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Day 2, Season of Fall, 513 AV
In the morning after Kit woke up, she laid out her clothes to examine. Since she had escaped from captivity, she had purchased three ordinary linen shirts to wear. One was utterly destroyed, but since then, they had all been ripped in one way or another. She studied the damage. During a run, someone had grabbed Kit's shirt and torn it a little down the side while trying to grab stop her, when a few thugs had thought it was a good idea to try to shake her down. It was, perhaps, the only one she could wear without feeling utterly self-conscious, with a a quick glamour to mask the rip.
The last she just didn't feel comfortable wearing at all now. From sleeve to collar it had been torn open, so that her shirt sagged and revealed too much for her comfort. This one had been ripped . . . Ten days, more or less. Kit remembered a man dragging her into an alley, probing hands, the stink of his breathe . . . The stress of dumping his body into the canals. She closed her eyes and shuddered, and did not know if it was at the violation or the killing. Perhaps both?
But it had been her only good shirt then, and since she'd been forced to wear the one that had already been damaged, and it showed. A rip to a shirt was like a wound, Kit thought; leave it be and it would only get worse. And as she stretched and went about her daily business she had felt the fabrics of it begin to tease further and further apart. It would quickly grow to be too much.
She needed everything well mended. Her employer would not tolerate a girl working in sub-par garments, but she thought it safe to assume that neither would Valerius Nitrozian clothe her himself. And even if he would, Kit would not ask for it. Without autonomy, what difference was there between a free girl and a slave?
Never again. Never.
Kit opened the sewing kit that she had purchased off the old lady in Odds and Ends, laid out the various tools. Most she did not wholly understand. Kit studied the little paper, written in elegant script, describing in nigh indecipherable shorthand how to do this and that . . . Luckily, Kit needed do none of that. She pulled out a spool of thread and a needle, struggled to get the thread threw its eye, once, twice . . . There! She tied it in a granny's knot, like the sailors in the Patchwork Port did in Alvadas when they wanted to know if a thief had gone through their things. It worked well enough, Kit supposed, though there was a great deal of thread left over, hanging uselessly to the side.
Her auntie had sewn a great deal back in Alvadas. Sometimes, she had even mended Kit's clothes, or taught her to do the same for herself, though her stitches were always neat and tidy, while Kit's were wild and irregular. Then she had stopped trying to teach or . . . Or had Kit escaped, before she could manage too? She couldn't remember it clearly, not after so long.
It felt like an eternity since she was small, living with just her aunt and uncle. Her memories of them were faded and gray, like a painting with its color all bled away.
"Ow!" Kit pricked her finger with the needle and held it in her mouth, a moment, pulled it out again. Was it bleeding? Not that Kit could see. Thankful, Kit pulled the simplest job closest, the one with a rip down the side. She stared, looking for a place to put the needle, bit down on her lip and picked a spot as near to the bottom hem as she dared.
She did her work slowly, weaving as close she could, but ran out of thread fast. Did she need to unwind all the thread she needed first, and then pull it all through every time she stuck her needle in? What a petching bother . . . She ripped the thread away with her knife and started again, this time giving herself a generous lead of thread. Stuck it in, pulled it all the way through, stuck it in . . . She wove her way around the rip, pulling the thread taut as she pushed through, pulling it shut. Still the stitches weren't satisfying, they were irregular and zig-zaggy as she put them in, but if it ever became a real problem Kit supposed the way it looked as as simple as a thought.
At last she reached the end, peeked at the note that had come with the kit. It had said . . . Tie the threads into a knot, to make sure it didn't come loose? It seemed an intelligent thing, so she cut her string with a knife, and realized looking at it that this time she had used too much. Kit muttered to herself, tied the knot at the start and end of the stitch, to keep it from slipping either way.
Perhaps she should have cut off the thread at the start as well, and tied it there? Kit peered at it, thought that maybe her thread had already slipped a bit down the stitches she had made for it. It would be serviceable, sure, but . . . Not ideal.
Kit slipped the shirt on over her chemise, grabbed her mirrored and began to examine herself a bit with it. It was obvious that her shirt had been mended . . . Until she waved her hand over it and willed that it not. It hurt her pride to think that Ionu's gift would be used for something so utilitarian . . . She would find a way to make it up to them, when she was well and truly free.
The last mending was, startlingly enough, the easier one. Kit had already made her mistakes, and aside from a few pricks on the finger this one was easy. Kit, tied it off and breathed a sigh of relief, glad to have escaped the need to purchase yet more clothing with her fast dwindling funds.
It was very near the time that they would expect her. She slipped on her leather pants and jacket, tightened her belt around her waist, slipped her dagger and throwing knives into their places. She felt armed, felt prepared to face the world. She breathed in deep and marched off to meet the day like a soldier goes to war.
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