“That’s merino wool,” Lark said.
Sandry yelped. The wool twisted in her hands and trapped her fingers.
Lark knelt beside her. “It’s my favorite, but I don’t use it to teach someone just learning to spin. The fibers are very short, which makes it hard to work with.”
Sandry tried to scrape the suddenly contrary fibers off her hand, but they refused to come away.
“It normally isn’t disobedient—it must like you. Enough,” Lark ordered. Sandry didn’t think that Lark meant her. “Let go.” She dragged her fingers across the girl’s palms. The wool followed her, shaping itself into a neat strip.
“It’s a kind of magic,” Lark murmured. “Look how fine each hair is. Pick one out—just one.” She offered the strip to Sandry. Carefully the girl grasped a single hair and drew it away from the others. “Now pull it apart.”
Sandry obeyed. With just a quick tug, the hair snapped.
“By itself, it’s weak. There’s little work you can do with it.” Lark smiled. “Put it back with its friends, and things change.”
Sandry reached over and pulled away a few more hairs.
“Roll them together,” Lark said. “Twist them, as you would yarn. Now try to pull them apart.”
Sandry obeyed. The twisted thread held, no matter how hard she tugged its ends. “I wish I could spin. I wish I could make things stronger. Instead I’m always told nobles don’t spin or weave,” she whispered. “They say needlework is all I should want to do, and then they tell me I do too much of that.”
“Why were you taken up before Honored Moonstream?” the woman inquired gently. “Why were you sent here?”
Sandry blushed and looked down. “I kept sneaking off to the loomhouses.”
Lark drew a bobbin from the pocket of her habit and pulled an end of thread free. When she let it go, the thread stretched, snakelike, toward her, then to Sandry. When Lark held the bobbin out to the girl, the thread fought to work itself free of its anchor. It twined around Sandry’s fingers when she reached for the bobbin.
“Silk likes you, too,” Lark said. “That’s unusual. Silk likes few people.”
Half-hypnotized by the thread’s movement, the girl said, “I was—in a dark place, once. My lamps were going out, but I had all this silk embroidery thread.” Part of her was shocked to hear the story come out—she had told it to no one, not even to Niko, during their long journey to Summersea. “I thought that I’d called light into the silk.” She sighed. “It was probably just a dream, though.”
Lark wrapped her brown hands around the girl’s white ones. “Do you want to learn how to spin?”
“I would love to,” replied Sandry.
“Do you know how to prepare wool for it?” Lark asked.
Sandry nodded. “Pirisi, my—nurse—taught me how, when I was little. She hasn’t—hadn’t—let me do it for a long time. She said I was getting to be a lady.”
Gently Lark smoothed Sandry’s hair. “Then find me a basket of rolags, if you please, and a drop spindle. One with no leader on it, or thread.”
Next to the uncombed wool was a straw basket with a cloth lining. It was filled with the long rolls of combed wool called rolags. Sandry picked it up and offered it to Lark, then found a spindle that had no yarn or thread on it. Bare, it looked like a child’s top with much too long a stem.
When Sandry took it to Lark, the woman asked, “Do you know the names of the parts?”
The girl shook her head. “All the ones I ever saw were being used, and I got scolded for asking.”
“You won’t be scolded for asking questions here.” Lark pulled the wooden disk off the stem. “This is the whorl.” In her other hand she held up the stick. “Here’s the shaft. The whorl fits on the short end like this.” She thrust the pointed end of the shaft through the hole in the whorl. Putting the complete spindle on the floor, she gripped the long stem and twirled it, as if she played with a top. Like the toy, the spindle whirled on its point. “With spinning, you learn how to control the spindle and how to feed your wool to it at a steady rate. That’s why you see even five-year-old children spinning; it’s easy enough, once you learn how.
“I’ll show you how to place the leader yarn and how to store your spun thread later. Right now, there’s something I need to see.” She drew a piece of yarn from a pocket. In a series of quick movements, Lark fixed it around whorl and shaft, and tied it in place. “This string is your leader, the thing that makes the thread happen.” She held out a hand. “Give me a rolag.”
Sandry took one of the specially prepared bunches of wool from a basket and put it in Lark’s outstretched palm.
“Watch,” Lark ordered. Overlapping the end of the wool with the end of the leader yarn, she gave the spindle a gentle twist. As it turned, Sandry could see the yarn, and the fibers attached to it, twirl until the loose fibers wound themselves into a tight string. Her grip on leader and wool just tight enough to keep everything from dropping from her fingers, Lark allowed the spindle to fall slowly to the floor, hanging from the new thread. A bit at a time, she let new fibers from the rolag get caught in the twirling thread, until they were thread as well.
“I love this work,” Lark murmured. “It’s soothing.”
Sandry nodded, eyes never leaving the spindle. “No matter where we traveled, I watched the local women as they spun. It always seemed like magic.”