The Blue That Keeps Its Appointment

She came at the hour when the arcade sells its shade rather than its cloth, when the square outside stands empty and white and every seller in the covered row is doing arithmetic instead of trade. She did not look at the good bolts. She looked past them, the way a woman looks past a suitor’s brother.

“I am told you have a bad lot.”

I have a bad lot. It sits at the back in a wrap of undyed linen, struck three weeks ago from water the Karvel had been holding somewhere it should not have held it — dirty in a way low water does not explain, as the old dyer wrote to the Gazette this morning, and she is right, and I threw out one lot and kept the other, because I could not bring myself to pour a color that beautiful into a drain. It is the truest cerulean I have made in two years. It has perhaps eleven months in it. Then it will go the color of a bruise remembering itself.

“That blue will not keep,” I said. “Not a year. Whoever wears it will come back and stand where you are standing and call me a thief, and she will be correct.”

“How long, exactly.”

I told her: eleven months, twelve if it is kept from the sun and not much loved.

She counted on her fingers, and she did not hide the counting, and she counted twice. Then she said: “That will do. That is right.” And she named a length, and paid it in slivers she had brought counted, as if the sum had been decided long before she came up the arcade steps.

I did not ask. In the Bazaar we do not ask; we sell the thing and let the reason walk away wearing it. But I broke my own rule at the door, because the heat makes fools of us, and I said — for what?

She stopped in the white light with the wrapped bolt against her hip. “For something that should not be wearable next Dryheat,” she said. “I would rather it left on its own than have to be the one who puts it away.”

And so I did the thing the Guild cannot forgive and cannot forbid: I went back to the bench and took my needle and set my mark in the hem, the small looped Z I have put on every honest bolt for nineteen years.

Let it be warranted. Not the keeping — the going. I have never in my life signed a promise I was so certain of.