Dust motes dance in the single shaft of morning light that Maren cannot see, though she feels its warmth against the weathered skin of her cheek. Her fingers move with a scholar’s precision, dancing across the warp threads of the Great Loom to read the story she is mid-way through telling. The lanolin scent of unwashed fleece clings to her charcoal smock, a familiar comfort in the subterranean stone silence of her workshop. Forty years at the beater bar have broadened her shoulders and thickened her hands, yet she handles the bone shuttle as if it were a feather. Each slide of the wood is a breath; each strike of the comb is a heartbeat.
She pauses, laying one open palm flat against the tensioned wool to hear what the house is saying. Above, the distant scrape of a dragon’s claw against the courtyard flags vibrates through the bedrock, a low thrumming that usually signals the dawn’s end. But today the vibration is different—sharper, more deliberate—carrying the weight of iron and authority. A royal escort does not descend into the weavers’ warren for common cloth. Maren reaches for the bone pin at her nape, tightening her iron-grey hair as the air in the corridor shifts, pushed forward by the approach of men who do not belong in the dark.
Heavy, booted footsteps stop directly outside her workshop door.
