The records room smelled as it had on every visit of the Weaver's life: paper and old dye, dust and walnut-brown and the faint mineral tang of the iron-gall ink Ketta mixed herself in the back cupboard. Shelves ran floor to rafter along both long walls, each one labeled in Ketta's own hand by thread-class rather than by household.
The valley's whole taxonomy of what a person could ask a loom to change sat there in rows. Birth-threads in the top row, never touched. Growth-threads below them, the small routine adjustments a body earned simply by aging. Grief-threads at eye level, the shelf worn shinier than the others from the sheer traffic of ordinary sorrow passing through. At the bottom, a single narrow shelf held, by long habit rather than any written rule, the mercy-edits. Fewer in number than any other class. Each one, without exception, filed under a dying hand rather than a living one.
The Weaver had walked these three corridors a thousand times on other people's business: filing a reweave for a neighbor's wedding cloth, checking a household's thread-count against last year's ledger, standing witness while some younger weaver's apprentice made her first formal notice. She had never once stood at the counter on her own account, and the difference showed itself in her hands before it showed anywhere else. She had brought nothing to hold. No swatch to unfold, no client's garment to lay flat for inspection. Only the thing itself, carried in memory and in the private book still warm from where it had ridden against her ribs the whole walk over.
Ketta looked up from the morning's intake ledger the way she looked up at everyone, without hurry, pen still resting against the page mid-line. "Notice, or a question first?"
"Notice." The Weaver set the swatch-book on the counter and did not open it yet. "Against a mercy-edit thread. Ansa's hand."
"This one is yours too." Ansa's voice does not change for this line, no more weight in it than in any of the others. Her daughter's hands do not understand yet what has been added to the frame under them. They know only that the needle has moved once more than the visible work required, and that her mother's fingers, guiding hers now more than working alone, have gone cold against the back of her own wrist.
The rest of the room does not exist yet. There is the frame, and the thread, and her mother's hands. Beyond the small circle the lamp throws there is nothing she can afterward account for, no other voice, no other presence, only the two of them and the working. It has always only ever been the two of them at any loom either one of them has ever sat before.
The tallow smell is stronger here than it ever is at the loom-house, and under it, wet wool, and under that, something she has never been able to name and has stopped trying to.
Costin was quiet again, longer this time, his own cup cooling untouched in his hands. The fire popped once, a green log somewhere in the stack still fighting its own moisture. Outside the small window the last grey light of the afternoon had begun its early winter fall toward dark.
"I didn't think that far," he said, plainly, no shame in the admission and no attempt to dress it as anything other than what it was. "I heard you ask, and I thought of her, and I said yes before I'd got round to thinking what saying yes actually costs me," he said. "That's still yes. I'm not taking it back for having been slow to work out the price of it."
"Tell me one thing first, though, before you take up the needle." He set his cup down at last but did not yet offer his sleeve, his own easy manner slowing for the first time all visit into something closer to careful. "The rest of the coat. The rest of her, I suppose I mean, whatever's woven through the parts you're not here for today. That stays."
Yorn's farmhouse sat at the valley's harder edge, where the good bottomland gave way to slope and the work never let up long enough for a household to sit soft. Three boards at his threshold too, though wider set and less worn than Costin's. The latch under her hand carried no particular warmth, and the door itself stood half open already, to let the morning's cold air fight the woodstove's heat to a working truce. She found Yorn in his own kitchen with his sleeves pushed back, working a length of harness leather with an awl. He did not stop the work when she came in, only tipped his chin toward the bench across the table in something between a greeting and a permission.
"I know why you've come," he said, before she could open with the small talk that had served her well enough at Costin's door. "Word travels faster than you're walking these lanes. Sit, if you're staying."
She sat, and did not take that as unkindness; a working household did not owe a visitor its whole attention the way an idle one might. Yorn's own hands kept moving over the leather while he waited for her to say what she'd come to say.
Pell was quiet at that for longer than the exchange required. Her own eyes tracked back down the slate to a name the Weaver had not paid particular attention to before. It sat three-quarters of the way down the list in Pell's own hand from the day of the tally. The girl's chalk had marked it the same as any other entry, no double underline, no visible hesitation on the page. Yet something in the way she was looking at it now carried a weight the mark itself did not show.
"That one's mine," Pell said, at last, not looking up. "My own family. I put us on the list myself, the day we made it, because I couldn't very well leave us off just because I didn't want to say the name out loud."
The Weaver had known, in the abstract, that the tally would eventually include households close to both of them. Any list drawn wide enough through a valley this small always did. She had not, until this moment, let herself picture Pell's own name sitting among the forty-one, waiting its turn like any other door. "I hadn't looked that far down the slate. I should have."
The oldest lane in Skeinhold ran along the valley's original terrace, where the first households had built before the rest of the settlement spread down toward the river. Torvald's house sat at its farthest end, small and square and older than any other roof still standing on it, its slate corners settled unequally while the ridge remained straight. She had been deferring this door deliberately, re-routing whole days around the old terrace to keep from arriving at it, and Pell had noticed the re-routing without once pressing her on it.
She counted the threshold boards now, as she had counted them at every door since Costin's, though her hand went less readily to the latch than at the seven doors before this one. Three boards, older and more deeply worn than any others she had counted yet; the wood had gone the particular silver-grey of a threshold that had carried the same handful of feet across it for the better part of a lifetime.
Torvald opened it before she'd finished knocking, the second knuckle still raised, and stood back to let her in without any of the surprise she had braced herself to meet. "I wondered which week you'd finally get to me," he said, plain as weather, no accusation in it. "You've been saving me, haven't you." He watched her a moment. "I've watched you work your way round this valley these weeks, door by door. Mine's the one you kept circling back to and putting off."
She waited until the records room had emptied for the evening before she came, as she had planned to for three days past, ever since the fifth freed thread confirmed what four already suspected. Ketta kept the counter open past the ordinary hour most nights, closing out the day's entries alone once the last client had gone. The Weaver found her exactly where she'd expected, bent over the intake ledger by a single lamp. The room's stove was already banked low enough that the cold had begun creeping back into the corners the fire no longer reached.
Frost had begun forming again on the inside of the high window, a season not yet done arguing with itself. The whole room held the particular hush of a working space after its workers have gone: tools racked, ink capped, only the one lamp's small circle still admitting that anything in it was unfinished.
"So are you." The Weaver set her satchel down on the counter, the case-file of five matched swatches inside it, though she did not take them out yet. "I've come about the ledger-cloth. The one from the year my mother died."
The thaw had begun overnight, the first true give of the season rather than one more false promise of it. Water ran thin and steady off the eaves along the lower lane, dripping into the packed snow below in a rhythm that had not existed the evening before.
She had slept perhaps two hours after leaving Ketta's counter, sitting up in her own chair rather than her bed, the fire long since burned to ash and never rebuilt. She walked to Runa's door carrying the previous night's understanding as a person carries a weight too large to set down, riding present in every step whether she attended to it or not.
The lane itself had softened enough overnight to hold the print of her own boots behind her, the first such print the season had allowed. She noticed it only once, glancing back without meaning to, before she made herself stop looking at anything but the door ahead.
Runa's door opened before her hand reached the latch, before she had even finished the last of the threshold boards' count. Runa stood in the gap already speaking, her voice pitched low and fast, the words arriving as though they had been queued behind her teeth all night, waiting for a door to open them through.
"I voted," Runa said. "Twenty years past. At the Round. I was one of the forty-three." She drew a short breath. "I've known since word of your notice reached this lane that you'd come here eventually," she said. "I decided I wasn't going to make you say the ritual words to me first, not for this, not knowing what I know."
The Weaver stood on the doorstep a moment, the ordinary asking-words she had carried to eleven doors before this one arriving in her mouth and finding nowhere to land. Runa's confession had already done the work the ritual was built to do, only faster, and rawer, and without any of the ceremony that usually softened the visit's first minutes. "You know that I know, then. About the Round."
The noise of Bryn's household reached the Weaver a good while before the door did. Two children argued over some small possession in the room beyond, and a third somewhere further back was crying the particular exhausted cry of a nap refused too long. Under all of it a woman's voice, steady and unhurried, managed the noise rather than fighting it.
The house sat at the lane's bend, where the packed snow had gone to a grey slush no one had yet bothered to clear. Bryn opened the door with a toddler braced on one hip. She did not apologize for the household's disorder, only stepped back to let the Weaver in with the same plain welcome she might have given any ordinary caller.
"You'll forgive the noise. It never stops long enough to forgive around here, so I've stopped waiting for the quiet before I let people in." Bryn settled the toddler onto the floor with a folded cloth and a wooden spoon, both of which bought perhaps a minute's peace, and gestured toward the room's one clear chair. "I know why you've come. Word of the notice reached this house same as every other, and word of what came after it, from what I hear, reached most of the valley within a day of Ketta's counter closing that night."
"Then you know more of it than I explained to most doors."
"I never met her," he said. "I'd rather keep the valley's old memory of a woman I have no stake in correcting than take on a truer one I did not earn." He folded the cuff closed himself, keeping her needle from finding it, and stood to see her out before the lime dust on his sleeves had time to settle. Each refusal she recorded as she recorded a yes: the same steady hand, the same ledger. The law made no distinction in its bookkeeping between a door that opened and one that stayed lawfully shut.
The season's-turn deadline pressed on her now in a way she had spoken of only once aloud, back at Ketta's counter on that first morning. Ninety days had sounded, in the abstract, like more time than any single reweave could ever need. It did not sound like that now. Halfway through, with the list thinning but not yet finished, the number had become a weight she carried the way she carried the satchel itself, present at the edge of every calculation she made about which doors to visit next and in what order.
It grew heavier, too, for the week's steady drip of thaw off every eave she passed, a season visibly turning around her whether or not the last of the doors had turned with it. She had begun, without fully deciding to, marking the days remaining in the corner of her private slate each evening, a small tally beside the larger one. The numbers fell faster than she liked to watch them fall.
