The first Weaver was a man in the crimson uniform of the Valdorian Empire.
Roen recognized the cut immediately—the high collar, the silver buttons, the embroidered
sunburst on the breast. Imperial military. Not just military, either. The gold threads dancing
around his hands marked him as a Gold Weaver, one of the Empire's elite combat mages.
They could pull fire from the air itself, turning battlefields into infernos.
Roen had seen a Gold Weaver work once before. A man had cheated the wrong merchant,
and the merchant had hired protection. The protection had been a Gold Weaver. There
hadn't been enough left of the cheater to bury. Just bones and stink and a lesson for anyone
watching: don't cross the Empire's favored sons.
The second Weaver was something else entirely.
A woman, perhaps thirty, with dark skin and darker eyes. She wore the ragged coat of a
moors-drifter, the kind of garment that had seen years of hard travel and harder living. But
she moved like someone who'd been trained since birth. No wasted motion. No hesitation.
No shimmer of gold around her. No red threads of flesh-weaving, no silver of mind-weaving.
Instead, the air around her seemed to gray, to dim, as if light itself was uncertain about her
presence.
Gray threads. A Fate-Weaver.
Roen had heard of them. Everyone had. Rare. Dangerous. Unpredictable. They didn't throw
fire or heal wounds or break minds. They shifted probability. Changed luck. Made the
impossible merely unlikely, and the certain suddenly questionable.
In the stories, Fate-Weavers were either heroes or villains, depending on who was telling the
tale. They could make arrows miss their targets by inches. Make a critical bridge collapse at
just the right moment. Make a king's horse stumble at a crucial charge.
In reality, they were myths to most people. Rare enough that many doubted they existed at
all.
"You're far from home, Valdorian," the woman said. Her voice carried across the silent
square, clear and unhurried. "The Empire's reach ends at the Ashford bridge."
"You have something that belongs to the Crimson Hand." The soldier's voice was flat,
professional. "Return it, and I'll let you walk away."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I'll take it from your corpse."
The woman smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of someone who'd heard that
threat a hundred times before and was still breathing.
"Try."
The Gold Weaver moved first.
He thrust his hand forward, and fire bloomed from his palm—a concentrated stream of heat
that should have reduced the woman to ash in seconds. Roen had seen it happen before.
The fire was white-hot, so bright it hurt to look at directly. The air itself seemed to combust.
But the fire didn't reach her.
It should have. There was nothing between them but empty air. No barrier, no shield, no
obvious defense. But the flames bent, curving around the woman like water flowing around a
stone in a stream. Where they passed, they left scorch marks on the cobblestones. But not a
hair on her head was singed.
"Lucky," she said, her voice still conversational. "A sudden gust. Who could have predicted?"
The Gold Weaver's face twisted. He pushed harder, and the fire intensified, becoming a
roaring column that should have consumed half the square. But still it bent, still it missed, as
if the universe itself couldn't quite agree on where the woman was standing.
The crowd gasped. Someone screamed. A child began to cry.
Roen watched, transfixed. He'd never seen anything like it. Gold Weavers were supposed to
be unstoppable. Their fire was supposed to burn through anything. But this woman was
making a fool of one without moving a muscle.
Then she counterattacked.
Roen didn't see threads. He couldn't. He was thread-blind, would always be thread-blind. But
he saw the Gold Weaver stumble, saw his foot catch on an uneven stone that shouldn't have
been there. Saw his concentration break for just a moment.
That was all it took.
The fire winked out. The woman closed the distance between them in three quick steps. She
didn't use magic. She used a knife.
A simple thrust, up under the ribs, into the heart. The Gold Weaver's eyes went wide. He
opened his mouth to scream, but only blood came out. He crumpled, and the woman stepped back, wiping her blade on his crimson uniform with the casual efficiency of someone
who'd done this before.
Many times before.
"That," she said to the corpse, "is why luck beats fire every time."
The square was silent. Then the screaming started again, and people scattered, running in
every direction. The woman didn't run. She bent down and pulled something from the dead
man's coat—a small leather pouch that clinked when she moved.
Then her eyes found Roen's.
He froze. He'd been watching from the edge of the crowd, not quite hidden, not quite visible.
Just another face in the chaos. But now a Fate-Weaver, a woman who'd just killed an
Imperial soldier in broad daylight, was looking directly at him.
Her lips curved. A smile, but not the cold one she'd given the soldier. This one almost looked
genuine.
"You," she called. "The pretty one. Come here."
Behind him, Mirelle grabbed his arm. "Run," she hissed. "Now. Run."