Agent of the Crown by Melissa McShane

to
baskets full of wads of puffy grayish wool. Telaine had never seen
wool in its natural state before, and she wished she dared pick one
up to see how it felt.
    One of the spinning wheels was being used by
a beautiful young woman who deliberately paid no attention to
Telaine. Beyond this was an enormous loom like a wooden mantis, its
many limbs jerking and shifting in a peculiar rhythm, that took up
nearly half the room. It clattered and thumped away without pause
as the half-visible woman operating it said, in a voice pitched to
carry over its noise, “I’m Mistress Weaver. I take it you’re my
niece?”
    “I am, mi—Aunt,” Telaine said, swallowing
“milady” just in time.
    “Sit there. I’ll be with you shortly.” The
clattering and thumping of the loom continued, loud enough to ring
in Telaine’s ears. It was a wonder none of the three were deaf.
Telaine sat on the stool Mistress Weaver had indicated. The young
girl, hesitating between Telaine and her mistress, settled at the
second spinning wheel and began to work the pedal.
    Telaine watched them both spin. The girl
seemed to be a true novice; how good the young woman was, Telaine
didn’t know, but she never seemed to stop and only paused briefly
to pick up a new wad of wool and somehow splice it into the old
one. Telaine observed the mechanism of the spinning wheel. A
Device could do the work of the pedal, ease the strain on the leg.
I wonder if you could do anything about that pause to put the two
pieces of wool together? Probably not, that looks finicky. But it
would be simple to set up a Device to do the up-and-down motion, or
better yet, create a wheel that runs by itself…
    “Come with me,” Mistress Weaver said. The
loom went silent, and so did the spinning wheels as the two girls
stopped to watch. “Back to work, girls. And, Alys, I want you to go
stir the dyeing pot and make sure the fire’s fed up nice.”
    Mistress Weaver came out from behind the loom
and regarded Telaine with a look that said she thought Telaine was
wasting her time. She was a tall woman in her early thirties, with
tightly pinned black hair, fierce blue eyes, and a stern mouth. She
didn’t look like someone who laughed often. The shape of her face
reminded Telaine of someone, though she couldn’t remember who. It
would come to her eventually.
    “Upstairs,” she said, and Telaine followed
her down a narrow hall to an even narrower stairway with no
handrail and no light. Telaine tried not to walk so closely she’d
trip over Mistress Weaver’s skirts, but the dimness, and the
cramped stairwell, made her nervous. Going downstairs in the dark
could be dangerous.
    The second floor wasn’t more than a hallway,
narrow and dim, with three doors opening off it. Mistress Weaver
went to the door at the far end and opened it. “I haven’t had time
to spare cleaning it up,” she said as Telaine goggled at the room,
which had no carpet and a small window overlooking the street.
    It was not a large room. It contained a bed,
and a chest at the foot of the bed, and a small table with a
cracked mirror over it. It also contained a hat stand, a stack of
boxes labeled WINTERSMEET, a piece of garden statuary that might
once have been a bear cub, a pile of fur coats covering the bed, a
straw hat that was not on the hat stand, a framed landscape in
oils, and a woven belt coiled on the floor like a snake. Telaine
checked twice in case it actually was a snake. She glanced
at Mistress Weaver. There was a definite look of pleasure in the
woman’s eyes. “You can store whatever you won’t use in the room
next door,” she said.
    “How long did it take you to haul everything
in here?” Telaine asked, following a hunch. The look of pleasure
was replaced with one of caution.
    “ don’t know what you mean . Happen
things pile up, over time. Not too good to do a little honest work,
are you?”
    She turned, and Telaine asked, feeling
somewhat desperate, “You do know why I’m here,