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Old Neesi the ragpicker comes plodding up the lane, bent double under her basket, and Alla lays her mending aside.
“Don’t get up,” Neesi says, and plunks the basket down on the muddy flagstones by the fountain. “Some good fortune today; plenty to keep you busy.” She digs in the basket and pulls things out to show Alla: a linen shift, torn and stained; a pair of sewn woolen hose badly darned and worn through again; an embroidered sash trailing snags and loose threads where coins or spangles were cut away before it was discarded. “The rest is for the papermakers, I think, unless you can make something of it,” Neesi says, and pulls out a bundle of rags.
Alla sorts through them, trying to judge the strength of the fabric, the stubbornness of the soil and stains. A few, she thinks she can save – one might do to patch the stained shift, another can be squared off and hemmed for a handkerchief if that stain will lift – but most are fragile, raveling scraps, worn and tired.
“See what you can make of them, girl,” Neesi says.
*
On market day, Alla rises with the night crier and picks up the basket she packed the night before. Her week’s spinning; the shift, washed and mended and hemmed; a pair of quilted slippers sewn from scraps. The embroidered sash, its loose ends darned in, bright glass beads from a broken necklace stitched on to replace the missing decorations. Small things, light things, nothing to overburden her on the long walk to the market.
Her clothes are as clean and neat as she can make them; her face and hands are scrubbed clean, her close-cropped hair wrapped away under a kerchief like a respectable housewife going to market.
Alla the tumbler would have been running and jumping, limbering herself up to perform. Wheezy Alla, Alla the mire-mouse spinster, stretches her hips and calves and rolls out her neck and shoulders, draws the gods-circle on her chest and prays that her chest won’t spasm, her lungs won’t seize.
She walks slowly, breathing through a kerchief against the cold damp of the morning air. It’s a long way to go, up the harbor to the big market, but for those who can look respectable enough, the higher prices are worth the walking.
The shift and the slippers go to a dealer in used clothing who hems and haws and haggles, but gives a fair enough price. The spun thread goes to a broker who inspects it and weighs it and tallies it against the weight of the wool Alla was given last week, and sends her away with payment and more wool. The sash, she sells to a juggler by the market square fountain, a friend of a friend who asks awkwardly after their mutual acquaintance and not after her health, but pays fair value for the sash. He puts it on right away, twirling to show it off as he tosses his painted wooden pins back into the air.
It’s a good market day. The money is better than usual, the proceeds from the shift and the sash a windfall Alla will divide between herself and Neesi. Enough for the week, enough for lodging, enough for porridge and tea, enough for a trip to the bathhouse. Enough, just, for Urda’s House, for the lung-opening tisane and liniment. Maybe enough even to put a coin or two away against a market day that’s not so good.
The Winding Circle folk are at their usual stalls, selling their usual wares. Alla doesn’t usually linger - the dust and press of the market square, the long walk there and the long walk back all sound reasons not to, to say nothing of the aches of envy and loss – but she does like to take time just to look at the Temple goods, especially the new-woven fabrics, plain and simple, strong and clean and full of potential. Today, there are spindles from the temple carpentry shops, their turned-wood whorls polished smooth and gleaming in the morning sun.
“Will you try one, Mistress Spinster?” asks a novice behind the table, nodding to her basket of prepared wool. He’s as short as Alla is, his hands broad and capable-looking, nicked and callused.
“Did you make these?” she asks, and he smiles.
“Some of them,” he says. “Here, this one – birch for beginnings, maple for balance.”
He picks it up and offers it to her, and as much as she means to demur, she can’t set it down immediately. It’s lovely, the finish silk-smooth in her hands and just the weight she likes, and – what would be the harm in just trying? She has plenty of wool. It’s easy enough to pull her own spindle out of her basket, to pull a little thread off it for a leader, to give that shining-smooth shaft a quick twirl.
“I thank you,” she says, pulling the thread off the spindle and setting it down with a pang. “It’s lovely, but I’m afraid I’m not buying today.”
“Well, it’s yours now,” says a green-robed dedicate. “I felt that power moving; that’s your spindle now and no mistaking it. A mage’s tools are her own.”
Alla backs away from the table, raises her hands.
“What power, Dedicate? I meant no harm.”
The dedicate looks her over, face less stern than her voice sounded. She’s tall and broad, her shoulders a little crooked, her eyes dark and brows arched high behind horn-framed spectacles.
“I’m sure you didn’t, and you’ve done none. But I hope you had no more pressing errands this market day, Mistress, because I think we must speak at some length.”
*
Alla goes back to her lodgings with her head awhirl.
Of course she spins; in the mountain villages of Capchen, every hand turns a spindle through long watches over the flocks and any spare moment which can be contrived between other tasks. Alla might have left Low Croft for the market fair one summer and run off with the circus instead of following some shepherd lad home, but she took her spindle with her when she went. Circus life isn’t so profitable as all that. The spindle and the needle have been her companions and her tools, ready to hand when her body failed. But she never thought – magic?
Well. Alla never thought a lot of things, and Dedicate Vetiver was certainly firm in her conclusions.
For the first time in a long time, Alla feels herself trembling on the edge of a bright new day, ready to take flight and sing for sheer joy.