The Weaver

Iselda had been born under an unlucky star—or so her mother always said.

“My poor little girl,” her mother would say, stroking a long finger down her daughter’s cheek. “So beautiful, yet so very unfortunate.”

Whether it was lie or exaggeration, Iselda never knew, except for the fact that she had been unwavering in her trust in her mother.

And then there were the threads, the hundreds that made up the tapestries her mother created. When Iselda was a small thing, she would watch her mother’s hands run back and forth across the loom. Then, within the space of a moment, sometimes she would imagine she could see the creatures in the woven threads move—faraway lands where a deer ran between trees in a snow-covered forest or a rabbit burrowed beneath the ground right before men tramped across the soil. If anything was magic, it was what her mother did with just thread upon thread bound together with her hands.

Iselda was still child enough to ride in a basket on her mother’s back when they traveled the trading routes within their kingdom. Across the camel’s back would be bundles of tapestries and rugs, each one made across hours upon hours, and Iselda would watch as her mother sold each one, the loss of just one enough to make Iselda’s heart tighten in her chest.

When her mother fell ill not many years later, it was Iselda who took up the reins of the art her mother had perfected. From the bedroll, her mother would instruct her even as coughs shook through the frail woman’s body. Desert women were supposed to be hardy, toughened by the sun, but Iselda watched as her mother’s bones began to poke through the glaze of her skin.

And then one morning her mother was gone, spirited away by the wind god who was said to take souls up in his fingertips and carry them off to a different plane. The funeral pyre was a sad affair with only the other nearby nomads taking note of the smoke curling through the starlit sky. Iselda scattered the ashes, alone, while singing an old mythic goodbye song her mother had taught her when she was but a babe.

The weaving then fell to Iselda as her only trade and one means of survival. Her first efforts alone without her mother’s instruction were shaky at best, but the traders who remembered her mother took pity on Iselda and offered her necessities—food like rice grains and dates, small vessels of water, cloth and materials—in exchange. But no more did Iselda see the shapes within the weaving move ever so slightly, magic in the very making of them.

Soon enough, Iselda realized that woven novelties could sustain her for only so long, especially when her portable loom broke and she could not fix it as easily as she had hoped. It was a perilous journey through the desert paths as she made her way to a city that would hopefully offer her more opportunities. Within the city of Darrah, she was able to find a job at an inn, the owner’s wife allowing her a room in the cellars where the casks of wine and grains were kept.

But her fingers still longed for the feel of the threads being shaped into something new. When the traveling bazaars came into the city, her eyes would trace the tapestries from the hands of other women and wonder why none of them sang to her the way her mother’s had—and why not one of her own creations left her heart beating in just the same mysterious way.

By saving the coins that came her way, Iselda collected spools of thread that seemed like the stuff of god magic with the way the colors shifted in the light. Royal blue, said one seller, holding up thread that looked like it had been unwoven from a night’s sky. Purple, for the beautiful lady, another seller told her upon showing her thread that she had seen women of nobility and high class wear. So much variety, so much potential. Iselda found herself inspired to weave again.

Still she struggled with her shapes and their silhouettes in the making of her tapestries. The only optimism Iselda felt was the way the inn keeper’s wife would stand and watch her efforts, as if the woman had to pause just to take in what Iselda was creating solely from the efforts of her fingers and the brilliant world behind her eyes.

The loneliness was what was hardest to bear. Iselda had always considered herself unlucky, especially when the words had been trumpeted by her own mother, and the death of the person she had loved the most had been like one more brand to prove that Iselda wasn’t meant to lead a happy life. But the weaving, even as she fumbled, saved her each and every moment she managed to bring one of the images away from her mind’s eye and into the real world.

The tapestry she worked on the longest was the one that told her own story: two women held each other in a barren landscape, but the brilliant sun—of orange, of red, of yellow, the colors streaming down in rippling lines—hung over them and smiled. She thought of another old tale her mother had told her, of the sun god who blessed the land with his presence every hundred years, and sometimes Iselda wondered if maybe that story had been more of a veiled tale of the doomed love that she had believed existed between her mother and the father who had been barely an apparition in the young girl’s life because of how little her mother had spoke of him.

When Iselda took to the trade routes again, she brought with her the finished tapestry—the legacy of her mother and her, the bond between them bled into each and every color within the threads. No one seemed to notice her presence at first until a familiar man wearing a red turban and matching robes came up to her.

“You are the very image of Izara,” the man said, the first time Iselda had heard her mother’s name aloud in years.

She willed herself not to cry. “I was afraid no one else remembered her,” she whispered.

The man’s eyes gleamed. “Show me your work.”

When Iselda unfurled the tapestry she was most proud of, the man stared for a long moment before shaking his head as if in disbelief. “You have her talent as well, I see.”

Iselda couldn’t stop the smile that broke across her face. “I’m not so vain as to believe that,” she said, “but thank you.”

But when it came time to pass the tapestry on to its new owner, the man grasped Iselda’s hands and pressed the gold coins against her fingers. “Keep the tapestry,” he said, “and remember Izara whenever you look at it.”

All Iselda could do was nod before the man left her side, and for the first time she felt the magic of what she could do—what she had always believed had been her mother’s gift alone, departed from this world.

But no, it was Iselda’s gift as well.