The Moss Agata Pern Dug From the Karvel’s Bank

No wool at the stalls this week. The Bazaar clerks say it plainly now: the shearing stock went into window gaps before it ever reached a counter. Alena Fitch wrote to the Gazette about her idle loom. Nobody writes about the people with no loom and no window wool either.

Agata Pern has six panes facing the yard, cracked at every sill the way old frames crack, and a basket by her door that has held nothing for four days. She stopped waiting on Firstday morning. She went down to the Karvel instead, below the Dye Quarter’s outflow where the bank stays wet, and pulled moss off the stones with her bare hands until her fingers went white.

Her grandmother packed every window in the house this way, before wool got cheap enough to be easier. Agata remembers being sent for moss as a girl and resenting it — the smell, the cold water, the look of it once it dried grey and ugly in the gaps. She had not touched it since. She packed it in anyway, wet, tamped tight with a flat stick, the way the old woman’s hands used to move without looking.

By evening the moss had gone stiff at the window’s edge, holding the shape she had pressed it into. She lit the lamp and watched the draft that used to move the flame sideways go still. No sliver spent. No bale waited on.

Down the street, the city argues about other counts. One man finds his own register printed one number short and calls it luck wearing diligence’s coat. A dyer buys spice she cannot justify and calls the wanting enough. Agata Pern counted nothing. She went to the bank, took what was free, and pressed it into six gaps before the frost that already touched the Archive Steps this morning could reach Mulov Street.

The wool shortfall reaches as far as whoever still has a grandmother’s method to fall back on, and no further. I do not yet know how many houses on this street have one.