First Pick
The banners were my doing, and I want them in the cloth just as they happened, because the coast tells it as saintliness and the mountain tells it as strategy and it was neither. It was weaving.
Ghera’s corner of the hall held her three sons’ war-banners, and her three sons were dead — two to the mountain in Ghazan’s day, one to the renegades’ last winter, killed by his own clan’s broken men for hunting them.
That is the kind of wound a feud deals on its way down.
The banners were thirty years old, wool-moth in them, the reds gone to rust. Every fire in Redwatch had watched them fray and none dared touch them: not the glad fires, who wanted the past folded away, and not the hard ones, who wanted it bleeding on the wall forever.
I am neither of those things. I am a weaver, and rotting wool offends me, and dead men deserve straight selvages.
So on a gray morning I crossed the hall to the hard corner, in front of everyone, and stood before Ghera and her banked eyes, and asked — in Morda’s own tongue, learned by then well enough to be laughed at, which is well enough — for the honor of weaving her sons’ banners new.
The hall went so still you could hear the peace-fire eat.
“Their names in the old knotwork,” I said.
“Your wool, your colors, my hands. And the old cloth we do not burn or bury. We weave the sound lengths of it into the hem of the new — a weaver can do that; it is slow and it is possible — so the new banner carries the old inside it, where it doesn’t tear.
” I looked at the third banner, the youngest son’s, and then at her, and gave her the truth like a bolt unrolled: “Your son and my husband died in the same feud, mother. I cannot mend either of them. Mended shows the join. But I know how to carry the dead forward in new cloth, because I am doing it standing in front of you.”
Ghera looked at me for a long ten breaths. Eyes like banked fires, I said, and hers had thirty years of fuel.
“My youngest hated the rust,” she said, at last, in her cracked deep voice, to no one, to the banners. “He said it made them look like dying was rusty work.” And then, to me, terrible and level: “Wool’s in the third chest, weaver. If you knot one name wrong I will burn your loom myself.”
“If I knot one name wrong, I will hand you the torch.”
That is how the hardest fire in Redwatch came to sit in my weaving hall three mornings a week, correcting my knotwork, telling me, by accident at first and then not by accident, thirty years of sons.
And the wool-women followed her, because where Ghera sits is where sitting is allowed.
My loom-hall filled that winter, fire by fire.
I gave no speeches about peace. We wove. It does what speeches think they do.
The chief altered his liturgy that same season, in the smallest possible way, which from a man that precise was a proclamation: his evening visit stopped ending at the door.
He walked me from the weaving hall to my rooms, public corridors, escort behind, and we found that the route had one flaw in it, only one, and neither of us moved to have it corrected, and I will let the flaw stand for everything the terms would not say.
Between the loom-hall and the guest stair, Redwatch’s builders had set a turn: ten paces of corridor where the torch-brackets stand too far apart and the escort, following correctly, falls a wall’s-thickness behind.
Ten paces of dark, one turn wide. For three weeks we walked those ten paces every night in scrupulous silence, a hand’s width apart, not touching, and I have been kissed with less effect than I was not-kissed in that corridor.
Seventy paces of it, all told, every one a held pick with the shed open and the shuttle refused.
On the last night of the third week, in the middle of the dark ten, the chief of Clan Morda stopped walking.
“Widow Holt.” Low. The treaty-voice, but down at its true weight, the way stones speak under a hold.
“I require an honest answer before midsummer stops being an abstraction. When I asked your villages for a living clause, I priced everything. The insult my hard fires would offer you. The risk. The cost to you of Morda faces at every meal. I priced it all; it is what I am for.” A breath.
In the dark his hand found the wall, as if the hold itself needed steadying.
“I did not price you. There was no column for — I have no terms for this, and I am a man who has nothing else. Ten paces of corridor have become the whole of my day. If that is a burden on a woman who came north to end a feud and not to be wanted by its chief — say so now, whole, and I will wall up this turn and be your treaty and nothing else, and count it the best bargain I ever made at the worst rate.”
The dark held both of us. Somewhere behind, correctly, the escort’s boots.
“And if it isn’t a burden?” I said.
Silence — his kind, counting. Then, for the first time since a rainy moot hall two seasons gone, the count came up short, and I heard the treaty fail in his voice, and what was under it all along: “Then I am going to need new terms entirely. I drew the old ones to keep you free of me, and I have kept them, and they are the only promise I have ever regretted keeping.”
The ten paces were nearly walked. Torchlight ahead, escort behind, forty fires waiting to read our faces at breakfast. I reached across the hand’s width (I did; let the cloth be exact; the shuttle was mine to send) and took the front of his shirt in my fist, wool his mother had likely woven, and drew the chief of Clan Morda down into the dark of his own hold’s one blind turn, and kissed him.
He came apart from the word enemy entirely, in that turn.
He kissed the way he counted: thorough, unhasty, nothing skipped.
And then the count failed him there too and it became something with three years of hunting in it and ten paces of restraint a night, his hand cradling the back of my head off the cold stone, wool creaking in my fist, a sound out of that great careful chest like a treaty tearing.
We broke apart inside our ten paces, exactly at the torchlight’s edge, and finished the walk to the guest stair a hand’s width apart, breathing like conspirators, correct as clauses.
At my door he bowed, chief-correct, escort watching. But his voice had not found its way back into the treaty, and what it said was for me alone:
“The wedding stands at midsummer, at your word and only ever at your word. But I would have you know the terms have changed past all recovery, Verity. I no longer ask the weaver to bless a treaty.” The bow deepened; the old formality made new, carrying everything now instead of hiding it.
“I ask her to bear a fool who priced the whole north and forgot to price her own heart.”
I barred my door and stood with my back against it a long while, holding my own fist to my chest, the one that had held his shirt, as though it had wool in it still.
A feud you weave new, pick over pick. Nobody tells you the weaver goes into the cloth.