She sighed. “Just my luck. Well, we’ll find something for you to do.”
“I can sew,” I ventured. “And embroider.”
“All right.” She sounded polite, but unimpressed.
“Look, I have some here.” I rummaged in my pack and pulled out one of my half-finished pieces—swans with necks entwined against a backdrop of bulrushes. Mieka took it from me and studied it, running her fingertips over its surface.
“Netta. This is wonderful. It’s a real skill. You have talent, and we can certainly use it.”
I flushed. “Thank you.”
“Now try to get some sleep. We’ll talk more in the morning.”
Chapter Five
The Sacred Knot
‘A complex stitch that only the experienced seamstress should attempt, often used in the construction of altar cloths and sacred robes, providing both strength and ornamentation.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches
Both Holy and Base, 4th Edition
When I woke, I reached for the curtain across my bed and pulled it back as quietly as I could, revealing the large room beyond. The fire had died long ago, and a spill of cold morning light from the one half-boarded window spattered the floor like milk. Even when I sat up, the Hair stayed coiled on the pillow like a sleeping cat, as if it, too, had been worn out by the excitement of the previous day. I ran my hand over its coppery length.
“Please behave today,” I said softly. It didn’t move, but I felt it listening.
Baldbeak had seen me wake and made a soft noise in his throat from where he had perched on the curtain rail. I wrapped the thin quilt around myself like a cloak, swung my feet to the floor, and padded over to the central table. Looking behind me, I saw that half of the little cubbies had theircurtains drawn while half were open, bedclothes lolling over the ledges. The bellow of a town crier outside easily cut through the noise and commotion of a city in the early morning.
“King’s health to improve by Plaguenight, royal physicians assure! Trouble in Northern Electorate as Margraves protest rise in royal taxes! Arson attack on West Temple, heretics suspected!”
The door creaked open, startling me and Baldbeak both. He shot out, presumably to take care of his business, and Mieka emerged from outside, bringing in a gust of cold and the coppery smell of new snow. She shoved a paper bag at me. It was still warm. I opened it and found a small, dense loaf of Plaguebread—a sour, grayish bread cooked in ashes that had become commonplace in the famine after the Plague. I had made several of these loaves myself, back in the Tower.
“Eat this,” she said, “And come with me.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere, but we need to talk, and I don’t want to wake Zlata. She only stumbled in an hour ago, and she’s like a badger with a sore bum when you wake her.”
The rain from the night before had turned to light snow. It crusted the street edges, becoming slush and mud at the center where cart and carriage wheels passed. Smoke billowed from the crematorium chimneys, black against the flat gray sky.
Mieka settled down on the little stool where I had met her the night before, munching on her own little loaf, and I sat beside her on another. Baldbeak returned, landing on the edge of the iron pot where Mieka had her fire the night before, almost overturning it with his weight. I grabbed its edge to stop the coal from spilling, and my hand came away sooty.
“I’ve been thinking about your Book Man,” she said. “And I think you’re most likely to find him if we visit the Undermarket.”
“The Undermarket? What’s that?”
“A place where people like us can meet and sell our wareswithout the Temple or the Watch looking over our shoulder,” she said. “It’s the one place you might be able to find a dealer in black market books. I’ll take you this afternoon. Until then, just lie low in the workshop with the rest of us.”
I wondered if Mother had heard of the Undermarket—or even had dealings with it. I had no idea to whom she had been writing all those years, or who sent those packages of paper and materials. A mysterious underground black market sounded like the sort of place our pigeons might have visited.
Mieka was right—Zlata stalked about looking like a beautiful, scowling storm cloud for the first hour after she woke, and was then all smiles after bread and ale. The others—the ones who weren’t already out on business—woke in staggered order, yawning and stretching as they started their day, either dressing warmly and heading out into the city, or going to one of the stations behind the many curtains that hung in the workshop.
I got the hang of the workshop fairly quickly. Visitors from outside trickled through all day, carrying sacks or small chests with goods to sell. Mieka picked through whatever was on offer—fine linens, cloth, garments, silverware, jewelry—and selected and rejected according to her mysterious standards. Then the visitor would leave with a bulging purse, and Mieka would set out the new goods for her young women to transform. Large washtubs at the back of the room stood ready to be filled with boiling water and dye to disguise the fine clothing and linens. I found out they also used them for bathing, which meant that their skins were often faintly colored by the powerful fabric dyes.
Some of the young women excelled at filing designs or inscriptions off jewelry and snuffboxes, while others worked on transforming the cloths. Mieka sent others on deliveries, taking the transformed goods to other parts of the city.
“Now, let’s see what you can do,” said Mieka. I felt the Hairtwitch under the knitted cap and clapped my hand to it to keep it still.
