Chapter 26
Hannalinde
Her stomach felt like it was full of moths.
Somehow, the knowledge that she could heal his wings made her more anxious.
What had been an impulsive expression of love was now much more serious business.
She’d spent two days strategizing the best course for the next repair.
Rikard was desperate for it to work, and she did not want to let him down.
“Hold still,” she ordered her husband, who was squirming with understandable excitement.
He settled down, and she selected a larger tear along the upper strut, mapping the anchor points where the scar tissue was thickest. Then she blew out a breath to settle her nerves and began to work. It was just embroidery, after all, and she was good at that.
She spent several hours working a pattern of flowers and stars while Rikard sat still as a stone. By midnight, the embroidery was some of her finest, both sturdy and beautiful. She tied the final knot, cut the thread, and sat back to admire the lacework bridging the gap.
But it was still lacework in the morning.
She checked it the moment she woke, climbing onto a chair to examine the wing where Rikard roosted. The silk was silk. The membrane beneath it was still torn, the broken edges unchanged, the gap unbridged by anything except thread. Beautiful thread, but thread nonetheless.
She tried again the next evening. A smaller tear this time, near the trailing edge. Same needle, same spool of silk. In the morning, the same beautiful result that remained thread and nothing more.
“That’s all right,” she said when Rikard woke that evening and discovered the failure. “We’ll try again.”
“We should stop.” Rikard’s voice was flat as he waved away her needle. He moved to the window and stood with his back to her, his wings unbound, the two embroidered repairs a taunt among the cascade of gaping tears. “It’s fruitless. The first was an anomaly.”
His hopeless tone made her jaw set. “Why, though? I must have done something different.”
“Hannalinde.”
“Don’t say my name in that voice.” She jabbed her needle into the pincushion. “Something happened the first time that didn’t happen the second or third. I used the same thread, the same needle, the same technique. I don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand?” He shrugged, still not looking at her. “Some wounds don’t heal.”
“Why not?” she burst out, frustrated. Rikard didn’t turn.
She stared at the three repairs. The first repair, the one that had worked, the healed membrane smooth and whole with its ghostly watermark of silver leaves.
Beside it, the second and third embroideries looked like jewelry pinned to a torn sail. Pretty, but useless.
Same thread. Same needle. Same technique. Same wing. What had been different about the first time?
She replayed the evening in her mind. Where he sat. The repositioned lamps. The first anchor stitch into scar tissue, which had resisted, requiring more pressure than she’d expected. She’d pushed it through with a thimble.
She’d pricked herself. That’s why she’d used a thimble.
There had been blood, just a drop. She hadn’t thought much of it at the time.
A seamstress’s fingers bled so often it barely registered.
But the blood had been there, on her fingertip, on the needle, on the thread that she’d drawn through the membrane.
Blood and stone make magic.
Every child in Tael-Nost knew that. When the gods fell, their blood had seeped into the earth, and from the union of divine blood and ancient stone, tael was born. It was the foundational equation, as fundamental a pairing as needle and thread.
But that was divine blood, and this was just…her blood. But there was no denying that her blood had been carried by the silk into the living stone of Rikard’s wing, and the stone had responded.
“Rikard.” Her voice came out strangely thin. The sound of someone standing at the edge of a revelation and not yet sure the ground would hold. “The first night. I pricked my finger during the first stitch. I bled on the thread.”
He went still. Then he turned around slowly. “Blood and stone,” he said wonderingly. She nodded, feeling her pulse in her throat.
The silence lasted four heartbeats.
“No,” he said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I won’t have you bleeding for me.”
“It’s just a needle prick. A few drops. I bleed more than that trimming a stubborn bodice.
” She held up her calloused fingers, the map of tiny scars that a decade of needlework had drawn across their pads.
“These hands have bled onto every piece of fabric I’ve ever loved.
Blood is part of the work. It always has been. ”
“This is different.”
“How? Because the fabric is alive? Because the fabric is yours?” She pushed up to standing with awkward effort, holding her belly. “All the more reason to let me. I owe you my life. Let me bleed a few drops for you!”
His jaw worked. The muscles beneath the scarred hide shifted, and his wings drew tighter against his back, showing his resistance to the idea.
“The thought of anyone else’s blood on your wings is intolerable to me,” she added quietly, “If a mason could do this in my stead, I would still want it to be mine. My blood. My thread. My work.”
He stared at her, shaking his head.
“We will try again. A needle prick,” he finally said, crossing to sit on the backless sofa. “One drop and no more. Just to see if it works. And we tell no one until we understand this better. Not Carlijn. Not my mother.”
She hadn’t expected that, but she trusted Rikard’s instinct for secrecy. If his wings healed, questions would be asked about how. And when it came out that a human woman’s blood could heal gargoyle stone, what would that mean for the fragile alliance between their species?
“No one,” she agreed. “And we’ll make sure the moths don’t find out.
” She drew the draperies over the windows and balcony doors so they could not be spied upon by eyes of any species.
Then she lit another candle to illuminate her work, threaded her needle with the same silver silk, and pricked her finger on purpose.
The blood welled up in a bright bead on the pad of her index finger. She touched it to the needle’s eye, let the silk draw it through, and set the first stitch.
It felt like they were both holding their breath as she worked. When the candle had burned low, the embroidery was complete. She’d stitched the same trailing vines and flowers she had the first time.
“We’ll know by morning,” she said lightly as she secured the last knot. Her fingertip throbbed with a pleasant soreness, the ache of useful work. Rikard said nothing, merely bundled her off to bed with his arms tight around her.
She woke at dawn. The light through the shutters was gray and uncertain, the color of a held breath, and she climbed out of bed and crossed to where Rikard stood frozen on his roost, wing extended like he knew she’d want to see.
The embroidery was gone. In its place, whole membrane, taut and new, the ghostly tracery of silver vines like a watermark.
Her knees gave out. She sat on the floor beside his stone feet. “Fallen gods,” she whispered to the statue of her husband. “It worked.”
She had so much work to do. She would need more silk. She would need more time. Blood was the least of it.