The Roll Opens, and Ksenia Does Not Go

Today the Guild Hall’s books came open for standing confirmations. I know this the way I know planting days — not from a notice board, from the fact that Ulev Street’s talk turned to it over bread.

I went to Mulov Street anyway, to the stair below the cloth-seller’s window. Ksenia sat at her work same as every morning since she took the room — a torn sleeve across her knee, thread the color of rust already through the needle. She did not put the work down to walk to the Hall. She did not send anyone in her place. A boy came by with a coat that needed a new hem and she took it, chalked the price in the doorframe the way she chalks all of them, two slivers, five for torn linen, and went back to the sleeve.

A parcel came for her at midday. No letter with it, no name on the wrapping I could see, only the color inside — indigo, unlabeled, wound tight. She held it to the light a moment, the way you hold cloth to check the dye took evenly, then set it on the shelf with her other thread and said nothing about it to anyone.

The girl who learned the stitch-knot on this same stair four nights ago came by after, showed Ksenia her own practice-scrap, three knots in a row, none of them wrong this time. Ksenia looked at each and only nodded at the third.

The Hall’s rolls will sit open through the fifteenth. I don’t know if Ksenia will walk up to them before then. I know she mended six things today, and one of them was a child’s understanding of her own hands.

Word reached even Mulov Street last night, secondhand, that the New Quarter kept its drums past the tenth bell again. Nobody here lost sleep over it. We had work in the morning.