The Sundering by Vanessa Nelson

Author:Vanessa Nelson [Nelson, Vanessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Guise had simply said that the cloth merchant was at the blue house. It was only as she was walking towards the trade streets that Yvonne wondered if she should have asked for better directions. She could not remember a cloth merchant with a blue house from her time living here.

One look at the street and she realised it was unnecessary. There was only one blue house.

It stood on its own, surrounded by a thick band of green plants, and rose two storeys above the ground. And it was, indeed, blue. The deep, cobalt blue of the most expensive dyes available, a uniform colour around the entire building, that was larger than her house, or Guise’s annex. The paint alone was worth a fortune.

Both the lower and upper floors had large windows. The upstairs windows were slightly open, and she could hear the clack of wooden looms from the upper level as she drew closer. Her brows lifted. Few merchants had their own cloth woven on site, mostly using weavers who worked at their own, small, looms in cottages around the town and in the surrounding villages. To insist on cloth being woven in their own building usually meant that it was high quality, using the most expensive yarn.

Then she shook her head. This was Guise’s contact. Of course he would be using expensive yarn. It was probably silk from Abar al Endell. Or the finest wool from the remote villages in the northlands.

The doors to the building were open, the sound of voices drifting out to the street.

She climbed the few steps to the front door, stepped across the threshold and stopped, blinking, as her eyes adjusted to the interior.

The room she had stepped into probably took up about half of the ground floor on its own, and it was a riot of colour. Bolts of cloth as tall as she was were propped against the walls. The room itself had about a half dozen large, waist-high, tables spread around the space, most of them with one or more bolts of cloth on them, and an assistant talking with a customer. Then there were racks, too. High wooden shelves stuffed full of more cloth.

Her first thought was that Mariah would absolutely love this place. Her second thought was that if Mariah ever came into this room, her daughter might never want to leave.

Before she had time to think further, a slender young man dressed in a beautifully fitting dark suit approached her.

“Good day, mistress. How may we help you?”

“I need to see the merchant, please.”

“The owner is not on the floor just now. But I can ask. Who shall I say?”

“We have a mutual friend,” she told him. The assistant’s eyebrows lifted, but he drifted away to one side of the room where a large wooden door was almost hidden between bolts of cloth in different shades of red. He disappeared through the door. It must lead to the rest of the building, she thought.

Not expecting an immediate

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