2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

No squeak—no whine of rusty hinges. Another piece of the pretty trap: practically
inviting thieves in. I peered inside when the door had opened wide enough.
A large main room, with a small, shut door in the back. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined
the walls, crammed with bric-a-brac: books, shells, dolls, herbs, pottery, shoes, crystals,
more books, jewels … From the ceiling and wood rafters hung all manner of chains, dead
birds, dresses, ribbons, gnarled bits of wood, strands of pearls …
A junk shop—of some immortal hoarder.
And that hoarder …
In the gloom of the cottage, there sat a large spinning wheel, cracked and dulled with
age.
And before that ancient spinning wheel, her back to me, sat the Weaver.
Her thick hair was of richest onyx, tumbling down to her slender waist as she worked
the wheel, snow-white hands feeding and pulling the thread around a thorn-sharp spindle.
She looked young—her gray gown simple but elegant, sparkling faintly in the dim
forest light through the windows as she sang in a voice of glittering gold:
“But what did he do with her breastbone?
He made him a viol to play on.
What’d he do with her fingers so small?
He made pegs to his viol withall.”
The fiber she fed into the wheel was white—soft. Like wool, but … I knew, in that
lingering human part of me, it was not wool. I knew that I did not want to learn what
creature it had come from, who she was spinning into thread.
Because on the shelf directly beyond her were cones upon cones of threads—of every
color and texture. And on the shelf adjacent to her were swaths and yards of that woven
thread—woven, I realized, on the massive loom nearly hidden in the darkness near the
hearth. The Weaver’s loom.
I had come on spinning day—would she have been singing if I had come on weaving
day instead? From the strange, fear-drenched scent that came from those bolts of fabric, I
already knew the answer.
A wolf. I was a wolf.
I stepped into the cottage, careful of the scattered debris on the earthen floor. She kept
working, the wheel clattering so merrily, so at odds with her horrible song:
“And what did he do with her nose-ridge?
Unto his viol he made a bridge.
What did he do with her veins so blue?