Chapter 2:
The Weaver
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“Did they see you?” Briallen turned around brusquely at her companion’s voice. He had spoken a total of ten words since the moment she had decided they would go together while Ivor and Ewen took another door. Now he stared at her up and down inquisitive, his hand going to the pendant she had given him to mask themselves in this strange new world.
“They are not supposed to, not for so long,” she whispered, turning around to see that the two women were gone. The amulets she had prepared were supposed to hide them from the inhabitants of this grey, strange world. Not turn them invisible, because only a Weaver had the kind of power to alter so much, but to make the people just go along and turn away when they passed them, not noticing how different their clothes or hair were.
But that woman had looked at her for a long while, intently, fixated. Beings without magic – as she suspected the people of this world to be – shouldn’t be able to bypass the spell so quickly.
“I think that could be her,” Briallen said, starting to walk towards the direction the two women had gone. “We have been here for two days and no one noticed us. Only someone that had previous contact with magic can.”
“Why didn’t she say anything then?”
“I don’t know, maybe she is weak or maybe—” she stopped in the middle of the road. There was no trace of them; maybe they were already away in those strange, thin metal carts everyone seemed to use for transport. “Do you think this world might be different than ours? Like a prison?”
“You mean like the ones made to contain uncontrollable users?” The man asked and Briallen nodded. “It could be, but what kind of spell would be able to contain a Weaver?”
“That is what we have to find out,” she said, raising her hand and pointing to the direction where the two women went.
The spell was a tracking one, meant to form a track on the person she had in mind, but nothing came and she sighed. This world was… difficult to navigate, half of her spells didn’t seem to work but it wasn’t as though she was completely without magic like her companion. More so, there was a lingering pulse of magic but it was too simple to be detected, too thin to try spells that would just come with her full abilities.
“Maybe we should wait till the morning.” Briallen turned around and faced the man, a little embarrassed at her failure and also partly for not being able to remember his name. “We can intercept her as she comes out of that fortress, I would need something of hers to track her anyway.”
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Why did I do this? I’m too old for this kind of impulsive waste. Amelia sighed as she walked and secured the Remington typewriter on the basket of her bike. The owner had been delighted at seeing her there, saying he had spotted her staring at it plenty of times, which just made her want to turn around again, but she didn’t. She stood her ground and asked for the portable machine, saying it was for an office job. A full blown lie, but what else could have she said? That she didn’t know why she wanted to buy something she had seen in a dream? Something that was, in every practical point of view, completely useless to her?
But well, here she was, carrying her new item to her job because she couldn’t possibly lose more time by returning to her flat. Fiona was going to have a field day with her and then probably ask where she would go after quitting their job at the station.
While arriving, Amelia contemplated the idea of giving the typewriter to her friend, a little something so she could get out of answering calls and changing plugs to get a job she actually wanted, but the selfish notion of spending endless hours of her long shifts without Fiona’s comforting presence made her retract on the idea. So she bore her friend’s teasing once she saw the machine on her basket, though it wasn’t as bad as Mrs. Norris' frown at seeing it under Amelia’s stool. She had to give a weak excuse that she couldn’t leave it outside because someone would surely steal it and it was a present for her mother.
But it was yet again when walking out, arm locked on her friend's, when she saw something strange across the alley. The impulse was greater than her good sense when the image of a shock of blue hair appeared again, this time she ran, calling for the woman while Fiona ran behind her.
“Excuse me, miss. Miss!” Her hand caught the woman’s arm and she turned around. Quite young, her hair still a striking dark blue, she wore an expression that Amelia couldn’t read and embarrassment started heating on her at how erratic her chase looked. “Oh, god, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to disturb you. I just… I thought you looked like someone I knew. It was a mistake.”
“It’s no matter,” the young woman said evenly, with an accent that she couldn’t quite place. “I have a rather common face, my lady.”
“My lady?” Amelia repeated with a nervous chuckle. “You are not from here, are you??”
“Mel!” Fiona got to them and rested her arm on her shoulder, panting with the effort. “Why did you run like that? Oh, I’m sorry, do you know each other?”
Amelia turned her head to her friend, her face didn’t show any of the surprise that merited on seeing someone dressed with such older looking clothes and blue hair.
“I just… It was a misunderstanding,” Amelia said, staring in between her friend and this girl, trying to find any sign of curiosity. But all she could see was normal exasperation that could just be attributed to Fiona being cold, tired, and wanting to go home after their workday.
“Hey, you want company to your stop? It can be really empty here when all the others go,” Fiona beamed, her hand circling around Amelia’s waist.
The young woman nodded and turned around, someone else was walking towards them, and the first thing Amelia noticed was the long cloak that shadowed their figure. Amelia turned to Fiona again, was she the only one who saw how they were dressed? Or did her friend have a secret hobby for clothes out of a Shakespearean play that all of this didn’t seem to startle her?
“I would love to, let me tell my friend—” The woman cut herself when Amelia gave a step behind, her eyes fixed on the man that walked towards them, a chill going down her spine.
“Mel?” Fiona squished her shoulder but she couldn’t take her eyes from the man. She had seen him before; she was sure, but where? In a dream? It was ridiculous but her body was screaming at her to run.
“Let’s go, Fiona.” She took her friend’s forearm as she turned around. In a normal situation, she would have been mortified about being so rude. But these people… Something was wrong with them and Fiona didn’t even seem to notice the strangeness of their appearance.
“Mel! What— Oh, I’m sorry, we’ll see you around!” Fiona waved her hand over her shoulder and then turned to her. “What’s wrong with you today? You were the one that went after that girl.”
“Something was wrong, didn’t you see their clothes?”
“Their clothes? What you mean? Did the bloke have an offensive pin on his coat or something?”
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“Coat?” Amelia stopped her tracks and took her friend by her shoulders. “Fiona, what exactly did you see? The girl… her hair was blue and the man was wearing a cloak that seemed out some medieval—”
“What did you see, Mel? Are you all right?” Fiona was frowning at her now, her expression turning into genuine concern.
Amelia stared at her, scraping away her own mind for the first time in the evening. Were those people’s appearances only in her mind? Was it really just her mind recreating two normal, harmless pedestrians in some strange light? Were the work and the nightmares truly affecting her that much?
“Nothing,” she forced herself to say after some seconds. “Nothing, I’m just… I must be tired, that’s all. Let’s go.”
“I can stay with you today if you want to,” Fiona offered sweetly, hooking her arm with hers, “make sure you get a proper sleep.”
“No!” Amelia snapped and then shook her head, realising how wrong that came. “No, I just… I just need to rest a little. I’ll rest all day tomorrow, I promise.”
The promise seemed to land somewhere in the believable side for her friend, which was all good because she didn’t sleep once she arrived at her flat. Pacing was something of an overnight activity for her, especially with her job always keeping her sat down. That night, she walked around her tiny living room-kitchen, her eyes fixated in a painting that her aunt gifted her to, per her words, give some light to her depressing little house and she had placed the typewriter on the small table that served as her desk. The two objects in particular couldn’t be more foreign to Amelia's life: the painting was one of a ship battling a storm, the green-blue waves almost swallowing it. The typewriter looked as strange in her empty table as it wouldn't have looked at home on the table of someone who actually knew what they had brought it for. She didn’t know why, no more than she knew why her aunt would think that a painting of a storm would somehow give some ‘light’ to her flat.
After pacing for about half an hour she finally went back to her room and searched for the only notebook she had, ripping a page and coming back to her desk. The sheet didn’t fit perfectly on the roll but it mattered little when her fingers started pressing down the keys, words flowing out, not entirely coherent. After all, there was little in her head in that moment except for the idea of possibly losing it. So she thought of the man she saw today and the one in her dream, of the raven and of those blurry pages in the white typewriter of her dreams, of the woman with the dark blue hair and wrote:
They were at the end of their journey, they had almost found what they wanted, but she would not reveal herself. She had been tucked away in her own refuge, sitting down, writing. The lady almost gave up, this quest was clearly impossible. She turned around and prepared to go home, but the man, the raven, stayed and kept looking.
And it was him who found her.
Amelia stared at the page and let out a laugh, what even was that? Some rationale of what had happened in her dream? Why did it even matter? People rarely remembered or cared about the narratives that the subconscious created, especially about something so strange and recurrent that could probably just be easily explained by the stress of her job.
Maybe writing it down will help me and I will stop having them. She took out the sheet from the roll and stared at it. Well, yes, the typewriter had been an unnecessary expense, so why not use it? She was no Jane Austen, who Fiona loved to swoon about sometimes, but a dream journal was not at all bad. After all, no one would ever read it.
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Briallen hated to be wrong, especially when her being wrong meant more weeks of travel, another failed mission and more time lost to help the people that were suffering back home, her own family, but right now, she had to admit defeat over finding the Weaver in this world. She had thought that getting closer to her would spark some recognition on the sorceress, but maybe this was just one woman that had magic and could see past her spells. As Lord Merlian had said, the Weaver they were looking for was from their world. She knew what one of the witches of Briallen’s clan would look like, or at least, she had heard of them. But that woman had just stared at them like they were some strange apparitions.
“She could be enchanted.” That had been the first excuse that had left her lips when the two women stepped away from them, at first angry at Ector because it had been his arrival that threw the woman off. “Or maybe she recognised you, do you remember her?”
“Why would I remember her?”
“Well, she was in your king’s court, wasn’t she?” Briallen always had a bitter taste in her mouth when having to mention the Raven King without the customary disdain that was used at home. But she knew there had been a powerful sorceress in King Almeric’s court a few years ago, though little word had travelled of her, her mother disdained the women that attached themselves to the rigid institution of the very appropriately named Brotherhood and their leagues with the ruler of the Moorlands. “Can’t you remember what she looked like?”
“I haven’t seen this woman in my life,” Ector replied and started walking.
“Then how in the Goddess’ name we’ll find her?” she snapped. “We can’t cover entire worlds, with their own realms, oceans, to find a single woman.”
“We are not,” he said coolly. “We’ll find her because of her power; a Weaver like her can’t hide for long, not even in this world without magic.”
He had never said how, though, and now they were still here, walking to the very edge of that strange city where people travelled on metal carriages without horses and dressed in short tunics. Briallen was tired of holding her tongue from just telling this strange man that she had to be the one to guide them since he didn’t have magic of his own to open a portal nor had the key that Lord Merlian had given her and Ivor to cross over to the different worlds. What could he even do besides being the one to carry the Weaver if they were eventually forced to take her back home by force? Briallen hoped it wouldn’t get to that. That she wouldn’t have to degrade herself to the likes of the Raven King or the one before him.
“Do you plan to lead us to the next city?” She finally spoke, but Ector didn’t turn around. She withheld from calling him by his name even after finally remembering it while trying to recall Lord Merlian’s instructions about tracking the Weaver’s location, though she wasn’t planning to use it because it was not as if the man had referred to her as anything other than ‘princess’ either. “I don’t know if you remember, but Lord Merlian said he had made sure the keys would lead us to a place close to the Weaver. We can’t exactly travel this entire world and the others—”
Briallen cut herself when a mental carriage passed dangerously close to them, letting out a dreadful sound as the man inside made a rude sign to them. She scoffed, following the machine with her eyes as it kept its way on the road and left the city. Ector had stopped too, his cloaked figure also fixated in the road.
“What is it? Why did we stop?” she asked, looking around, only the road and some trees and those carriages. “Do you want to ask for a lift on one of those things?”
“We can’t.”
“What?”
“We can’t ask them, they can’t leave this place even if they wanted.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at them go, princess.”
Briallen frowned and turned to see the carriages passing them, despite their unmanliness and the fact they didn’t even move with magic. What else was there to see of them?
“I don’t—”
“Look at them,” Ector repeated, pointing with his chin. Brialln frowned at first, but then understood what he meant, closing her eyes and softly reciting the spell. When opening them again, she saw it: the carriages went to the border, yes, but they weren’t really leaving. It was as if the road, the trees and the sky itself bended like liquid iron or a mirror that became a portal like the ones used by the Brotherhood. The carriages appeared at the other side of the road and back the city as if leaving was never the intention, as if leaving wasn’t permitted.
“They are not letting them go,” she whispered, a chill creeping down her spine. What kind of monster would trap people like that?
“It’s not like that,” Ector said and her head snapped at him when he started walking back, “there is nowhere else to go.”
“What?” she strode to him. Was this some kind of trick? “What are you talking about? Is this world just this small?”
“Not just small, we need to go back before everything starts again, unless you want to walk all the way back there. Negotiations will have to be for another time.”
“You mean this is a looped prison?” Briallen was panting now; she had never been so out of her depth since she was a child, barely touching any magic that wasn’t part of the ways of the covens.
Ector nodded, his hand going to the short sword resting on his waist. “You were right; there is a Weaver here, because no common sorcerer can break the rules like that.”