The first task was the easiest one, in a way. “It’s straightforward, anyway,” said the dust-wife. “This is owlcloth.” She ran her hand down the fabric. It did not shimmer or shine in the light, but there was something about it that confused the eye. There were a half dozen ragged pieces laid out across the flat roof of the dust-wife’s home. “Make a cloak of it. You must spin the thread yourself.” She gestured to a wooden drop spindle and a distaff and a coarse mass of something only slightly more substantial than smoke. “With that.”
Marra frowned. It seemed too easy and she was suspicious of things that seemed easy. She had spun thread before—everyone in the convent spun on drop spindles all the time while talking or sitting or even praying. It was the only way to keep the weavers supplied with thread. You needed six sisters with spindles for even one sister weaving.
She reached out and touched the smoky mass and snatched her finger back at once. It smarted as if she’d been stung. She stuck it in her mouth to cool it.
“Nettle wool.” The dust-wife did not look smug, which was the only thing that made it bearable. “You must spin it into thread to sew the owlcloth together. It will hurt you if it can.”
“They used to make cloth of nettle thread,” said Marra. “It can’t have been like this.”
“Oh, no. You let the stems stand in the field for a few months and it acts like anything else. This is the wool of a ram who was trapped in brambles for a hundred years, while the thorns grew into his blood and his eyes.” The dust-wife nudged the wool with her boot.
“Is that true?” asked Marra skeptically.
“Probably not. But it’s evil, enchanted stuff, nonetheless.” She straightened. “You have from dawn to dusk and back again. There’s water in the jug.” She swung herself down on the ladder and left Marra alone on the roof with the wool that could not be spun.
* * *
She did it in the end, of course. She had the same bitter feeling as when she had shoveled the stable—I will do this. You will not stop me. She tried a half-dozen different ways to cover her hands, only to find the fabric too clumsy to work with or too thin to offer any protection. Finally she stared at the mass of smoke and thought, I am doing a heroic task and heroic tasks are not done by half measures. It’s only pain. Kania’s pain is so much worse than mine. And she plunged her left hand into the mass of smoke and nettles and began to spin.
It burned and stung and blazed against her flesh. She hissed and cursed and bent over her hand. No. Keep going. You can’t stop once you’ve started. She thought of every birth she had ever seen. Those women had been in far worse pain and they had done it, because once you started, you couldn’t stop. She would do this. Left hand only. I will need the right to thread the cord. She could protect her right hand with fabric for this bit but she needed her left to pull the wool onto the distaff and there was no protecting it.
She was clumsy with her left hand, but it did not have to be done well, only done. Her fingertips turned angry red and her knuckles began to swell, but that did not matter. She only had to keep her fingers in position and let the angry smoke flow through them. The sun crawled overhead. The web of skin between thumb and forefinger hurt and hurt until it stopped being pain and became something else entirely.
It was hard to keep the drop spindle going slowly enough. She wanted to rush through it. But a faster spin meant finer thread and she wanted coarse, heavy stuff to hold her cloak, so that she need not use so much of it. She bit the inside of her cheek bloody and stared at her clawlike left hand and wondered if she’d ever do anything much with it again.
At last she had enough. Probably. The nettle wool was nearly gone, leaving only a great sharp thorn as long as a sheep’s foreleg, with a point that could have pierced a man’s heart. She dropped the spindle and clutched her ruined hand to her chest. It was red and violet and the joints were swollen thick. When Marra tried to open her fingers, she could feel the tendons grating against bones and could not contain her scream.
She looked up. The sun was on the far horizon and the shadows were turning blue. She drank water, holding the jug with her right hand. She tried to pour a little over her left. It didn’t do anything. She cried a little, and that didn’t do anything, either.
Marra had saved her right hand for the delicate work. She took a deep breath and then worked the thread loose from the spindle while her flesh blazed as if it had caught fire. The thread came off lumpy and ugly and uneven, but there was nothing to be done. She had no more nettle wool to spin anyway. She wished that she could ply it, but she did not have enough time and she did not know how much more pain she could endure.
There was no needle. She stared at the owlcloth scraps and the thread in her hand and could not believe that she had missed that. There’s always a needle, she thought wearily. I am an embroiderer; I always have a needle. She started laughing softly to herself, the broken laughter of a mortal wound. All her needles were in her room at the convent, carefully jabbed into a pincushion shaped like a little white rat. It had been a gift from the Sister Apothecary.
She looked over the rooftop, looking for a shape she had missed, the wink of bone or metal in the moonlight. When had the moon come up? Had it been that long already?
Marra did not find a needle. Instead she saw the dull gleam of light on the bitter thorn at the heart of the nettle wool.
She picked it up in her swollen fingers and looked at the point. It was sharp enough to serve as an awl. She would have to push the thread through with her fingers and then grab it on the other side and pull it through and it would burn and burn and her fingers would stop working and then, Lady of Grackles help her, perhaps she would have to use her teeth.
Did you think impossible tasks were so easily done?
She looked at her sad, misshapen pile of thread and the soft, shifting owlcloth, and she cried a little more, and then she bent her head over the fabric and set to work.
* * *
“God’s balls,” said the dust-wife a week later, looking at the bone dog. “You did it.” She did not sound happy about it. She hadn’t sounded happy about the cloak of nettles, either, when Marra had come down with her ruined hands and her swollen lips and dropped the owlcloth garment at her feet.
“I did,” said Marra. “Where do I begin the next task? Moonlight in a jar of clay?”
The dust-wife groaned. She got up without answering and went to rummage in her pantry. Eventually she found a pile of chicken bones and tossed them to the bone dog.
Marra had a vague notion that chicken bones were bad for dogs, but she also wasn’t sure that there was anything in the bone dog to be injured. He lay down happily and began to gnaw. Bits of splintered bone rained out of his neck as he swallowed.
The dust-wife pulled out a chair at the table and slumped into it. She was tall and bony and stoop shouldered where Marra was short and round. “Do you know why you set someone an impossible task?” she asked.
Marra scowled. This was the sort of question that she hated, the kind that made her think that the other person was trying to be clever at her expense. But the dust-wife had dealt fairly with her, so she tried to think of an answer. “To see if they can do it?” She racked her brain, thinking of all the old legends: Mordecai and the worm; the white deer who loved a human and her terrible quest to save her lover; Little Mouse who killed the dragon on her wedding day. “To see if they are heroes?”
“Heroes,” said the dust-wife with an explosive snort. “The gods save us all from heroes.” She gazed at Marra, her normally expressionless face lined with sorrow. “But perhaps that’s the fate in store for you after all. No, child, you give someone an impossible task so that they won’t be able to do it.”
Marra examined this statement carefully from all directions. “But I did it,” she said. “Twice.”
“I had noticed,” said the dust-wife grimly. “And quite likely you will do the third task and then I will be obligated to help you kill your prince.”