Day 14 / 100
For two days, Wynne Harrowgate was perfectly pleasant.
It was the most terrible thing that had ever been done to Ione.
There was no coldness in it. There was no sulking, no sharp word, no turned back. Wynne rose at the same hour, tied the cord with the same quick fingers, set the pace with the same musical care, and said "Good morning, Miss Calder," in a voice like a polished bell. She pointed out a rotten stretch of ground and said "Mind the edge, Miss Calder." She passed the tea. She remarked, in a neutral and informative tone, on the weather, which was fog. She did not joke. She did not hum. She did not once mention a goat. She was as courteous and as exact and as warm as a good innkeeper, and every word of it was a door closing softly in a long corridor.
Ione had been shut out of a great many rooms in her life. She had never been shut out so politely.
She tried, at first. On the first morning she said, "Wynne," and Wynne turned with a bright, attentive, helpful face, and Ione found that there was nothing at all behind the word. She said, "The path is clear," and Wynne said, "It is. Well noticed." On the evening of the first day she opened her mouth to say *I'm sorry*, and saw, with sudden horror, how it would sound: a small stiff thing, a coin laid on a table. *I'll not be in debt for a meal.* She shut her mouth. She ate her biscuit. She lay awake watching the gray come down.
On the second afternoon, they came to the shelter at the Hollow Stones.
* * *
It was not a waystation, only a hut: a low round room of fitted stone with a roof of turf and a hearth in the middle of the floor, put up by some earlier generation of walkers and kept, since, by anyone who passed. There was a stack of dry peat under the eaves and a shelf with a tin of salt and a chipped bowl and a candle stub in a saucer. Someone had scratched a row of tally marks into the doorpost, and someone else had added, underneath, in small neat letters: *Tern's Rest. Leave it better.*
"We'll stop here," said Wynne, in the voice of a clerk reading an entry. "The next shelter is a day on. You'll want a dry night, Miss Calder, and the light's going." She unlooped the cord from her wrist. She laid it on the hearthstone. "I'll scout the east side while there's light. I'll be an hour."
She went. The door swung shut behind her, and the sound of her boots faded into the fog and was gone.
Ione stood in the middle of the hut with her pack on her back and the whole of the silence pressing down on her ears. She looked at the hearth. She looked at the tin of salt, and the chipped bowl, and the iron pot sitting on top of her own pack where she had put it, wrapped in oilcloth, on the second night of the journey.
Her mother had had a saying. She had said it over the vats, in the days when the whole family worked the long table together and nobody had yet stopped speaking: *if you can't say it, dye it.* It had been a joke. It had been a thing said to Tamsin when she was small and furious and had slammed a door, and was found a quarter of an hour later at the back of the works with her arms in a bucket of madder to the elbow, silent and red and, as it turned out, quite finished with being angry.
Ione had never had a use for it. She had always been able to say what she meant.
She put down the pack. She knelt, and unwrapped the pot.
* * *
It was a cheat, and she knew it.
A true indigo vat was a living thing. You fed it and kept it warm and let it ferment for days, and it turned over from sour to sweet, and a skin of copper bloomed on the top of it, and only then did you dare to put a hand in. Her mother's master vat had been alive for forty years. You could not make such a thing in a small iron pot over a peat fire in an unwatched hut in a country where the dead did not speak.
But you could make a pot-vat. It was a poor cousin, a tinker's trick, the thing a dyer did at the end of a long day when a customer had come in asking for something by morning and the real vats were spent. You ground a cake of indigo to powder with the back of a spoon. You made a lye from hearth ash and hot water, and poured it through a cloth. You put in a handful of bran for the vat to feed on, and a pinch of lime, and you set it near the heat and waited, and if you were patient and lucky the sour-sweet smell began to rise and the liquid turned from blue to a dull, clouded green.
She worked slowly, without thinking. Her hands knew every motion. It was the first time in two weeks that she had felt entirely competent. The smell came up out of the pot as the vat woke, a sharp animal reek, and it hit the back of her nose and her eyes stung and, for a moment, she was nine years old, standing on a stool at her mother's elbow, being told not to breathe so deep.
The pot sat in the heat for four hours. She fed the fire. She skimmed the top. Outside the light went from pewter to ash, and the fog pressed on the single window like a face, and at the end of the fourth hour a thin bronze bloom crept across the surface of the vat, and she let out a long breath she had not known she was holding.
It was ready. It would not last, a night, perhaps a night and a morning, but it was ready.
She tore three squares from the spare linen in her pack, each a hand's breadth across, and rolled up her sleeves.
* * *
There was the question of the color.
She had thought about it all afternoon. What she meant to make was a blue, of course. She had never in her life been able to think of an apology without thinking of blue. But there were a thousand blues, and she wanted one in particular.
She wanted the one she had seen on the Slick.
It had gone through her like a bell. It had run down the cord and out of the woman's hand and across the wet black rock in a single bright flood, deep and clear, so dark and so alive that she had felt it in her teeth. She had not known there could be a blue like that. She had spent her whole life in blue and she had not known. She could still feel the shape of it in her mind, though not the color: the depth, the way it had seemed to be lit from inside, like a window in a house at night.
She could not see it now. That was the whole of the difficulty. In the Pall, in the gray of the shelter, with the lamp guttering on its saucer, the vat was a dark gleam and nothing more. She could see value: lighter, darker, the faint tonal difference between a cloth that had taken one dip and a cloth that had taken five. She could not see hue. She could not tell green from blue from violet. She would be dyeing blind, by count and by smell and by the feel of the cloth in her hands, and trusting her mother's lessons to hold.
She took the first square by its corners and lowered it into the vat.
Count of thirty. Lift. The cloth came out dripping, a sickly greenish yellow, as it should, and she hung it on the hook and watched it turn in the air, darkening as the indigo met the oxygen, passing from sulfur to green to something deeper. She watched until the change stopped. It was a pale, soft, watery gray, with a mottled streak along one edge where the fabric had folded in the vat.
Too light. Uneven. Wrong.
She dipped it again, and again, and when it came out the fourth time it was darker, but there was a dullness in it, a flatness, a quality she knew but could not name, and she hung it on the hook and looked at it for a long time and said, aloud, "No."
The second square she ruined by hurrying.
She made a very bad mistake with the lime, and the vat went sour on the third dip, and the cloth came out in a patchy blot like a bruise. She stood looking at it with her hands wet to the wrist and heard her mother's voice, dry and quite unsparing: *you're dyeing for yourself, not for the cloth. Slow down.*
She made a new batch of lye. She fed the vat. She waited a quarter of an hour, with her hands folded in her lap, and made herself breathe.
The third square she dipped like a woman handling glass.
* * *
It was close to midnight when the third cloth came out of the vat.
She had done six dips, each timed on her own pulse, each lifted and hung and watched until the air had finished with it. She did not trust her eyes. She trusted the smell, the weight of the wet linen in her hands, the exact darkness of the gray against the gray wall of the hut. It was dense and even and very deep. It was, at least, the right depth. It looked like the thing she meant.
She hung it by the fire to dry, and sat back on her heels, and the exhaustion fell on her all at once.
It was only then, in the stillness, with the cloth turning slowly in the warmth, that she understood what she had done.
She had known it, in a way, all evening. She had known it the way you know a word you have not yet said. But she had been so busy with the vat, so deep in the details of the work, that she had not looked at the whole of it. Now she looked, and she felt the blood come up into her face and go away again.
There were three occasions in Vethmoor on which a dyer gave away cloth she had dyed with her own hands. It was a custom older than the Guild, so old that nobody wrote it down. You gave a cloth to a child at its naming. You gave a cloth to a bride on the morning of her wedding. And you gave a cloth, quietly, with no words, never aloud, to the one person in the world you meant to keep.
She had not set out to do it. She had set out to apologize. She had thought: *if you can't say it, dye it.* She had thought of it as a thing made of cloth and dye and a mother's joke, a very small and stupid and practical thing.
But her hands had known. She stood in the dark hut with her wet sleeves and her stained fingers and understood, with a sort of cold, slow horror, that her hands had known the whole time, and that they had chosen a color, and that they had taken six dips, six, the number her mother had taught her for the deep Calder blue, the blue you did not waste on anyone you did not love.
"No," said Ione, to the empty room. "No. It's an apology. It's only an apology."
The cloth turned on its hook. It did not argue.
* * *
She left it on Wynne's pack in the gray before dawn.
She did it in the way of a woman setting down a bomb: carefully, quickly, without looking at it, and with her heart going like a drum. She had pressed the cloth in a towel and dried it by the coals until it was merely damp, and folded it in four, and laid it on top of the pack where the woman would find it when she woke. She did not leave a note. She did not say a word. Then she went and sat on her own bedroll with her back to the wall and her arms around her knees, and watched the fog lighten in the window, and did not breathe.
Wynne woke at the usual hour. She sat up on the bench, and yawned, and stretched, and reached for her pack, and stopped.
Ione saw her stop. She saw the hand go still in the air. She saw the folded square lying on the canvas, dark and damp, a small blue-black shape against the gray, and she saw the woman's face change.
It did not change very much. Wynne was a professional. But Ione had been studying that face for fourteen days, and she saw the brightness drop out of it, the arranged and courteous attention, the mask of the good innkeeper. What was left was bare, and quiet, and not quite certain.
Wynne picked up the cloth.
She held it in both hands, turning it, looking at the weave and the selvedge, and the edges where the dye had pooled. She lifted it to the lamp. She was looking at it very closely, with a strange, absorbed, hungry attention, as someone looks at a letter in a language she cannot read.
It was only then that Ione remembered what she had half forgotten: that wet dye held its color in the Pall for a day or two, a faint last hold on the light, which was why the walkers dyed their cords. She could not see it. But Wynne could.
"What do I do with it?" said Wynne.
It was very quiet. It was the first thing she had said in two days that was not part of the performance. She did not look up from the cloth.
Ione's mouth was dry. She said, "It's a rag. Use it."
She heard how it sounded. She heard it land, flat and hard, and she saw Wynne's fingers tighten on the linen for a moment, and then loosen. And then, to her complete astonishment, Wynne did not make a joke. She did not say *how generous*. She did not say *you shouldn't have*. She shook out the cloth, folded it once along its length, and wound it around her neck like a scarf, twice, and tucked the ends into her collar.
She did it with great care, as though it were made of glass. And then she stood there, in the gray hut, with a damp strip of blue-black linen at her throat, and did not smile at all.
Ione's heart was going so hard she could feel it in her teeth. *She doesn't know,* she thought. *Walkers don't give cloth. They give cord. She doesn't know what it means.* It was a relief. It was also, in some obscure way, unbearable.
* * *
They packed in silence. They stamped out the fire, and swept the hearth, and left a handful of dry peat on the shelf for the next traveler, as the doorpost asked. Ione scratched a single tally mark under the others, because it seemed right. At the door, with the pack on her shoulders and the cord looped at her wrist, she stopped, and could not make herself go out.
Behind her, Wynne said, in her ordinary voice, the real one, a little rough, with a lot of light in the middle of it, "It's the wrong blue, you know."
Ione did not turn.
"It's too green. There's a bit of the sixth dip in it that's gone off in the air. Calder blue has more red in it, from the harbor. I've seen it on the Guildmistress's shawl." A pause. "It's quite definitely the wrong blue."
"I know," said Ione.
She did. She had known it as soon as she hung the cloth. She had counted the dips on her own heartbeat and she had known, by the dullness at the heart of the gray, that she had got it wrong. She had spent her whole life learning to see exactly what was there. And it was the only color she had ever made that she wished, with her whole heart, she could have seen.
There was a small sound behind her, a sort of breath, almost a laugh.
"I like it," said Wynne.
Ione stood in the doorway with the fog in her face and her thumb on the stain, and did not turn around, because she did not know what her face was doing. She only nodded, once, at the white. Then she stepped out over the threshold, and the cord drew gently taut, and behind her the other woman followed, carefully, with one hand lifted to the cloth at her throat, as if to be sure that it was there.
She could not see what color it was. She would have given anything she had to know what it looked like on her.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Day 14 / 100
For two days, Wynne Harrowgate was perfectly pleasant.
It was the most terrible thing that had ever been done to Ione.
There was no coldness in it. There was no sulking, no sharp word, no turned back. Wynne rose at the same hour, tied the cord with the same quick fingers, set the pace with the same musical care, and said "Good morning, Miss Calder," in a voice like a polished bell. She pointed out a rotten stretch of ground and said "Mind the edge, Miss Calder." She passed the tea. She remarked, in a neutral and informative tone, on the weather, which was fog. She did not joke. She did not hum. She did not once mention a goat. She was as courteous and as exact and as warm as a good innkeeper, and every word of it was a door closing softly in a long corridor.
Ione had been shut out of a great many rooms in her life. She had never been shut out so politely.
She tried, at first. On the first morning she said, "Wynne," and Wynne turned with a bright, attentive, helpful face, and Ione found that there was nothing at all behind the word. She said, "The path is clear," and Wynne said, "It is. Well noticed." On the evening of the first day she opened her mouth to say *I'm sorry*, and saw, with sudden horror, how it would sound: a small stiff thing, a coin laid on a table. *I'll not be in debt for a meal.* She shut her mouth. She ate her biscuit. She lay awake watching the gray come down.
On the second afternoon, they came to the shelter at the Hollow Stones.
* * *
It was not a waystation, only a hut: a low round room of fitted stone with a roof of turf and a hearth in the middle of the floor, put up by some earlier generation of walkers and kept, since, by anyone who passed. There was a stack of dry peat under the eaves and a shelf with a tin of salt and a chipped bowl and a candle stub in a saucer. Someone had scratched a row of tally marks into the doorpost, and someone else had added, underneath, in small neat letters: *Tern's Rest. Leave it better.*
"We'll stop here," said Wynne, in the voice of a clerk reading an entry. "The next shelter is a day on. You'll want a dry night, Miss Calder, and the light's going." She unlooped the cord from her wrist. She laid it on the hearthstone. "I'll scout the east side while there's light. I'll be an hour."
She went. The door swung shut behind her, and the sound of her boots faded into the fog and was gone.
Ione stood in the middle of the hut with her pack on her back and the whole of the silence pressing down on her ears. She looked at the hearth. She looked at the tin of salt, and the chipped bowl, and the iron pot sitting on top of her own pack where she had put it, wrapped in oilcloth, on the second night of the journey.
Her mother had had a saying. She had said it over the vats, in the days when the whole family worked the long table together and nobody had yet stopped speaking: *if you can't say it, dye it.* It had been a joke. It had been a thing said to Tamsin when she was small and furious and had slammed a door, and was found a quarter of an hour later at the back of the works with her arms in a bucket of madder to the elbow, silent and red and, as it turned out, quite finished with being angry.
Ione had never had a use for it. She had always been able to say what she meant.
She put down the pack. She knelt, and unwrapped the pot.
* * *
It was a cheat, and she knew it.
A true indigo vat was a living thing. You fed it and kept it warm and let it ferment for days, and it turned over from sour to sweet, and a skin of copper bloomed on the top of it, and only then did you dare to put a hand in. Her mother's master vat had been alive for forty years. You could not make such a thing in a small iron pot over a peat fire in an unwatched hut in a country where the dead did not speak.
But you could make a pot-vat. It was a poor cousin, a tinker's trick, the thing a dyer did at the end of a long day when a customer had come in asking for something by morning and the real vats were spent. You ground a cake of indigo to powder with the back of a spoon. You made a lye from hearth ash and hot water, and poured it through a cloth. You put in a handful of bran for the vat to feed on, and a pinch of lime, and you set it near the heat and waited, and if you were patient and lucky the sour-sweet smell began to rise and the liquid turned from blue to a dull, clouded green.
She worked slowly, without thinking. Her hands knew every motion. It was the first time in two weeks that she had felt entirely competent. The smell came up out of the pot as the vat woke, a sharp animal reek, and it hit the back of her nose and her eyes stung and, for a moment, she was nine years old, standing on a stool at her mother's elbow, being told not to breathe so deep.
The pot sat in the heat for four hours. She fed the fire. She skimmed the top. Outside the light went from pewter to ash, and the fog pressed on the single window like a face, and at the end of the fourth hour a thin bronze bloom crept across the surface of the vat, and she let out a long breath she had not known she was holding.
It was ready. It would not last, a night, perhaps a night and a morning, but it was ready.
She tore three squares from the spare linen in her pack, each a hand's breadth across, and rolled up her sleeves.
* * *
There was the question of the color.
She had thought about it all afternoon. What she meant to make was a blue, of course. She had never in her life been able to think of an apology without thinking of blue. But there were a thousand blues, and she wanted one in particular.
She wanted the one she had seen on the Slick.
It had gone through her like a bell. It had run down the cord and out of the woman's hand and across the wet black rock in a single bright flood, deep and clear, so dark and so alive that she had felt it in her teeth. She had not known there could be a blue like that. She had spent her whole life in blue and she had not known. She could still feel the shape of it in her mind, though not the color: the depth, the way it had seemed to be lit from inside, like a window in a house at night.
She could not see it now. That was the whole of the difficulty. In the Pall, in the gray of the shelter, with the lamp guttering on its saucer, the vat was a dark gleam and nothing more. She could see value: lighter, darker, the faint tonal difference between a cloth that had taken one dip and a cloth that had taken five. She could not see hue. She could not tell green from blue from violet. She would be dyeing blind, by count and by smell and by the feel of the cloth in her hands, and trusting her mother's lessons to hold.
She took the first square by its corners and lowered it into the vat.
Count of thirty. Lift. The cloth came out dripping, a sickly greenish yellow, as it should, and she hung it on the hook and watched it turn in the air, darkening as the indigo met the oxygen, passing from sulfur to green to something deeper. She watched until the change stopped. It was a pale, soft, watery gray, with a mottled streak along one edge where the fabric had folded in the vat.
Too light. Uneven. Wrong.
She dipped it again, and again, and when it came out the fourth time it was darker, but there was a dullness in it, a flatness, a quality she knew but could not name, and she hung it on the hook and looked at it for a long time and said, aloud, "No."
The second square she ruined by hurrying.
She made a very bad mistake with the lime, and the vat went sour on the third dip, and the cloth came out in a patchy blot like a bruise. She stood looking at it with her hands wet to the wrist and heard her mother's voice, dry and quite unsparing: *you're dyeing for yourself, not for the cloth. Slow down.*
She made a new batch of lye. She fed the vat. She waited a quarter of an hour, with her hands folded in her lap, and made herself breathe.
The third square she dipped like a woman handling glass.
* * *
It was close to midnight when the third cloth came out of the vat.
She had done six dips, each timed on her own pulse, each lifted and hung and watched until the air had finished with it. She did not trust her eyes. She trusted the smell, the weight of the wet linen in her hands, the exact darkness of the gray against the gray wall of the hut. It was dense and even and very deep. It was, at least, the right depth. It looked like the thing she meant.
She hung it by the fire to dry, and sat back on her heels, and the exhaustion fell on her all at once.
It was only then, in the stillness, with the cloth turning slowly in the warmth, that she understood what she had done.
She had known it, in a way, all evening. She had known it the way you know a word you have not yet said. But she had been so busy with the vat, so deep in the details of the work, that she had not looked at the whole of it. Now she looked, and she felt the blood come up into her face and go away again.
There were three occasions in Vethmoor on which a dyer gave away cloth she had dyed with her own hands. It was a custom older than the Guild, so old that nobody wrote it down. You gave a cloth to a child at its naming. You gave a cloth to a bride on the morning of her wedding. And you gave a cloth, quietly, with no words, never aloud, to the one person in the world you meant to keep.
She had not set out to do it. She had set out to apologize. She had thought: *if you can't say it, dye it.* She had thought of it as a thing made of cloth and dye and a mother's joke, a very small and stupid and practical thing.
But her hands had known. She stood in the dark hut with her wet sleeves and her stained fingers and understood, with a sort of cold, slow horror, that her hands had known the whole time, and that they had chosen a color, and that they had taken six dips, six, the number her mother had taught her for the deep Calder blue, the blue you did not waste on anyone you did not love.
"No," said Ione, to the empty room. "No. It's an apology. It's only an apology."
The cloth turned on its hook. It did not argue.
* * *
She left it on Wynne's pack in the gray before dawn.
She did it in the way of a woman setting down a bomb: carefully, quickly, without looking at it, and with her heart going like a drum. She had pressed the cloth in a towel and dried it by the coals until it was merely damp, and folded it in four, and laid it on top of the pack where the woman would find it when she woke. She did not leave a note. She did not say a word. Then she went and sat on her own bedroll with her back to the wall and her arms around her knees, and watched the fog lighten in the window, and did not breathe.
Wynne woke at the usual hour. She sat up on the bench, and yawned, and stretched, and reached for her pack, and stopped.
Ione saw her stop. She saw the hand go still in the air. She saw the folded square lying on the canvas, dark and damp, a small blue-black shape against the gray, and she saw the woman's face change.
It did not change very much. Wynne was a professional. But Ione had been studying that face for fourteen days, and she saw the brightness drop out of it, the arranged and courteous attention, the mask of the good innkeeper. What was left was bare, and quiet, and not quite certain.
Wynne picked up the cloth.
She held it in both hands, turning it, looking at the weave and the selvedge, and the edges where the dye had pooled. She lifted it to the lamp. She was looking at it very closely, with a strange, absorbed, hungry attention, as someone looks at a letter in a language she cannot read.
It was only then that Ione remembered what she had half forgotten: that wet dye held its color in the Pall for a day or two, a faint last hold on the light, which was why the walkers dyed their cords. She could not see it. But Wynne could.
"What do I do with it?" said Wynne.
It was very quiet. It was the first thing she had said in two days that was not part of the performance. She did not look up from the cloth.
Ione's mouth was dry. She said, "It's a rag. Use it."
She heard how it sounded. She heard it land, flat and hard, and she saw Wynne's fingers tighten on the linen for a moment, and then loosen. And then, to her complete astonishment, Wynne did not make a joke. She did not say *how generous*. She did not say *you shouldn't have*. She shook out the cloth, folded it once along its length, and wound it around her neck like a scarf, twice, and tucked the ends into her collar.
She did it with great care, as though it were made of glass. And then she stood there, in the gray hut, with a damp strip of blue-black linen at her throat, and did not smile at all.
Ione's heart was going so hard she could feel it in her teeth. *She doesn't know,* she thought. *Walkers don't give cloth. They give cord. She doesn't know what it means.* It was a relief. It was also, in some obscure way, unbearable.
* * *
They packed in silence. They stamped out the fire, and swept the hearth, and left a handful of dry peat on the shelf for the next traveler, as the doorpost asked. Ione scratched a single tally mark under the others, because it seemed right. At the door, with the pack on her shoulders and the cord looped at her wrist, she stopped, and could not make herself go out.
Behind her, Wynne said, in her ordinary voice, the real one, a little rough, with a lot of light in the middle of it, "It's the wrong blue, you know."
Ione did not turn.
"It's too green. There's a bit of the sixth dip in it that's gone off in the air. Calder blue has more red in it, from the harbor. I've seen it on the Guildmistress's shawl." A pause. "It's quite definitely the wrong blue."
"I know," said Ione.
She did. She had known it as soon as she hung the cloth. She had counted the dips on her own heartbeat and she had known, by the dullness at the heart of the gray, that she had got it wrong. She had spent her whole life learning to see exactly what was there. And it was the only color she had ever made that she wished, with her whole heart, she could have seen.
There was a small sound behind her, a sort of breath, almost a laugh.
"I like it," said Wynne.
Ione stood in the doorway with the fog in her face and her thumb on the stain, and did not turn around, because she did not know what her face was doing. She only nodded, once, at the white. Then she stepped out over the threshold, and the cord drew gently taut, and behind her the other woman followed, carefully, with one hand lifted to the cloth at her throat, as if to be sure that it was there.
She could not see what color it was. She would have given anything she had to know what it looked like on her.
You've reached the end of this chapter