Brightly Woven (10 page)

I sat up straight. No cloaks, no bags, no boots—no men. I had been left behind.

A sharp knock on the door startled me from my thoughts. The small face of Mrs. Pemberly appeared in the doorway.

“Oh, bother!” She opened the door wider. She was carrying a heavy tray of food. “I thought for sure Owain had come back last night….”

“He didn’t come back at all?” I asked.

Mrs. Pemberly shook her head and set the tray down on the small table.

“Hungry, my dear? I wouldn’t mind some company for breakfast….” After not eating the night before, I was ravenous. As we chatted, I couldn’t shake the image in my mind of Owain, hunkered down next to the little old woman, sipping tea and eating eggs. She asked me where I had come from and where I was going and, when the opportunity presented itself, counted off her ten grandchildren on her fingers, pausing when she momentarily forgot the sixth one’s name. When we were finished, she went about her day, and I was left alone to worry.

There was nothing for me to do in Owain’s room. I must have plotted and replotted our path to Provincia a dozen times, looking for the shortest way possible.

“Are you looking for something to do?” Mrs. Pemberly asked when I finally came downstairs. “I have a package that needs to be delivered, but I’m waiting for two of my guests to arrive—I would hate to miss them.”

“Of course,” I said. “Do you happen to know anyone else who might need help today? I need to earn a bit of money.”

What I didn’t say was that we needed to earn
a lot
of money, and I doubted North could do it alone. If he was going to leave me behind to fight a dragon—a dragon I would have given anything to see with my own eyes—then I wasn’t going to have any qualms about taking the day for
myself. Besides, I wanted to be able to buy my own food, to have some sense of independence while I was bound to the wizard.

The old woman rested her hand on her hip. “Emmaline Forthright, perhaps—though she can be a tough bird to haggle with. She’s the one you’ll need to deliver the parcel to. Let me just write a note to her.”

Armed with the parcel in one hand and the note in the other, I passed into the bustling streets of Fairwell. It wasn’t difficult to retrace the path Owain and I had taken to get to Mrs. Pemberly’s inn; the only real danger I faced were the carts of pumpkins and enormous horses that had very little regard for the humans passing before them.

When I finally managed to cross Main Street, I found a small boy sitting beside the road with tears streaming down his cheeks. He had been struck by a wagon; I could tell by the bruise forming on his face and the way he clutched his arm against his chest. At his feet were piles of sand that had escaped from torn burlap sacks.

“Are you all right?” I asked. My eyes were focused on his small face, but my hands had found the piles of sand.
Cliffton
. I had thought I would never see or feel sand this rough again. I forced the images of fire and tortured faces to the back of my mind.

The boy nodded, but his breathing had become erratic.

“Your arm—is it hurt?”

This time he nodded, and when he spoke, his voice was
scarcely above a whisper. “I got kicked by a rottin’ horse and dropped the bags. Mrs. Forthright’ll slaughter me for messin’ up her deliveries.”

“Mrs. Forthright?” I repeated. I tried to salvage as much sand as I could into the bags that weren’t badly torn. They were all labeled with the glassmaker shop names. “We’ll have to talk to her about that then, won’t we? I was just going to see her myself.”

“Why would you want to do that?” the boy whispered. A few minutes later, when I handed the near-empty bags to the middle-aged woman, I understood why.

“And
what
is
this?”
she demanded. The boy cowered behind me. “I give you a
simple
task—”

“He’s hurt his arm,” I cut in. “I don’t think he’ll be able to deliver the sandbags today.”

“And what a little genius
you
are,” the woman practically snarled. Her fingers raked her dark hair out of her eyes. “What in the
seven sodding hells
are
you
doing here?”

I handed her Mrs. Pemberly’s parcel and note and watched her sneer of anger turn to appraisal.

“So you’re looking for work, then?” she asked. “Off home with you, Geoff! I’ll be speaking to your mother tonight about this!”

The boy turned and ran as though the four winds were at his heels, leaving me the sole victim of scrutiny.

“I’ll work the entire day for you,” I said. “For a hundred pieces.”

The woman let out a strangled laugh. “Do you have any idea how much that is?”

“I’ll do every delivery, and I’ll do them quickly, without a single complaint,” I swore.

“Little girl, I
make
that much in a
month
!” she said. “You’ll do all that for ten pieces.”

“Sixty,” I said. I was in the position to bargain. The city relied on glass to stay alive, and no glassmaker could make his creations without the sand.

“I can find another boy just as easily for twenty.”

“And I can go faster and take more at once for fifty.”

“With those weak arms? You’ll be lucky to get four deliveries done. Twenty-five.”

“Forty, and I’ll mend the poor excuses for curtains you have in your store window and that dress you’re wearing.”

Mrs. Forthright caught her tongue at my final offer, glancing down at the frayed hem of her old dress. I gave her a hard look, already frustrated by how little I would make from such hard work.

“Forty,” she agreed at last. “But if you drop a speck of sand on the way to any of the deliveries, you’ll be gone without a single piece. And don’t think I’ll give you directions—
you
are here to make
my
life easier.”

I fought to hide my smile. “Where would you like me to go first?”

The task was simple enough, but it didn’t make carrying the bags any easier. I had helped Henry load his father’s wagon with mud barrels hundreds of times, yet the distance we had been forced to walk with each bushel had been minimal. Fairwell’s strange streets seemed to constantly double back on one another, and for the first time in my life, my sense of direction abandoned me. I wandered helplessly from one street to the next, relying on chance to find the shops I needed.

I had wanted to love Fairwell so badly, to take in everything it had to offer. Now I was ready to smash in the glass signs and sculptures outside each shop. When the sun reached its highest point in the sky, not even the rainbow of light they created could put the smile back on my face. Finally, after I passed the same glass shop half a dozen times, a little woman with an enormous grin stuck her head out her door to ask if I was lost.

I handed her the delivery slip on which Mrs. Forthright had hastily scribbled the address.

“You’re nearly there,” she said. “Two streets over—you’ll have quite a battle trying to get through the crowds, I’m afraid.”

“Why?” I asked, shifting the bag’s weight on my shoulder. “Did something happen?”

“The men are leaving for the capital,” the woman said. “They were summoned last night to prepare Provincia’s defense. Just manual labor, of course, but the Wizard Guard needs the able bodies to do it for them.”

“What about Fairwell’s defense?” I asked.

The woman gave me a sad smile and patted my arm. “Exactly, my dear, exactly. What do they care so long as they’re safe in their castle? In the past, we’ve suffered through years of fighting and destruction, but none of our calls for help were ever answered. There’s a crime in that, you know, a real tragedy. I don’t think any of our men should go.”

But they did, by the hundreds. I found the large street not by her directions, but by the sound of smashing glass and humming voices. I abandoned the bag on my shoulder in front of the nearest shop and pressed my way through the crowds to the very front.

The children in front of me threw flowers, and petals showered down from above, but there was no way I could tear my eyes away from the broken glass in the road. Every now and then, a glassblower would present one of his or her creations, bending down to place it on the road. The men, dressed in everything from dress coats to torn trousers, smashed the figurines to pieces beneath their boots.

It went on this way for some time, until every piece of glass had been ground into a fine dust and mixed with the fallen petals. When the last man had finally passed, a group of women came along and began to brush the dust into bins.

“What’s happening?” I asked the woman next to me. Her little girl chewed on the end of her braid and pressed her face into her mother’s skirt.

“It’s tradition,” the woman said, patting her daughter’s head. “You’ll have to excuse her. She’s never been without her papa for long.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, looking down at the girl again.

“The glass and petals,” the woman continued. “They’re refired into new shapes and forms. It’s meant to show that even if the city is set forth into ruin, it can always be built back up. We’re a city of re-creators, you know. It’s in our blood to start again.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but it seemed somehow appropriate to me that we were standing on Restoration Road.

With the deliveries finished and my money collected, I ran back to Mrs. Pemberly’s inn. The woman caught my eye as I ducked back inside and shook her head. The wrinkles on her face deepened with her frown.

“They’re still not here?” I asked, my fingers fiddling with my necklace.

She shook her head. “I’ll send them up as soon as they get back.”

The hours went by, and there was still no sign of either North or Owain. A dragon isn’t an easy job, I reminded myself. But it was half-past six, and I was ready to start traveling again. We had wasted too much time already.

Half sprawled across Owain’s creaky bed, I wrote a letter to Henry. I told him about the wizards, about the fight and earthquake in Dellark, the rover beetle, and Fairwell’s destroyed bridge, but there was no way to explain the strange headache I had, or the hollow feeling at the pit of my stomach. Examining the letter, I saw that my words were disjointed and angled; none of my
o
’s were fully rounded, and I hadn’t dotted any of my
i
’s.

I don’t know what to do
, I wrote.
I want to look for them, but I’m too scared to go outside. Does that make me a terrible person? One of them—or both—could be terribly hurt, and would anyone know? I’m not sure when I’ll have time to write again, or if this letter will even find you at all. Write to me if you can, please, at this address! I miss you very, very much
.

I crossed it out hastily, guilt welling up inside me. I didn’t want Henry to know any of it, but every word of the letter had been true, and seeing my heart splayed out in words made me feel only worse.

Several hours later, I found myself by the lonely window in Owain’s room with my reassembled loom and ten rows of blue. Mrs. Pemberly had brought me dinner and even cookies, though they weren’t nearly as delicious as the ones that emerged from my mother’s oven. At that point I would have given anything—a finger, my best dress, my loom—just for a
taste of her cooking. I would have devoured it, even if it had been coated with dust.