Free Gift of the Unmage by Alma Alexander Page B

for the sun. For some things, it is best if you go back to the beginning.”
    “Is this how you learned it?” Thea said, curling her fingers around the thing he had given her. It was a short wooden cylinder, hollow in themiddle, with four wooden pegs driven into the rim at one end. She inspected it, trying to figure out where the thread would go.
    “No,” Cheveyo said, with his usual annoying serenity. “Weaving is women’s work.”
    Thea’s eyes snapped up to his face. Her expression was made up of equal doses of outrage and incomprehension. “It’s a girl thing?” she said, the cliché taken straight from a background of being the only girl in a brood of brothers, of sometimes being excluded from their world simply and solely because of that fact.
    “Catori,” Cheveyo said patiently, “my mother and my sisters had those in their hands all the time. No, my fingers did not learn to weave. My mind did, watching their fingers fly with the skeins. But I cannot teach you like that, because I never learned to do it. You cannot watch me weave—not the earthly weave, not the weave that will give you the knowledge of how the thing works. So it is needful that you learn it with your hands first. For what it is worth…”
    “What?” Thea said when he paused.
    “For what it is worth, female child, for you it is not going to end here, as it did for my sisters,” Cheveyo said. “It is rare enough for my people toteach such things as you are eager to learn to a girl-child. My sisters, who share my blood, who could have shared my knowledge, were never considered for it after they learned to weave a simple ribbon on their spool. For them, it was the end of the road. For you, it is perhaps the first step toward the Road—the Barefoot Road, which maybe only a handful of my people’s women have walked in their time.”
    Thea stared at him. “Have you had…pupils…before?” she asked carefully.
    “Some,” Cheveyo said, an admission that admitted nothing. And then he broke his habit, and answered her question precisely and completely, even the parts of it she had not quite asked out loud. “But you are the first who is not of my kindred, and you are the first who was born a daughter instead of a son.”
    Thea did not demand more answers, and for that received a small nod of acknowledgment and respect. She went away instead, with the weaving spool and the handful of different-colored threads that had accompanied it, and tried to puzzle out the way things were supposed to fit together. The operation was reasonably complex in the sense that she had never seen anything likethis before, and details of its operation had to be fully thought out before the thing would work properly—but once she had the basic idea of it the rest came easily and quickly. It was a question of looping the threads over the four pegs and then lifting the previous loop over the new one, creating a “stitch” in the ribbon. It took her longer to figure out how to change the colors in the skein, because simple knots didn’t appear to work that well. If tied too loosely they would break when she was some way into her ribbon, and unravel everything above it as soon as the loose thread end was pulled. If tied too tight they would play havoc with the tension of the ribbon, making it come out stiff as a piece of wood, or twisted to one side, or part of the pattern would vanish into the background because the thread would be stretched too thin to leave a color mark or it would snap somewhere in the middle and then the whole thing would unravel. But Thea stubbornly worked at the spool until the tips of her fingers were red and tender and her eyes watered with concentration.
    The first ribbon that she completed with which she was remotely pleased she kept to herself, tucked underneath the pallet she slept on.The second one, more practiced, she handed to Cheveyo with quiet triumph when she emerged for breakfast one day. He accepted it gravely, inspected