Teal scale design on a thigh

The river at Lantern Weir has gone the colour I promised you, and the Guild has finally stopped arguing about the price of it. Master Corrin sent me down from the capital of Vell with four crates of copper and a cart of sea-lichen, and I have been stirring the vats since the bells for Vespers. The teal takes three days to settle. The first day it looks like pond water. By the third it has the green-blue of a kingfisher's back, and you can hold a bolt of cloth up to the lamp and watch the light go down under the surface.

Corrin wants the new barge sails dyed in overlapping rounds, each one a shade darker along its lower edge, so the whole sail reads like the armour of the old river serpents. I told him the serpents were a story his grandmother invented to keep children off the ice. He told me to mind my stirring.

So I have been stamping the shapes by hand. A bowl of wet wood, a press, a row of blocks cut from a pear branch. Every scale has a lighter crescent painted on its upper rim and a smudge of grey pressed into the lip, so when the cloth dries it bulges as if it could move. Corrin came down at dusk to inspect and went quiet for a long while. Then he asked me to make one more sail, only one, and to put the grey on the inside where no one on the bank can see it.

I did not ask why. The dye has taken to my fingernails, the weir is loud tonight, and I think the river has been wanting a sail that looks like it could swim.

Your loving cousin, Wren