Ash Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Ash locks the shop behind him at dawn and walks into the wet street with the new coat half-finished in his head. He turns the corner and stops. A stranger stands at the curb wearing one of his coats. The black weave. The hardware at the collar. Ash never sold it. He never gave it away. The stranger has not seen him yet. The coat is wrong now. Painted over. Flowers and leaves bloom across the black weave in blues and yellows. A hood rides high on the stranger's shoulders, stitched into shapes that did not come from Ash's bench. But the bones are his. The cut is his. And at the chest, exactly where he always puts it, a small stitched sun shines pale against the dark lining. His mark. His hand. No one else makes that sun. The stranger turns and walks. Ash follows at a distance, through the wet street and down a path he does not know, until the stranger ducks into a small clay shack with a thatched roof and dried bundles hanging from the beams. Ash stops at the door. Inside, the stranger lifts the coat off and lays it across a low table beside jars of leaves. Ash steps in. He keeps his hands open. He says, that coat is mine. The stranger does not flinch. They say a woman gave it to them at the south gate, half-finished, and they painted the rest themselves because the cold was bad. They show Ash the inside seam, where two of his stitches still hold. Ash touches the small sun at the chest. He does not ask for the coat back. He asks the stranger's name, and where they walk, and who else saw them wearing it. The stranger answers. Ash writes nothing down. He walks out with empty hands and a name he did not have an hour ago, and the work, for the first time, is somewhere he did not put it.