I roll my eyes and return to trying to decipher my grimoire, but my eyes are still chasing the words all over the page, and my mind isn’t comprehending the words I catch anyway. A swing of my knees later, and I’ve hopped to the ground. When I stroll over to Gunter’s counter, I make sure to block the lantern he’s got lit behind him.
He looks up from his work to shoot an irritated look in my direction, but I only shrug. “You were hogging all the light. I could hardly see to read, so I figured I’d come over here and witness for myself what was so important about this loom that the extraction of the parasite from my mind could wait.”
I cross my arms for emphasis.
Gunter jerks his head to the side, and I obey the gesture by moving out of the way of the lantern light.
When the soft glow settles on the loom, I have to fight back a tiny gasp.
It’s a tapestry—well, half of a tapestry. The background is black as velvet, and appears just as smooth, but when I reach out to feel it, Gunter grunts, and I recoil. Amongst the darkness are threads of lavender and mint, sky and seafoam green, all pastels that practically glow against the dark backdrop. Gunter appears to have reached the middle of the tapestry, where half of a full moon frays out into loose strands of thread that hang from the loom. Surrounding the full moon are its phases as it waxes and wanes, but within each pale moon is a story of its own, woven so intricately, with such attention to detail, I have to squint to make out any of the scenes. Within the image of a waxing moon is a fair-haired girl playing by a serene river, setting a makeshift boat made of honey-glued leaves into its waters. The image doesn’t show whether the boat can withstand the waters, whether it will float. Within the next moon is also a girl—the same girl, except several years older, sneaking onto a ship in a crate of supplies.
With each passing moon, she continues to age, adventures ensuing the whole while, but she’s passed the center of the mooncycle, and now the moons are waning, and the story frays into a series of loose threads dangling from the loom.
“Who is she?” I whisper, so entranced by the tapestry that I hardly realize I’ve spoken aloud until Gunter responds.
“Her name is Zora,” says Gunter. “She was Nox’s twin.”
My throat tightens. “Was?”
Gunter purses his lips. “Nox loved his twin dearly. I try…” Gunter swallows, and when he speaks again, his voice is raspy. “From what Nox tells me, his sister lived for adventure. These are…” He stops, contemplating his words, “the adventures she never got to have while she walked this side of the sun. I try to gift her the lives she would have wanted.”
Needles puncture my heart, and I feel as though my chest might cave in.
Nox had a twin. A twin who wasn’t allowed to live past childhood.
Why do I get the feeling the Queen of Mystral had something to do with that?
“You do these for Nox,” I whisper.
Gunter says nothing. He only returns to weaving the tapestry. I watch as his fingers slide over the threads, weaving them tightly back and forth to form the most beautiful stitching I’ve ever seen.
“When you are stuck, sometimes it is best to take a break from your tasks,” Gunter finally says after several minutes of me staring at his work in disbelief over his shoulder. “I find that working with my hands often gives me insight I never would have gotten to at the workbench.”
“How do you choose what comes next—in her life, I mean?”
“I do not. The thread chooses.”
“Can I just watch you for a while?” I ask, my gaze transfixed on the full moon taking form in the center of the tapestry.
Gunter sighs, but he doesn’t tell me no.
I figure that’s a start.
When Gunter ignores three of my questions in a row and the silence becomes uncomfortable, I return to my book. I find the passage with ease, since I dog-eared the page.
Gunter must notice, because he lets out a sigh that sounds a bit like a stifled squeal of agony.
I ignore him, and it’s a good thing I do, because otherwise, I might have missed the solution to my little magic problem.
CHAPTER 13
NOX
It’s days before I leave my chambers.
I can’t seem to get Claudia’s stench out of my robes, out of my pores. It doesn’t matter that I scrape my skin with raw lye, burning through the top layers of flesh just to watch them regenerate anew.
Her blood reeks. I’m doused in it.
When I vomit, I scent her then too.
It’s been years since I’ve had what Gunter refers to as one of my episodes. Years since I’ve lost control, let him out of his carefully crafted coma. His drunken stupor of animal blood that keeps him alive but weak, satiated but containable.
What Gunter calls an episode, I call murder.
That’s what I’ve done after all. I murdered that poor woman.
I wonder when her husband will arrive home from his trading venture. If she’ll have begun to rot before he finds her, or if he’ll see her as I left her. Pale and bloodless and tucked into bed as if she simply fell asleep, never to wake.
Blood will stain her neck, her front, but the coroner will be puzzled to find no sign of a wound from which the blood might have originated.
The same venom that paralyzes my victims also serves to knit their wounds, erasing the evidence of my existence.
At least I’m no longer hungry. It won’t save the woman, won’t make up for her life—snuffed out too early. But it will keep me from attacking Blaise.
Gunter leaves chicken blood at my door in the days following my episode. It used to be the blood of a heifer or a lamb. The type that tastes somewhat tolerable. But he’s learned in the years since my Turning that I won’t drink it if it gives me pleasure. Not directly following an attack.
So now he brings me chicken blood, and I’m grateful to him for it. It’s bitter and it scalds my throat on the way down.
