It had taken Lissa another two weeks of her apprenticeship to finish plying all the yarn for the saddle blankets. Yesterday, she and aunt Igmi had wet-finished the thick yarn she had made by soaking it in hot water, wringing it out, and hanging it all up to dry. All Lissa had left to do was wait until it was bone dry and carry each hank over to Hayzen's workroom. Today, as she and aunt Igmi were both well aware, they would pull out the remaining [umbral fur] and see what it was like.
Lissa's mother, Tecka, had nearly forced her daughter to sit down and eat her breakfast that morning. From the moment Lissa woke up until they arrived at Igmi's shop, she had been talking incessantly about what the [umbral fur] must be like and how it would "be magic" for Lissa. Tecka, who had actually been the one holding onto the special fur in a large leather satchel all this time, passed the pouch over to Igmi with a raised-brow look that said, "You asked for this." Still overflowing with excitement and prattling on about her ideas, Lissa didn't notice the exchange at all.
Tecka was also curious about what they would be able to do with the strange fiber and decided to linger. Igmi pulled up a tall stool for her short apprentice. Lissa was much taller than she had been half a year before when they had made their journey, but she was still too short to see much when sitting at an adult-height chair at Igmi's raised work tables. Lissa hoisted herself up on to the stool, and suddenly went quite still when she noticed the pouch in her aunt's hands. Igmi unbound the satchel, and carefully poured the contents out onto the clean tabletop.
All three women watched huge handfuls of inky black fur that seemed to give off a shadowy miasma tumble out of the bag. They were indeed giving off inky vapor. In fact, it almost looked like the locks were evaporating right before their eyes.
"No, no!" Lissa cried, grabbing at the clumps.
As she reached out, the shadows of her outstretched fingers fell across them, and the portions in shadow seemed to solidify slightly.
Igmi hmmed aloud in obvious concentration. She retrieved an oil lamp she kept nearby and brought it closer. As the lamp's light illuminated the fur made of shadows, it began to dissolve even more quickly than it had from the ambient light within the room. Tecka and Lissa gasped. Lissa tried even more urgently to grasp the fibers as they dissolved into an inky haze that began to pool on the table top. Igmi nodded thoughtfully, retreated, and only returned after placing the lamp far across the room.
"Well, that was illuminating, if you'll forgive the pun," Igmi said. "It's no surprise that fur from a shadow fundament creature would have trouble in bright light. It's good that you kept it in leather—kept the light out. I've never tried working with anything like it though. We might have to process it in the dark entirely by feel, and I'm not sure if spinning it will make it resilient enough to use in daylight."
"So you mean we might just end up doing a bunch of work for something you can't use," Tecka added.
Lissa was still gathering the apparently fragile fur against her chest as she said, "I don't care. I wanna do it anyways." She was going to try. It didn't matter what the adults thought. This was her special fur.
Igmi looked over at the wall of drying hanks of yarn that Lissa had spun. "Well, I guess you've earned my help, even if it doesn't get you anywhere," she conceded. She planted on hand on her hip and idly rubbed her chin with her other hand, considering. "If you want to have any hope of getting something useful out of it, we'll need to make a plan and do some experimenting."
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Days later in the waning late afternoon light, mousey-haired Lissa sat on a wide, flat outcropping of rainbow sandstone in her family's meadow, staring blankly at the sluggish, icy creek. She huddled under a thick woolen poncho, just barely visible as a triangular silhouette if someone had been looking out of the kitchen window toward the far side of the creek. She hugged her knees tightly to her chest and rested her chin atop them. If anyone had been close enough to see her face, they would have noticed her bright red eyes and nose, damp and puffy from crying. Experiments with the [umbral fur] had not been going well.
Igmi was very methodical in her approach to most everything, and the [umbral fur] had been no exception. She had planned and begun to execute an excellent breed study, which was apparently a spinning term for making a variety of samples out of the same fiber to showcase its material properties. If Lissa had been looking for a recipe of how to make a specific kind of yarn or cloth from the fur, there wouldn't have been a better approach. Unfortunately, that was not what Lissa had been looking for. No, she was hoping that working with the fiber, even just holding it in her hands, would help her figure out how to do magic. It hadn't.
Not only had Igmi's approach not helped, but Lissa had thrown a tantrum when things hadn't gone well (at least for Lissa's goals) for the third evening in a row. Because of the fiber's unique response to sunlight, Igmi had been kind enough to bring her tools to their meadow for the last three evenings so that Igmi, Tecka, and Lissa could all spend a couple hours each evening working together to execute Igmi's plan for the breed study. After three evenings of preparing different kinds of samples that Lissa didn't actually care about, and making exactly zero progress on how to connect with the magic the fur obviously held, Lissa had been angry. She had been angry enough to dump her basket of carefully combed top out onto the frosty brittle grass in frustration and angry enough to yell at her aunt, to blame Igmi and her plan for Lissa's own failure.
In response, Igmi had carefully and calmly packed up her tools, and told her not to come to her apprenticeship today. If Igmi had yelled or screamed, Lissa might have felt even more justified in her anger, but the quiet response had left Lissa's bluster without anything to stand on.
Tecka had given her a stern rebuke after Igmi had departed about how it's okay to be angry, but it's not okay to wield your anger against others. Her darkly-bearded father, Drust, had joined them at some point, and managed to coax out of Lissa what she had actually been angry about. Lissa had realized as she explained that she was actually only a little bit angry with Igmi for taking over, but mostly she was angry at herself for failing. She had some of the [umbral fur]'s magic inside her now, so how come she couldn't connect to it? Her gentle father had held her in his lap and asked her where she had gotten the idea that she ought to be able to do something like that in the first place. When she had said that it just made sense to her, he chuckled softly. How could she be angry with herself for failing to do something that no one even knew was possible? While his laughter had initially irritated her, his question had helped ease her bruised and frustrated ambition.
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This morning though, waking up and remembering the events of the last night, she felt horribly ashamed. She wasn't allowed to go to her apprenticeship today because she had screamed at aunt Igmi. She felt she was basically required to stay at home, since she couldn't bear to show her face at her mom's shop when she was barred from Igmi's next door. She had spent the morning with her father grazing their flock, but he had given her some time to be alone this afternoon. She had come out to this rock right after lunch, huddled under her thick woolen poncho, and sulked for hours.
Lissa watched small air bubbles travel along with the current under the thin layer of ice on the top of their creek. The afternoon air was crisp and quiet save the faint sounds of the breeze and the brook. She would have preferred to stay here in the cold forever over having to go back and face both her aunt and her sense of failure. After her outburst, Igmi had carefully packed up all of the [umbral fur] including all the samples in various stages of completion, and left them with Lissa to do with whatever she wanted. Igmi's help had been a gift, not an obligation, and she had spat on it. She knew her mom had forgiven her, but what was she going to do about aunt Igmi?
The shame over her failure and her behavior rode heavy on her chest, and guilt over what she had said stretched like a rod of frozen iron across her shoulders. She squeezed her knees harder. Tomorrow, she would go apologize to her aunt. No matter how much she wanted to do magic, her relationship with her family was more important. If her aunt forgave her, maybe, just maybe, she would try to connect to the magic within the [umbral fur] again.
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A growing sense of dread had filled Lissa as she and her mother had walked the winding, uneven pathways through the trees to their shop in the market district. Each step, her feet felt heavier, like walking up a steep mountain with someone adding rocks into her pack. As they came around the trunk of last tree before the long straight stretch that both her mother and her aunt's shops were on, Lissa's feet seemed to be stuck against the path's living cobble-boughs.
Tecka, who was holding her daughter's hand, felt her stop moving and turned back to find Lissa staring down the street, petrified. Having a strong conscience would probably serve Lissa well in the long run, Tecka thought as she looked down at her daughter, but not if it only filled her with fear. She knelt down beside her daughter and gently grasped her shoulders, rotating Lissa to face her and not the shops beyond.
"Igmi loves you, Lissa. You're more than just her apprentice—you're her niece. She will forgive you, and things will be right again. Apologizing—admitting you were wrong, especially to the person you did wrong to, takes real courage. Will you be my courageous girl?" Tecka's voice was gentle, kind, and filled with warmth.
Lissa's dark eyes looked into her mother's matching ones, and her wavy shoulder-length hair in the same mousey-brown shade as her mother's bobbed as she nodded firmly once, steeling her resolve. The icy clamp of shame around her heart loosened against the determined fire her mother's words had kindled there. She would be courageous. She refused to let even herself stop her.
Tecka smiled. "That's my girl," she said, as she stood and resumed walking toward their shops.
Before the guilt, shame, and fear could snuff out Lissa's new-found determination, she marched forward, hand in hand with her mother to face the proverbial dragon.
As they neared the shop, Lissa's determination wavered again, and she whispered loudly to her mother, "Will you go in with me?"
Tecka smiled quietly and murmured her assent, and then they were in front of Igmi's door. Through the display window in the front of the store, Tecka and Lissa could see the warm yellow-orange light of an oil lamp mingling with the green-golden glow from the living walls inside, indicating that Igmi and Hayzen had already arrived. Lissa and her mother exchanged a glance, she was as ready as she was going to be, and Tecka gently pushed the door open. The bell at the top of the door chimed, and Igmi soon bustled out from her workroom.
Her smile was tight-lipped as she greeted them, "Good morning, Tecka. Lissa."
Before she could lose her nerve, Lissa loudly launched into her apology, "I'm sorry for what I did, aunt Igmi. I was angry and I took it out on you and that was wrong. I shouldn't have said you were a takeover meany-head." She had quickly run out of steam and looked to be on the verge of tears. She finally squeaked out, "Can you please forgive me?"
Igmi's wide, answering smile was fresh kindling for Lissa's bravery. She stooped down to look her sniffling apprentice in the eye. "Yes, Lissa. I forgive you," Igmi began.
"You're not the first person to experience disappointment and take it out on others. You know, I never wanted to be a spinner... ," Igmi said invitingly as she stood and walked back toward her workroom, motioning for the two to come with her.
"You didn't?" Lissa asked between sniffles as she and her mother followed Igmi.
"No. You see, I wanted to be a dancer," Igmi's face took on a wistful, faraway expression that Lissa had never seen. "One spring when I was about your age, a traveling troupe called the Marvelous Mayhem came through our area. They were the most beautiful thing I think I've ever seen to this day. Their bodies made such entrancing shapes as they all moved together like one creature." Her voice trailed off. Her younger sister, Tecka, listened with rapt attention. She had been just two or three at the time, and had no recollection of the dancers.
"But, there's no way to earn a living as a dancer in the country, and I wanted to stay with my family. I was angry at everyone and everything for at least a year. My mom, your Gramma Migna, could tell you story after story of the tantrums I threw at the time." She laughed in chagrin, then continued, "but eventually I accepted that if I wanted to stay, I couldn't be a dancer. So, after my coming-of-magic at 11, I chose something practical that would allow me to stay nearby. If it hadn't been for what happened with the [king] six years ago..."
Tecka nodded, understanding, and finished the thought for her, "We'd all still be living close to mom and dad and our other siblings."
Igmi nodded, jaw clenching.
For once, Lissa took time to think through what she was hearing before she began speaking, "I'm sorry you didn't get to be a dancer, aunt Igmi. I bet you would have been really good at it."
Igmi smiled at her small apprentice, "Thanks, Lissa. I sometimes still wonder what my life would have been like if I had run off to be a dancer, but I'm really thankful that I chose to stay with my family. Don't let what you don't have make you lose sight of what all you do have. Okay?"
She waited until Lissa nodded at her, then cleared her throat and changed the subject. "Since we won't be working on your [umbral fur], we need to decide what your next project will be."
Tecka soon excused herself to go to her own shop as her sister and daughter began to sort out their next steps. Lissa hadn't mastered all there was to know about fiber preparation or using a spinning wheel, but she had a good deal of experience in both now. Together, they decided it was time to introduce new skills into her repertoire, and Igmi judged her [dexterity] high enough to handle dye without accidentally staining everything in the shop. As they talked, Lissa's guilt and shame melted away without fear to freeze them in place. Her courage and determination were strengthened by her aunt's kind, commiserating response. Late that afternoon, as she walked home hand in hand with her mother, Lissa thought about trying to work with the [umbral fur] again on her own. Determination burning brightly in her chest, she was ready to try again.