Dan’s days began with a lot of running. Tagu usually joined him while the adults sparred with each other, then left halfway through the circuit to practice her climbing and agility, covering the bark of the nearby trees with scratches and tiny holes. He sometimes wondered whether she had forgotten about the bet they’d made after his first mission. He knew where Aressea was, but he vaguely remembered Morìc mentioning that the weavers’ palace was extremely difficult to break into, even if he couldn’t recall why. For that reason, he planned to wait until Merekis left again and observe him from afar to see how he would enter. Tagu’s help would have been invaluable: she knew more about the city than he did, and his senses weren’t yet developed enough to follow a completely invisible man. He didn’t want to discuss it with her, though: there was always someone nearby and she couldn’t really keep a quiet tone.

After the training, he usually helped wash the clothes and keep the general area of the camp in order. Once a week, the strays moved to a different spot, so everything was always ready for a hasty escape. In the afternoons, when he didn’t wander around the forest with Tagu, Kaspuru brought him to a local market to practice his Arissian while she bought ingredients and equipment. Sometimes, Autur taught him how to fish without alerting the crocodiles floating in the river.

Sibras organized frequent meetings, mostly focused on anticipating possible missions and organizing the resources they already had. They were all waiting for Mayvaru to contact them again. Merekis periodically left for a nearby village to which she usually sent coded letters when she was too far to deliver them with her animals.

One evening, while Dan was helping Kaspuru cook the meat for dinner, trying his best not to wonder where it came from, Merekis returned from his usual trip with a letter.

“The Iraspes,” he only said, handing it to Sibras.

He read it out loud. It was very short, barely a sentence: they requested he sent someone trusted at the palace to discuss the most recent events.

“Which events?” Sibras asked.

They all looked at each other, waiting for someone to answer.

“I didn’t hear anything at the market the other day,” Kaspuru said. “Maybe they’re keeping it a secret.”

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Sibras murmured. He turned the letter upside-down, held it up to the light, then tossed it into the fire.

“No need to worry yet. I’ll go to the palace tomorrow,” Merekis said.

Dan glanced at Tagu: she was already looking at him, her pupils two hair-thin slits. She remembered.

The next day, he completed the circuit faster than usual, to the point Autur gave him one of her rare compliments. He put on a shirt, Arissian trousers and a short cape and announced that he was going to the river to bathe and fish. Tagu left to look for garbage. They met in the woods, not too far from the camp.

“I’m ready,” Tagu said. “Do we start the race from here?”

“No,” Dan said. “It’s easy to cheat in the woods. We’ll start at Aressea, near the palace. We’re doing another game, now.”

“What?”

“We’ll follow Merekis. If he sees one of us, we both lose. Deal?”

She nodded, even if her ears lowered a bit. She was too competitive to enjoy the idea of collaborating

They waited until Merekis returned from his bath at the river after the sparring session. He said goodbye to everyone, then closed his eyes and disappeared. Dan waited for Tagu to move, but found she had vanished too. Then he looked up and saw a dark brown tail dangling from the foliage. He followed it as quietly as he could, even if it was difficult to tell without any kind of augmented hearing. Luckily Merekis didn’t have it either, as far as he knew.

It took them at least one hour of walking through the woods to reach the outskirts of the city. Dan raised the hood of his short cape to hide his face. As soon as Tagu dropped down from a tree to join the crowd, he raised her hood too. She hissed.

“Where is he?” Dan whispered.

“I don’t know,” Tagu said in a whiny tone, grabbing at the brim of her hood. “There’s too many people.”

There was a small crowd flowing into the city from one of the main roads. Dan’s heart accelerated when he thought he had lost Merekis, then saw a weird movement in the middle of the crowd: people seemed to disappear for a moment, replaced by a portion of space the color of the road and the grass beside it, as if it reflected a reality where the city was empty. Merekis’s powers, whatever they were, didn’t extend to people.

“I see him. Quick,” he said, and this time he was the one leading the way.

Merekis was cutting the crowd diagonally, slipping in between the groups of travellers. It became difficult to spot him once he had reached the side of the road, because the people there were more sparse.

“How does he do it?” Dan wondered.

“He explained it to me,” Tagu said, her voice too loud as usual. “People are too complicated for the colors inside his skin. He’s a weird kind of octopus.”

Dan took it to mean he had some powers, like Autur and Sibras.

“How does he move around with his eyes closed?” Dan whispered, hoping she would imitate him.

“I don’t know. Maybe he uses his tentacles?”

Merekis was even more difficult to spot once inside the city, since he could avoid most people by keeping close to the walls. Tagu grabbed Dan’s hand, forcing him to slow down.

“We won. We got through the woods and he didn’t see us. We don’t need to follow him, I know where the palace is.”

She ran away before Dan could stop her. He glanced over his shoulder, but he couldn’t spot Merekis anymore. He bolted after Tagu, who was climbing the metal ladder protruding from one of the buildings.

Despite all of his training, he was out of breath when he reached the roof. Tagu was waiting for him with her tail twitching.

“You’re slow.”

He couldn’t even take in enough breath to answer. It didn’t matter, since she was already jumping onto the next roof.

Dan looked down: it wasn’t a big drop and the buildings were close together, but he didn’t know how to activate the pattern in his trousers. He tried to focus on his viss like Morìc had attempted multiple times to teach him. He didn’t feel anything, except for the blood rushing in his pulsing ears.

He knelt down and grabbed the border of the roof, then swung himself over the edge. He dangled for a few instants, then held his breath and let go.

The fall was rough. He tried to roll as Autur had taught him, but it barely did anything to lessen the impact and it brought him dangerously close to the border of the roof.

Tagu was already running on the walkable archway that connected the building to the next, but stopped and came back down.

“Are you stupid?” she asked, grabbing him by the shirt, the same he’d been wearing the day he arrived on the other side of the sea. “You have to use the pattern.”

“I don’t know how!”

“Like this.” She touched a dot embroidered in the tight of her trousers. “Then you push out your viss.”

Dan could only look at her with his mouth half-open. His side was starting to pulse with a painful ache.

Tagu’s ears lowered.

“You don’t know what viss is?”

“I know, I just don’t know how to use it.”

“Autur taught me. She said I had to use my animal traits to feel it.”

Dan stared at her. She turned and bolted for the next roof, as if that sentence was enough to help him. Two people arrived in the opposite direction, gave him a funny look and proceeded on their way.

He closed his eyes and thought about sea snakes. They mainly did two things: bite and swim. He wasn’t inclined to test whether he had already developed venom by biting his own hand, so he closed his eyes and held his breath. The seconds passed without him feeling anything except for slight discomfort. Soon, a minute had passed, then two.

He felt a prickling sensation on the back of his arms. He opened his eyes, but he didn’t see anything. He closed them again and waited some more. The slight trembling in his skin intensified. The sensation wasn’t new, but he couldn’t place it, which meant he’d been very small when he had last experienced it.

He tried to push the feeling forward, whatever it meant, and was surprised to sense it moving toward his fingers and from there to the slate roof, where he couldn’t feel it anymore.

He stood, still holding his breath, and jogged up the archway. There was another drop afterwards. He put his hand over the dot on his trousers and jumped. He felt the cloth tighten around his legs as he pushed his viss forward. He dropped to his feet as if he’d just bounced in place. He couldn’t see Tagu anymore, but he didn’t need to: the thirteen steeples of the weavers’ palace were emerging from behind the higher buildings.

It was difficult to believe he had anything to do with such a big place. Hundreds and hundreds of cloths covered a structure that no creature alive had seen since the moment of its creation. The thirteen steeples were the only defined elements emerging from that mass of shifting veils, curtains as tall as towers, and layers of knitted fibers. The central one was the tallest, while the others were positioned around it in groups of threes, maintaining an equal distance from each other. The colors of the cloths on the surface were bright, with yellows, reds and pinks. They raised in the wind to reveal the darker colors below, greens, blues and purples like the carapace of a beetle.

He was so busy gaping at the palace he almost didn’t notice Tagu crouching at the border of a roof. He sat down next to her, lowering his gaze from the steeples to the base of the palace. It wasn’t surrounded by a garden or fence, only by a large square covered in flagstones. There weren’t guards on the outside.

“Where’s the entrance?” he asked, feeling a bit of shame about not knowing such a fundamental thing about a place where he used to live.

“They change it. You have to know where it is. If you enter from the wrong place, the guards will catch you.”

A pigeon landed next to one of the lower steeples, where the solid structure underneath was closer to the top. Ripples expanded from the bird in circles, as if it had landed on the surface of a perfectly still lake and not dozens of layers of different cloths at once. Dan wondered how it was possible, since there were no visible patterns. A short curtain right under the steeple shifted when a hidden window was opened. A guard leaned out and looked up, as if knowing exactly where to find the culprit of all that movement, and scared the pigeon away with a barrage of insults.

Dan was reminded that they were supposed to avoid animals. He looked around, but he couldn’t see any in the area.

“Do you think Mayvaru saw us?” he asked.

“No,” Tagu said. “The animals don’t glow.”

Her ears were low, as if she didn’t consider it good news. Dan raised his hood a bit more to conceal his hair completely. As friendly as the strays were, he needed to remember whose side they were actually on.

Merekis appeared some steps away from the palace. He headed toward a specific spot, already reaching out with one hand. Before he could touch the curtain that covered it, Tagu ran past him and grabbed it, causing ripples on its entire surface.

“I won,” she yelled. “Did you see, Dan? I won!”

He looked at the empty roof beside him, incredulous. He hadn’t even noticed her leaving.

Merekis said something, then looked up in the direction Tagu was yelling at. Dan retracted a bit, but he was still clearly visible.

“Come down,” Merekis ordered, and Dan threw his legs over the edge and let himself drop, activating the pattern with one hand.

He approached the palace meekly. Merekis usually had a kind expression, but now he followed Dan’s approach with a pointy gaze. He braced himself for a scolding, but the curtain Tagu had touched was brusquely flung aside, revealing four guards and an open door. They didn’t wear the same upper garment of Aressea’s inhabitants, but an ochre shirt completely embroidered with patterns that extended to the trousers.

“Identify yourself,” one of the guards said.

“Merekis of the strays.”

The guard nodded, looking up and down at him with open disgust.

“Here,” another one tossed a long coat at him. “We were waiting for you, but we weren’t told anything about these two. Who are they?”

“Tagu and Dan of the strays.” Merekis sighed. “They’re with me.”

“Next time alert us that you won’t come alone, or we’ll throw them in prison,” the first guard said.

Merekis nodded. Dan felt guilty about forcing him into that situation. The guilt faded at every step he took inside the palace, as fragments of memories tugged at his attention. Some of them came from conversations he’d had with Morìc, others from his life before the mountain.

Even the inside of the palace was covered in tapestry. Rectangular works of art of various sizes were sewn directly to the walls. The solid structure underneath was covered by a woven layer of cornflower blue that enveloped the floor as well, hiding every corner that the long carpets couldn’t reach. Embroidered patterns and decorations ran up and down the walls, snaking around the tapestries. Dan extended a hand to graze the reproduction of a constellation, but a tentacle slapped it away.

“Don’t touch anything,” Merekis hissed. “You two shouldn’t be here. Did someone see you?”

Dan thought about the two people on the roof. He shook his head.

“We’re wearing hoods,” Tagu said.

“Keep them on. Don’t speak to anyone.”

They entered a small hall. The corridors and rooms were brightened by spheres that contained a shifting luminous fog, woven into the tapestry of the walls like eggs in a spider nest. Merekis stopped at the center and waited. Soon enough, a man emerged from one of the three corridors that started from that room. A servant, Dan thought in seeing his uniform of the same color as the walls, as if he had emerged directly from them.

“I’ll escort you to the meeting room,” he said.

He promptly turned around and started marching along a different corridor. Merekis followed with another sigh.

“Are we meeting with Mayvaru or Beramas?” he asked.

“I wasn’t told,” the servant replied.

Dan felt his heart skip a beat. He looked over his shoulder to gauge whether it was too late to bolt for the exit. Meeting Mayvaru again in the weavers’ palace was like inviting her to investigate him.

As much as he looked for a sign of where he was inside the palace, he couldn’t make sense of the corridor’s twists and turns and the position of the stairs. He remembered how easy it was to get lost. Nobody knew the structure of the building underneath the layers of cloth, except maybe for his parents. Some of the tapestries were thicker than they looked, acting as secret doorways. Dan remembered following his brother into an opening in the wall, losing him in the dark, and eventually being found while he bawled his eyes out.

He observed the tapestries on either side, dreading the moment when the corridor would have given way to a room with Mayvaru inside. He slowed down to let Tagu walk ahead of him and touched the wall with the tips of his fingers, ready to retract his hand as soon as Merekis or the servant turned around. He remembered a distant scolding about not touching the cloth with dirty hands, because the palace took an entire month to clean.

The next tapestry depicted an orange fish swimming on a background of leaves. Each scale was depicted with a darker color, the edges curving and touching each other as they followed the bend of the fish’s tail.

Dan stopped. He remembered that tapestry, and most importantly, he could see the pattern traced by the scales. The cloth it was made of felt different under his fingers.

He looked at the rest of the group. Their steps made almost no sound on the soft woven floor covered by a carpet, so Merekis and the servant hadn’t yet noticed that he wasn’t following them. Only Tagu had slowed down and was looking at him.

Dan raised a finger to his lips, then touched the only visible eye of the fish and pushed out his viss. For a moment the stupidity of that gesture caught up with him: he didn’t know the effect of that pattern. It could have been a defence system, for all he knew. But then the strings at the side of the tapestry started to part, revealing a dark cavity beyond.

Dan slipped into it. Tagu called his name in alarm, but he retracted his hand from the tapestry and the strings closed behind him.