One
Robin ran his fingertips over the bare strands on the loom without seeing a single thread. He didn’t have much of the dull, simple pattern left to finish, but he’d caught a glimpse of stormy blues, and a different, more interesting pattern had started in his mind’s eye. The design he was meant to be weaving slipped away in favor of complexity and color, so much color it almost took his breath away; black and grays, yes, but also tempestuous blues, so many of them. Storm clouds of color, but a pillowcase soft enough to use, fine and comfortable and giving. His hands itched with the life in it but touched nothing except the loom and the as yet unused portion of the warp, and then, sadly, the pattern he’d completed so far.
His steadiest customers now were boutique hotels and expensive cabins that catered to the sort of people to go “glamping,” and those people did not seem to enjoy color. Large, uncomfortable pillows and throws in shades of eggshell, ecru, and stone were what were ordered, more often than not, and without much concern for texture.
Robin blinked, but the colors of a midnight cloudburst lingered before his eyes. He’d noticed the unused skeins earlier, found them under piles of other colors in a basket that he’d had no reason to be digging into, and put them on the table although they had no place there. Now they’d pulled him from his work.
He turned his head to frown dizzily at skeins that did not belong on his worktable, colors he was not going to acknowledge because they were not the “rustic, natural” vibes his customer wanted. Robin was tired, obviously, or he wouldn’t have let the skeins call to him from the basket he had probably buried them in months ago. He didn’t even know why he’d dyed them those colors…. If he had. The last few years had been taxing, and it was just as likely that Flora or John had set up that dye batch, or that Phillip had ordered it from one of the small producers in the state for a project that one of the others had been working on, or intending to work on. Robin could not remember the last time he had dyed anything for his own needs, in fact, but maybe that was the late hour.
If itwaslate.
He looked up toward the windows that lined the rooms converted into the family workroom, pausing in stunned confusion to see the curtains drawn. He’d apparently been working by artificial light only. Even the fire in the fireplace had gone out. The Blessing-Redferne farmhouse had a fireplace in every room, a system that worked better for heating than the furnace and vents installed in the 1960s.
He shivered reflexively to see the dark, long-cold hearth.
Thunder rumbled distantly, likely miles away. It might have rattled the windows of the Storr farm, the nearest neighbor.
Robin shivered again although he wasn’t cold. If it was raining, he’d have to make sure the heat was on in the appropriaterooms, or the fires going. He’d closed the vents in the unused rooms, or meant to, earlier in the fall.
He couldn’t seem to recall doing it, though. Maybe he should check. He probably needed a break anyway. He’d get a snack, check the heat situation, then finish. Working by artificial light alone wasn’t great, but he wanted this done. Then he’d lie down for a while, rest before he made another silly mistake like forgetting to open the curtains.
Robin straightened up, his back popping in a way that would have made Marise cluck over him in concern.
“You’re only a baby, Blessing, too young for that,” Robin said for her, although he would be thirty in the spring.
He shook his head to clear it of clouds and flexed his hands and wrists.
Thunder rolled again, closer and louder.
Robin glared muzzily at the skeins of yarn he did not need and would not use tonight, then, decidedly picked them up and crossed over to the crisscrossing shelves along the long wall. The shelves, made up of old crates and diamond bins from the local wineries, used to be stacked with skeins for the projects the others had going. There was more than enough room for a pesky batch of yarn that was doing its best to get on his nerves.
The floor creaked under his footsteps, the sound softening when he passed over one of the many rugs around or beneath various empty work tables and benches. When the house had first been built, the workroom had been intended as a small sitting room, and then perhaps a library and a parlor. The wide doors between each room had been permanently opened decades ago, however, and all of the furniture had long since been replaced with sewing machines, both treadle and electric, spinning wheels, or various looms.
There was an antique wheel near the fire, on a thick Hutsul wool rug; the rug a gift to his grandmother from a like-minded craft person, years ago. The other wall held racks, some still displaying the yarns that Robin’s older relatives had left there and never picked up again.
He should look it all over, see what condition it all was in.
He shuffled back to his worktable instead, slipping on the exposed hardwood floor and holding onto the tabletop until the wash of black faded from his vision.
“Okay,” Robin said out loud. “I will take a break.” The words cracked, barely making it passed his dry lips. He reached for a mug that wasn’t there; he’d brought no coffee or tea with him in here, either. “Forgetful tonight,” he chided himself, rubbing his eyes with the sleeve of his baggy knitted cardigan.
The clouds remained when he was done, blue-black like coming rain.
Robin ducked at another rumble of thunder, not sure he didn’t hear the patter of water against the walls. He left the unfinished pillowcase and shuffled over to the fireplace. The fire was good and out, must have been for hours.
New logs sat there beside it on the wide stones. Robin had managed that much this morning, gathering wood from his dwindling woodpile. He lifted one oddly heavy log onto the grate, then reached for the matches. Some witches did not need matches. Robin, despite his illustrious, or at least infamous, ancestry, did.
The matchbox was empty.
He gave up and tossed the box onto his worktable before grabbing his phone and leaving the room. The audiobook thathad been playing while he worked had ended, perhaps because his phone had died.
Robin slipped a few times on the floor in front of the staircase, even with the rugs to catch him. He must have spilled something earlier. Maybe that’s where his tea had gone and he’d never replaced it. He didn’t stop to deal with the clouds again, nor the hovering dark shape in front of the office doorway.
Inside the office, a small room off the living room and to the side of the front door to the house, he plugged his phone in to charge, then would have sat down for a while among all the stickers and shipping boxes with the Blessing-Redferne logo on them because he hadn’t sat down in hours and his legs were shaky, except the hovering shape continued to hover, so he made his way back down the hall.
The door to the living room was open, giving him a glimpse of overflowing baskets of unfinished projects, the TV and bookshelves, the beat-up armchair and ottoman beneath a reading lamp, and the couch with its back to yet another fireplace. The couch had a pillow on one armrest and a collection of crocheted blankets at the other end where Robin had kicked them off that morning, too hot upon waking.
The shape hovered near that door too.
