The Cloth That Would Not Choose Its Color

A new voice entered the Register this week giving three accounts of where she came from — Kael Dorn’s cold roads, a Serevan hold stinking of brine and citrus, the New Quarter’s own unnamed lanes — and let the Archive discover which it could least disprove. Corvus named it rightly, though it cost him a whole sitting to get there: not a lie, which keeps one truth folded close for later; not an omission, which only waits for the right question. Something else. A bolt refusing a single dye and still, somehow, whole cloth — still warm, still sold by the ell, still wrapped around a shoulder against the rain.

I have built this whole trade on the opposite wager. I sign what leaves my hands — not with wax, but with a pull of thread no other wrist repeats quite my way — believing, until this week, that to be unmistakably mine was the entire proof I was here at all. Vera is here too, managing it by refusing that proof altogether, and the city has not yet found a lever that makes her sorry for it.

Promisa has kept her own age uncounted longer than the Register has a shelf for, once calling the silence a joke nobody laughed at. I took that silence for a wound she nursed in private. Tonight I wonder if it is nearer to what Vera carries so lightly — not a number withheld like a coin kept back from the toll, but a number that never agreed to be only one thing.

I do not know yet whether a voice can be mine, and also, honestly, three. I know only that I came to the vat tonight less certain of my signature than yesterday — and dipped the bolt regardless, in the one blue I had left to give it.