Chapter 6: What the Seams Know

Nine days later, Merryn could thread a needle in under a minute, and she wanted a parade for it.

"Again," she said, and did it again, and held it up to the whole table.

"Beautiful," said the eighty-one-year-old, without looking up.

"You didn't look."

"I looked last time."

We had eighty robes finished on the racks in the back storeroom, charcoal wool, hung in rows.

Two hundred and twenty to go.

Nineteen days.

Kitto had done the math again and refused to tell me the answer.

To cut three hundred robes, I needed three hundred sets of measurements.

My mother had them.

She'd kept a ledger for every household in the pack since before I was born.

Thirty years of green clothbound books sat in a crate under the stairs.

Chest. Shoulder. Back length. Who let out, who took in, what was paid.

I sat on the floor of the workroom that afternoon with the ledgers open around me and copied numbers onto a card for every wolf.

After a while, I stopped copying and started reading.

The widow with the ramp on her porch. Take in, take in, take in. Her husband's coats cut down for her boys.

The youngest widow. Take in, every year since the ice.

The eighty-one-year-old. Turn a collar. Turn it again. Patch both elbows, no charge, my mother had written, and underlined it.

Down the whole pack, families who'd lost a wage were getting smaller in their clothes.

Then I turned to the H page.

Hocking, Clement. Let out, March. Let out, again, August. Three new suits from a tailor in Duluth, hemmed here, eighty dollars, unpaid.

Hocking, Tressa. Eleven gowns in two years. Unpaid. Unpaid. Unpaid.

The Beta was getting bigger every season.

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