Chapter Text
The room was quiet, the swish and soft thrum of the shuttle, the only noise.
Her father was dead.
Had been dead for near a decade now.
The aches and twinges of her back were noted, and dismissed, because there would need to be shrouds. The men were gearing up for war, the smithies and armories making and stocking weapons and other tools of war. Feasts and sacrifices were being prepared, the oracles consulted.
But the room was quiet.
Her uncle was dead.
Her fingers twitched, nearly losing her place, and Comaetho shook her head, needing to focus. She had a shroud already done, folded neatly, laid to the side -- it would be oversized, perhaps, but he was shooting up like a weed, and she had needed to ensure that it would cover him. This one would be oversized as well, though her cousin was not growing nearly as much -- he was almost done growing, a man bearded, if not bloodied.
But that would change, wouldn't it? When all this was over, he would be bloodied enough for the whole of the polis, or he would be draped in her shroud, the final gift that she could give him.
She hissed, as the babe in her stomach flipped and turned, sending a dull pain spreading up her side and back. The priests had said that that was a good sign, that the babe was healthy, that it was a boy, a son, that she could present to her husband. Though he swore up and down that a daughter first was not a bad thing, that they could have more sons, if their eldest was a daughter.
As though there was not the looming doom rising towards them like a wave on the horizon, red and bloody with the corpses of their father and uncles.
Her grandfather.
There was no shroud for him. Her aunt and mother would take that duty on themselves, and she would not argue for it. What right had her grandfather to return, and leave her uncle lying in the dirt, left to rot. He had not brought him home, leaving her aunt with no body to care for, her three cousins with no closure.
At least her father had been returned and been buried, even as whispers had swirled around them, like winds in rustling reeds on the river, brushing by her ears, sound rising and falling over the years, as her brother grew and grew, into the image of their father, into a fighter, deadly and focused, chasing the shadow of their father even as he tried to escape from it.
As he toddled and then ran away from her, she was left further and further behind. There was nothing to be done for it, as boys and girls grew and separated, but there was the sadness of knowing that their childhood was being discarded, the cares and responsibilities of adulthood being picked up.
Her husband.
There was a pile of thread for him still. She would save her best work for last, for her husband, whom she had grown up alongside, who had snuck her grapes and sweets during feasts, who had been so patient with her, when she had been scared and worried on their wedding night. The burden of leadership rested on his shoulders, and while she could not openly help, she listened, his head resting on her shoulder, her fingers tangled in his hair as he spoke into her skin, breath warm, his fingers digging into her hips.
There were so many looking to him, her cousins, her mother and aunts, as the next head of the family, when there was no paternal family to look for their interests.
Another kick, another pain.
A sign that she should probably finish, should step from the shadows out into the gardens, into the light. The wave was looming, cresting, but there was still time. She pushed some hair from her face, running her fingers over the smooth cloth, still melancholy, but the movements, the signs of life growing within her, kept her from succumbing entirely.
She rose, leaving the weaving for the moment, and stepped out into the gardens, the transition from shadow to light seeming like it should signify something, but…. It was a good day, a nice day, and she could leave the potents for others.
There was still life here.
The potential dead could wait.