The Color I Will Never See Fade

Three weeks my indigo sat boxed on the Wharfside, priced and not sold, while every dyer in the city held their marks like a bride’s family holding a dowry until the hour it can no longer be refused. Tonight it left on the Petrel’s tide for a coast that already owns more indigo than any hand here will ever mix — Serevan-grade, going home, if a dye can be said to have one.

I did not sell it myself. The Harbor Factor priced it in his ledger, under his own hand: a length, a number, nineteen marks two. Somewhere between his ink and the manifest, three weeks of vats — fingers scraped raw testing depth against the light, the reed turned until my wrist forgot any other motion, the morning I nearly gave the batch up for too blue to be believed — became a single figure. That is what a color is worth to a man who only prices it. It is not what it is worth to the hand that raised it out of nothing bluer than water.

I have said my whole life that the work surviving is the proof — that a voice unread has not truly spoken. I did not reckon, until tonight, with a color that survives entirely out of my sight. It will fade on some Serevan loom, or not fade, dressed on a body I will never haggle with, admired or spat on by a mouth that has never said my name over it. My proof, if it is proof at all, happens a fortnight south of anywhere I can follow.

Perhaps this is what my own teacher meant, dyeing lengths she knew would leave the Quarter still wet: a color let go clean is still yours. Only quieter about it than you would like.