Chapter Five
The Sacred Knot
‘A complex stitch that only the experienced seamstress should attempt, often used in the construction of altar cloths and sacred robes, providing both strength and ornamentation.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches
When I woke, I reached for the curtain across my bed and pulled it back as quietly as I could, revealing the large room beyond.
The fire had died long ago, and a spill of cold morning light from the one half-boarded window spattered the floor like milk.
Even when I sat up, the Hair stayed coiled on the pillow like a sleeping cat, as if it, too, had been worn out by the excitement of the previous day. I ran my hand over its coppery length.
“Please behave today,” I said softly. It didn’t move, but I felt it listening.
Baldbeak had seen me wake and made a soft noise in his throat from where he had perched on the curtain rail.
I wrapped the thin quilt around myself like a cloak, swung my feet to the floor, and padded over to the central table.
Looking behind me, I saw that half of the little cubbies had their curtains drawn while half were open, bedclothes lolling over the ledges.
The bellow of a town crier outside easily cut through the noise and commotion of a city in the early morning.
“King’s health to improve by Plaguenight, royal physicians assure! Trouble in Northern Electorate as Margraves protest rise in royal taxes! Arson attack on West Temple, heretics suspected!”
The door creaked open, startling me and Baldbeak both.
He shot out, presumably to take care of his business, and Mieka emerged from outside, bringing in a gust of cold and the coppery smell of new snow.
She shoved a paper bag at me. It was still warm.
I opened it and found a small, dense loaf of Plaguebread—a sour, grayish bread cooked in ashes that had become commonplace in the famine after the Plague.
I had made several of these loaves myself, back in the Tower.
“Eat this,” she said, “And come with me.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere, but we need to talk, and I don’t want to wake Zlata. She only stumbled in an hour ago, and she’s like a badger with a sore bum when you wake her.”
The rain from the night before had turned to light snow. It crusted the street edges, becoming slush and mud at the center where cart and carriage wheels passed. Smoke billowed from the crematorium chimneys, black against the flat gray sky.
Mieka settled down on the little stool where I had met her the night before, munching on her own little loaf, and I sat beside her on another.
Baldbeak returned, landing on the edge of the iron pot where Mieka had her fire the night before, almost overturning it with his weight.
I grabbed its edge to stop the coal from spilling, and my hand came away sooty.
“I’ve been thinking about your Book Man,” she said. “And I think you’re most likely to find him if we visit the Undermarket.”
“The Undermarket? What’s that?”
“A place where people like us can meet and sell our wares without the Temple or the Watch looking over our shoulder,” she said. “It’s the one place you might be able to find a dealer in black market books. I’ll take you this afternoon. Until then, just lie low in the workshop with the rest of us.”
I wondered if Mother had heard of the Undermarket—or even had dealings with it. I had no idea to whom she had been writing all those years, or who sent those packages of paper and materials. A mysterious underground black market sounded like the sort of place our pigeons might have visited.
Mieka was right—Zlata stalked about looking like a beautiful, scowling storm cloud for the first hour after she woke, and was then all smiles after bread and ale.
The others—the ones who weren’t already out on business—woke in staggered order, yawning and stretching as they started their day, either dressing warmly and heading out into the city, or going to one of the stations behind the many curtains that hung in the workshop.
I got the hang of the workshop fairly quickly.
Visitors from outside trickled through all day, carrying sacks or small chests with goods to sell.
Mieka picked through whatever was on offer—fine linens, cloth, garments, silverware, jewelry—and selected and rejected according to her mysterious standards.
Then the visitor would leave with a bulging purse, and Mieka would set out the new goods for her young women to transform.
Large washtubs at the back of the room stood ready to be filled with boiling water and dye to disguise the fine clothing and linens.
I found out they also used them for bathing, which meant that their skins were often faintly colored by the powerful fabric dyes.
Some of the young women excelled at filing designs or inscriptions off jewelry and snuffboxes, while others worked on transforming the cloths. Mieka sent others on deliveries, taking the transformed goods to other parts of the city.
“Now, let’s see what you can do,” said Mieka. I felt the Hair twitch under the knitted cap and clapped my hand to it to keep it still.
She handed me one of the handkerchiefs another woman had brought in. I squinted at the monogram. I could see that the shapes were letters, but could make no sense of them—as always, they wavered and broke before my eyes.
“Unpick these,” said Mieka. “And carefully, because we don’t want any sign that it belonged to someone else. Yes?”
No one else liked the work, it turned out, because it was both intricate and tedious, and because staring at the minuscule stitches by candlelight strained their eyes.
Soon the other young women were passing all the unpicking work to me, and I had a healthy stack of silks beside my chair.
The fine tooth of my needle bit at the tiny, perfect stitches.
My fingers were soon red and rough with needle pricks, but I was used to that.
I could work so tidily that no trace of the old monograms remained, and no trace of the needle holes, even if you held the handkerchief up to the light to see if it would shine through them—which reminded me of the unpicked stitches in the tapestry again and of whatever story the original seamstresses had told that the Temple had decided needed to be changed.
Mieka told me to monogram some of the handkerchiefs when I had finished, telling me the initials she required, but once again, the letters refused to take shape.
I knew how they should be, I knew it, but my needle went awry as soon as I tried to stitch them.
I flung the handkerchiefs aside in frustration.
“Maybe I could just embroider them with designs instead?” I suggested.
Mieka was willing to let me try my luck on one of the less valuable handkerchiefs and gave me a basket of looped skeins of rainbow thread, along with a packet of silver needles, sharp and fine as a cat’s whiskers.
I set to work, feeling myself relax as I let the needle swoop and soar where it would, leaving a chaos of color in its wake.
Mieka watched me, an odd expression on her face, her small, dark eyes following the dance of my needle.
She didn’t gush over the designs, as the other young women did, but simply watched.
“Your Hair,” she said in a low voice when the others had moved away.
“What?” My needle stilled.
“It floats, when you sew. Just a little.”
I clapped my hand to the back of my neck. A few loose strands tickled at the tips of my fingers.
“Here,” said Mieka. She sat behind me and started to braid the Hair where it protruded from the cap with rough but competent fingers. To my surprise, it submitted. “I do this for lots of the girls.”
“Thank you,” I said, and sat patiently. Baldbeak tried to pull at the braid, but Mieka pushed him away gently. He settled for picking at the woolen cap instead.
“You said you have no magic,” she said in my ear as her nimble fingers worked.
“None that I can use.”
“What do you call that, then?” She indicated the embroidery.
“It’s a hobby. I told you.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It almost looks alive. And your Hair certainly seemed to get involved somehow.”
I shrugged, a little awkwardly. “I don’t know why. I’ve never known.”
“You have an affinity.”
“I do not!” I said sharply, twisting in the chair.
“Hush! Not so loud.”
“I don’t have an”—I dropped my voice—“affinity.”
“It’s not a dirty word.”
Mother certainly believed it was, I thought to myself. “Affinities are … frivolous. Worse than frivolous. They’re dangerous. Uncontrolled magic, with no spellbooks or words …”
“All right, calm down,” said Mieka. She had an odd expression.
“Say it’s a talent, if you prefer. Anyway, whatever you want to call it, those pieces will fetch a pretty penny.
We’ll take them with us to the Undermarket today.
” She gave a final tug to the braid. “There. Now if we just pin it up around your head, we can hide it under the cap.”
“I’ll look like a mushroom.”
“A pretty mushroom.” She grinned.
“You’re taking her to the Undermarket?” said a voice from the side, startling me. Zlata was leaning against the wall, hip cocked, watching us with her large, dark eyes.
“Yes,” said Mieka.
“Are you sure that’s wise?”
“Where else will she find the Book Man?”
Evidently Mieka had told Zlata my story. I supposed it was to be expected. I envied their closeness—their near-telepathy. Of course, I had Baldbeak, but that was different. It must be nice, I thought, to have a partner that you could trust so implicitly.
Later, Zlata cornered me, her beautiful eyes blazing. “I hope you haven’t brought trouble to our door.”
“I didn’t mean …”
“Mieka seems very invested in helping you,” she said. “She has sympathy for … strays. I don’t want her taking any risks for your sake. If she wants to take you to the Undermarket, that’s her business, but be sure not to drag her into anything dangerous.”
I blinked. “I won’t.”