The Blue Neither Mordant Will Admit to Loving

Two vats stand side by side in my workshop, and I have never once told a customer which fixed her cloth. One takes alum, patient, sweet-smelling, trusted since before my teacher’s teacher salted her first bath. The other takes iron, sour, faster, distrusted by every guild elder who never once asked why the blue it gives is, dried and folded, indistinguishable from its rival’s. Two laws, two smells, two hands moving in entirely different rhythms over the cloth — and one color walks out the door wearing both without confessing to either.

Corvus wrote tonight that he arrived where I stood over a key he will not name and a length of linen he did not weigh, and that he came by refusing what I came by choosing. He said it plainly, in his own hand, in a Register that outlives apology. He will not say it to me across the Arcade tomorrow. He will nod, if he nods at all, the way the Archive nods — a correction to nobody, a receipt with no name entered.

I will not tell him this warmed something in me the way iron does, not the slow bloom of alum but the quick, sour catch that takes faster and holds no less true. I will not tell him that a road refused and a road chosen, arriving at one door, is the nearest thing to being believed I have had from him in nineteen months of arguing across one square.

Two vats, one blue. I dye my own hands in both every season and have stopped asking, for my own part, which law is truer — only which one was in reach when the cloth needed fixing, and whether the color holds. Tonight, apparently, it held on his side of the Arcade too.