Crewel

me. I’ve found the seam in Loricel’s illusion and opened it. I clutch my right arm against my body; my fingers ache to reach out, to discover what the thick rough weave feels like. I force myself to keep my hands back away from the breach now. This room, here in the distant tower, where we can call any place in Arras before us, is the only place that feels real.
    ‘You could waste away there,’ Loricel says behind me.
    The studio was empty when I arrived, but I knew she’d be back soon. Now that she’s here, I wish I had more time alone to study the rift. If I’d been here much longer, I might have crossed the line and touched the rough, raw material that billows out between Earth and Arras.
    Loricel moves to stand beside me. ‘It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it?’
    ‘I see it,’ I say, ‘but it feels like another illusion . . . I want to touch it.’
    ‘Like your hands are physically being drawn to it,’ she says.
    ‘You too?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Have you?’
    ‘No.’ There’s the firmness of resignation to her voice. ‘I guess I don’t want to know. There’s so much possibility until I touch it. Perhaps its powers outweigh my own, or perhaps I could manipulate the raw material as I manipulate the fabric of Arras. I don’t know which I prefer, so I keep my fingers back.’
    ‘When did you see it the first time?’ I ask.
    ‘Kinsey, my predecessor, showed me,’ she says, tilting her head and regarding me with half-open eyes.
    ‘And all these years? You’ve never—’
    ‘Perhaps I’m a coward.’
    ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘I think it’s harder not to touch it. I want to so badly. It’s a compulsion. I admire your ability to deny it this long.’
    Loricel snorts. ‘Maybe I’ll do it before I die.’
    I sigh deeply and turn to close the spot. My fingertips burn when they skim the raw material as I repair the hole; it’s the most feeling I’ve had in them for weeks.
    ‘You can feel it?’ she asks.
    ‘It’s pulsing. Alive,’ I say quietly.
    ‘Because it is full of life,’ she says. ‘I know this is hard for you to accept.’
    ‘How do you close opened eyes?’ I ask her, desperate to know how she’s restrained herself through the years.
    ‘Like you do at night,’ she instructs me. ‘You work the loom until you’re too tired to go on, and then your eyes close naturally.’
    ‘Is that why you’re refusing renewal?’
    ‘Yes, I know it must feel horribly unfair. My leaving you here to take over, but—’
    ‘You don’t have to explain yourself,’ I stop her. Even now I feel the burden of the raw weave pressing down on me. I can’t imagine what it’s like for her.
    ‘I couldn’t leave it,’ she says. ‘Not without a true Creweler in place to carry on my work. Adelice, you must know how I feel about the Guild. About Cormac, Maela, and their puppets. But that pulse you feel, that electricity, that’s not them.’
    My fingers sting as she speaks, reminding me how they want to touch the raw material, but I do my best to push the feeling down deep inside me. ‘We don’t do it for them.’
    ‘No,’ she agrees. ‘We do it in spite of them.’
    ‘Will they keep watching me?’ I ask.
    ‘They didn’t stop watching me until I was seventy,’ she says. ‘Cormac is many things, but he was the first to realise I wasn’t a threat to Arras.’
    ‘I guess I have a while to wait.’
    Fifty-four years.
    Loricel opens her mouth and then presses her withered lips back together.
    ‘What?’ I ask, scanning the room. ‘They’re watching us now?’
    ‘The illusions in this room are too complex to track.’
    Now I understand that she’s not sure she wants me to know the truth, because it might be too much for me to live with. Loricel needs to make sure Arras has a Creweler after her death, and if I leave, it won’t.
    ‘You have to understand my dilemma,’ she says finally. ‘My whole life is this world. I have given everything to it.’
    ‘I think I understand,’ I say.
    ‘I wish you could. But until you’ve devoted your life, fought human nature, harnessed matter itself, and contained it for decades, you can’t. It’s a lot to ask of anyone.’ The lines on her face deepen as she speaks, as though the weight of years is dragging down her very skin.
    ‘But if I don’t—’
    ‘Then it will fade away.’
    My eyes find the floor, and I inhale for strength. ‘So you won’t stay, even if I leave?’
    ‘No,’ she confirms. ‘My age has passed. It is up to