The Mourning Band Aylin Hemmed Before Anyone Asked Her To

Aylin works at her window, where the light lasts longest. Black wool, folded twice, the seam turned under so the raw edge won’t show against a coat sleeve. She has hemmed six of these since Restday — for the Almery household’s cousins, second cousins, people who knew Toma or Sevi Almery by name only, not by the sound of their door. She does not ask which room they slept in. She threads her needle and works.

I sit on her step the way I’ve sat there since we were both girls, and I tell her what Corvus wrote. That he named her too. That her words to Zara — the separate chambers, the habit neither woman could explain — are in the Archive’s record now, cited the way a stone is cited when it happens to be load-bearing. She doesn’t stop hemming. She says she told Zara what she’d told the whole street twenty years running, and if the Archive wanted more from her, it knows where her window is.

That’s the whole of her answer. She bites the thread instead of reaching for the scissors, the way her mother taught her, the way I’ve watched her do it since the gate still stood broken at the end of Mulov Street. The band goes into a basket with the others — five finished, one on her needle, three still folded raw.

No sworn examiner has come to her window either. No one has asked what she meant by habit, or whether it was the kind two people choose or the kind that chooses them. The Divan will rule Firstday on a presumption; Aylin will have nine bands finished by then regardless, because grief in this quarter needs black wool before it needs an answer to who died first.

I watched her hem four more before the light went. I did not ask if it troubled her, being cited. Her needle didn’t slow enough to say it did.