Filed to story: A Court of Mist and Fury Book by Sarah J Maas
I was not prey any longer, I decided as I eased up to that door.
And I was not a mouse.
I was a wolf.
I listened on the threshold, the rock worn as if many, many boots had passed through-and perhaps never passed back over again. The words of her song became clear now, her voice sweet and beautiful, like sunlight on a stream:
“There were two sisters, they went playing,
To see their father’s ships come sailing …
And when they came unto the sea-brim
The elder did push the younger in.”
A honeyed voice, for an ancient, horrible song. I’d heard it before-slightly different, but sung by humans who had no idea that it had come from faerie throats.
I listened for another moment, trying to hear anyone else. But there was only a clatter and thrum of some sort of device, and the Weaver’s song.
“Sometimes she sank, and sometimes she swam,
‘Til her corpse came to the miller’s dam.”
My breath was tight in my chest, but I kept it even-directing it through my mouth in silent breaths. I eased open the front door, just an inch.
No squeak-no whine of rusty hinges. Another piece of the pretty trap: practically inviting thieves in. I peered inside when the door had opened wide enough.
A large main room, with a small, shut door in the back. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls, crammed with bric-a-brac: books, shells, dolls, herbs, pottery, shoes, crystals, more books, jewels … From the ceiling and wood rafters hung all manner of chains, dead birds, dresses, ribbons, gnarled bits of wood, strands of pearls …
A junk shop-of some immortal hoarder.
And that hoarder …
In the gloom of the cottage, there sat a large spinning wheel, cracked and dulled with age.
And before that ancient spinning wheel, her back to me, sat the Weaver.
Her thick hair was of richest onyx, tumbling down to her slender waist as she worked the wheel, snow-white hands feeding and pulling the thread around a thorn-sharp spindle.
She looked young-her gray gown simple but elegant, sparkling faintly in the dim forest light through the windows as she sang in a voice of glittering gold:
“But what did he do with her breastbone?
He made him a viol to play on.
What’d he do with her fingers so small?
He made pegs to his viol withall.”
The fiber she fed into the wheel was white-soft. Like wool, but … I knew, in that lingering human part of me, it was not wool. I knew that I did not want to learn what creature it had come from, who she was spinning into thread.
Because on the shelf directly beyond her were cones upon cones of threads-of every color and texture. And on the shelf adjacent to her were swaths and yards of that woven thread-woven, I realized, on the massive loom nearly hidden in the darkness near the hearth. The Weaver’s loom.
I had come on spinning day-would she have been singing if I had come on weaving day instead? From the strange, fear-drenched scent that came from those bolts of fabric, I already knew the answer.
A wolf. I was a wolf.
I stepped into the cottage, careful of the scattered debris on the earthen floor. She kept working, the wheel clattering so merrily, so at odds with her horrible song:
“And what did he do with her nose-ridge?
Unto his viol he made a bridge.
What did he do with her veins so blue?
He made strings to his viol thereto.”
I scanned the room, trying not to listen to the lyrics.
Nothing. I felt … nothing that might pull me toward one object in particular. Perhaps it would be a blessing if I were indeed not the one to track the Book-if today was not the start of what was sure to be a slew of miseries.
The Weaver perched there, working.
I scanned the shelves, the ceiling. Borrowed time. I was on borrowed time, and I was almost out of it.
Had Rhys sent me on a fool’s errand? Maybe there was nothing here. Maybe this object had been taken. It would be just like him to do that. To tease me in the woods, to see what sort of things might make my body react.
And maybe I resented Tamlin enough in that moment to enjoy that deadly bit of flirtation. Maybe I was as much a monster as the female spinning before me.
But if I was a monster, then I supposed Rhys was as well.
Rhys and I were one in the same-beyond the power that he’d given me. It’d be fitting if Tamlin hated me, too, once he realized I’d truly left.
I felt it, then-like a tap on my shoulder.
I pivoted, keeping one eye on the Weaver and the other on the room as I wove through the maze of tables and junk. Like a beacon, a bit of light laced with his half smile, it tugged me.
Hello, it seemed to say.
Have you come to claim me at last?
Yes-yes, I wanted to say. Even as part of me wished it were otherwise.
The Weaver sang behind me,