Daja shrugged. "It was just the sneezing that made my eyes water," she lied. "But listen, my friends and I were up and down this bluff all the time, before the quake. We never saw anything like this."
"You weren't supposed to," replied the mage. "It works only when triggered. And it's worked so long, and so well, that most of the Council had forgotten that it might have been damaged when the bluff dropped into the sea, until I reminded them. We're to find as much of it as we can, and bring it in for repairs." He sighed. "If most of it's in pieces like that" - he nodded to Kirel's small pile - "then we'll need more help."
"Have there been omens of pirates?" asked Kirel, worried.
"Who needs omens?" asked Frostpine. "We had an earthquake. Everyone's defences are in a mess. What pirate would want to lose an opportunity like this?"
As briskly as a housewife, Frostpine took the large piece of net and brought the ends together, folding it up like a blanket. Daja helped, thinking over what he'd said. Once the net was folded into a neat bundle, the man loaded it into the empty basket on the mule. Kirel added his stack of smaller pieces, and went back to combing his part of the ground. Daja went to a clear spot several yards away from where she'd discovered her piece of the net, and knelt.
Something tugged at the corner of her eye: was that a fishing-boat? It had a three-cornered sail, at least. She turned her head to look straight at it.
The sea was empty. There was no boat in sight.
Sandry was just finished with the dishes when Lark returned from the loomhouses. "Was Tris right?" asked the girl.
Lark nodded. "I just can't understand how Water temple supervision is so lax that a novice could empty four storerooms, but... Oh, that's the Water-folk for you. All froth and bubble, and they get diverted by the tiniest stone in their paths." She shook her head. "Worse, Dedicate Vetiver tells me that her two best weavers suffered broken bones and broken looms in the quake, and the others are still turning out cloth and blankets for the countryside. She'll put one more weaver to bandages, but they still need us."
"I'll do all I can, of course," Sandry replied, "but you know I can't weave. You haven't had the chance to teach me yet."
"That's all right," Lark told her with a sigh. "What we have to do won't exactly involve weaving. And bless Mila and the Green Man both that you're so strong, as young as you are. We could never do this otherwise. Come on. Leave Little Bear with Briar."
She led Sandry across the spiral road between Discipline and the two great loomhouses. Entering one through an open door, they came to a small workshop, apart from those rooms where Sandry could hear the clack of a dozen weavers at work. In this chamber a strange assortment of things had been set up. A few rolls of bandages had been placed on two long tables; more rolls filled a large basket on the floor. Other baskets held giant spools of linen thread. A comfortable chair was placed beside each long table. The shutters were thrown open, to catch what breeze the day might send their way. A pair of novices sat on a bench next to the door, to run errands.
Lark sent them to the kitchen at Winding Circle's Hub for tea. Once they were gone, she took Sandry's hands in hers.
"What I'm going to ask is strange, but you can handle it." She took a deep breath. "I will teach you how to weave properly, when I can. What we do today is not real weaving. It may look like it, but it's a cheat. If you rely on magic without learning to do ordinary weaving properly, there will come a day when your great magics won't hold - magic can't teach you how to weave right. The novice always has gaps, loose threads, or places that are too tightly packed in her cloth, and all those things weaken the spells you include in the work. Do you understand?"
"Of course I do," replied Sandry. "I don't want to take shortcuts. I want to learn to weave well."
Lark smiled, and cupped one of Sandry's cheeks with her hand. "That's why you'd be so good at weaving - you care for the work, not just the magic." She looked around. "Magic, though, is what we need today - and magic worked fast, which isn't what I want you to learn about magic, either, now that I think about it." She began to open up a roll of bandage linen, pulling until the narrow cloth was stretched across a third of the length of one table. "You see those spools of linen thread? Bring some here. Put them in a row across the cloth you already have. Take the loose ends and draw them until they hang over the far end of your work surface."
Sandry obeyed. Watching Lark, who did the same thing at the other table, she arranged spools end to end across the narrow part of the bandage, so the thread followed the length of the cloth and went on past it, all the way to the end of the table and over.
"If you're trying to strengthen a wall against destruction, or bring a company of people together, this is a way to do it," explained Lark, coming over to check what she had done. "We weave magic, and get the stone, or the hearts of the people to follow it. Here we guide the thread to continue the original pattern of the cloth, like a vine growing along a trellis. We grow new cloth from the stumps of the old." She deftly put spools of thread on either side of first the bandage, then the long, bare threads. "These will be your weft. They'll run through the warp threads to produce a whole cloth."
Sandry frowned, turning these ideas over in the mind. "Could Briar and Rosethorn manage it? They grow plants on trellises. Flax and cotton both come from plants - I bet they could do this, too, if you end up needing more help."