Light-Weaver

The Light-Weaver holds an ordination the Cathedral of Aurel-on-the-Hill did not have a form for until she needed one: Sister-Weaver of the loom-cloister, carried. Ottilie Danvers, thirty-five, is the daughter of a Vesper-district silk house and entered the loom-cloister at nineteen, where the Cathedral's vestments have been woven for eleven generations and, since the sky broke, its wards. The loom-cloister weaves raw mana off the leyline into thread and the thread into cloth that holds. The cloth had never left the cloister. Ottilie is the first weaver ordained to carry the loom out on her back, and the dean's seal on the ordination is dated the morning after she demonstrated, in the transept, that the cloth would hold a wound closed as readily as it held a ward.

Her combat-grant is the loom itself: warp of mana, weft of light, spun as she moves and thrown as it is needed. A patch of it over an open wound closes the wound; the full bolt, run at once, will put a soldier back on their feet who had stopped expecting to be. She keeps a thread-count of every engagement — threads spent, threads wasted — and her figure for the second column is zero across four years in the field. The cloister disputes one thread, from her second engagement, which it holds was thrown at a man already dead. Ottilie holds that he was not dead when she threw it. The dispute is recorded in the cloister's ledger and neither party has asked for a ruling, because a ruling would require the cloister to say what it thinks a dead man is, and the cloister would rather not.

She stands the Cathedral's field-detachment with Warden-Sworn Odile Kestrane and Brother Ilario of the ink cloister, and it is her cloth that Corin Aster fights in. Since the hill fell, the detachment is all of the Cathedral that is left outside it. The next wounds she closed in the transept were his, carried up the hill from a cellar stair at the end of the night the far side came up under the salt-quay, and the wraps he has worn on the line since come off her loom. Corin, who watched the whole of the closing without speaking, said nothing when it was done, which the cloister has recorded as gratitude and which Ottilie, who was there, thinks was something else. The high collar is not fashion. It covers the scar the loom gave her the first time she wore it, the length of her neck, and she has offered to weave a new hood for the Lumen archer Sorrel Hane, whose own is dissolving. Hane declined. Ottilie has left the thread on the loom.