Entry 41, Gaugers' Row parish book, third week of October: one wool shawl, gray, reported stolen from the line behind the cooper's. Recovered the following morning from a rafter in the Upholders' Hall, hung in a web, folded as neatly as a bakery cloth.
That shawl is how the Aranea came to my notice. She keeps the loft above the hall at Upholders' Reach, and for nine nights I watched her from the stair. By day she is a woman of about fifty, narrow in the shoulder, with long hands and a habit of looking at a person's sleeve before their face. A seamstress named Lorna Quist, who has taken in mending from her for years, says she pays in thread so fine it cannot be seen until it is pulled taut. At dusk the change begins at the wrists. The fingers lengthen first and bend backward at a second knuckle. Then the arms divide, and the rest follows in a manner I will not try to describe, because I looked away twice and was not sure of what I had missed.
She is not hostile. She is particular. Overnight she rewove the hall's torn banner, and at one point she stopped to pick a moth out of the work and set it on the sill, alive. What she cannot abide is a mended seam that has been done badly. Quist reports that the Aranea once unpicked an entire christening gown and left a note, in thread, on the table: a single knot, pulled tight. Quist took it as a complaint about the hem. I cannot verify this, but I believe the Aranea has not slept since the hall was built, because no resident of Upholders' Reach has ever described her as tired.
The local rule is simple. Nobody in Gaugers' Row sweeps a cobweb from a doorframe after the first of October, and anyone who does must leave a spool of thread on the lintel. The spool is always gone by morning. In its place hangs a single strand, which is not left for the household's benefit but is the Aranea's way of saying the matter is settled. She also leaves husks of dried flies in tidy rows along the beams, and those, at least, are easy to follow if one wants to find her. On the ninth night she came down the rafter head first, eight-legged and silent, with a small pale spot on the back of her abdomen, shaped like a thumbprint. She paused over my notebook, tapped the open page twice, and corrected a spelling. The pencil was left lying across the margin, wrapped in a single turn of silver thread.
- Classification
- Weaver-kin shapeshifter
- Habitat
- Rafters, lofts, and cloth halls
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 5.5 ft as a woman; 8 ft legspan
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Guild towns of the cloth country
- Binomial
- Araneus mutabilis
- Diet
- Flies, moths, and spilled cider
- Temperament
- Fastidious, aloof, unhostile