The main story's twelve chapters, side quests, daily duties and the world quest, with where to go for each step.
You woke on the road with Lattice-light in your veins and no memory of the night before. Harrowford's elder wants to see you.
“The Captain has been expecting someone like you.”Elder Maren Tolliver
The dead walk the crypt road at night. Thin their numbers before they reach the farms.
“Good. But they'll keep coming as long as something calls them.”Captain Odric Hale
Something old commands the dead from the crypt east of town. End it.
“Ossric... he guarded this valley once. Whatever turned him is still out there.”Captain Odric Hale
Lights were seen at the Old Watchtower. Cutthroats, maybe. Or worse.
“An Ashen Choir sigil. They are here, in the Vale. Take this to the Thornwood; the Vaelin know this mark.”Elder Maren Tolliver
The sigil leads east to the Thornwood and the Vaelin of Lisswen Hollow.
“The Heartroot bleeds Lattice-light. The Choir is drinking from it.”Ithrael of the Quiet Leaves
The warrens beneath the Heartroot have been unsealed. Whatever nests there is feeding the Choir.
“The roots are quiet again. But the Choir's trail leads west, to the sea.”Kael Swiftbough
Ships vanish off the Saltreach coast. Sailors speak of a bell ringing under the waves.
“The bell is silent. In the Cantor's hoard: a map of the Cinderreach, marked in ash.”Harbormaster Ada Quill
The map leads to the Cinderreach, where the Emberwatch keeps a lonely vigil.
“The Choir is forging something in the old forge-halls. We must stop it.”Commander Ilsa Vey
The Choir is forging a key from the Cinder Fall's heart. Destroy the forge.
“A key to the Spire. They meant to open it. Ride for Highwatch.”Commander Ilsa Vey
The road climbs into Frostspire, to Highwatch Keep and the Spire above it.
“The Spire's gate is open. Gather your strongest allies.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
The Sundered King waits at the top of the Spire, with the Choir at his feet. End this.
“The Crown is broken for good. But the Lattice Gate has opened, and the threads lead somewhere new...”Lord Aldric Stonemere
With the King fallen, the Lattice Gate shimmers with impossible places. Ysolde can open the way, and she keeps a waystone for anyone going through for the first time.
“There is no end to the threads. Gather Waystones, climb the tiers, and find the heart of the Lattice.”Gatewarden Ysolde
Since the King fell, the Gate has been bleeding threads of Lattice-light, and they do not drift. Something is reeling them in, west over the mountains toward Brightmeadow, toward the road where you woke. I have seen a light like yours before, Ysolde says. On a man who came through here with a lantern, the year before you came.
“So it has begun, and it has come back to you. I should have told you long ago, friend. Sit down by the fire.”Elder Maren Tolliver
I told everyone I found you on the road. I didn't. I found you lying among the Nine Sisters, and there was a lantern burning beside you with no oil in it, and a man in a lamplighter's long coat walking away north with his pole on his shoulder. I hid that lantern under the altar stone the same night. I was afraid of it. I still am.
“It's still burning. Twenty years without oil or wick. Whoever lit you, friend, lit this from the same flame.”Elder Maren Tolliver
The old songs say a lantern wants to burn where it was first lit. Set it on the altar stone among the Sisters and keep watch. It will show you where its flame came from, if it shows anything. But the Hollow can smell that light three valleys off, and they will come for it. Don't go alone if you can help it.
“You saw him in the flame? A shrine in the ice, and a woman's voice counting threads... The Shrine of the Quiet Frost, above Highwatch. The Weavers kept it, before the Order came. Nobody has gone up there in fifty years.”Elder Maren Tolliver
Follow the flame north, to the Shrine of the Quiet Frost above Highwatch Keep. If anyone still knows who lit you, it is whoever keeps the threads up there.
“Ilgrim. His name is Ilgrim, and he was the last Lamplighter of the Lantern Order. He kept the Last Lantern, the flame the Order lit beneath the Glass Scar to hold the Hollow under the earth. When the Choir rose he took a spark of it and put it into you, so that you would break the Crown for him. You did.”Wenna Coldspindle
A Crown sunders and the threads it held go free. A Lamplighter who gathers them can make the Last Lantern burn as it was always meant to: a dawn that never sets, that burns the Hollowing out of the world. And everything else the Lattice has touched. The Vaelin's Heartroot. The Gate. You. His Wickbound are spinning the threads down into the Glass Scar. Take them back.
“Wickbound in my wastes, and no one thought to tell me. There's a door at the bottom of the Scar, old Order stonework under the glass. My scouts say it's warm to the touch, and that something behind it hums.”Commander Ilsa Vey
Ilgrim waits beneath the Glass Scar with the Last Lantern and every thread he has gathered. End it, before he lights it.
“He's gone, and the Lantern is in your hands. It is yours to decide what happens to it now. No one else here has the right.”Commander Ilsa Vey
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
The Last Lantern goes dark for the first time in four hundred years. The threads drift free over the wastes, and somewhere far below, the Hollow stir in their sleep.
The flame goes into you as it went in once before, twenty years ago among the Nine Sisters. It does not burn. Not yet.
Go home to Harrowford, Vey says. Whatever you did down there, the woman who found you among the stones has waited twenty years to hear the end of it.
“Whatever you chose, you chose it yourself, and that is more than he ever gave you. The threads he gathered are loose again and the Gate still hums with them. There will be other roads, friend. Rest a night before you take one.”Elder Maren Tolliver
A letter came up the road for you while you slept, friend, sealed with frost that didn't melt by the fire. It's from the Weaver in the mountains. She writes that she counts the threads every night, as she always has, and that every night now there are fewer. She doesn't write what she thinks is taking them. I think she's afraid to.
“You came. Good. The threads the Lantern let go didn't drift away, the way loose thread should. They fell south, like snow, into the Thornwood. And something there is eating them.”Wenna Coldspindle
Moths. I knew it the moment I said it aloud. My grandmother's grandmother told of one: a moth as pale as the moon that ate the cloth of the world, until the Weavers wove it into the dark beneath the Heartroot, where the Lattice was first spun. If the threads are falling there, it has woken, and it is hungry. Go and see. The Vaelin will not thank you for coming, but go.
“Gnawed through. Every one. And they came from the Heartroot's own light... Sit, outsider. You have earned that much from the Vaelin today.”Ithrael of the Quiet Leaves
Some of my people breathed the dust off the moths' wings and went quiet, and then they went down to the Heartroot and began to spin. We call them the Silkbound now. They wrap our own in silk and hang them in the Heartroot's roots for the moths. There are four cocoons there tonight. Cut them open before morning.
“Four of ours, alive. Cold, and they will not speak yet, but alive. Whatever the Silkbound spin for, it is beneath the Heartroot, and it is growing.”Ithrael of the Quiet Leaves
Wenna Coldspindle has come down out of the mountains, the first Weaver to set foot in the Thornwood since my grandmother was a girl. She means to mend the Heartroot's threads where the moths have eaten them. The moths will come for her the moment the work begins to glow. Keep them off her until it is done.
“It held. It's mended, for now. But I felt the thread pull back while I worked it, down through the roots. There's a door down there, under the Heartroot, and someone on the other side of it unpicking every stitch I make. Someone who learned to weave where I learned.”Wenna Coldspindle
Fifty years ago my sister went down to the Weavers' Loom beneath the Heartroot to learn the oldest patterns, and she never came back up. Aldreth. I thought the dark had taken her. I think now she found the Moth asleep in the warp and woke it, and has fed it the Lattice thread by thread ever since. If she's down there, she's not my sister any more. Do what you must.
“It's dead. Then the Loom is quiet for the first time in fifty years, and its last thread is in your hands. You brought it up; the choice of what becomes of it is yours, Ithrael says, not ours.”Ithrael of the Quiet Leaves
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
Wenna weaves the last of the Moth's silk into the Heartroot's wound, and for a night the whole Thornwood glows like a lantern. The Lattice is a little stronger, and a little stranger, than it was.
The Loom goes up like dry grass. Beneath the Heartroot the Weavers' oldest work burns away, and nothing will ever be woven there again. Nor eaten.
Go to Wenna, Ithrael says. She stayed by the Heartroot while you were below. Someone should tell her before the Silkbound do.
“So that was Aldreth, at the end. I'll count her thread among the others tonight; it's the least I owe her. The Lattice holds, friend, but it's thinner than it was, and the Gate still hums. Whatever wove it is still out there. Rest. Then come and find me.”Wenna Coldspindle
I counted again last night, and then again, because I didn't believe it. The threads the Moth ate are mended, but the oldest ones, the warp the whole Lattice hangs from, are being pulled. Not eaten. Pulled, the way you'd pull a thread to see where it goes. They all run north, to the Pillars in the snowfield past Highwatch, where my grandmothers tied the first knots. Someone keeps them. Go and see who's pulling.
“Weaver sent you? Then she's counted too. Good. I'm Tavish; I've kept these stones for thirty winters, and in all that time the threads never moved. Tonight they're singing like a bowstring.”Tavish Rime
They came out of the snow a fortnight back. Spiders, made of something like ice and something like glass, the size of a pony, and they climb the Pillars and spin. Not webs. Thread. Lattice thread, glass-hard, in a pattern I've never seen. Break them. Bring me what they spin and I'll show Wenna.
“Look at it. Each strand's a dozen threads twisted the wrong way round. They're not breaking the Lattice. They're re-weaving it to some other pattern.”Tavish Rime
Every Pillar's tied to the ground by an anchor stone, three of them, out in the snow. The spiders have spun their glass over all three, and the big ones, the Weavers, sit on them like hens on eggs. Cut the glass away and tie the old thread back. You'll feel it when it takes.
“There. You hear that? They've stopped singing. But down under the snow something's still pulling, harder now we've pulled back. Wenna's on her way up. She'll want to see this herself.”Tavish Rime
Wenna's come up with her frame on her back, all the way from the Heartroot. She means to re-weave the warp here, at its roots, where it was first tied. The spiders will come for her the moment the work starts to glow. Stand by her, and keep them off.
“It's done. It's the first warp I've woven from nothing, and it's holding. But I felt the other end of it, friend, all the way down. There's a hall under the Pillars, and something in it with its hands on every thread there is. Not a Weaver. The Weaver. The one we learned from.”Wenna Coldspindle
My grandmothers' grandmothers told it as a children's story: before the Weavers there was the Loomwright, who wove the Lattice round the world to keep the dark out, and then went down under the snow to sleep at its loom. If it's awake, and it's pulling the Lattice apart to weave it again, then nothing we mend will hold. Go down. Stop it. And whatever it says to you, remember it's had a very long time to think of it.
“It's down. It's still alive, if that's the word, kneeling at its loom with the Lattice's first thread in its hands. And it's asking you, not me. Bind it back into the warp it wove, or cut the thread that holds it.”Wenna Coldspindle
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
You lay the first thread across the Loomwright's hands and Wenna weaves it shut. The glass giant goes still at its loom, and every thread in the Hall lights at once. The Lattice will hold, as long as it does.
The thread parts like a sigh. The Loomwright's light runs out of it into the warp, and it shatters where it kneels. The Lattice is the Weavers' alone now, to keep or to lose.
Tell Tavish first; they're his stones. Then come back to me. I've some counting to do.
“I counted every thread in the Lattice tonight, all of them, for the first time in my life. They're all there. But they don't run the way they did. Some of them run out through the Gate now, friend, out past anything I know how to count. Whatever the Loomwright was weaving toward, it got a little way.”Wenna Coldspindle
The threads that run out through the Gate now, the ones the Loomwright pulled: I've followed them a little further every night. Last night one of them came back. Not through the Gate. In off the sea, at Saltreach, on the tide. The harbourmaster at Gullhaven has been sending word of lights in the water since the new moon. Ask her what her boats have seen, then go out to the Greywatch Light. Whoever keeps it will have seen the most.
“Wenna Coldspindle sent you? I didn't think the Weavers knew there was a sea. Come up and look, then. Every night since the Light was lit again they come in on the tide, hundreds of them, glowing like drowned lamps. And every night there are more.”Orla Penwarden
Medusae, the old keepers' books call them, but no jelly I ever netted stung like these. They come up out of the surf and drift about the headland, and they'll put a bolt of light through a gull at twenty paces. Thin them out. And bring me what's left of them when they burst: there's thread in it. I want to show your Weaver.
“Hold it up to the lamp. It's not jelly at all. It's thread, a thousand threads, wound so fine it goes clear. Something out there is weaving them.”Orla Penwarden
Gullhaven's boats stopped going out a week back. The nets came up so full of those threads they glowed on the shingle, and the big ones, the lantern medusae, follow them in like gulls after a trawler. Cut the warp out of the nets they've left on the shore and put the lanterns out. Hesk Wadebury's the one who'll want to know: they're his nets.
“Every one of them? Mind your hands, the threads sting even cut. Funny thing, friend. When I hauled the last net, the threads in it were all pulling the same way. Back out, and down, toward the Light. Like they'd been sent for.”Hesk Wadebury
Your Weaver's come down to the Light. She was out on the headland at dawn with that frame of hers, telling the Keeper the jellies come in to the lamp because it's the brightest thing on the coast, and if it burned with the warp's own light they'd come to it and stay, and leave the harbour be. She means to weave a wick tonight. They'll come for the light of the work. Go and stand with her.
“It's lit. Look at it: a wick of warp in the Greywatch lamp, and the sea lit to the horizon. They'll come to it now and drift there under the headland, and Gullhaven can fish. But I felt where the threads go, friend. Down. There's a cave under the Light, older than the Light, and the tide fills it twice a day. Something is down there, weaving them. And someone is with it. Someone holding a lamp.”Wenna Coldspindle
Orla says there was a keeper before her: Old Hallam, who kept the Light forty years, and went down into the cave one storm to fetch a light he'd seen washed in, and never came up. A loose end of the Lattice, I think, come in from past the Gate. And whatever came in with it has been weaving ever since, out of every thread the tide brings. Go down at slack water. Find Hallam, if anything's left of him. And find what he found.
“You found it, then. The Tideloom. It's still drifting down there in the dark, pulsing, every thread of it unspooling into the tide. It doesn't want anything, friend. It's like the little ones: it only weaves. You decide. Bind it to the Light, or cut it loose and let the sea have its threads.”Wenna Coldspindle
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
Wenna weaves the Tideloom's longest thread into the wick of the Greywatch lamp. Far above, the Light flares blue-white, and in the cave the great medusa rises toward it and hangs there, pulsing slow. Every loose thread the tide brings will come to the Light now, and stay.
You cut the thread that moors it to the cave. At slack water the Tideloom drifts out through the cave mouth, dimming, its threads trailing after it: out past the headland, past the Gate's light, beyond anything Wenna can count. Whatever is out there will have them back.
Go and tell the harbourmaster her boats can go out. Then go up to Orla. She found something on the shingle at low tide, she says, and she won't tell me what. She wants to show you.
“There. On the shingle, where the threads came in: a boat. Not one of ours, not anyone's I know. A little hull of something like glass, no oars, no sail, and a single thread running from its bow back out to sea. Hallam's logbook says the old keepers saw one once, long ago, the winter before the Lattice was woven. Your Weaver went white when I showed her. Ask her, not me.”Orla Penwarden
Orla showed you, then. I'll tell you what I told her, which is all any Weaver is ever told. Before the Lattice there was only the Ravel: every thread in the world loose and tangling, and nothing holding. Then a boat of glass came in on the tide with one thread in its bow, and the first Weavers followed the thread out to where it was tied, and wove the Lattice inward from there. The end they tied off, the edge that keeps the cloth from fraying, they called the Selvage. It's a children's song, friend. It was a children's song. Go down to the boat. Orla says things have been coming in along its thread at night. Bring me what they leave.
“Look at it. It isn't Lattice-thread. It's older, plainer, spun tighter than anything in the world. And it pulls two ways. One end runs out to sea, along the boat's line. The other end pulls inland, east, toward the Gate.”Wenna Coldspindle
Since the King fell the Gate has bled threads out into the world. This thread says it's drawing them in. Go to Emberwatch. Petra Dunmore has watched the Gate every night for twenty years, and Gatewarden Ysolde keeps it. If anything has changed, they'll have seen it first.
“Drawing in, yes. Since the new moon the Gate's stopped bleeding and started breathing in, and everything loose in Cinderreach goes crawling to it: those knots you cut up, threads out of the ash, the glow off the Lattice itself. Petra says it's like a cloth being pulled from one corner. I say I don't care what it's like, so long as someone stops it.”Gatewarden Ysolde
There are stones round the Gate older than Emberwatch, older than anything. Hem stakes, Petra calls them: the Lattice was pegged to the land with them, like a sheet on a drying green. Something is working them loose, one thread at a time. Pale things, like empty cloaks. Drive the stakes back in, and cut down whatever is pulling at them.
“The stakes have words on them, did you see? Under the ash. I've taken rubbings for twenty years and never read them till tonight: 'Where the end is tied, the cloth will hold. Where it frays, the boat will come. Send a weaver.' The boat hasn't come for the threads, friend. It has come for a weaver. For her.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
Your Weaver read that rubbing over my shoulder, went white, and went. She's gone back to the coast to wake that boat and go out along its line. She can't do it alone. They'll come up out of the sea for the light of it, the way they always come for the work. Go and stand with her.
“Feel that? It's awake. The line's gone taut, all the way out: past the headland, past anything. It will carry us out to where it's tied. The song only says what the first Weavers did when they got there. It doesn't say who came back.”Wenna Coldspindle
The boat will take us. Hold on to the gunwale and don't look over the side: past the headland there's no water out there, only the weave thinning to nothing. At the end of the line is the knot the first Weavers tied. If the boat came for a weaver, it's because the knot is coming undone. And someone will be keeping the crossing. There is always someone keeping the crossing.
“You saw her face, under the hood. Hesper was a Weaver; the first of us, maybe. She tied this end off and stayed to keep it, and the Ravel's been wearing her away ever since, one thread at a time. Now the end is loose, and it's in our hands. Tie it off again the old way, and the Lattice holds, close and tight, nothing in and nothing out. Or leave it a loose end, the way Hesper never dared, and let the cloth breathe.”Wenna Coldspindle
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
Wenna takes the Ravel's last loose end and ties it into the Selvage with her own thread, a knot her grandmother taught her on a kitchen loom. The weave draws in tight from the edge of the world to the Gate, and far inland, for the first time since the King fell, the Gate goes still.
Wenna weaves the end back in loosely, the way you finish a cloth that is still being woven. Out at the edge of the world the weave breathes. Threads drift in through the Gate and out again, and somewhere beyond the Selvage, something notices.
Tell Orla her boat won't come back to the shingle. It's where it belongs now. Then go up to Ysolde. She sent word while we were out there: the Gate did something the night we sailed. She wouldn't put it in a letter.
“The night you sailed, the Gate went dark. Dark, friend, not quiet: for an hour there was no light in it at all, and when it came back it came with a sound like a loom starting up. A very big loom, a very long way off. Petra's been through every rubbing she has. There were two boats once, she says. One went out to the sea's edge. Nobody ever wrote down where the other one went.”Gatewarden Ysolde
Petra hasn't slept since the Gate went dark. She's been through every rubbing she ever took, looking for the other boat, and tonight she came down the steps white as ash and said she'd found it. Not where it went. What it went to do. Go and hear her. Then I think you'd better take it to Wenna. She went home to her shrine after the Selvage. I don't think she's slept either.
“'One boat to the edge, to tie the end. One boat to the back, to keep it.' To the back. Petra thinks that means the back of the world, somewhere past the peaks. It doesn't. Every cloth has a right side and a wrong side, friend: the side you show, and the side where all the knots are. My grandmother kept this shrine, and her grandmother before her. I always thought we kept it for the threads. Look at the mere. Look how still it is. There hasn't been a ripple on it since the night the Gate went dark.”Wenna Coldspindle
Since the mere went still, things have been climbing out of it. They look like whoever is standing on the shore when they come up: the same coat, the same walk, the same face, all of it made of the mere's own silver. Tavish's lads saw themselves walk out of the water two nights back and ran all the way to Highwatch. Don't run. They break like ice if you hit them hard enough. Bring me the pieces.
“Hold one up. No, not to your face: to the shrine. See? The shrine is the wrong way round in it, the door on the wrong side, the bell on the left. And look past it, under the water, where the mere should be black. There. Lying on the bed of the mere, keel up. A boat of glass.”Wenna Coldspindle
Before I sing anything up off the bottom of a mere, I want to know how deep it lies and what lies down there with it. I've weighted four lines with spindle-whorls. Drop them in from the rocks round the shore and let them run. And mind the pike. There were never pike in Frostmere. There are now, and you can see clean through them.
“Wenna sent you with those lines? Then you'll want to see what my lads hauled up after you'd gone. Look at the ends. Not bitten. Knotted. Tied off neat as you like, every one, in a knot I've only ever seen in one place: the old warp anchors up at the Pillars, the ones the first Weavers tied. Something down there is tying off whatever comes into the mere. Thirty winters I've kept these peaks. Nobody ever told me there was anyone down there.”Tavish Rime
Wenna's gone down to the shore with her frame. She says if the boat is knotting her lines it's awake already, and an awake boat can be sung up. I told her the last time she sang a boat awake you sailed off the edge of the world in it. She said yes. Go and stand with her. Everything in that mere will come up for the sound.
“It came up keel first, then rolled over, like something turning in its sleep. Look at the thread in its bow. Hesper's ran out to sea. This one runs straight down into the mere, and the mere lets it. When we get in, hold on, and don't look at the water. You'll see us in it, upside down, getting in.”Wenna Coldspindle
Down there is the back of everything: every knot the world was ever tied with, every loose end it hides. Hesper had a sister, friend. It's in the rubbing, if you know how to read it: 'The one to tie, the other to keep.' Hesper tied the end. Her sister went down to keep the back of the cloth. Ten thousand winters keeping the back of the cloth, alone, in the dark, with nothing but her own reflection for company. I'd like to think she's still herself. The things that climb out of the mere make me think otherwise.
“She's free of it. Look at her: she's barely more than a shadow on the water herself, and she kept the back of the world tidy with those hands for longer than there have been people to wear it. Her Reflection is gone, broken into the mere. And now she's asking us, friend, as if we would know: does she stay down here and keep the knots, or come up into a light she has never seen?”Wenna Coldspindle
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
Ilsabet stands in the bow as the boat rises, and for the first time in ten thousand winters she sees the right side of the world: snow, and stars, and the shrine on the shore with its bell on the proper side. She weeps. Far below, a knot that nobody is minding begins, very slowly, to slip.
Ilsabet takes Wenna's frame and goes back into the dark, where the knots hang like stars. 'Someone has to,' she says. 'Someone always has to.' Above, Frostmere takes its first ripple in a month, and the water moves again.
Tavish should hear it from you. He's kept those peaks thirty winters without knowing what lay under them. Then go up to Highwatch. Lord Aldric sent a rider down while we were below, and his riders don't come off the Keep for nothing.
“My lookouts saw it from the walls: a light going down into the mere, and an hour after, a line of figures walking west over the pass, up out of the water, silver in the moonlight. We counted forty before the cloud came over. Her Reflection broke, you say. I believe you. I think it broke into pieces, and I think the pieces walked. West over that pass is Cinderreach, friend, and the Gate. And Petra writes that the Gate has started up its loom again.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
Forty of them, every one walking in the last one's footprints, like geese on a wet field. They left a track, friend. My huntsmen went up to the pass at first light and came back saying the snow up there is full of silver: footprints filled to the brim with it, as if the mere itself had got up and walked. And the frost wolves on the pass have gone the same colour. Follow the track west. Where it comes down you'll be in Cinderreach, and Ysolde will want to know what is coming down her hill.
“They came down at dusk. My watch on the palisade saw themselves come down it: their own coats, their own spears, their own faces, all of it silver. Half of them still won't go up on the wall. And it didn't stop at us. It walked straight past the camp to the Gate, like pilgrims to a shrine, and it's there now. Petra's been watching it all day through her glass. She says they look like they're working.”Gatewarden Ysolde
What is said here follows the choice you made at the end of The Wrong Side.
Forty of them, every one walking in the last one's footprints, like geese on a wet field. Ilsabet came up to the Keep with Wenna last night. She stood on the wall where my lookouts stood, looked west for an hour, and said one thing: 'They are mine. Every one of them is wearing my face under whatever face it wears now.' Then she asked me which way west was. She'd never needed to know. Follow their track over the pass. Where it comes down you'll be in Cinderreach, and Ysolde will want to know what is coming down her hill.
Forty of them, every one walking in the last one's footprints, like geese on a wet field. Wenna sent a line up from her shrine this morning: the thread down to the Underweave had a knot tied in it overnight, and Wenna says the knot reads 'mine'. Ilsabet knows, then, down there in the dark. Follow their track over the pass. Where it comes down you'll be in Cinderreach, and Ysolde will want to know what is coming down her hill.
Not all of them went to the Gate. Some stayed out on the ash wearing my watch's faces, and at night they walk the road calling the watch by name, in the watch's own voices. I won't have it. Break them, and take Petra what's left of them. She says a mirror remembers the last thing it saw, and she wants to know what these saw.
“Look. Hold the silver flat, in the shade, so. It keeps a picture, very faint: the last thing it saw before you broke it. Here, the pass, and the snow. Here, my own tent, from outside. And this one... this is the Gate, friend. From the far side. The Gate has no far side. Something has been looking at it from where nothing ought to be standing.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
Go out to the Gate and you'll see what they've been doing. They've built a loom. The Gate is one beam of it, and thirty paces in front of it they've woven a second gate out of their own silver, the wrong way round, the way the shrine was the wrong way round in Wenna's shard. Between the two they've strung a warp, and the ones that look like weavers work it with heddles of silver. Cut the heddles. A loom can't weave without them.
“Did you look at the cloth? Coming off the loom, between the two gates? I did, from the ridge, with my glass. It's Cinderreach, friend. Very small and very fine and the wrong way round: Emberwatch with its gate on the east side, the crater on the wrong hand, the ash going up instead of down. They're weaving the world again. Backwards. And they've woven enough of it that the twin gate opens onto it. I've written to Wenna.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
Wenna came at a run when she read my letter. She's at the twin gate now, the Looking Arch she calls it, with her frame up. She says she can't unweave what they've made from out here: it has to be cut from the inside, from the Looking Side, and for that the arch has to open to us and not only to them. She's going to weave herself a way in. Everything silver for a mile will come for her the moment she starts.
“It's open. I've kept the Lattice Gate twenty years and never seen the like. You can see through it, and what you see is my own camp, back to front, and the ash falling up into the sky like sparks off a forge. Something is standing in the middle of the road in there, waiting. It looks like a woman. It looks like it's made of all of them.”Gatewarden Ysolde
What is said here follows the choice you made at the end of The Wrong Side; otherwise it is as above.
Wenna came at a run when she read my letter, and she didn't come alone. Ilsabet stood in front of that silver arch a long time, then laid her hand flat on it, the way you'd touch a window, and said: 'She's in there. She's whole.' Wenna wouldn't tell me who she meant. Wenna says the thing has to be cut from the inside, from the Looking Side, and for that the arch has to open to us and not only to them. She's going to weave herself a way in. Everything silver for a mile will come for her.
“It's open. I've kept the Lattice Gate twenty years and never seen the like. You can see through it, and what you see is my own camp, back to front, and the ash falling up into the sky like sparks off a forge. Something is standing in the middle of the road in there, waiting. It looks like Ilsabet. Ilsabet says it isn't.”Gatewarden Ysolde
Wenna says the cloth they've woven is thin as yet, thin enough to cut: get to the heart of it, to whatever is weaving it, and the whole thing comes apart. I don't pretend to understand. I understand it's my camp in there, and I'll not have my camp the wrong way round. Take a group. The silver in there has learned every face it ever saw, and it saw a great many on the road from Frostmere.
“She's lying in pieces on her own silver road, and still talking. Forty voices, and all of them hers. She says her name is Tebasli. She says it was her name all along, only she had to read it from the other side. She says she never asked to be anybody's reflection. And now she's asking what we mean to do with her.”Gatewarden Ysolde
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
Tebasli gathers her pieces and stands, and for the first time the face she wears is no one else's. She walks away down the silver road toward a gate of her own. Behind you the Looking Arch goes dark and is only a mirror again: in it you can see her, very small, still walking. At the Lattice Gate the Forty's loom falls still.
You carry her north over the pass in a sack of sailcloth, forty pieces chiming at every step, and lay them in the still water by the shrine. The mere closes over her like a breath on a glass. Wherever Ilsabet is tonight, when she looks into still water there is someone looking back. At the Lattice Gate the Forty's loom falls still.
The Forty's loom has stopped. Go and tell Wenna. She's still at the arch with her frame and she won't leave it until she hears it from someone who was inside. Then come and stand at the Gate with me a while. I want you to listen to it.
“You heard it too. Don't tell me you didn't: you've gone white. The Forty's loom is stopped and the twin is a mirror again, and the Gate is still weaving. It never stopped. It started the night the Gate went dark, before any of them came over the pass. They didn't start the Gate's loom, friend. They came to it because it was running, the way moths come to a lamp. Somebody on the far side of the Gate is weaving. And I've taken rubbings off that arch for twenty years, and I've just found the one place on it where the words run the other way.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
What is said here follows the choice you made at the end of The Wrong Side; otherwise it is as above.
The Forty's loom has stopped. Go and tell Wenna, and Ilsabet: they're both still at the arch, and neither will leave it until they hear it from someone who was inside. Ilsabet will want to know what became of her. Then come and stand at the Gate with me a while. I want you to listen to it.
Twenty years of rubbings off that Gate, friend, and I never once read them in a glass. Why would I? There's a band of letters cut round its three footing stones that I always took for masons' marks, and last night, for no reason I can give you, I held one up to my shaving mirror. It read. It's writing, the wrong way round. Take me fresh rubbings off all three stones, and then do what I can't make myself do: hold them up to the Looking Arch. It's only a mirror again. It ought to be the right sort of mirror for this.
“Read it to me again. Slowly. 'To whoever keeps the Gate after me. I have kept its far face as long as I could. The thread is short. Send me the loose ends. Aubrel Corrow, Gatewarden.' Aubrel Corrow. The first Gatewarden. The oldest roll in the camp has him walking into the Gate the summer it was raised, three hundred years ago, with twelve of his watch, 'to keep its far face'. Every Gatewarden since has read that line and taken it for a figure of speech. Ysolde has it cut over her door.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
What is said here follows the choice you made at the end of The Looking Side; otherwise it is as above.
Only the words when you hand it in change:
“You didn't read it, did you. Don't look at me like that, it's all over your face. She read it to you. Tebasli, walking her silver road in the glass, very small: she turned round, looked at the rubbings, and read them out, because on her side they run the right way. 'To whoever keeps the Gate after me. I have kept its far face as long as I could. The thread is short. Send me the loose ends. Aubrel Corrow, Gatewarden.' The first Gatewarden. The oldest roll in the camp has him walking into the Gate the summer it was raised, three hundred years ago, with twelve of his watch, 'to keep its far face'. Every Gatewarden since has taken that for a figure of speech.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
'Send me the loose ends.' Well, something is sending them. Since the Forty's loom stopped, the watch has seen them coming in over the ash from the east: empty cloaks walking along on their own hems, tangles of old thread rolling like thistledown, every one of them going the same way, and every one of them going to the Gate. Ilsa calls them the Drawn. Go out to where their tracks come together and cut a few of them down, and take Ysolde a length of whatever they're made of. She's been asking for proof since breakfast.
“Hold it up. No, let go of it. Watch. There. Wherever you drop it, it lies down pointing at the Gate, every length, like a needle in a compass. Wenna wrote this morning: there's not a loose thread left in the Selvage, she says, nor a slack one in the Underweave. It's all walking here. Something on the far side of my Gate is drawing in every loose end in the world, and it's drawing hard.”Gatewarden Ysolde
Two nights now my watch on the wall has seen men come out of the Gate after dark. Out, mind. Nothing has ever come out of the Gate. They walk among the Drawn and gather up the thread like gleaners in a stubble field, and carry it back in by the armful. They wear our livery, near enough: the old cut, the badge on the shoulder. Ilsa went out to them with a lantern and came back saying they're woven. Woven all through, like a tapestry of a man. Bring me their badges. I want to read the backs.
“Every Gatewarden's badge has its wearer's name cut on the back. Mine has. This one says Hob Tallis. This one, Merra Vell. Corwin Ashe. Old Lusk, it says, just that. They're the first watch, friend. The twelve who walked into the Gate with Aubrel Corrow. Three hundred years, and they're still in their livery and still on duty, carrying thread to him. I've written to Wenna. I think somebody has to go through after them.”Gatewarden Ysolde
Wenna's come. She walked from Frostmere in two days, which can't be done, and she's standing at the Gate with a spindle in her hand and a look on her I don't like. She says nobody goes through a door like that without a thread tied to this side of it, or they don't come back, and she means to send one through ahead of you. The moment she starts, everything that's been drawn to the Gate will want what's on her spindle.
“There. Feel it? Put your hand on it. It went in at the front of the Gate and came out of the back, and kept going on into the air, and then something on the far side took hold of the end and pulled it tight. Gently, the way you'd let someone know you'd got it. He knows we're coming. Follow the thread round behind the Gate. Where it goes into the air, you go in after it.”Wenna Coldspindle
The far side of the Gate. Sixty years I've woven the Lattice and I never once thought of it having a far side, the way you never think about the back of your own head. Every place the Gate opens onto, every one of those impossible places past it: somebody has to weave them, friend, and keep weaving them, or they fray. He's been doing it alone for three hundred years with whatever thread he had. Take a group. Take my thread with you, and don't let go of it.
“He's standing at his loom with your hand on his arm, and he's weeping, and he's three hundred years old. He says the thread ran short a long time ago: he's been unpicking the old places to weave the new ones, and his watch have been gathering up the world's loose ends for him, and it still isn't enough. He says somebody has to keep the far face. He says he's tired. And he's asking you, because you're the one who came.”Wenna Coldspindle
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
Wenna's thread goes twice round his wrist, and you walk him back along it, out of the back of the Gate into the ash and the daylight. Behind him the Gone-Through come out one at a time, and in the sun they come gently undone and lie down as thread. He is very old in the light. He asks for a chair, and to be told who keeps the Gate now. At the Lattice Gate the drawing stops.
You put the end of Wenna's thread into his hand. He closes his fingers on it and stands a while, and then he goes back to his loom. The Gone-Through take up their gleaning again, slower now, not hungry. Out on the ash the Drawn lie down where they stand and stay there. Wenna will send him thread, a spindle at a time, as long as she lives. At the Lattice Gate the drawing slackens.
Before we came out he told you where the thread comes from. I saw your face. All the thread in the world, he said, every warp the Lattice was ever strung on, was spun on one spindle, and the spindle was the crown on the Spire in the north, before it was broken. That's why it ran short. Nobody has spun a yard since. Go and tell Ysolde, she's owed that. Then go north and look at the Spire for me. Lord Aldric's keep looks straight at it.
“You're telling me the crown on the Spire was a spindle. Every child in Highwatch knows it broke the night the old king fell, and every one of them has looked up at it all their lives, the six shards and the two snapped off short. Well. Come up on the wall and look at it now. That line of light running down out of the broken crown into the ice. It started at dusk. It's moving, like thread running off a wheel. Something has started spinning again.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
What is said here follows the choice you made at the end of The Far Side.
Before we came out he told you where the thread comes from. He's told me twice more since, sitting in Ysolde's chair with a blanket on his knees. All the thread in the world, every warp the Lattice was ever strung on, was spun on one spindle, and the spindle was the crown on the Spire in the north, before it was broken. That's why it ran short. Nobody has spun a yard since. Go and tell Ysolde how it ended, she's owed that. Then go north and look at the Spire for him. He can't make the climb any more.
Before we came out he told you where the thread comes from. I've thought of nothing else since. All the thread in the world, every warp the Lattice was ever strung on, was spun on one spindle, and the spindle was the crown on the Spire in the north, before it was broken. That's why it ran short, and why my spindles won't keep him long. Go and tell Ysolde how it ended, she's owed that. Then go north and look at the Spire for me. Lord Aldric's keep looks straight at it.
All night it's been running, that line, down out of the broken crown and away east into the ice above the sea. I sent two riders after it at first light. They came back with their horses lathered and their beards white, and they wouldn't tell me what they'd seen, only that out there the snow is being combed. Combed, they said, like a fleece. Go and see where the line goes in, and bring me back whatever is lying there.
“Thread. You've brought me thread. Feel it: it's colder than the snow it came out of, and it won't melt in my hand. My riders weren't mad, then. Do you know there's a skipping rhyme every child in Highwatch learns before they can read? 'The King's Spinster spins the snow, round and round and down below.' I skipped to it myself. I never once thought it was about anyone.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
My riders saw more than they said. They've told me now, over a great deal of brandy. The drifts round the Spire are moving. Not blowing: crawling, every long heap of them humping along like a caterpillar, all of them going east to where the line goes in, and every one combed out as fine as carded wool. The men are calling them the Carded. Break a few, and take what's left of them to Wenna at her shrine. If anyone alive knows what the King's Spinster was, it's her.
“Carded. Your lord's men have the right word and not the first idea what it means. This is fleece, friend: frost carded into rolags, ready for the spindle. Somebody is carding the north's snow and spinning it, and there's only one spindle in the world it could be spun on. Gyda Thrum. The King's Spinster. The Weavers had her name on the first page of every pattern book: she spun the warp the Lattice was strung on, every yard of it, on the crown of the Spire. We thought she died the night it broke. Weavers never think about spinners. That was always our trouble.”Wenna Coldspindle
She had maids, Gyda Thrum. A dozen girls of the king's household to card for her, and they went into the ice with her, I'd always supposed, the night the cold came down. If she's spinning again they're carding again, and I'd lay my best reel it's them combing the drifts round the Spire. And there's worse. The two shards the king snapped off his crown fell into the snow below it, and the crown was the spindle's whorl. Without them she spins slowly. With them she could spin as she did before the king fell. Find the pieces before her maids do.
“They'd been at them already. You saw: the snow round every piece was combed flat toward the sea, where they've been dragging them, and they'd cut a stair down into the glacier to drag them by. Frost-woven, those girls, frost carded and spun and woven through them until there's nothing else left, and still in the king's household's aprons. I'm going down to the foot of her line. I want to feel the other end of it.”Wenna Coldspindle
A line runs out of the crown and into the ice, and every line has two ends. I'm going to put my reel on it and wind, very gently, until whoever has hold of the other end feels it and looks up. It's the oldest way there is of knocking on a spinner's door. The moment I start, everything she's carding will come for the reel. Stand with me.
“She felt it. The line went slack in my hands, and then it pulled, once and twice, the way you'd let somebody know you'd heard them. Down the Carders' stair, then. It goes all the way to the foot of the Spire, I'd think, and the line goes down beside it. She's asking us in.”Wenna Coldspindle
Down there is the woman who spun every thread I've ever woven, and I've no more idea what to say to her than a pot has to its potter. Be civil. She'll be frightened, or she'll be angry, and she'll certainly be cold. Whatever she's spinning has the north's winter in it: you'll feel it on the stair. Take a group, and don't stand where she's carding.
“She's frozen to the waist in the glacier, and she has the line of light in her hand still, the way she held it the night the king broke the crown on her. She says she's spinning to make up all the thread the world has gone without, and she can feel how short it's run. She asks you for the crown's pieces, so she can spin as she used to and finish before she's finished, and the north will thaw for it. Or, she says, you can take the thread out of her hand. Then she'll stop, and the ice will let her go.”Wenna Coldspindle
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
You lay the crown's pieces in the snow at her feet, and the last of her maids carry them up the line, and far above you something grinds and settles. The spindle turns. Gyda Thrum spins, very fast, humming, and the line of light runs up out of the ice as thick as a bell rope. On the terrace the Carded lie down and run away to the sea as water. In Highwatch, for the first time anyone can remember, the eaves are dripping.
You close your hand over hers and take the line out of it. It runs away up through the ice like a kite string cut. The wheel stops. Her maids lie down in their own snow. The ice round Gyda Thrum's waist cracks across, and she steps out of the glacier for the first time since the old king fell, sits down hard, laughs, and asks for something hot. High above the Spire the crown stops turning.
Before we came up she told you why the king broke his crown. I watched your face. Somebody came to Highwatch to ask him for it, she said: somebody who doesn't spin and doesn't weave and has never once made anything, who only ever cuts. The king would sooner snap his crown over his knee than hand it to her, and he did. Go and tell Lord Aldric, he keeps the keep's books. Then come to the Pillars. Tavish has sent for me, and his rider wouldn't say why.
“Look at the warp, friend. Not frayed. Not worn through. Cut. Every thread on the north face of the Pillars, cut clean across in a line at the height of a woman's hand, sometime between dusk and the change of the watch, and not a track in the snow. I've seen frayed rope, and I've seen rope the rats have had. This was done with shears.”Tavish Rime
What is said here follows the choice you made at the end of The King's Spinster.
Before we came up she told you why the king broke his crown. I watched your face. Somebody came to Highwatch to ask him for it, she said: somebody who doesn't spin and doesn't weave and has never once made anything, who only ever cuts. The king would sooner snap his crown over his knee than hand it to her, and he did. And now the spindle's turning again. Go and tell Lord Aldric, if you can find him under the drip from his eaves. Then come to the Pillars. Tavish has sent for me, and his rider wouldn't say why.
Before we came up she told you why the king broke his crown. I watched your face. Somebody came to Highwatch to ask him for it, she said: somebody who doesn't spin and doesn't weave and has never once made anything, who only ever cuts. The king would sooner snap his crown over his knee than hand it to her, and he did. Go and tell Lord Aldric. Gyda's sitting by his fire with her feet in a bucket of warm water and she'll tell him herself, I'd think, at length. Then come to the Pillars. Tavish has sent for me, and his rider wouldn't say why.
Look at them, friend. Hand height, all along the north face, and not a mark in the snow. Whoever did it walked in and out on nothing. And they left their tools behind, or their tools stayed: there are shears in the snow up there that walk about on their own and snip at whatever's still standing. Break them before they get round to the south face. Then bring the cut ends to Wenna. She'll read them. I can't.
“Shears. Hand shears, the sort a finisher keeps on a string at her belt to snip the loose ends off a cloth. Look at this end, friend: no fray. One stroke, and the shears so sharp the thread didn't feel it. There was only ever one craft that cuts like this. It isn't mine.”Wenna Coldspindle
Weavers weave. We never once finish a thing: we cut it off the loom and hand it on, and it goes to the Cloth Guild to be finished, fulled and stretched and cropped and folded, and the guild has a Cutter-off to take it off the loom in the first place. Maud Kerf was the last of them. My grandmother's grandmother wouldn't sit down in a room with her. When the Lattice was first woven it went to the guild's Tenter Ground in the far south below Harrowford, to be hooked out on the frames to its width, and its edge has been on those hooks ever since. If she's cutting it off at this end, she'll be unhooking it at that one. Go and see. I'll follow when I've tied off what I can.
“You'll be from the weaver. I've kept the frames since the guild went, out of habit mostly, and grazed my sheep between them. Then last week they came back up the river: the Finishers, in the guild's aprons, and her with them. They're unhooking the old list. Thirty-one frames, and it's off nine already.”Hob Lister
A cloth wants to shrink, see. Wet it and it draws up like a sheep in the rain. So you hook it out on the frames by its two edges, the lists, and let it dry to the width you want, and it keeps that width ever after, mostly. The guild hooked the Lattice's list out on these frames when it was new. Never took it off. Every hook they pull, it draws up a little, and somewhere a field's a yard shorter than it was. The Finishers have got my hooks in their aprons. Get them back, and hook the list on again where it's come off.
“Feel that? No, you can't, you've not the hands for it. The list's taut again. It was going slack under my fingers like a sail when the wind drops. I'll tell you a thing my father told me: the Lattice never shrank an inch in a thousand years, and he'd never once heard why. It was these hooks. Nobody remembered.”Hob Lister
Hob's hooks will hold it, but the list's been drawing up all week and it has to be stretched back out to its width before the hooks can take it. I've brought my stretcher down from the Pillars. It's slow work. And every Finisher on the river will feel the cloth moving under their hands and come to see who's moving it. Stand with me.
“There. Thirty-one frames and the list on every one, and the cloth out to its width. Somewhere north of here a field's a yard longer this morning and the farmer's wondering where it came from. Now, friend. The Cutting House. She's in there, and she's got the guild's great shears with her.”Wenna Coldspindle
The guild finished its cloth in the Cutting House: cropped the nap off it with the great shears, as long as a man and heavier, and folded it, and sent it out. Maud Kerf's down there now, folding. I don't know what she thinks she has to fold. Bring me her shears, friend. Not the great ones: hers, the little ones on the string at her belt. Those are the ones that cut the warp. Then we'll see what's to be done with them.
“She told you, then. It's finished, she said, it's had its edges woven and its far side drawn through and its slack spun up, and a cloth that's finished comes off the loom. She isn't wrong, friend. That's the trouble with her. It is finished, near enough. It's only that we're all still living on it.”Wenna Coldspindle
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
You set the shears' blades against the edge of the folding table and lean on them, and they go with a sound like a bell cracked. Maud Kerf makes no sound at all. She folds her hands in her apron and looks at the two halves on the floor for a long time, and then she gets up and walks out of the Cutting House, and down the river toward the sea, and the Finishers lay their shears down on the frames as they go by and follow her.
You take the shears up the stair and out onto the Tenter Ground, Maud Kerf behind you, and hold them out to Wenna. Wenna looks at them a long while before she ties their string to her belt. 'Not yet,' she says to the Cutter-off. 'When it's done I'll tell you, and you can watch.' Maud Kerf unties her apron and gives it to you, since she won't be needing it, and sits down on the grass with Hob.
Go and tell Tavish, friend. He'll want to hear it from you, and he'll want to tie the warp off himself, the stubborn old goat. And ask him what else he's found on the Pillars. His rider said notches. Notches, cut in the stone, straight as a rule. That's not her. She cuts. She never once in her life measured anything.
“Three. My grandfather's grandfather kept the books that night, and he wrote it plain, and nobody's read it since because nobody reads the books: three came to Highwatch the night the crown broke. A spinner, who came for the thread. A cutter, who came for the cloth. And a third, who said nothing and asked for nothing, and measured the king from his head to his feet with a yardwand before she left, and wrote nothing down. The notches on your Pillars, friend. Somebody is measuring the Lattice. And when you've measured a thing, it's because you mean to make something to fit it.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
What is said here follows the choice you made at the end of The Cutter-off.
Go and tell Tavish, friend. He'll want to hear it from you that the shears are broken, and he'll want to tie the warp off himself, the stubborn old goat. And ask him what else he's found on the Pillars. His rider said notches. Notches, cut in the stone, straight as a rule. That's not her. She cuts. She never once in her life measured anything.
Go and tell Tavish, friend. He'll want to see these shears on my belt with his own eyes before he believes it, and he'll want to tie the warp off himself, the stubborn old goat. And ask him what else he's found on the Pillars. His rider said notches. Notches, cut in the stone, straight as a rule. That's not her: she's sitting on the Tenter Ground with Hob, shelling peas. She never once in her life measured anything.
Tavish has sent another rider. The notches don't stop at the Pillars, friend. There are yardwands staked in the snow south of them, an ell apart, all the way down the mountain to the foot of my north field, with tapes strung between them that coil up and strike at you like adders when you go near. Somebody is laying a line across my country, and it has come as far as my door. Pull them up. Take whatever you learn to the weaver.
“An ell. The guild's ell, see the mark burnt in the end: the Cloth Guild's own measure, the one they kept in brass on the guildhall wall so nobody could cheat it. Nobody's measured by the guild's ell in a hundred years. I know whose it is, friend. I've been hoping I was wrong since Aldric said 'wrote nothing down'.”Wenna Coldspindle
The guild buried its own, friend, in its own ground, and it had its own woman to lay them out: to wash them and close their eyes and measure them for their winding-sheets, and sew the sheets to fit. Agnes Ellery. She measured my grandmother's grandmother for hers. Measured, never wrote it down: she never forgot a measure in her life, they said. The yardwands go south and west across the whole country to the Lych Field, on the downs above the Gullhaven road. If she's measuring the Lattice, I know what for. Go and see.
“You'll be from the weaver. I'm the sexton here, what there is of here. I keep the grass down and ring the bell when there's anybody to ring it for, which there hasn't been since the guild went. Then she came back, and her women with her in their black, and they've staked out every grave in the field. Not the graves, I said to her. The field. She's measuring the field. And she smiled at me as if I'd said a clever thing.”Dunstan Pell
It's a pattern, see. Chalked on the grass the way a tailor chalks a cloth before he cuts it, only it's the whole field, and there's more of it every morning. And the forms, the guild's old dress forms from the fitting room, walk about on it at night with the half-made sheet pinned on them, trying it for size. Rub her lines out. Take the pins off the forms. A sheet that isn't pinned can't be cut.
“Look at these. Steel, and every one of them bent the same way, like they'd been pushed through something thicker than linen. I've buried a lot of people, friend. I never in my life saw a pin bent like that. Go and tell the weaver it's a pattern. She'll know what of. I'd rather not.”Dunstan Pell
A shroud, friend. She's chalked out a winding-sheet to fit the world, and she's nearly done. I can't stop a measurer measuring, nobody can. But I can lie to her. I'll weave a wrong measure into her pattern, an ell in the wrong place where she won't look for it, and whatever she cuts to it will never fit. It'll take me a while, and every form in the field will feel the pattern change and come walking. Stand with me.
“There. It's out by an ell, right through the middle, and she'll never find it, because she never once in her life checked a measure: she never needed to. Anything she cuts to that will come up short. Now, friend. The Winding House. She's sewing in there, and the guild's lay figure's on its feet with her.”Wenna Coldspindle
The guild laid its dead out in the Winding House, and fitted them, and sewed them in. There's a fitting room with a figure in it as big as a barn door, all joints, that the guild's tailors turned to whatever shape they needed to cut a coat to: it's walking, Pell says. And there's the loft, where she sews. Bring me the sheet, friend. Whatever she's made of it, don't let her finish it.
“She said it's for when it's over. That's all. Not that she wanted it over: that it would be, one day, and somebody had to have the sheet ready, and who else was there? She isn't cruel, friend. She's the only one of us who ever looked at the end of a thing and didn't look away.”Wenna Coldspindle
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
You carry the sheet out of the Winding House and down onto the Lych Field, and Pell brings oil from the chapel lamp, and it burns slowly, the way good linen does, all night. Agnes Ellery stands at the lych gate and watches it go without a word. In the morning she breaks her yardwand across her knee and gives you the two halves, and walks away north along her own line of stakes, pulling them up as she goes.
You fold the sheet with Agnes Ellery, corner to corner the way the guild folded its linen, and it folds down smaller than it has any right to, until it fits in a weaver's basket. Wenna puts it in hers without looking at it. 'Short by an ell,' she says. 'It won't fit for a long while yet.' Agnes Ellery laughs for the first time in a hundred years, and gives you her veil, and goes out to help Pell with the grass.
Pell will want to hear it from you, and ring his bell. And, friend, Agnes left a coffer in the chapel, with chalk inside the lid. She never wrote a measure down in her life. If she wrote one down, it's because it wasn't hers to remember. Read it, and take it to Aldric. He keeps the books.
“Shoulders as wide as the world from the Cinderreach to the sea. A neck to go through the Lattice Gate. Arms the length of the Thornbrook. That's not the king's measure, friend, and it's not a shroud's: a shroud has no sleeves. That's a coat. Somebody sent the three of them, a spinner for the thread and a cutter for the cloth and a measurer for the fit. Somebody means to wear the Lattice. And they've been waiting for it to be finished.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
What is said here follows the choice you made at the end of The Winding House.
Pell will want to hear it from you, and ring his bell. And, friend, Agnes left a coffer in the chapel when she went, with chalk inside the lid. She never wrote a measure down in her life. If she wrote one down, it's because it wasn't hers to remember. Read it, and take it to Aldric. He keeps the books.
Pell will want to hear it from you, and ring his bell, though Agnes says it wants a new rope. And, friend, she's left her coffer open for you in the chapel, with chalk inside the lid. She says she never wrote a measure down in her life but that one, and she'd sooner you read it than she said it. Take it to Aldric. He keeps the books.
Boars are rooting through Millbrook's fields. Drive them off and Tobin will make it worth your while.
“My turnips thank you. My back thanks you more.”Tobin Greaves
Wolves have been taking sheep. Bring back pelts as proof.
“Fine pelts. Bess at the inn will pay well for these, but that's your business.”Tobin Greaves
My wagoner needs to reach Millbrook, and cutthroats have been prowling the road.
“Every crate arrived in one piece. You've a future in the trade.”Wila Thistledown
A smith's no use without leather for the straps and iron worth the name. Take a knife to the boars and wolves of the Vale, and smelt me some bars at my anvil: two ore to the bar. I'll sell you the knife.
“Supple hides and clean bars. You've the makings of a crafter. Come back with silversteel when the mountains let you have some.”Brannoc Ironvein
The old standing stones hum when the Lattice stirs. See what they're saying.
“Three nodes attuned. The stones remember the Weavers... and so, it seems, do you.”Elder Maren Tolliver
The watch caught a cutthroat who knows about the Choir. Hale wants you to decide his fate.
“It is done.”Captain Odric Hale
When you hand it in you choose one of these two. The choice is made once, for good.
He tells you of a hidden cache in the Thornwood.
Hale nods. The law holds, for now.
The forest is choking on its own growth. Thin it.
“The paths are clearer. The forest breathes easier.”Kael Swiftbough
Our healers need duskcap. It grows in shadowed hollows across the Thornwood. Cut it low, under the cap, or it spoils; I will show you how.
“These will save lives. Ours, and perhaps yours.”Ithrael of the Quiet Leaves
An old Vaelin hunter hid a cache somewhere east of the Heartroot. Rumor says it was never found.
“The old hunter had good taste in steel.”Kael Swiftbough
Reef snappers are nesting on the beaches and cutting the nets.
“Nets intact, fishermen happy, me less shouted at.”Harbormaster Ada Quill
Those touched by the Lattice can seek its Trial and walk a specialised path. Its stair goes down beneath the Nine Sisters, the old stones south-west of Harrowford.
“You have walked the Trial. Choose your path.”Elder Maren Tolliver
The Greywatch light went dark the night the bell started ringing. Rekindle it.
“The light shines again. Ships will find their way home.”Harbormaster Ada Quill
The Merrow's Due went down with a full hold. Find the wreck and the ledger.
“The ledger names names. Interesting names.”Harbormaster Ada Quill
Ember hounds hunt our supply lines. Cull the packs.
“The supply wagons will get through now.”Commander Ilsa Vey
The black glass of the Scar holds echoes of the Cinder Fall. Read them for me.
“So the Choir caused the Fall. Three hundred years of lies.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
Trolls block the high passes. My patrols can't get through.
“The passes are open. Highwatch owes you.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
Legends speak of a shrine where the old Weavers meditated. If it exists, it's somewhere near Frostmere.
“A Weaver shrine. The Lattice is older than any of us knew.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
Since the Crown broke, thread has been coming loose all over the mountains, and some of it gets up and walks. The Unwoven, I call them. Unmake the ones round my shrine before they unpick it.
“Better. I can hear myself count again.”Wenna Coldspindle
The Order kept lamps burning at its waymarks, and in Old Kaldris someone has lit them again. The Wickbound use them to draw thread down out of the sky. Put them out.
“Dark again. I never thought I'd be glad to see Kaldris dark.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
Three of my hunters went out to the old cache and didn't come back. I found their bows in the ferns and silk on every branch above them. Cut them down, if there's anything left inside to cut down.
“Alive, all three. They're saying the moths sang to them. I'll be glad if they ever stop saying it.”Kael Swiftbough
That dust off the moths' wings: breathe it and you spin, my cousins say. Bottle it and it fetches a fortune in Emberwatch, where they'll put anything in a lamp. Bring me ten wings' worth, and don't breathe.
“Pale as moonlight, and it shimmers in the jar. I'll say nothing of where it came from if you don't.”Orisande
Three climbers from Highwatch came up for the Pillars' ice last week, roped together the way they do. I found the rope. Then I found the glass webbing along the slope above, with shapes in it. Cut them down. Please.
“Alive, all three, and frozen to the marrow. One of them says the spiders were humming while they spun. The same tune the Pillars sing.”Tavish Rime
Highwatch's glaziers would give their back teeth for what those spiders spin: glass that bends and won't break. Bring me their spinnerets and I'll see the money goes somewhere it'll do some good. Mostly my roof.
“Clear as meltwater, and still warm somehow. Highwatch will have the best windows north of the Gate.”Tavish Rime
The little ones, driftlings the boys call them, have come into the shallows in their hundreds. They're no bigger than a bucket, but they'll sting a hull right through its tar. Clear the shoreline and I'll see you right.
“The harbour's dark again tonight, and I never thought I'd be glad of that. The Tidewardens pay their debts.”Harbormaster Ada Quill
You've been out among those lantern jellies? Then you've seen them glow. Bring me some of that glow, a good jarful. A light that burns without oil, without a wick, in salt water? Every captain on the coast will want one, and I mean to be the one who sells it to them.
“Still glowing, even in the jar. Look at it! I'll have to find out what it eats. Carefully.”Nim Saltwhistle
The boats are going out again, friend, thanks to you, and coming back with these in the nets: little knots of something like glass, tied tighter than any sailor ties. Old Gullhaven folk say a knot from the sea's edge keeps a boat from foundering. Bring me a handful. I'll hang one in every bow in the harbour.
“Six of them. Look how they catch the light. There'll not be a boat in Gullhaven without one by the new moon.”Hesk Wadebury
Every unpicker you leave standing pulls another thread out of the Lattice, and I've counted forty of them on the ash since dusk. They come apart easy enough when you hit them. It's the hitting them that takes the time.
“That's the ash quiet again, for a night or two. Emberwatch owes you a drink, and I'll see it's paid.”Gatewarden Ysolde
My sentries keep walking off their posts toward Frostmere in the night, because they see themselves waving from the shore. Two came back. Go down there and break every silver face you find, and I'll stop losing sentries.
“Not one of them waving at the walls tonight. I'll tell the watch they can look at the mere again. From a distance.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
Those pike in the mere: their scales are glass, clear as a window, and harder than any steel I've worked. Quench a blade in water with one of those in it and the edge comes out like frost on a pane. Bring me a handful and I'll make it worth your while.
“Clear as meltwater. Watch the edge come up when I quench it. There. Frost on a pane.”Grenna Coalbrow
Corporal Hale went out past the palisade last night because he heard his mother calling him from the road. His mother's been dead nine years. He came back. He says it was himself out there, calling in her voice. Break every silver face on that road, and I'll stop counting my watch every hour of the night.
“Hale slept last night, first time in a week. So did I.”Commander Ilsa Vey
Where they stood still on their way down, the Forty left silver lying in the ash like rain in a hoofprint, and every pool still holds the last thing it saw. I want them before the ash drinks them. Take these jars. And don't look into the pools too long. Hale did, and he says something looked back.
“Five jars, five pictures. The pass. The pass again. The camp. The Gate. And this one... a hand, reaching up through still water. I think that's the last thing Ilsabet's reflection saw before it broke.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
The Loose Ends roll in at night, and anything woven they brush against starts coming undone after them: tent canvas, the watch's cloaks, the bandages on my wounded. Corporal Hale woke up last night in his shirt and nothing else, with a line of his own blanket running out under the tent flap toward the Gate. Break them before the whole camp is sleeping in the ash.
“Hale's got his blanket back. Most of it. He's sewn the rest into a scarf, and he won't say why.”Commander Ilsa Vey
On the rise between the camp and the Gate there are twelve old stones every child at Emberwatch is told are the first watch's graves. They're not graves. I dug under one when I was young and very foolish, and there's nobody in it. Take rubbings of the names for me, as many as the weather's left. I want them next to the badges.
“Hob Tallis. Merra Vell. Corwin Ashe. Old Lusk. The same names as the badges, letter for letter. Twelve stones over twelve empty holes, and twelve wardens walking about in the ash with their arms full of thread. Somebody ought to tell them they were mourned.”Scholar Petra Dunmore
The thaw's bringing things up out of the ice east of the Spire. Spinning wheels, would you believe it, standing in rows where the old king's household left them, and the iron on them's better than anything I've ever forged. Bring me the treadle irons off four. I want to know how it was made before I'm too old to learn.
“Look at that. Never been near a fire in its life, and it's still sprung like a bow. Whoever made these didn't forge iron. They spun it.”Grenna Coalbrow
Meltwater, coming down off the Spire in the dead of winter, and the Tufts come down with it: the little Carded, rolling along in the runoff like dirty foam. They've got into my climbers' huts and they're carding the blankets. Break them before my climbers freeze in their beds.
“My huts are dry, my climbers are warm, and I've a blanket here carded so fine you could pull it through a ring. I'm keeping it.”Tavish Rime
My sheep, friend. Look at them. Shorn to the skin in November, every one, and shivering. It's the little ones, the Snippets: they run in under the flock in the grass and snip, snip, and the wool goes off on the wind like thistledown. Break them before my ewes take a chill.
“That's the last of them? Good. I've had the ewes in the Cutting House's old drying loft with a brazier. They're eating me out of house and home and they look like plucked chickens, but they're warm.”Hob Lister
Thirty years I've bought my cloth off Hob's frames, and last week he sends word there's none to be had: the Finishers are back on the Tenter Ground, cutting the bolts off the frames and leaving them lying in the wet. Wet's the death of good broadcloth. Bring me five, before they mildew, and you'll have the pick of what I make of them.
“Oh, that's guild cloth. Feel the nap on that. They cropped this with the great shears, you can tell by the way it lies. Nobody's cropped a cloth like this in a hundred years. I could weep. I won't. I'll make a coat.”Odette Fairweave
The bell, friend. The tapes have got up into the lych gate and wound themselves round the rope, every one, and if I put my hand to it they go for my throat. A bell that can't be rung is a bad thing in a burial ground. Folk get buried and nobody knows. Get them off my rope.
“Listen. That's the first time it's rung in a hundred years, and I rang it for nobody in particular. Nobody came. I didn't think they would. But they'll have heard it, wherever they are, and known somebody's still keeping the field.”Dunstan Pell
They come out at dusk, the forms. Walk up and down between the graves in her sheets, slow, the way mourners walk, and stop at each grave as if they're reading the name. I don't mind the walking. It's the stopping. Break them, friend, and I'll burn the poles in the chapel stove.
“Good dry wood, that. The guild never stinted on a pole. I'll sit up by the stove tonight, and if anything stops by a grave it'll be me.”Dunstan Pell
The watch pays bounties on beasts that threaten the farms.
“Bounty paid.”Captain Odric Hale
The briars creep closer to Lisswen every night, and the Bramblelings with them. The Covenant remembers those who help.
“The Covenant remembers.”Kael Swiftbough
The drowned walk the tideline at dusk, still looking for their ships. Give them rest and the Tidewardens will owe you.
“The Tidewardens pay their debts.”Harbormaster Ada Quill
The Choir sends new faces into the ash every day. Thin them out before they reach the wall.
“Another day the wall stands.”Commander Ilsa Vey
Highwatch pays well for every Hollow put back in the ground.
“Bounty paid.”Lord Aldric Stonemere
An elder wyrm circles the Shattered Ring when the Lattice flares. It will take many blades to bring it down.
“They will sing of this. Probably badly.”Lord Aldric Stonemere