Kourrem stood abruptly. “I’ll be right back.” She hurried from the tent.
“I just thought—all the girls are taught when we are very young,” Kara explained. “You don’t know how to card wool, or spin thread, or—” She stopped, baffled.
“I don’t know how to bake, either,” Alanna confided. “The only cooking I know is the kind soldiers do on the march.”
Kara shook her head. In many ways she was a very proper Bazhir maiden; Alanna often puzzled her. She was trying to explain the process of weaving when Kourrem returned, bearing a lap-sized model of her big loom. The girl knelt beside Alanna. “I can teach you the simplest kind of weaving, if you want to learn,” she offered. “You couldn’t do anything like stripes, but it would be a start.”
“I’d love to learn,” Alanna admitted. “It looks like fun.” Kourrem grinned. “It is fun when it goes right,” she said. “I really shouldn’t start you weaving right away. We always had to learn to card wool—you know, comb out all the dirt and tangles—and spin a good thread before we were let near a loom.”
Alanna laughed. “It’s just like every fighting art I studied,” she explained to her surprised audience. “We had to learn how to make our weapons before we got to use them.”
“You have to understand how a thing is made before you master it,” Kara said wisely. Suddenly her face brightened. “That’s what you’ve been teaching us about magic!”
“So if you know how the crystal sword is made, you can command it!” Ishak added.
Alanna fought down a trace of alarm. “That’s not all of it, Ishak.” She fixed his eyes with her own grim ones. “To command things of nature, you need to understand how they are made, and you must want to command them. With things of magic, you develop your will until you are stronger than your Gift. Otherwise the power will turn on you. Do you understand me?” she demanded.
Ishak met her eyes defiantly, then looked away. “Of course I understand.”
Alanna frowned, worried for him, but there was no sense in pursuing the matter now. She examined the loom she held. “What do I do with this thing?”
Kourrem explained the device, naming the different parts and describing what they did. When she finished, she worked the shuttle until a row had grown on the threaded loom. Then she handed it to Alanna. “Your turn.”
The loom was clumsy and awkward-feeling to the knight, who was far more used to weapons. At last she drew a breath and started the shuttle.
The moment the thing began to move, she realized she didn’t understand what was supposed to be happening. Within seconds the threads were impossibly snarled. Kara choked back laughter; even Kourrem had to smile. Ishak looked bored.
Alanna put the loom down, feeling younger and more ignorant than she had in years. “Perhaps I need to learn the other things first. My teachers were right—for real skills, there aren’t any shortcuts.”
“I’ll teach you,” Kourrem offered, “if you still want to learn. Though it seems silly for you to go to such trouble when the things you do are more important.”
“What’s more important than the clothes I wear?” Alanna wanted to know.
“Kourrem’s right,” Ishak remarked scornfully. “Why should you fool with looms and women’s things when you can fight and do magic?”
Alanna didn’t miss the scorn in Ishak’s voice, or that both girls had flushed with embarrassment and begun to finger their veils. He needs a lesson, she thought, picking up a thread. This time I’m going to give him one. “So you think weaving is stupid?”
“Women’s work.” Ishak yawned, very much a Bazhir male. “It’s all right if you have nothing better to do.”
Alanna swiftly tied a knot in the thread. Ishak fell as the carpet he stood on yanked itself out from under his feet, dumping the young man on the ground. The carpet then sailed around the tent frantically. “Did I understand you correctly?” she asked as the girls ducked and Faithful hissed and spit. “Is working with thread less important than talking to demons and seeing the future?”