While the smith was clearing the gear teeth at the Third Gate, Jo Saye was finishing the final stitches on Sleeve Gamma in the dry staging loft above the basin. Her mandated ten-minute rest had restored the warmth to her fingers. Her needle was moving with rhythmic, mesmerizing speed through the heavy sailcloth canvas.
“Look at this tension, Dima,” Jo said softly. He pulled each knot snug against the oiled linen piping. “You see how the flax thread sinks halfway into the weave without cutting the cross-fibers? That’s the secret. If you pull too tight, the needle hole becomes a perforation that tears under thirty pounds. If you leave it too loose, the water slips between the threads and washes the wax out.”
Dima leaned over her shoulder. He watched with the keen appreciation of a fellow master tailor studying a rare guild stitch. “In Lathmere, Mistress Jo, our masters taught us that binding was a matter of sky shape and Latin formulas. They never told us that thread tension could hold thirty tons of water.”
“They didn’t know because they never had to wash their own aprons, my dear,” Jo replied with a warm smile, snipping the thread with her pocket shears. “A formula looks very pretty on thick parchment. But when the river comes, it’s the knot that carries the load. There. Sleeve Gamma is finished, inspected, and rolled. Let’s hope Ada doesn’t need it. But if she does, it will hold eighty pounds until midnight.”
