The Wind's Call

The loom stood in the corner of the longhouse the way old grief stands in a room — quiet, load-bearing, impossible to walk around.

Freydis was ten winters old the last autumn her mother worked it whole.

Signy's hands moved without looking, the way they always did, weft over warp, a pattern of interlocking waves meant for a cloak that had been promised since spring. Freydis sat cross-legged near the hearth, mending a net she wasn't really mending, watching the shuttle instead. She liked the sound of it. It was steadier than her mother's breathing had been, lately.

"Tell me the wave-pattern again," Freydis said. "The one that keeps the sea from taking what it wants."

Signy's mouth curved, but the smile was a loose thread, unanchored to anything beneath it, the way it had been for months. "It isn't a pattern that keeps anything from anything, little gull. It only asks. Sea knows how to say no if it wants to."

"Then why weave it at all?"

"Because asking is worth doing. Even when the answer's no."

The shuttle passed again. And then — Freydis was almost sure of this, though she would spend years unsure of everything else about that evening — a single thread on the loom moved without her mother's hand on it. Slid sideways, an inch, like something underneath the weave had breathed.

Signy's fingers stilled.

"Mama?"

"It's nothing." But her mother's eyes had gone somewhere else, somewhere behind the pattern rather than in front of it, and her lips were moving now with no sound at all, or a sound too low for a room to hold. Not words Freydis knew. Not words shaped like any tongue spoken in the fjord.

The wave-pattern on the loom began, impossibly, to lose its color. Not fray. Not unravel. Just — fade, blue going to grey going to the color of nothing at all, the way a bruise goes yellow before it goes away, except this looked like something going away before it had finished becoming anything.

"Mama, it's — the blue's leaving —"

Signy blinked, and the room came back to her all at once, the way a person comes back from very cold water. She looked at the loom as though she hadn't touched it in an hour. Then she looked at her daughter, and something in her face closed like a door pulled shut against weather.

"I'm tired, that's all," Signy said. "Weaving tires the hands. Go bank the fire, love."

Freydis went. She was ten, and she knew — the way children know things without being able to hold them up to the light — that her mother had not answered the question. She did not ask again. Some part of her, too young to have a name for the feeling, understood that the not-asking was a kindness she was doing for both of them, and that it would cost her something later to have done it.

She was right. It cost her not knowing, for years, what to call the shape of the loss when it finally came — only that it came quietly, the way the color had left the thread, and that by the following winter the loom stood silent in its corner, and the cloak was never finished the way it was promised, and no one in the  longhouses ever spoke of what, exactly, her mother had been asking the sea, or why the sea had never once said yes.