Unbound

Chapter One: The Weaver Who Kept Her Head Down

The merchant wanted his clerks bound for three years, and he wanted it cheap.

"Two silver a knot," said Halbrek Tull, spreading his fat fingers on Sabine's worktable as though the price were a gift he was setting down. "Eleven knots. That's twenty-two silver for an afternoon's work. My cousin in the lower market does them for one."

"Your cousin in the lower market isn't licensed," Sabine said, not looking up from the loom. "His knots hold for a season and then they slip, and when they slip, the contract is void, and the magistrate charges you the fee twice. Three silver a knot."

"You said two."

"You said two. I said three when you came in, and I'll say four if you keep leaning on my table. You're crushing the weft."

He took his hands off the table. Merchants always did. There was a certain way of speaking that worked on men like Tull—flat, bored, faintly insulted—and Sabine had learned it before she was twenty. She had learned a great many useful things before she was twenty.

The shuttle passed. The thread hummed under her thumb, a low pleasant vibration like a cat's purr, which was how she knew the loyalty knot was taking. Thread-magic was not lightning and not fire. It was a hum. You felt it in the small bones of your hand, and if you were any good, you could tell by the pitch of it whether a spell would hold for three years or three weeks.

"And the other thing," Tull said, lowering his voice. "The silence."

Sabine's shuttle did not stop. "No."

"I haven't even—"

"You want a thread that stops your clerks' tongues about your business dealings. A speech-lock. It isn't on my license, it isn't on anyone's license outside the Conclave's own weaving hall, and the penalty for making one is the loss of my hands." She tied off, snipped, and laid the finished ribbon on the counter, a band of dove-grey silk with a knot in its center like a small closed eye. "Also, I won't. Your clerks agree to keep your accounts and not to steal your copper. They didn't agree to have their mouths sewn shut."

"You're very sanctimonious for a woman who sells obedience."

"I sell promises," Sabine said. "Made freely, worn freely, and they let go when the term is up. That's the whole trade. If you want the other thing, go and beg the Conclave for it, and see what they charge you."

Tull paid, because everyone paid in the end. Sabine Dacre's knots held. Everyone on Tallow Street knew it. She was twenty-seven years old and she had the neatest hand in Weavers' Row, and she was careful never, ever, to be any better than that.

When the door shut behind him the bell above it swung, and the shop went quiet in the particular way of late afternoon: dust in the light, the smell of lanolin and beeswax and the faint vinegar breath of the dye house next door. Sabine sat back and rubbed the place between her eyebrows.

Eleven loyalty knots. Two truth-threads for the magistrate's court on Fifth-day. A mourning band for a widow on Cutler Lane who wanted her husband's name woven where she could touch it. That was the shape of her life, and it was a good shape, and she reminded herself of that at least once a day, the way you press a bruise to check it's healing.

The door banged open again without the courtesy of a knock.

"Tell me," said Mina Fess, "that you have wine, because I have had the sort of day that ends in either wine or arson."

Mina's hands were blue to the wrist. Her apron was blue. There was a streak of blue along her jaw where she had scratched an itch and forgotten what she was covered in. She ran the dye house on the other side of the wall, she was built like a woman who lifted barrels for a living because she was, and she had been Sabine's closest friend since they were both fourteen and stealing plums off the same cart.

"Second shelf," Sabine said. "What happened?"

"Conclave requisition. Forty bolts of grey, indigo-fast, delivered to the fortress by the end of the month, and they've set the price themselves, which is to say they've set it below what the indigo costs me." Mina found the wine and drank from the bottle. "When I said as much, the clerk wrote my name down. Just wrote it down. Didn't say why. That's all they have to do these days, isn't it? Write your name down."

"Don't say things like that in the street."

"I'm not in the street, I'm in your shop." Mina dropped onto the stool by the window and stretched her legs out. "How's the reading going?"

Sabine's hands went still on the loom.

Because that was the other thing about Mina Fess: she was the only living person who knew that under the third floorboard from Sabine's bed, wrapped in oilcloth, were four thin journals in a cramped, slanting hand. Her mother's hand. Ilsa Dacre had written in a code of her own devising, half symbols and half old weaving shorthand, and Sabine had spent ten years learning to read a dead woman's secrets by candlelight.

"Slowly," Sabine said.

"Slowly is not a report."

"Slowly is all the report there is. There are three pages I still can't read at all. She used a symbol I've never seen anywhere else—it looks like a spindle with a bird on it—and every time it appears she stops explaining herself, as if she were writing to someone who already knew." Sabine set the shuttle down. "I unbound an oath-knot last month."

Mina sat up. "You didn't tell me that."

"It was a two-year loyalty knot off a stable boy whose master died. Legally it should have dissolved with the master. It didn't, because the pig who made it anchored it to the household and not the man, and the boy would have been bound to a dead house until he was nineteen." She flexed her right hand. Three of the fingertips were still shiny, the skin new and tender. "It took me four hours and it burned me."

"Sabine."

"I know."

"They took your mother's life for that."

"They took my mother's life for a great deal more than that," Sabine said. "An oath-knot is nothing. A child's puzzle. If they'd caught me I'd have paid a fine and lost my license." She heard how her own voice went thin at the end and hated it. "He's carting for a brewer now. He came by and gave me a pot of honey."

Mina looked at her for a while. Then she raised the bottle. "To honey."

They drank. Outside, the bells of the Conclave fortress rang the seventh hour, four notes falling, and every person in Thornmark within earshot paused for the length of the fourth note the way you pause when a large dog looks at you.

Sabine had watched her mother die in Conclave Square on a wet spring morning when she was seventeen. There had been no axe and no rope; the Conclave did not need them. Two of their weavers had brought out a length of white cloth and wound it round Ilsa Dacre's chest, over the heart, and the High Speaker had read the charge—*unauthorised interference with a lawful binding*—and then he had spoken a word, and Sabine's mother had gone down on the wet stones like a dropped coat. It had taken eleven seconds. Sabine had counted them because counting was the only thing her body could still do.

Afterward a clerk had cut Ilsa's license disc in half with tinsnips and handed one piece to Sabine, because that was the law: the family received the token, so that they would remember the family had produced a criminal.

Sabine still had it. She kept it in the bottom of her thread box, under the spools, where she could put her thumb on it without looking.

She had made her decision that same wet morning, standing in the crowd with her mother's blood not spilled anywhere because there was no blood, that was the obscenity of it, there was nothing to show. She had decided she would live. She would be a weaver, a small good ordinary weaver, and she would never be interesting to anyone in that fortress for as long as she drew breath.

And for ten years she had kept it. Except for the journals. Except for the stable boy. Except for the thing in her that lifted its head like a hound whenever she heard the words *lawful binding*, and that she pushed back down, every time, with both hands.

---

Anneth Sorel came at dusk, as she did on the last day of every month, to inspect the license work.

She was sixty-one, narrow as a heron, with white hair braided so tightly it looked structural, and she had taken Sabine as an apprentice four months after Ilsa's execution, when no other weaver in Thornmark would have her sweeping their floor. That fact sat between them always, unspoken, and Sabine had loved her for it in a way she had never found words for.

Anneth went through the finished pieces one at a time, holding each up to the lamp, running the pad of her thumb along the knots.

"Your tension's improved on the silk," she said.

"I changed the beater weight."

"Mm. This one." She held up a truth-thread for the magistrate. "You've put in a release."

"On the fourth day. The court only needs it for the hearing. If the ribbon stays live it'll compel the witness at home, with his family, in his sleep."

"The court doesn't ask for a release."

"The court doesn't ask for good work either," Sabine said, "but I give them that too."

Anneth's mouth twitched. She laid the ribbon down and, for a moment, only stood there with her hand flat on it, and something went across her face that Sabine had learned to recognize over ten years and had never once been able to name. It looked, if you had to call it something, like a woman listening for a sound in another room.

"You're a better weaver than I was at forty," Anneth said. "Don't tell anyone that."

"Who would I tell?"

That was when the courier came.

He was not a boy with a satchel. He was Conclave, in grey, with the woven collar-band of the fortress staff, and he did not come in. He stood in the doorway with the last of the light behind him and read from a folded paper.

"Sabine Dacre, licensed weaver of the third rank, Tallow Street. You are summoned to the fortress at the second hour after dawn tomorrow for a commission of repair. Bring hand tools only. No thread, no dye, no shears above four inches." He looked up. "Say that you've heard it."

"I've heard it," Sabine said.

He handed her the paper and went. The bell over the door swung and swung.

Sabine looked down at the summons. The wax was the High Speaker's own—a spindle inside a ring—and the hand that had signed it was small and precise: *A. Malveris, High Speaker of the Conclave.*

"Repair," Anneth said.

"That's what it says."

"The Conclave has fourteen weavers of its own inside those walls." Anneth's voice had gone very level. "Nine of them are first rank. They do not hire out of Tallow Street. They have never in my lifetime hired out of Tallow Street." She took the paper from Sabine's hand and read it herself, and Sabine watched the old woman's fingers, and saw them shake.

"Anneth."

"Refuse it."

"You can't refuse a summons under the High Speaker's seal. They'd pull my license by noon."

"Then be stupid," Anneth said. "Do you hear me? Go in there and be an ordinary tradeswoman with an ordinary eye. Mend what they show you, take the fee, say *yes sir* and *no sir*, and do not—" She stopped. She put the paper down on the table, squared it with the table's edge with great care, and finished, in a different voice altogether, "Do not let them see how good you are."

She left without saying goodnight.

Sabine stood a long while in her darkening shop. Then she went upstairs, lifted the third floorboard from her bed, and read her mother's journals until the candle guttered, without knowing what she was looking for.