The two men exchanged a look above her head.
“I’ll see you at dinner,” said the weaving master. Before he left, he touched Eris’s shoulder in what could only be good-bye.
As his footsteps padded away, the implications of his words unraveled inside her.
He wanted her to leave? But this was her home. Everyone and everything she loved was here. Day. The looms. Her best friend, Yew. The cliffs and the meadows and the sea...
“Why?” Her voice sounded strange in her ears. Like a mirror breaking. “Why will I bring sorrow on everyone?”
Day bent toward her until their eyes were level. He wore no tasseled robes, but a knit gray sweater and trousers stained with dirt. He was only a caretaker, after all.
“Listen to me....”
Eris wasn’t listening. She was panicking.
She’d always known she was no one important. She was an orphan, taken in out of charity. Because the weavers had made a vow to the Skyweaver: to harbor those who needed harboring.
But she never thought they would send her away.
“I can’t leave,” she said, her voice cracking. “Where would I go? I have nowhere to go, Day. I’ll be all alone!”
“Eris.” His strong hands came down on her shoulders. “You are never, ever alone. No matter where you are.”
She shook her head. Tears burned in her eyes. He didn’t say: Everything will be all right. He didn’t say: I won’t let them do this.
“You don’t want me either,” she realized then. She’d always feared it, deep down. But here was the proof. “No one wants me.”
“Eris...”
She didn’t want to hear any more of his empty words.
Pulling out of his grip, Eris turned and ran.
She ran hard down the halls—bumping into apprentices as she escaped the scrin. Beneath the setting sun, she ran up the dirt paths, through the silver boreal forest, along the rocky cliffs facing the sea. Her footsteps pounded the earth, trying to outrun what she’d overheard.
She didn’t stop running until she reached the meadow.
It smelled of juniper and sea salt up here. In the distance, far below, the sea roared as it crashed against the rocks.
Eris had just collapsed in the grass, weary from running so fast and so far, when a sound came from across the meadow.
She looked up to see Yew bumbling toward her. Bleating loudly, his stubby white tail bouncing as he ran across the field. He butted Eris’s shoulder with his soft white head, then proceeded to nuzzle her.
Eris threw her arms around Yew, breathing in his musky smell and burying her tear-streaked face in the sheep’s wool—which was fuzzy from being recently sheared.
“Why does no one want me?” she whispered.
As if in answer, Yew curled up beside her and put his soft white chin in Eris’s lap.
When she’d cried herself out, she lay in the golden grass, staring up at the blue sky. Picking up her knife—the one Day gave her for cutting scarp thistles—she ran her fingers over the embossed star pattern in the silver sheath.
“To remind you the Skyweaver is always with you,” he’d told her the day he gave it to her. “When you use it, say a prayer to her.”
Eris closed her eyes, thinking of the prayer Day recited with her every night before bed:
When the night descends...
I look to those who’ve gone before me
