Selvage
The six weeks to midsummer, Redwatch healed the way a hold heals: loudly, all at once, and pretending it had never been sick.
The hard fires did not vanish — a feud thirty years in the weave does not lift out in a season — but they had watched their best case burn at the peace-fire and their loudest voice walk out small, and something older than argument had shifted.
Ghera’s corner became, without one word of proclamation, the place where the hard-fire women brought their wool.
To sit at the knotwork under the new banners was to make a statement nobody had to say aloud, and the corner filled, week on week, with the very women who had wanted me gone — who came, and sat, and corrected my gorge-grammar, and taught me their dead sons’ favorite colors, which is how the hard half of a clan surrenders: not to the treaty. To the loom.
“You understand what you did at the fire,” Ghera said to me one of those mornings, not looking up from the knots.
“Draz gave them a story where the enemy is clever and the clan is deceived. You gave them a better one. The enemy’s bride stands at our fire and reads our cloth in our defense.
” A knot, snapped tight. “Clans live on stories, girl. You out-wove him. My youngest would have laughed himself off the bench.”
And Ulmar — my Ulmar, the treaty in boots, thawed now past any refreezing — spent those weeks in a state the gorge had never once seen its chief inhabit: visibly, catastrophically happy.
It unsettled Redwatch more than the trial had.
He counted still, because counting is his bones; but he had moved me, permanently, past the line where totals stop applying, and he did sums for me now instead of about us — how many mountain guests the gorge could sleep, how much dye-fuel the wedding-cloth wanted, how a second loom-hall might be raised by autumn with a south window because I had once, one time, in passing, said the light was better from the south.
That is what a cost-counter in love looks like.
You will not talk him out of the counting; you can only watch it change sides.
One night, the last week, the fear came anyway, the way it does — at low ebb, in the dark of my own rooms, the wedding-cloth done and cut from the loom and all of it suddenly real: two winters a widow, six weeks from a wife, and somewhere under the gorge-stone of my new certainty, one end of the old cloth pulled loose.
I went to his door in the dark. His guard had long since stopped developing deafness; she simply nodded.
And I stood in the banked light of his plain room and said the thing all the way through, because he had earned the whole of it and half-truths are mends and mends show:
“I loved Corin with my eyes open and I mean to love you the same, and tonight I am afraid — not of you; of the trade. That loving you means the bolt of him is finished and rolled. That the new cloth uses up the old.”
Ulmar of Clan Morda sat up in the dark, and was quiet the way he is quiet, counting — and for once in my life I was glad all the way down of a man who counts, because when the answer came it was exact.
“You taught my whole clan the answer to that at Ghera’s wall,” he said.
“The old cloth doesn’t get used up. It gets carried.
The sound lengths of it go into the hem of the new, where they don’t tear.
” He drew me down into the warmth, and his voice in the dark was the corridor’s, the true one under all the treaties.
“I am not asking to be the whole cloth, Verity. I am asking to be the rest of it. Carry him in every hem you ever weave. The man loved you first and taught you what it holds. When we drink at midsummer, his cup gets poured full, and I will raise it myself — chief of the clan whose broken men took him — and the whole north will see what the new cloth is for.”
I wept then, the once, the whole two winters of it, into the shoulder of the enemy — and there is my third thread gone, and the fourth I am keeping for the end, and he held me through it exactly the way the loom holds the warp: firmly, evenly, without once asking it to be done sooner than it was done.
Afterward — and the cloth may keep this too, because joy is a fiber that wants working the same as grief — afterward was not slow, and not formal, and not counted.
It was the two of us laughing in the dark like conspirators who had robbed the feud of everything it was owed, his mouth at my throat and my hands in the wool of his hair, want running full and easy now down the warp of three seasons, and when he moved over me and asked the shed’s one question I answered it with my ankles crossed behind him and my teeth at his ear: “Willing. Always willing. Now give me the vows early, chief — practice makes precise.”
He practiced. Twice. He is a very thorough man, and I have never once regretted the terms.