Evil for Evil by K. J. Parker Read Free Book Online

forgotten it was there.
    “A goshawk in a bate,” he replied. “I unhooded it too early. My own fault.”
    She turned away, the set of her shoulders telling him he no longer mattered, and picked up a sack of boots. Then she stopped.
    “My brother used to say you should keep them hooded for three days before you start manning them,” she said, not turning round.
    “Was he a falconer?”
    “No.” She paused, as though weighing up the issues for an important decision. “You can sew, then.”
    Of course he couldn’t; but a falconer could. “Yes,” he said.
    “Fine. Something useful you can do. Stay there.”
    She went out, and came back a little later with a sack full of clothes. Miel had rested his head on it during the cart-ride.
     From the pocket of her gown she took a thread-bobbin; there was a bone needle stuck into the thread. “Darn the holes as best
     you can,” she said. “Anything that’s past repair you can tear up for patches. Don’t break the needle.”
    Bloody hell, Miel thought; then, Well, how hard can it be? “All right,” he said.
    Apparently, unloading the cart was her job. She came and went with the sacks and the bundled-up weapons, sorting them and
     stacking them against the walls; no sign of the carter. He tried not to watch her. Instead, he tried desperately to figure
     out how you were supposed to get the thread to go through the hole in the needle.
    As far as he could judge, it was physically impossible. The end, where it had been cut off, was frayed and tufty, not to mention
     fiendishly hard to see in the poor light, and the hole in the needle was ridiculously small. It was like trying to pull a
     turnip through a buttonhole. He tried to think; he’d seen women sewing before, you couldn’t turn round at home without seeing
     some woman or other sitting placidly in a corner, her arm moving gracefully up and down. He concentrated, trying to refine
     a memory. Every so often they’d stop sewing and do something; but they did it quickly and easily — the bobbin would just appear
     in their hands, they’d run off about a forearm’s length of thread, they’d hold the needle steady, and then they’d do something,
     if only he could remember what it was.
    (Come on, he thought; if they could do it, it couldn’t be all that hard.)
    He tried to squeeze the picture up into his mind. The head would go forward, he remembered that. Something to do with the
     hand and the mouth. But of course the Ducas is trained not to stare at people, which is another way of saying, trained not
     to notice things that don’t concern him; things and people.
    They licked it. That was it; they licked the end of the thread. Presumably, if you got the tufty bit wet, you could sort of
     mat it down and stop it being all fluffy and hard to manipulate. He tried it, and found he could twist the strands tightly
     together into a point that would just about go through the needle-hole (there was a word for it, wasn’t there? The eye of
     a needle). He tried that. At first he thought it was going to work. The tip of the point went through easily, and he tried
     to pinch hold of it with his fingernails as it came out the other side. But clearly it wasn’t as simple as that. He’d got
     most of the strands through, but not all of them, so that when he pulled, the thread started to unravel and jammed. He felt
     his arms and neck clench with frustration, but he daren’t let her see. He tried again, carefully rolling the tip of the thread
     between his lips; it didn’t do to hurry when you were trying something new and complicated. Still no joy; one or two strands
     stubbornly evaded the eye, like sheep who are too scared to go back into the pen. He was confident that he’d got the technique,
     but evidently it took both skill and practice to execute. For crying out loud, he thought; human beings are supposed to be
     resourceful, why can’t somebody invent a tool to do this quickly and easily? Or make needles with