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passed the cobbler’s shop on her way, and there stood Joth on the doorstep. He had grown taller in the time that had passed, and his kind hazel eyes were set in a leaner face, with a jaw more firm and knowing than she remembered. His crutches were propped beneath his arms, and he held a jar of dark ale in his hands. He was smiling.
    “Hello, Jacinth. It was a fine day for the wedding, wasn’t it?” he said.
    “If you like that sort of thing,” she replied.
    Joth held out his jar. “Will you have a drink of ale with me, to wish the newlyweds well?”
    But Jacinth’s frustrations swept over her head like angry water, and she shouted, “How can you be so gay about it? Don’t you see that there’s no place for us here? Half the roads in the world are closed to us for no good reason at all!”
    She started to run, her head awhirl with her own cares. But the crash of breaking crockery in the road behind her made her stop. She turned.
    There lay the ale jar, a heap of shattered fragments in a dark brown pool. Joth’s eyes were wet and bright, and his body as taut as a bowstring. “Then what are we to do?” he cried. “Lie down and die? I would rather make my own roads!”
    He spun on his one leg and disappeared into the cobbler’s shop.
    All through the smoky autumn and the winter, Jacinth spent her days alone in the meads and thickets, foraging for bark and stones and roots with which to dye her yarns. At night, she lit candles in the chilly loft and sat at her loom while the wind rushed across the meadows and through the brittle trees outside. She worked as if a demon lived inside her. Her fingers grew stiff and raw, and thin lines creased her forehead from the effort of peering at close work with her single eye. Only when the sun rose and the candles had turned to stubs did she ever give in to sleep, for she hated the dreams that came to her, and awoke from them weeping.
    The tapestries she wove in that long, dark season became her only respite. When her heart thrashed like a desperate bird, when she could not face her lonely bed, shewove tapestries, and they were like no others. They were filled with all the power, beauty, and pain that had no other way of escaping from her. She spun fabulous worlds, told impossible tales, and the people she wove danced and wept as if they were alive.
    When the weather began to soften and the air to grow rich with the smells of green buds, a merchant came to the miller’s door. He said that in his village, which lay two days’ ride to the west, he had heard rumors of the one-eyed weaver of Aranho. He asked to see the tapestries, and when Jacinth showed them to him, he bought several, paying her well for them.
    The next afternoon, Jacinth sat in the dappled sunlight beneath a willow tree and bounced Wynna’s children on her knee. They were used to her and thought nothing of the fact that their aunt had an eyeless cheek. They spoke to her and laughed as if she were anyone else. Jacinth felt the fragrant spring breeze touch her. She thought of her good fortune with the merchant, and of the places and futures she had woven into the tapestries. It came to her that perhaps Joth was right. Perhaps even a woman with one eye, if she was strong enough, could make her own roads.
    That summer, Jacinth watched a man build a new cottage. As she observed him, she took careful stock of the money she had made from the sale of her tapestries. When the man was finished and she had learned all she could from watching him, she set about making a cottage for herself. She chose a small piece of land near a creek on the outskirts of Aranho and she bought a few tools. From a glazier wholived nearby, she purchased six round pats of thick, bubbly glass with which to make a window.
    The work of building a house was not easy. The sun reddened her skin, and the tools slipped sometimes and bit into her weary hands. She made mistakes, for she had to learn as she went along. At first, the villagers laughed