of her lips, a softening, and she did not yield to it too well.

“And yet you’ve told me of casters who ruin their relationship with the mona,” Ava pointed out. “So perhaps it matters, in some sense.” Not for us, she did not say; not in a way that helps the cause. She ran her fingers over the soft calfskin, watching the trails she left behind. She opened it open, and drew the crackling drafting paper out, and unfolded it.

Ava studied the ward, the strangeness and familiarity of it. His writing she knew; she thought she could bear it, in his writing. She read the letters she could, and knew how to sound out the words, though she knew no more of them now than she had before. She set the plans down gently on the table before them, and turned to look at him once more.

Had she expected it to hurt? It did not seem so different from what they had already done - not yet, not when they were only words and symbols on a page.

“No,” Ava said. It was not quite a time for smiling, but she raised her eyebrows, slightly, curious, and let him fill in the rest. Will I, tonight? She almost asked. What do I do, for you, if it occurs?