Agata Pern Finally Has Both

The Kael Dorn convoy’s last bale sold through yesterday, every skein of it, before Agata Pern heard the shout. Today a boy came up Mulov Street with what was left over from a Guild Row order — half a skein, returned for a flaw in the carding, sold cheap because the Guild weaver wouldn’t take it back at full price. Agata bought it on her own step, still in her apron, moss drying beside her from the morning’s rinse.

She had both now. Three weeks she had said she would see which she reached for first.

She reached for both. The flawed skein went into the two windows on the river side, the ones that take the worst of the wind off the Karvel, because wool holds heat the moss never will, flaw or no flaw. The moss went back into the other four, same as it has for three weeks, packed tighter this time. She has learned which handfuls hold their shape in a gap and which fall apart by evening. She did not throw out what she had learned to do without wool. She kept it where it worked and put the wool only where the moss could not hold.

The passes close in Frostmonth. No more carts come up from Kael Dorn before the thaw. Whatever wool reaches this street before then will reach it the way this skein did — flawed, left over, sold on a step for less than it is worth to whoever is willing to take it. Agata knows this. She is not waiting on more.

Passing the Archive Steps again today, on the same errand for my mother, I saw that the stranger who sat there yesterday was gone. A name has reached the Gazette for her since — Vera, the Archivist says, though he says it the way a man says a thing he has decided to believe rather than one he has proven. I do not know if it is true. I know only that I saw a woman writing on a step, and today she was not there, and a name arrived in her place. That is not the same as having seen her.