[Mature] Underneath and Inside

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

I
n some sense. His grim look cracked; he smiled for just a moment, though he wasn’t sure if he should have. He wasn’t sure what sort of smile it was, either, only it didn’t last. He watched her run a hand over the portfolio, lacquered nails dark against the calfskin, fingers leaving soft light marks. She found the edge and opened it up; he took one last sip of tea, set the cup on the saucer, and leaned to set the saucer and cup on the table by the pot.

He shifted, turning to watch her take out the stencil.

“Like a knife,” he murmured; he didn’t play at the way he used to speak or the way he used to sit, but he glanced over at her with a spark of that smile. It fell, slowly. Or a friend. He watched her unfold the stencil with care. The lamplight shafted across the crackling paper, threw shadows and strange arcs of light over the table, where the lines had been cut.

She set it on the table, and he bent to move the tea tray and his cup out of the way. The back room still smelled of bohea and flowers and crisp clean cloth, and now leather and paper, too.

When she turned to look at him – when she answered – she’d lifted one dark brow. She wasn’t smiling, but he thought she’d caught what he was driving at, whether he’d meant to or not. He felt a slight prickling in his cheeks; he glanced away from her and down at the plot. He scratched at his jaw, thinking what to say and how to say it. He sucked at a tooth.

He supposed she wouldn’t’ve; he doubted she’d let any of them see her backlash, and he doubted Ava’d had much chance of seeing it otherwise, in any qalqa of hers. Backlash or fizzling was a reprieve you couldn’t count on, and the hope, he suspected, was that you never had to see a golly cast at all.

He felt a pang; he grunted. “I’ve backlashed,” he said, “before. Only once or twice. I’ve seen it more often than I’ve done it.”

The drafting paper was white; the plot was drawn in the holes, in the lines where the smooth wood of the table showed through. There was very little monite to be stitched – he wasn’t sure he could trust his hand, especially as he’d had to shrink the spell circles down to fit on the agreed-upon cloth – and most of what was scrawled in the corners, at the sides, along the arcs, was what he would speak aloud when the stitching was done.

He leaned to smooth the paper out against the tabletop, tracing a line, tapping a block of written monite.

“If I backlash, you’ll feel some runoff. Most of it will be me, but you might… feel strange, or hear things. The mona will leave; you’ll know, because I won’t have a field.” He leaned back and looked at her. “If the spell doesn’t work, it’s most likely I’ll fizzle. It’s – taxing,” he went on. “I’ll look like shit, no matter what. I might need to rest awhile afterward.”

He felt coarse, but there was no point beating around the bush. She hadn’t, and he was damned grateful for it. “Whatever happens, I’ll do my best,” he said. “I’ve warded many times, and you’ve more intent in your smallest finger than half Brunnhold put together.”

He straightened up, took a deep breath, and set his jaw. He smiled slightly.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said, “I’m ready to start stitching.”

[Ava Weaver]

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

Ava listened, her gaze soft on him. She inclined her head, when he spoke of needing to rest. She wondered if she should tell him to leave and come back through the side entrance – but if they were watched, then they were known, and his leaving late at night would help more than it should hurt.

“Then let’s start,” Ava said. She smiled at him; she collected the tea things onto the tray, and set them off to the side. She went to the wall, taking down one of the large silk hangings; she spread it out on the floor, kneeling, smoothing every corner, with the silk resting down into the carpet.

She had taken the stitches out of the bottom and sides five days earlier, but for a few small ones she had left in to hold it together; those she took out now, with short, sharp yanks. The side which faced out was a thick, golden silk; its backing was a piece of cotton nearly the same color, heavy, to protect the silk from the wall and to help it hang. Between the two ran a second piece of cotton, dark gray, and much milder than the other two. It was this middle piece which Ava spread out on a rougher cloth on the floor, smooth and even; she placed the light gray thread she had set aside for this purpose next to it.

First, they spread the stencil out over it; the dimensions were as Ava had told him. They lined the edges of the paper with weights, to hold it in place.

From the counter outside, Ava fetched two of the gray pencils she used to mark fabrics; one she handed to him, and the other she took herself.

They traced, first, slowly; they drew along the cut out lines of the stencil. Ava watched him, and the way he went, pushing the straights and pulling the curves, as he’d told her, once, to do when warding. It was a quick, light marking; Ava knew how to hold her pencil such that the lines were visible in the gleam of the light, but would not lay heavy on the soft surface of the fabric, so that if any were not thoroughly washed away, they would still be seen.

In time, they put the pencils away, and the fabric weights, too, and lifted the stencil from the dark gray cotton.

Ava knelt on the ground; she handed him his own spoon of thread and needle, too. She pinched the edge of the thread, and slid it through the eye of the needle – not expertly, but neatly enough. For all she knew better than to sew anything like the dress she wore, and for all she never would have called herself a tailor, Ava could sew a straight seam or embroider, well enough, at least, for this. She had not thought to ask if he could; she did not think he would have agreed, if he could not. There might have been other ways; he had not asked her to look for them.

For as sure as she was, she watched, and waited, a moment, for him to make the first stitch. Then, dark hair tied back behind her head, Ava began to sew.

The pencil had not been so different from writing herself, not really; for most of the stencil, it had only been tracing, as if outlining some large strange garment on the cotton. There was no such hiding with the embroidery.

They went quickly enough around the curves of it, marking out the lines of it. Ava finished an arc, tied the thread off and cut it clean. She went back, settling the tip of her needle at the beginning of one of the words written along the sweep of it. She studied it, intently, reading the letters to herself one by one, her eyes tracing the lines of them. She put it together, and she whispered the word, for all it was unknown to her, quietly aloud. Then, with a little press of force, she sent the needle through the cotton, and pulled the thread through to follow.

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

H
e didn’t repeat the word after her, though he could feel it on the tip of his tongue. Nor’d he look up from his needle, sparking silver in the soft light; he pushed the tip through the cotton, careful to avoid the pad of his finger. He sat opposite her, cross-legged with the light grey cotton spread out across his lap. His spectacles were perched again on the bridge of his nose, and he looked down through them at his stitches with a deep frown.

“To wait,” he said quietly, though louder than she’d spoken the monite. He turned the needle and pushed the tip back into the cotton, drew the thread through. “More like – to lie in wait, I think. It’s in the imperative mood; it’s got an irregular ending.”

His lip twitched; something that wasn’t quite a smile tugged at it. He’d almost asked her to parse it.

He glanced up at her over the rims of his glasses, her dark curls all pulled back, her fingers careful with the needle and thread. Faster, by a pina manna, than his stiff hands. His eyes weren’t the best, but he could see the word she was working at, even if he hadn’t known it by her precise enunciation.

He looked back down at his hands. “It’s rare. It’s not like an everspell; it’s not so easy,” he went on, “to ask the mona to wait on something. The word next to it, in the corner where those circles overlap, is memory. This part calls on the mona’s long memory. It asks them to lie in wait. The caster – makes an argument to them, that there’s something worth waiting for.”

He didn’t glance up at Ava again. Two days in a row, he thought, once a year. He’d asked, off and on, about the Grace Carre lass; for all it’d scared him out of his skin to see her there the first time, he felt strangely fond to think of her, climbing the stepladder to hang the lace displays, taking this or that order or package off Ava’s hands.

The shop itself had changed with the passing of the seasons, too, almost too slowly for him to notice. Almost, but not quite.

He snipped the thread. He wet the edge, pinched it with his fingers, slid it shakily through the eye of the needle.

He set about the detection clause, now, lips moving as his needle wove in and out, no sound coming out. This part of Hrcks’ spell went halfway down the page, in the grimoire he’d brought back from Hox; there wasn’t so much writing on the spell circle itself, but there’d been a great deal to memorize. To lay out, bit by bit, all of what the spell sought – because one omission, one rule that might be bent…

He had thought once, very briefly, to let the needle slip, to wince and curse as if it’d been an accident. To let the blood well up where it’d pricked him, and to press it to the stitches. He didn’t; he didn’t think it was a chance he ought to take, here and now. No poetry, he thought, without her knowing.

It had been quiet, mostly, as they’d worked slowly at the circles. Sometimes he’d shifted, turned to stitch from a new angle. Sometimes he had stopped to even out his breath and straighten his aching back. He’d practiced sewing a straight seam in the weeks before Clock’s Eve. It wasn’t unlike stitching up a hole in an old shirt, even with these hands.

Still, it’d been strange at first – kneeling with her on the floor, watching her pull her hair back, her dress still crisp and neat. To spread out the cotton, mark it along the stencil. Handling the weights, he found himself wondering what it’d be like, to work here day-to-day; he didn’t think he’d ever handled shears. He’d often come at the end of a long day, with packages yet to be wrapped and ribbons yet to be tied. He’d almost asked, once, if he could help, but he’d felt silly for thinking there was anything he could do.

He scarcely believed it, when they were done. He eased back, taking a deep breath, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. He smoothed his side of the cotton out, then pushed himself up on a shaky hand, eased his erse onto the table.

He breathed in deep. “It looks like the spell circle to me.” He ran a hand through his hair, swallowing tightly; he looked across at Ava, and smiled.

[Ava Weaver]

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

H
e answered the question she hadn’t asked, and she was all the more grateful for it. Her gaze was on the stitches still; she knew better than to take her gaze from the careful, precise work. She did not know what the cost of a mistake might be, and that made avoiding them all the more important.

Ava drew out the rest of the word, slow and even. Lie in wait, she thought, and fixed the sounds in her mind. She tried to imagine them, as she often did, in different voices: in a man’s voice, deep and even; in a woman’s, smooth and proud.

That there is something worth waiting for. Ava still didn’t lift her gaze; she went on to the next stitch, to the overlapping circles of memory. Was it waiting, what tools did? It was like the sharpening of a knife, the making of plans; it was a looking forward which required a doing now.

Waiting, Ava had once thought, was a passive word. She knew now the value of it; she knew something of the difference between waiting and laying in wait, between waiting and preparing, between waiting and making ready. She sewed the last of the curve, tied a knot, cut the thread loose and began again, steadily sharpening herself against the whetstone.

Ava went then to memory; this too she spoke aloud, and this too she fixed inside herself. Memory, she thought, was a good word to know, though she knew enough monite now to guess the way one spoke of the mona’s memory might be very different from the way one spoke of a man’s or woman’s. What did the mona remember? Everything, Ava supposed. She began to stitch, steadily, finding the jagged shapes of the letters, not so strange as they had been.

Ava’s hands, used to the drawing out and cutting of fabric, began to cramp and ache. Her fingers tingled where the end of the needle had pricked them, though never enough to bleed. She went on through it, steadily, flexing her hands in the moments between, and thought nothing of the pain.

She did not know it was the last stitch until she had sewn it, until she looked up and saw no lines of pencil left, only thin gray thread. She tied off the last of them, and took her thread, and smiled at him when he spoke the words aloud. Curled, Ava thought, as if it were itself the end of a spell.

Ava looped the ends of the thread around into a knot - one, two, three times, wider, not a neat thing as could be cut through, but a messy snarl. She drew the needle into the fabric on the spot they had marked, and tied the knot into place.

Ava rose, shaking the folds from her skirt, smoothing them with tired hands. The small needles and the rest of the thread she put away; when she folded up the cloth beneath the spell circle, it would be as if it had never happened, at least to look up.

Ava stood, her hands folded one over the other at her front, and looked at him, her gaze softening. She had not asked how dangerous it was; she had not asked what was the worst that could happen. She thought of the small notebook of cramped shaky writing, and she thought she knew.

She thought, too, that he would come back to her, if it did. She thought of the practicalities of it; there she almost thought to warn him. You kill me too, she wanted to say, if it happens here. Ava Weaver cannot survive that.

“Do you need anything?” Ava asked. More tea, more water, more time; they were perhaps all she could offer, but she could offer them at least.

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

H
e watched her tie the knot. He thought of the way she had stretched out her hands when she’d tucked the needle in; her hands didn’t shake as she pinched the end of the thread, but he thought the motions of her fingers looked stiff. He thought if he closed his eyes he could picture it: crouching on the damp floor, breathing in the rusty iron smell of the bars, one of her hairpins in his teeth and the other in his aching hands, and the look on her face when he’d risen up and looked at her.

It was a fine knot. Nothing graceful about it; no grace was needed from these tools, now. It was a snarl tight as a rat’s nest, and no picking or pulling could unravel it.

He met her eye when she met his; neither of them had to say it, what came next. He shifted in his seat, smile cracking wider. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said, then cleared a frog from his throat. “A glass of water would be helpful.”

He hesitated. He almost spoke again. He met her eye before she stepped around the plot and brushed aside the silk hangings, but he just smiled. He was still smiling when the fabric rippled still, when there was nothing but silence that lay thick like wool and lamplight just as soft.

He looked down at the spell circle.

He wasn’t sure if he needed the glass of water; he wasn’t sure if there was any reason he had asked, other than that he needed time. He wondered if she’d be gone long enough for him to cast the ward here and now. Curl before she got back. Should’ve asked for more tea, in that case; but he suspected she’d’ve known what he was up to, and that was no good.

He scratched the back of his neck and rolled his shoulders. His erse ached, but he unfolded his stiff legs and found his balance. He bent to pick up the cut of cotton; he shook it out gently, then spread it over the table. He smoothed it over the wood, feeling the soft bumps of the stitches they’d made underneath his fingertips.

He followed them. He shut his eyes and breathed in deep, and he followed the sweep of a curve, the reverb of a corner. His fingers danced over the monite, and he found the rhythm of the words in his memory. He tucked them into his breathing, in and out. There was no need to count the seconds; the spell kept the count, with each clause and the spaces in-between them. He breathed in on one syllable, and out on another. He knew the shape of every word and every movement.

When she returned, his back was turned. Maybe he’d expected the brush of a caprise; maybe he’d forgotten everything. There was bastly gold whispering through his field, all the mona shivering with it, when he rose and turned and found her.

He wasn’t sure what he saw in her eyes. They both knew the weight of intent; there could be no doubt, not now. Are you ready? There was no point asking; they’d passed the last threshold. “Thank you,” he said very softly.

And he didn’t – couldn’t – lose the rhythm. He took a few sips of water, cleared his throat, took another sip. It was like singing, he thought –

Something else leaked through his field. He couldn’t think of that.

When he sat on the couch opposite, on one side of the ward, he was smiling at her. The line of his back was straight. He met her eye one last time, pushing every bit of warmth he felt into his smile, then looked down at the plot. He knew to work clockwise, around and inward. He started at the knot, and he fixed her hands tying it in his mind.

He thought of her hands clasped on his, and of waiting, and of hope, and he let all of it fill up his diaphragm. Then, in a deep, smooth voice, he began the invocation, and his field flared etheric.

Roll

Casting Fatigue/Aftermath:
1d6 = (2) = 2

[Ava Weaver]

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

Ava inclined her head; she went behind another of the hanging, one which if taken down would reveal more than just the wall. She left him alone behind her, in her absence.

She wondered if she should dawdle, out of sight. She wondered if what was there beneath the water was a request for time or for space. Would he rather do it without her eyes there to watch him? How long would it take? How long would she wait, listening to the distant muffled rasp of monite, letting her imagination do its work.

She did not linger, or wait; she filled a glass of water and came back out with it. He was facing the plot when she came, his gaze down tracing over it. She crossed the threshold into his field, and felt it sweep over her; something like a smile, unexpected, tickled at the edges of her lips, and something like horror was freezing cold in her veins.

He thanked her for the water; Ava smiled at him, and it was of her own making, and nothing else’s.

He sat, where he always did; Ava sat too, on the opposite couch, out of the range of him. She sat with her back straight, with her skirt smooth in her lap and down over her legs. She sat with no weight of tiredness, with no sign of the ache in her back; her hands were in her lap, one over the other, with no concession to her aching fingers. She sat as if she felt none of it.

When he looked up and smiled at her, Ava smiled back. It slid off his face as he looked back down, and he began.

Ava watched.

It washed over her in waves, in his deep, familiar voice. She had dreamt of this, she knew; not of sitting here and watching him, but of listening. She knew that to close her eyes would be to make it worse, and so she watched - watched his face, the strands of gray and now white mingled amidst the red, and the grim, taut look of concentration beneath the smoothness steadiness of his voice.

She watched, and she listened.

She found letters that she knew, and sounds, and words too. To lay in wait, he said, after a time. No, Ava thought: lay in wait, he asked, or perhaps implored. Memory, he said too, shaping the words, and Ava remembered it, the sound, and saw the shape of it on his lips and tongue.

He went on. She clung to the words she knew. She wondered, briefly, what it would feel like in the midst of it. Never had she felt it without some other emotion stronger than her ability to focus; never had she felt it without the clouding of her senses that came so. She did not try it tonight, but she marked her own curiosity, and knew that she would think of it later.

He went on. She couldn’t trace the shape of it; sometimes she grasped a corner, following him around the plot, and sometimes she could read a word which would follow, even if she did not know its meaning. Her sounding outs echoed in her head before him, a strange chorus.

Something in his chanting changed; Ava recognized some of the ending words. His face was paler then the paper; sweat beaded at his temples and across his forehead in the cold, and he was swaying on the seat, as if the world were tilting around him. There was, she knew, nothing she could do.

His voice came to an end - curled, Ava thought abruptly, and she understood. Not stopped, but curled, wrapped the spell up and smoothed the ribbon out that he had used to hold it together. She did not shiver, though she could have done so.

Ava did not let herself think she felt it. She almost could have; she almost wondered. Her gaze went to the knot, the tangle of threads, and she studied it, wondering: was it tighter than it had been before? More impenetrable? She did not think so.

There was a noise like a grunt or a gasp from the couch; Ava rose, and went to him, though the space between them tingled and pricked over her skin, and she felt the small fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up, and knew something of horror.

His eyes fluttered shut; he was starched white between his freckles. Was this how he had looked, then? A part of her wondered; a part of her wished to know.

“Risha,” Ava said, softly, naming him as she had once before, many months ago. His hands were cold and clammy, and she covered them with hers, and breathed in deep in the rhythm he weakly kept.

“Risha,” Ava said, softly, sitting in the midst of it and looking at him. “Can you hear me?”

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

H
e didn’t look at her, though she was there in the corner of his eye; he knew better.

The invocation of this spell was long and humbling, and he neither tripped over nor rushed it. Then, like the second step of a dance – he breathed in and out, measured and even – he slid into the ward proper, describing the parameters. Its area, its effects.

The knot tucked into the spell where a bowl of water or a candle or smoke might’ve gone. He’d remembered a line from his old clairvoyant book, about how nearly anything can act as a window: bones, sand, rocks, thread. How anything can act as a mirror.

He drew round to the center of the plot and began to make his argument. The soft lamplight blurred at the edges of his eyes, and his pulse was a dull ache in his ears. The light grey stitching seemed to brighten and unravel off the cotton. It throbbed with his heartbeat. He asked the mona to lie in wait, and he told them what he knew of their memory; he could feel the nerves in his cheek flickering, the muscles twitching, his eyes prickling with the strain.

He thought of every second between the touch of her hands in the carriage and in the library. He thought of every slow step down the dim-lit hall, her hand on his arm, both of them swathed in silk and clinging perfume.

His voice didn’t weaken; he kept on across the leybridge and to the targeting clause, the words dropping out of him smooth and deep, as if spoken by somebody else. The room spun around him, and tingling dark washed over his vision, and the only thing he saw was the plot.

The air was warm and thin, and he felt breathless. He wove the circle closed with the amandation. He bit off the last consonant and curled the spell. He knew this, at least, that he’d curled the spell; every vein, every ley line in him was alive and bright with it. The mona had agreed, and he felt – for a second – some strange understanding fill him up.

Somehow the room was dark, or maybe he was nowhere at all. He felt something stir the air around him, still bright and alive with etheric mona. He could hear her saying something to him. He couldn’t grasp the sound to hold it, the rushing in his ears loud enough it could’ve been a downpour.

Her hands pressed his, and he jolted. He was cold, he realized, and numb. He felt sick suddenly, and he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t felt it before; his stomach flipped and rolled over, and he wanted to lay down, except he wasn’t sure which way down was.

Risha, she was saying.

“Silk,” said a deep voice. There was sweat underneath his arms, a film of it across his face, his shirt plastered icy-cold to his back. “I can hear you,” he slurred, “I can hear you.”

When he opened his eyes, she was close – fair close. The mona still swam etheric around them; he could feel the tug of them in all his nerves. Two large dark eyes watched him. He swallowed another wave of nausea. Something told him he ought to feel strange about it, but he didn’t have the mind to feel much of anything.

He felt a warm wetness on his lip, and tasted coppery blood. “I can hear you,” he said again, firmer. Her breath rose and fell along the rhythm; he found his again, stronger, if tired.

He slipped one hand out from under hers and pressed them again, with what strength he had, just to show her he could. He managed a sloppy smile.

“The ward’s… warded.” He couldn’t bring his eyes to focus on her face. He blinked and squinted, and tried to glance around her at the room; another wave of nausea threatened to knock him over, and he grunted and shut his eyes. “Are you all right?” he asked, taking his hand away to press it against his forehead.

[Ava Weaver]

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

Ava had called him Risha in Roalis - had named him Risha - when there had been a need for a name, when a life and perhaps their safety beside had depended on it. She had not regretted it; she could not. Neither had she ever thought to ask him: do you like it, does it feel like you’re.

Perhaps it was that they did not speak in such ways; he did not talk to her anymore of how this face fit him. She understood what to read in his silence there, in the straight back and spread feet, the square jaw and the hands clasped behind his back as he walked, and the smooth deep voice which he used like an instrument.

Names changed; they evolved. Ava Weaver knew that better than most; she didn’t know whether Tom Cooke had, but she knew the man sitting next to her did. When she had reached to call for him - when she had thought he needed calling - it had not been Mr. Cooke that came to her. He was Risha to her now, though she knew that that, too, could change.

Silk, he said, and she smiled. I can bear you, he told her. Something shifted when he spoke; blood trickled sluggishly from one nostril, sliding bright red down to his lip. Dark gray eyes opened and squinted towards her; he shifted and sat back, and pressed a hand to his clammy forehead.

“I’m fine,” Ava said, gently, and it was not hard to say.

She pressed the hand still beneath hers, and went and came back with a damp cloth, and tucked it into his hand. It did not seem right, just then, to congratulate him. Ava looked down at the circles they had sewn, and she wondered at it.

It looked no different; for all that the casting of the spell was etched deep into her, stitched onto something inside her in blood red thread, looking at it she would not have known. The feeling in the air had gone, or perhaps it was only that she could not feel it, anymore; perhaps it was only that she had become accustomed.

They sat in silence for a little while; he was slumped back against the couch for a long time, and she did not hurry him or call to him again, and the color washed back into his face beneath the sweat and blood. When he opened his eyes again, she was sitting still opposite him, all smooth, her hands folded in her lap.

He straightened, making a noise best described as a grunt; he frowned down at the cloth, and wiped at his face, and when he set it down his hand was trembling, just a little, and it had taken the smear of bright red from his face.

Ava watched, still, and bore the cost of it, if it was a cost to be born. She did not think him sorry to have paid such a price, not the man who had told her of his aching knuckles and bones with such pride. For all she did not speak of her scars so, she was proud of them too; that she had them to speak of, that she could speak of them at all, she knew, was evidence of her survival.

She was not ashamed of what she had become. How could she be? How could she have asked him to be?

“I’d like to call you Risha,” Ava said, quietly, looking across the ward at him, after he had drained the last of the water and set it steadily down. “Between us, when there is a need for such things - if it is a name which you think could be yours.”

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • Painted Ladies

Evening on the 7th of Intas, 2720

T
he blood was vivid red against the cloth. He sniffed once, sharp, smelling iron; he folded it and set it aside.

The sight of blood – of his own blood – had never troubled him in life; it wasn’t that it was blood, now. Settled back against the cushions as he never had in this room, his eyes shut, something in him had drifted. The sight had yanked it back, and he could feel the tingling and creeping in his skin, where sensation had leached back in. He wanted to run his hands over his face, to spread out his fingers and look at them until they were even stranger.

He took a drink of water instead, then realized he was parched. He drained the glass slow and steady, though he wanted nothing more than to guzzle it. When he set it down, he set it down carefully, though he didn’t think he’d’ve managed one of her lovely teacups just now.

He had been conscious of her eyes on him as he drifted, but there’d been no room in him to think of all he should’ve.

It was strange sitting across from her now, worn thin in the way only poetry wears you. With it singing in his veins still, for all the mona’d settled round him, the faintest tang of etheric still whispering through the air.

It hadn’t been the time for shame or doubt before; it still wasn’t. But he let himself wonder this time. She’d gone and brought him a damp cloth, and she’d spoken to him as you might speak to a man, still. Her face had been a swimming blur, but the press of her hands had been warm. And she’d called him…

He glanced up and met her eye finally when she spoke.

He pushed himself up and back, shifting his sore worse against the cushions. He didn’t smile at first, but it tugged uncertainly at his lips.

“Risha,” he pronounced. He’d never said it himself before; he’d thought it many times, and now heard it more than once on her tongue.

It didn’t sound quite like he’d expected in this voice, but then nothing did; he knew now that was the way of it. “Risha,” he repeated, shutting his eyes and feeling the reverb of it.

I was sorry you had to, he thought; I never wanted you to feel as if you’d named me, as you were named. I felt sorrier because I wanted it so much. I tried to find another name – I thought you’d want me to have a name I chose, for when I present myself in the How – but none of them fit so well. Do you know how hard it is to find something that fits comfortably? Once you have it, you never want to let it go.

He looked at her and thought she did know. “I’d like that,” he said. “I like to hear it. It reminds me…” He never thought to say it out loud; he looked down and ran shaky fingers over his hand. “If I have to play it, I’ll play it right, and take care of it,” and he smiled wistfully back up at her, “but I am not the strings or the wood.”

He rapped gently on the back of his hand and managed something like a laugh.

“I –” He hesitated. “I called you Silk,” he said. Without meaning to would’ve been a lie; without thinking, yes, but he’d meant the syllable in every fiber of him, even though he’d said it only once before that. He meant it now, looking across at her, straight-backed and with her hands folded in her lap.

She wasn’t wearing silk today; she didn’t have to be. “I’d like to call you Silk,” he said, “even just between us. If I may.” He tilted his head; for all he sagged with exhaustion, his eyes were keen. “How did you choose it?”

He thought it must’ve come before Woven Delights, if she’d found them while she was still – with him. If she couldn’t bear to tell him, or if the why was hers and hers alone, he thought she wouldn’t; all the same, he wouldn’t step back from the question.

[Ava Weaver]

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

She had never heard him say it before; for all that she had heard and imagined in his smooth, deep voice, she had never heard Risha. She listened to it, once and then again, watching him close his eyes as he said it.

How did a person say their name? How did one say the word which mean him or her own self, which he or she held closer than all others? Perhaps she should have known; she had stood before the mirror, quietly, after she had chosen it, and said it, again and again: Ava Weaver. Ava Weaver. Ava Weaver. It had settled onto her like a dress, and she had stitched it against herself with her words, slowly sewn up the seams and pulled it carefully into place. Ava Weaver, she had said, and she smiled into the mirror. Ava Weaver, she had said, short and sharp and demanding. Ava Weaver, she had said, solemn, meeting her own gaze squarely.

She had never even heard him say risha; she had not learned the word from him. He had spoken to her of the oud, of drifting summer nights in the garden, as if with his eyes closed. It had been a wick she had asked, in the time between – not quite a deliberate seeking out, but a taking of the opportunity when it came, and there she had learned the word risha for the small pick which swept the strings.

Before the moment when it was needed, she had not thought to call him so; she had not thought to call him anything.

She smiled at him when he answered, all the more so when his smile softened, fond with memories, at the edges. She nodded, grateful, for she did not think he would have accepted only for her sake. Risha, she named him, then; she did not think Risha would have accepted only for her sake.

“You may,” Silk said, smiling at him. This to her did not need asking. I have been Silk to you, she might have said, even since that night in Roalis, when first you saw me. I don’t know what you suspected before then; I know you must have wondered. When I took your hands in the library, when I told you what hope was: that was Silk, and that night as we wandered out of the tunnels, you knew my name.

How did you choose it? He asked.

She remembered Nellie as a small girl in her uncle’s fabric shop, running her fingers softly over the edges of a bolt of silk. She had snatched her hands back, and only admired it, when her uncle had come back in, talking proudly of the fabric and how much it would sell for. It had sat proudly displayed on the counter all summer long, and every customer who had come by had turned away at the cost; those who had reached to touch it, as she had, had been warned back. This and more she had seen, sweeping cuttings and dust off the floor, dashing in and out to run errands.

She remembered herself in the in-between, when she could not longer say Nellie but Ava felt foreign and strange on her tongue, watching girls dressed in silk, and more frightened than she could have ever felt for the day when it would be her turn too.

She thought of cutting silk: the weights, the sheers, the slippery twisting heaviness of it, the way it pooled and ran beneath her fingers when she least expected it. She had known none of that, then; she had never cut silk when she had chosen the name for herself. Perhaps she had known, in some way. She had never thought it would be easy to cut.

“It fascinated me as a child, and frightened me too,” Silk said. “I found it lovely and distant, and its smoothness can hide a great deal.” She looked down at the wool in her lap, at the hands resting upon it. “It’s slippery; silk goes its own way.”

“When the time came, I didn’t think of any of that,” Silk said, looking back up at him and smiling. “I just chose, as I did for you.”