She couldn’t care what the empress wanted with Asha. Shedidn’tcare.
Eris thought of her goal. Of what Jemsin promised her:Freedom. Freedom to leave, to run, to never be hunted ever again.
Her gaze followed the dark blue threads of the weft. Reaching for Safire’s ribbon, she tied it on, then started weaving it in.
She had just fallen into a rhythm when that familiar soul-chilling cold swept through the room.
“Couldn’t sleep either, hmm?” she said as she worked.
Silence answered her.
When Eris looked up, the ghost was back. It was no longer quite so formless. If she looked hard enough, she could almost make out edges, like a silhouette. It even seemed more...
Human.
Eris thought of the bed that didn’t belong to her and the chest of clothes she’d never worn.
“Did they belong toyou?” she murmured, wondering about this ghost’s story. Who it was, how it came to be here, how long it had wandered this lonely labyrinth.
It didn’t answer her. So Eris went back to weaving.
“Are you trapped here?” she guessed as she worked.
“Yes,” it said.
Her fingers fumbled the thread. Recovering, she thought of something Day used to tell her: that sometimes spirits with unfinished business didn’t cross from one world to the next but got stuck in between instead.
“Did you forget to finish something before you died?”
“I’m not dead,” said the ghost.
Sure,thought Eris.You probably all think that.
“I’m imprisoned.”
“Oh?” She paused again. “Who imprisoned you, then?”
When it didn’t answer her, she glanced back. For a moment,Eris could swear the ghost had fingers now. And those fingers were turning into claws. But the next moment, they were fingers again. So maybe she’d imagined it.
“Someone I loved,” said the ghost. “She’ll pay dearly for it.”
Eris turned to look more fully, to askwhowould pay, andwhoit had loved, but by the time she turned around, the ghost was gone.
Sighing heavily, she shook her head. It didn’t matter. Only one thing mattered.
She returned to the loom.
Eris finished her weaving just before dawn. Cutting it free, she lifted it up to study the brown and blue threads and to run her fingers along the bits of Safire’s ribbon showing through.
She’d never done it before—made a door connected to a person. Normally, a door took her to the same place every time. She didn’t know if it would work the same way with a person.
Time to find out, she thought, moving through the labyrinth now, her candle illuminating the images depicted in colored glass. Mossy green meadows and bright orange bogs. Grassy headland and rocky shorelines. Brightly colored fishing huts. Hooks and nets and boats.
Eris was so used to the images trapped in the glass, she hardly saw them anymore.
Finally, she arrived at the yellow door. The one leading to Kor’s now destroyed ship. Setting down her new weaving, she opened the door. Silver-gray mist poured in. But she didn’t step through. Instead, she slid the pins out of thehinges, and pulled the whole thing off.
The moment it came free, the door dissolved into thread. Now her hands held a weaving made of yellow and gold threads, tied with pieces of theSea Mistress’s sails. She’d made it years ago, when Kor was first given a ship and became the one Eris reported to.
