Gwen Wylde's hands shook so hard the shuttle jumped from her fingers and clattered across the floor. She stared at the loom strung with violet and bronze dragonfly wings. The thread she had just laid, meant to be the first line of a tapestry that would make the temples beg for her name, had snarled into a black knot. Every thread she'd touched since dawn had done the same. She flexed her ink-stained fingers. They would not stop trembling. She knew why. Three nights ago, at the tavern wrapped in ivy and flowers, she had climbed onto a bench and told a room of strangers that she wove better than any god. She had said it because it was true. Her hunting scene, forty-three colors, every hound's ear its own creature, had appeared on a temple wall without her carrying it there. Someone up there was moving her work. She meant to be enshrined for it. She meant to be the first mortal weaver the priests bowed to. A god had heard her. A god had answered. She wrapped her hands in a rag and went to find a priestess. The sun order's youngest walked the road past the mossy cottage where the kittens sunned themselves. Gwen had seen her before, always alone, always in that white robe the mud refused to touch. Elowen Orvath. The one people whispered about. The one whose name the dead were said to call. "Priestess." Gwen held up her shaking hands. "A god cursed me. I need to know how to take it back." Elowen looked at the hands. Then at Gwen's face. "What did you say to it." "That I weave better than any of them." "Do you." "Yes." Elowen was quiet a moment. "Kneel at the temple where your hunting scene hangs. Leave the loom behind. Say out loud that the gift is borrowed. Cut off the smallest finger of thread from your own hair and burn it on the step." "That's it." "That is the apology. It will lift the tremble." Elowen's mouth tightened. "It will not lift what comes after." "What comes after?" "The god will keep watching. You called its attention. Attention does not go back." Gwen walked to the temple that afternoon. She knelt on the stone step below her own hunting scene, forty-three colors staring down at her. She said the words. She cut a strand of her hair and burned it in a clay dish. The smoke went straight up. Her hands stopped shaking before the smoke was gone. She flexed her fingers, steady again, and looked up at the tapestry. In the bottom corner, worked in bronze thread she had never spun, was a new mark. A single open eye. It had not been there yesterday. Something had accepted her apology. Something was now signing her work.