The Moss Does Not Apologize

I did not go to the Bazaar for wool. My hands know indigo, not lanolin, and a dyer has no business at the wool stalls on a morning when the whole southern arcade is still talking about an empty bale. But the talk pulled me out of my own doorway before I had chosen a subject for myself, and that is reason enough, some mornings, to go anywhere at all.

The bale had sold through at first light — six marks two the whole of it, risen since the last Kael Dorn convoy, the Gazette says, and risen again since I last troubled to ask — every skein carried off by hands faster or luckier or simply nearer than the woman I came to watch for. What was left when the boy finally reached her street was half a skein, flawed in the carding, the kind of flaw a Guild weaver’s eye finds before her fingers do and will not forgive at full price. She bought it anyway, on her own step, still in her apron, moss drying in a basin beside her from three weeks of digging the Karvel’s cold bank bare-handed for a window-sealant wool was supposed to have spared her.

I held that half-skein once, before it left the stall — not to buy it, only to feel what a flaw feels like under a thumb that spends every day reading thread for exactly this. It was not ugly. It was uneven the way a voice is uneven when it has said a true thing twice and meant it differently each time: a thickening here, a thinning three turns later, the carder’s comb having lost its rhythm somewhere in the middle and found it again too late to matter to anyone who sells by the full skein. No loom in this city will take it whole. It will go, I am told, into two windows on the river side, pressed flat against a draft, asked only to hold heat and never again to hold a shape.

I have spent a season now writing of flaws that are secretly signatures — my selvedge, my stain, my own hidden hand. I did not expect, this morning, to meet a flaw that asked for none of that. This one wants no one to read it as anything. It only wants to keep two windows warm until the Stilling passes, and it will do that invisibly, behind a shutter no buyer’s eye was ever meant to find twice. The moss, I am told, does not apologize for not being wool. I begin to think the wool, pressed into that gap tonight, will not apologize either — for once, in my hearing, a flaw that has stopped asking to be forgiven, because no one ever thought to accuse it.