Chapter Two #2
Sometimes Mother required color, which came in the form of ground beetle shells, woad, or verdigris that I scraped off aging copper.
We found most of what we needed in the lands around the Tower, but if her work ever called for an ingredient we lacked, she would send off the pigeons to one of her mysterious contacts.
That is how we obtained gold leaf and lapis lazuli—and how I received my first packet of proper embroidery needles and colored threads, of which I shall speak shortly.
My most difficult work really came in at the time of binding, and that was why Mother had taught me stitchery in the first place.
I was eight years old before she trusted me to stitch spellbooks—to take the block of papers and, using a bone needle as thick as my little finger, sew it onto the tanned leather supports.
The layers of parchment might have looked as delicate as flaked pastry, but when crushed together became more like a stale loaf.
My hands soon became more callus than flesh.
Despite its difficulty, however, I found myself strangely drawn to the task.
The needle just felt right, and I found myself keeping hold of it throughout the day, rolling it over the pad of my thumb, enjoying the sensation.
The more I touched it, the more my head filled with colors and images, and I itched to make them a reality.
To this end, I begged some scraps of fabric and leftover thread from Mother, and got to work, practicing on coarser fabrics before I turned to silk.
I was clumsy at first, leaving bloodstains on the white cambric, but soon anything I envisioned took form as easily as a dream beneath my fingers: flowers, birds, strange beasts, symbols …
and shapes that weren’t quite any of those, or were somehow all of them at once.
Mother looked down on embroidery as something pampered ladies did to keep themselves occupied—nothing more than frivolous decoration and an occupation for idle hands.
What she did was an art, she said, the spellwork and bookbinding.
I knew better than to argue. But secretly, I preferred my needle.
Words inked on a page stayed inked. Stitches could take on any shape; move in any direction; surprise you at every turn.
I filled the Tower with my embroidery, which no one but me (and Mother, when I forced her to look) would ever see, and I think it stopped me from going mad through all those lonely years.
And then, one autumn, I turned twenty. Twenty years of seeing no one but Mother.
Twenty years of sweeping, cooking, cleaning, sewing …
so much doing, in so many different forms, and so very little becoming.
The clothes I sewed and embellished for myself might have fit differently as I grew, but so little else about me ever seemed to change.
How could it, when I never saw or experienced anything new, and couldn’t even escape into books, stories, and songs, other than endlessly repeating to myself the ones I had already learned?
I had been stitched tidily into place in Mother’s world and would stay there forever—unmoving, unchanging.
I felt a choking panic on that twentieth birthday, and ran from the Tower and across the meadow until I collapsed by the riverbank, staring at my reflection in the clear amber water.
I was a woman now, indisputably, and yet in so many ways I was still a child.
Mother’s wards kept the world out, and me in.
As always, when I was troubled, I turned to my embroidery.
I stitched furiously that night, as if engaged in a race with my own needle.
My Hair floated about my shoulders as I hunched over a little piece of fabric and embroidered the forest, the river, the meadow, and the Tower.
I debated stitching myself into the Tower as well, a little figure with a floating red-gold braid, but I dismissed that as too sentimental.
As my eyes followed the flashing in-and-out of the bone needle, I thought over and over, Find me. Find me.
I did not know to whom I was speaking, in the chaos of my own mind, but when I had finished the piece, I felt lightheaded and drained, somehow, as if I had unwound all my fears and frustrations and sewn them into that little square of silk.
When I had finished, feeling a little foolish, I took it to the window and flung it to the wind. It did not flutter to the ground as I had expected, but was caught by a gust and floated away from the Tower, over the meadow and the creek, into the tangle of forest that lay beyond.
Nothing happened for weeks. The wards continued to keep everything larger than a spider at bay—except for the pigeons, of course, who came and went as usual.
And then Baldbeak appeared.