Brightly Woven
Page 31

“Well,” Lady Aphra said, finally casting her eye on me. “You’ll be the ones to fix it.”
Lady Aphra provided us with North’s usual room in her cottage, and we slept on rolled blankets stuffed with hay. It wasn’t so much the sleeping arrangement or my bedding that had me waking nearly every hour—it was the cold air that seeped in through the floor beneath me and the small windows on the wall. Pressing my frozen fingertips under my arms and curling myself into a tight ball, I faded in and out of the darkness.
There was no hint of Dorwan that night. Instead, I dreamed again of the threads of light. They were still wrapped over my skin but had loosened enough for me to lift my arms and free my hands. My fingers groped for the edges, taking some of the warm strands and pulling them up from the ground. The ends fluttered around in the air above me; there was a spark of light as they touched, and they weaved among one another as though invisible hands were guiding them.
I sat up straight, cold dread settling in my stomach like a stone. My skin tingled with the memory of warmth, but my vision was splotched with black, and it took several minutes before my eyes readjusted to the dim light of early dawn. I pressed my hands against my face and breathed in the cool air. North was snoring in the far corner of the room.
The pieces of my loom leaned against the wall. I still hadn’t begun North’s single cloak—with all our traveling, the opportunity hadn’t presented itself. Now, in the quiet, hours before the others would rise, I picked up the pieces of the frame and fit them back together.
The hardest part was deciding where to begin; I knew I wanted the edges to alternate between colors, framing the scene inside. But would he find it odd if I began with shades of yellow, of dust?
It was strange how easily I fell back into it. The colors came together fluidly and my fingers worked quickly. The usual daze of color and imagination came over me, and by the time I began work on the yellow-and-brown mountains of Cliffton, my thoughts were somewhere else, caught in the snare of the picture I would weave.
The window shutters clattered against a sudden light breeze. The air whistled through the cracks in the wall and caressed the branches of nearby trees. Everything seemed to fall into perfect rhythm: my breathing with the wind, my fingers with the branches. Mr. Monticelli’s words floated up in my mind. Steady hands, eyes always on the art, mind always on the art…
I knotted, took up a different shade of yellow, began a new row and didn’t stop until I felt a hand clasp my shoulder, breaking the spell the loom had cast over me.
North leaned forward to take a closer look at my work but didn’t lift his hand.
“What are you doing up?” he whispered.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Was your bed too uncomfortable? I told you to take that extra blanket.”
“It was a little cold,” I admitted.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” he asked loudly, then dropped his voice. “You should have woken me up! We’re up in the mountains now—I forget you’re not used to colder weather.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh yes, I’m going to freeze to death while sleeping in front of a fire and under a hundred pounds of blankets. I said I was a little cold!”
“Do you want me to relight the fire for you?”
“No, I want to know where you’re going,” I said.
He looked pleased.
“I was going to put protective wards around the village,” he said.
I finished my row and stood.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Coming with you, of course,” I said.
“It’s freezing out there,” he protested.
“I’ll bring a blanket.”
“Why the sudden interest in my work?”
“It’s not that sudden. Why the reluctance to let me come?”
North and I stared at each other, waiting for the other to back down. Finally, North chuckled. “I’ll wait outside for you. Wear something warm, all right?”
The problem was that I didn’t have anything particularly warm to wear, just a thin shawl. I did the best I could, layering my stockings and underskirts. I was sorely tempted to crawl back into the little warmth my bed provided.
Outside, North was sitting on the cabin’s small stoop, his head tilted up at the remaining stars. The air had a strange scent, crisp and fresh, but…cold. It bit at my nostrils and the tip of my nose. The scent was unlike that of desert rain; it was unique and telling.
“It smells like it’s going to snow,” North said, as if reading my thoughts.
“Snow?” I gasped. “Do you think—? I mean, do you believe it’s really going to snow? Is this what snow smells like?”
North looked at me in pure amazement.
“Right…,” he said. “Right, desert. No snow.”
I felt childish, as if my excitement had somehow betrayed me.
“Well, I do hope it snows for your sake!” North said. We both rose to our feet, but North’s hand caught me and held me back. He unknotted his cloaks, pulling the crimson red material from the pile. I thought for a moment he intended to create one of his balls of light, but instead the cloak fluttered down onto my shoulders. He stuck the tip of his tongue out of the side of his mouth as he tied it securely around my neck.
“There!” he said. “We’re ready to go. Is that a little warmer?”
It felt like heaven, actually. I was warmed down to my very core.