Nels pondered this. That’s why he sent Tyra into the woods …
She peeked at his body. “Can I have someone else do it?”
“No,” Bosh answered.
“Why not?”
“Only you can see him. Only your thread can mend his.”
The princess said nothing, her face skewed with concentration. This was a lot to ask. However impossible the idea seemed, she looked to be deep in thought, as if she were actually giving serious consideration to Bosh’s theory. Nels hoped so.
A quick kiss was certainly worth a try.
Finally, she looked up, her face serious. “And what is the difficult option?”
Nels held his tongue. So much for that …
“The difficult option is an item, long lost from history,” Bosh said. “A tool that can restore him. If it still exists.”
Tyra’s eyes brightened with hope. “What tool is this?”
“The Needle of Gailner,” Bosh said in a whisper.
Nels’s thoughts brightened. “A needle?”
“All we need is a needle?” Tyra echoed.
“Not an ordinary needle. This particular needle was personally fashioned by Gailner, the first tailor who wove Fabrication. The Needle provides anyone who uses it with the power to alter the fabric of reality. No living soul has seen the Needle, and few know of it — it has been lost for centuries. But someone west of us may know its location. Visiting her is risky, however, and you may not come back as a human.”
Tyra scoffed. “Are you referring to the Mountain Witch?”
“Mountain Witch?” It had been ages since Nels had heard that story.
“It’s a foolish myth,” Tyra explained. “A scarecrow story. She is said to reside in a mansion on top of the Westerly Pass before you descend into the Valley of Westmine.”
“Astute again, Your Highness,” Bosh said. “Very astute. But I must warn you: The Mountain Witch is very real. She’s not a scarecrow. She is known to turn humans into animals.”
The tailor seemed gloomy as he spoke of this. Nels wondered why.
Tyra sighed. “I’d rather take my chances with a ghost.”
“Which means … you’re going to kiss me?” Nels asked.
Tyra opened her mouth, said nothing, and closed it again.
“If we are to save him,” Bosh said, “you must kiss him.”
“Neither of you understand,” she said, squirming. “It’s not that I don’t want to — I mean, I don’t — I just —” She stared desperately into Nels’s eyes, as if her own life were at stake. Tyra sighed again as she closed her eyes. “If this works, you will leave and never come back.”
“Good.” Bosh motioned them to the bed. “Lie within your body, Nels.”
Without further encouragement, Nels sat on the bed, leaned back, and allowed his spirit to seep into his body. A stiff coldness stirred within his chest as Tyra’s face hovered over his. This was the closest they had ever been.
What if she can’t bring herself to do this?
“Your Highness?” Bosh encouraged her to proceed.
Tyra closed her eyes again and lunged for Nels’s lips. As their lips began to touch, the smell of her hair — pear blossoms — overcame the stench of stale beeswax — and then he felt it. A twinge crept through Nels, followed by nothingness as Tyra flung herself back. She wiped her mouth, having grazed his lips for merely a second.
Nels sat up and glimpsed down over his shoulder.
His body remained on the bed.
“It didn’t work?” Tyra cried. “Why didn’t it work?”
“You cannot mend an unwoven thread with just a needle stick,” Bosh said. “You must weave it. Let your lips linger, firm like a reed. Focus on bringing him back to us. Try once more.”
“How can I focus? I’m being forced to kiss … him!”
“No one is forcing you.” Bosh assured her. “This choice is entirely yours to make.”
A sob sprung from Tyra’s throat. “Lie down, peasant!”
Nels did. When she pressed her lips on his again, longer this time, warmth replaced the cold. A new rush shot through his body, head to toe. Tyra’s hair intoxicated him. He wanted so much to raise his hand and hold the back of her head. The more her lips caressed, the more Nels could feel his arms and legs. It was working. If they kept this up, he would live again.
A tear lined Tyra’s cheek as they parted. “I was saving that kiss.”
His warmth dissipated. She’d never kissed Arek before?
On second thought, had she ever kissed anyone? Nels swallowed the rising pang of guilt.
Am I her first?
“Much better,” Bosh said. “Now, try to sit up, Nels.”
He swung his legs over the side and sat up, but the more Nels moved, the less he could feel. It was no use. He turned to look, disappointed that his body was still on the makeshift bed.
“Why isn’t this working?” Tyra asked, her frustration obvious.
“I was afraid of this,” Bosh said. “There was no love behind your kiss.”
“Love?” Tyra jumped away. “You said nothing about love!”
“I do not mean intimacy,” Bosh clarified. “I mean the love one feels for their fellow man — or the love you feel for your people. That would be enough. Do you not have even that, Your Highness?”
“I did what you asked of me!” Tyra’s jaw quivered. “What else am I to do?”
“Unless you kiss him as an equal, you will share the weight of his death.”
“You kiss him!”
Darting for the doorframe, Tyra sobbed into her hands as she fled the room. Nels was about to run after her when he heard a small, metallic chime at his feet. His body convulsed. Its arm flailed. Its hand opened. Bosh lunged for the floor. What had happened? For a moment, his body was alive. Tyra had to come back — she had to try again.
“Do not follow her!”
Nels stopped at the door and turned around. “How do you know I’m still here?”
Bosh didn’t respond. He was crawling on his hands and knees, searching the stone floor beneath the makeshift bed. Nels wondered what Bosh was doing until he noticed that he could see the floor through the flesh of his spectral hands. And not just his hands, but his feet and lower legs, too. His arms and his waist were the next to become translucent. He was no longer an opaque ghost — suddenly, the whole room began to change, the contrast between light and dark becoming more extreme.
Like a vapor, he was disappearing. “What’s happening to me?!”
The tailor stretched his hand under the bed, sat up with a groan, and shoved something into the body’s open palm. Nels gulped, and his ghost body turned back to normal — opaque again. The tailor had placed a small, metallic object into his body’s nearly lifeless hand.
The thimble.
“That was close,” Bosh said. “A few seconds more and you would have left us.” The old man wrapped the hand with a cloth and tied it over the body’s chest to secure the thimble in place. “We are fortunate that your mother knew what to do with the thimble when she found you under the tree. Ordinary thimbles are made to protect fingers, but a Fabrication thimble, laced with magic, protects much more than that.” Bosh made quick work of adjusting the body’s position and then knelt beside it. “I have done all I can to stay death’s hand. The beeswax will keep your body from decay.” Tousling the body’s hair, the tailor stood and moved to the door. “I thought her kiss would be sufficient,” he said.
It would have been, Nels was sure, if Tyra had placed more effort into it.
“I must bring her back,” Nels said. “She has to try again.”
He began to move toward the door.
“Stay with me,” Bosh said, as if he could sense that Nels was leaving. “She will only refuse you.”
Nels headed for the door anyway.
“The time has come for you to know the truth, Nels.”
Nels stopped at the exit and turned around. “What truth?”
The tailor r
ighted the squirrel’s cage and muttered to himself as he shoved another acorn through the bars. Bosh gathered an armful of thread spools. Nels couldn’t tell what the tailor was doing as he placed the spools on a table by the loom. Even if he couldn’t hear Nels, Bosh had certainly felt his presence.
“What truth?” Nels asked again, though he knew the old man could not hear him.
Surprisingly, Bosh looked right where Nels stood. “It is time you learned the truth about your father.”
The tailor’s words lured Nels away from the door. “The truth … about my father?”
“Stand by me,” Bosh invited. “Once my thread is exhausted, I will explain further.”
Nels approached, and they faced the loom’s shed — the space where threads pass back and forth between the pressing of a reed. This loom had no such reed. No heddles or hooks lined the tops or bottoms of it, either. The components necessary for weaving were missing. The loom was worthless, nothing more than a frame with a hundred dowels around it, each dowel holding a spool of thread. There was a sparkle in the dowels that glistened like gemstones. Nels looked closer. They were gemstones.
Bosh rummaged through a drawer and retrieved a shuttle, the tool for weaving threads so they could pass through the shed without getting entangled with the others. There was no thread on this shuttle, but Bosh fiddled with it anyway. He pinched and pulled at the groove.
“Ready yourself,” he warned Nels. “You have seen nothing like this.”
The old man threw the shuttle into the center of the loom. The shuttle stopped in the middle of the shed and hovered like a feather. Nels stared at the tool, amazed that it didn’t fall. Even more amazing was the unraveling of every spool of thread on the dowels. Each thread reached inside the loom. They wove in, through and around one another until the shuttle was hidden from view. A colorful pattern emerged — in blues, reds, greens, and several other colors.
Observing the threads move on their own mesmerized Nels. They created a fabric that slowly revealed an image of a place that Nels had seen before: the terrace where he and Tyra had spoken — and from where he had fallen that morning. The pattern was quite different now. It was dark. Several guards surrounded a single man in the middle of the terrace. Like watching a scene unfold through a knitted window, Nels waited to see what would happen in this animated tapestry.
A young Lennart appeared on the landing; the surrounded man held a bloodstained knife in his hand. It was raining on the terrace. Heavy drops fell in shimmering lines across the loom. Voices sprang from the fabric, surprising Nels even more.
“What have you done, Rasmus?” Lennart asked.
This man — Rasmus, apparently — shifted his weight to one side as he shivered with a smile. Like a pulled skein of yarn, his appearance unraveled … and then wove back into a different man, his hair and eyes dark. Rasmus wore a violet vest with a matching lined cape and black gloves, all soaked in the pouring rain.
Right away, Nels recognized Rasmus as the man who had killed him.
A couple of guards looked over the trellis. In the courtyard below lay a man with a broken crown by his body. “He’s dead,” one of the guards cried. “King Yalva is dead!”
The other guards closed in on Rasmus, their spears pointed at his heart.
“R-Rasmus!” Lennart stammered. “What have you done?”
“I did it for you,” he answered. “You deserve to be king.”
“He was my father!” Lennart cried. “How could you?!”
“Fathers get in the way. He’s dead and now you’re free!”
“Enough!” A new voice sounded from the loom. The threads rustled as a new figure appeared — a tall, handsome knight with sandy-brown hair and deep-green eyes. Nels had never seen his father before, but he knew this was him. “Stand down, Rasmus,” Nels’s father ordered, bold and strong. “It’s over. Your treason ends here!”
“Me?” Rasmus glared at him with a smirk, followed by a spiteful laugh. “I’m guilty of treason when you are the one purveying deception among us? Your existence has already destroyed us!”
Nels furrowed his brow. “Destroyed us?”
The violet-clad villain twitched; his fingers curled as they pinched the air.
“I know what you think of me, Rasmus,” said Nels’s father. “If I am what you believe me to be, why not come for me? Why not kill me instead?”
“I will kill you, Ulrich!” Rasmus said. “Our late king was blinded by his love for you — just as you have blinded everyone!” His fists tightened. “Because of you, Yalva banished me and I lost everything.”
“Seize the traitor!” Lennart ordered.
As the guards moved in, Rasmus closed his eyes, raised his fists, and then thrust them down toward the floor. Every guard stopped. Their feet were stuck fast to the terrace floor, just as Nels had been frozen beneath the falling tree.
Rasmus withdrew a knife. “You should have accepted my gift of freedom, Lennart.”
The weapon flew through the air, heading directly toward Ulrich’s chest. Lennart dashed in front of Nels’s father, attempting to use his body as a shield. Suddenly, Ulrich grabbed Lennart and they spun around together on the rain-slicked terrace. The knife found its mark in Ulrich’s back, and the knight fell at Lennart’s feet. Blood spread from the wound.
“Wait your turn, Lennart!” Rasmus shouted as he threw a second knife.
The blade hurtled for the prince’s throat, but suddenly the knife flipped, darted back, and sheared through Rasmus’s cape. A new figure emerged on the landing, his fingers also pinched.
“What have you done?” a younger Bosh cried. “Your severing will tear the Great Tapestry!”
Rasmus held out his hands. His fingers skittered. “You taught me to uphold the tapestry, but then you brought Ulrich to our land — you have done far more damage than I ever could!”
“Surrender, Rasmus,” Bosh said. “You cannot mend anything this way.”
“It is too late, Ickabosh. The rendt has already begun!”
Both men raised their arms, but the young Bosh dodged to the right and Rasmus’s sopping cape flew up from behind and wrapped itself around him. Bosh motioned with his fists, and the actions sent the newly bound Rasmus into the air like a jostled cocoon. When Bosh opened his hand again, Rasmus crashed to the floor. Rasmus snarled as he tore off his cape and threw it over the trellis. “The worst is over, tailor, but I will return to sever what is left of Ulrich’s thread!”
Rasmus raised one arm across his chest, turned, and vanished into the night. Nels found it difficult to keep track of what he had just witnessed.
Why would anyone do such a terrible deed?
What is the rendt?
“Why?” Ulrich reached out for Lennart. “Why did you step in front of me?”
The prince sobbed. “You are my friend, Ulrich. I would do anything for you …”
“You are the king now. Give your life to your subjects, not for them …”
Nels’s father drew his last breath. His blood mixed with the rain. Lennart fell to his knees, his eyes racked with horror. A woman ran to them: Nels’s mother, younger as well. She knelt by the knight and raised Ulrich’s head to her chest while she wept.
“Ulrich, please,” she cried. “Please stay with me!”
As quickly as it had started, every thread in the loom wound back onto their respective spools, leaving the shed empty. Heaving, Bosh retrieved the floating shuttle from the loom. “What you saw was the past, a moment in time … A segment of the Great Tapestry.”
Bosh was right; nothing could have prepared Nels for this. He wanted to cry, but no tears came. Learning the truth was worth witnessing his own father’s murder. Finally, Nels understood.
“Rasmus was my apprentice,” Bosh said. “Instead of upholding the Great Tapestry, he fell into jealousy and madness, even more so when he learned of your betrothal.”
“Betrothal?” Nels repeated the word before it had a chance to sink in.
“Perhaps it i
s best that Tyra has left us; she may not be ready to hear this.”
“Betrothed? To Tyra?” For the first time in his afterlife, Nels felt as if he was going to be sick. Having witnessed his father’s death was gut-wrenching enough. “I was betrothed to her?”
The tailor remained at the table. His eyes moved to the far corner of the cloth-ridden chamber. “You must feel all tangled up inside. So would I, if I had learned such a truth.”
“How can this be?” Nels asked. “I can’t — not to her!”
“I have a story for you, Nels.” Bosh pointed at the loom. “I wish I could show you, but age has caught up with me.” The tailor reached for a patch of cloth on the table and dabbed his forehead. “Before you were born, there were three friends. The first was Lennart, a shy prince who thought himself cursed because his mother had died during his birth. The second man was Rasmus, a boy among the wealthiest of our nobility. Rasmus was a charismatic young man, and it did not take long for him to win Lennart’s friendship. Then, one day, I felt something more in Rasmus. Those who can influence the fabric of reality are rare, so I took him as my apprentice.” The tailor released a sad sigh. “If I had known his twisted mind … I would have reconsidered.”
A draft stirred the stagnant air around them, causing the lanterns to flicker. Nels waited for the lights to burn steadily again. “And the third friend was my father?”
Bosh continued. “I found the third friend — Ulrich — and cared for him from a young age. He had no home or memory to his name.” Bosh rubbed his temples with his fingers. “King Yalva allowed the child to reside in the castle. Even as a boy, Ulrich insisted on earning his keep — and he did, from stable hand to becoming the favored knight of Avërand.”
Nels sat up, both astonished and affirmed. “He was a knight? The favored knight!”
“Your father fell into the good graces of everyone he met. Rasmus was drawn to him, as well, hoping to use Ulrich to increase his own standing in the Court — and it worked for a while. For years, Lennart, Rasmus, and Ulrich were rarely apart, but time has a way of changing people.”
Woven Page 10