“Sacred,” said the child, as best she could. The “cr” sound gave her trouble, so it came out more like “sake-d.”
“The work is crucial.”
“Coo-shul.”
“And one day,” the woman said, holding the child’s soft cheeks between her quill-calloused hands, “you will help me with it.”
PART
ONE
Chapter One
The Salmon
‘The simplest of the stitches, and the first any novice must learn as they master the art of dipping the needle in and out of the cloth with the required smoothness and fluidity. Without mastery of this most essential stitch, no great work can begin.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches Both Holy and Base, 4th Edition
I woke with my head hanging out the Tower window and my arms pinned behind me.
I’d had many a miserable awakening over my years spent in the Tower, as I was a heavy sleeper—Mother pulling the bedcovers off me and baring my naked toes to the frozen air, Baldbeak scraping at the window with his beak, or my Hair twining itself around my wrist to yank me into a sitting position. This one, however, was easily the worst. The Tower, well,toweredabove the landscape, and the ground was a long way down.
I realized there was hot breath on the back of my neck and started to panic. Who was dangling me out the window? I struggled weakly, but my mind and body alike felt clogged up and slow. My Hair seemed unusually groggy as well—limp about my shoulders and only twitching at the very ends, as if it, too, were barely awake. Even my panic felt sluggish.
“Stop struggling,” said a gruff voice behind me, and the grip on my arms tightened.
I tried to look behind me, but my captor’s head was so close behind my own that I couldn’t turn. Breath huffed on my neck again, turning my stomach. My struggling dislodged a little shower of pebbles from the stone sill, and I watched them fall fifty feet to the gravel below.
“Let me go!” I gasped, trying to twist in their grip. A hoarse laugh was my only answer.
Fighting through the strange malaise that leadened my limbs, I drew my head forward and then whipped it back as hard as I could, so hard that I saw stars. There was a satisfying crunch of cartilage, a loud curse, and the grip on my arms loosened—not for long, but for long enough to allow my reviving Hair to curl itself about whoever stood behind me and wrench them off-balance.
The stone underfoot was slick from all my years of polishing. My attacker’s feet shot out from under them, and they landed on their back with enough force to slam their skull against the stone with a crisp, wet sound, like an egg cracking against the lip of a bowl. My assailant was a man, I saw now—a frighteningly large one. He snatched at my skirts as he fell. I almost went down with him, but I had always been exceptionally good at keeping my footing—my Hair acting something like a cat’s tail, throwing itself out to counterbalance me if I threatened to wobble—and I managed to stay upright.
An undignified scuffle followed as my attacker, bleeding profusely from the head, tried to pull me down to the floor, and I attempted to scramble away from him. He was a large man, heavily muscled, and would easily have overpowered me if he were uninjured. As it was, though, he seemed dizzy and disoriented, blood from his wound running into his eyes. I kicked at his hands as he grabbed at me and backed away towards the window again, but still he crawled after me with a drunken, dogged determination, like a landed fish trying to flop its wayback to the river. If I could onlythink! My thoughts felt so numb and stilted.
My Hair rose about me as I staggered backwards, and my addled mind landed on a desperate idea. I kept moving, and when I felt the stone sill at my back, I let the man clutch at my legs and hips to use me to climb to his feet, although his hands on me made my skin crawl. I wouldn’t be able to lift him on my own, and I needed him standing again for the next part of my hasty plan.
When he was up, swaying slightly, his breath rancid on my face, I twisted so that his body was against the sill of the large window, waist-height for him. My Hair coiled itself around his arms, fixing them to his body so tightly that he looked like a baby in swaddling clothes.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice rough and unfamiliar.
His mouth set in a grimace as he strained against his bonds.
“Who are you?What are you doing here?”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he grunted, still squirming.
“Answer me!”
A thick strand of Hair uncurled itself from his torso to snake up towards his neck. I hadn’t planned that part, but sometimes the Hair improvised. The man’s eyes bulged out as he watched its approach.
A noise from behind made me spin round. There was another man standing in the stairwell, even larger and more muscular than the first.
“You have it?” said my attacker hoarsely.
“On the horse,” said the other man briefly. He hesitated, looking at me with almost superstitious fear—why?—then darted back into the stairwell and made a sudden, violent gesture with his hand. The Tower shook. The great stones above the threshold worried themselves loose like rotting teeth and collapsed in the doorway to the staircase, entirely blocking it. I threw my arm over my face to protect it from the flying chips of rock as the rumbling continued down the stairs, like a greatsnoring breath traveling down a giant’s throat. The whole stairwell was caving in behind the intruder as he ran, making sure that I couldn’t follow him—and that there was no way out. My attacker seemed just as surprised as I was. He looked behind to the impassable doorway and bared his teeth in fury.
