KNOTWORK, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

When we married, my husband and I tied knots in ourselves and in each other.

I am not from around here, and to me all knots mean special things. Where I come from, one moves through a lacework of knots; one learns to tie one’s own knots; one learns how knots limit one. I came here to get away from knotwork, and yet, four years after I arrived, I consciously brought my skills into play, and crafted a tangle to bind two people together, as local custom seemed to dictate.

I thought the knots meant the same things to my husband that they meant to me. We had been seven years married, and somewhere along the way our wild mutual madness faded into something I found comfortable in its complex sameness. To me, the knots remained, even though the passion had died. To my husband.…

“So, Nuala, what’s this we hear about your husband?” Marie asked me when I joined my three best friends for our weekly Tuesday lunch at Le Chèvre et Les Trois Framboises. This week Marie’s hair was purple and shellacked into a fountain of lazy curls. She was a live mannequin in the window of the largest department store in town, and this week the clothing she advertised was severe in pink and black. Everyone in the restaurant stared at her, which gave the others of us a measure of anonymity.

I put my beaded purse on the table beside my place setting. “So what is it you hear?”

Anika, who worked in the same corporate office as my husband—in fact, she was the person who had introduced me to my husband—said, “We hear he takes Jacy Hines, one of the associates, everywhere with him.”

“He took her shopping in my store,” Marie said. “‘I saw them come in together from my window, and later I asked the clerks where they went. To fishing equipment. When’s the last time a man asked a woman to look at fishing equipment?”

“Perhaps she knows something about it.” I had met Jacy at one of the firm’s office parties. She was a small pigeon woman, comforting and round, with short brown hair and bright brown eyes, ruddy of complexion and neat of hand, and I had liked her. She hadn’t borne any of the marks of threat one learns to look for when one leases her husband to a job for the bulk of the day. Jacy and I had discussed knotwork and the mysteries of coffee. If she had had the energy of a spouse-taker, wouldn’t I have felt it? I had given up several of my special senses when I bound myself, but not that one.

“He took her out to buy you a birthday present last week,” Anika said. “Last year he sent his secretary. This year he took Jacy, and they shopped together.”

My birthday celebration would happen on Saturday. It was something Hugh and I always did alone together. I hadn’t realized that selecting my gift was a task he delegated; the gifts I had received from him had been sensitive and thoughtful, and I had been touched.

I had not smelled them closely enough. The stink of someone else must have been on them. I used my eyes too much these days; I had lost some of the vital information streams I used to fish.

“He took her to coffee yesterday in my restaurant,” said Polly, who owned a diner two blocks from Le Chèvre. We never met at Polly’s for lunch; she liked to get away and eat somebody else’s food once in a while. “They sat on the same side of the booth instead of across from each other.”

Hugh had taken Jacy to Polly’s restaurant? Then he intended me to know; he knew about my friendship with Polly, certainly knew she would tell me what she had seen. Perhaps the other things could be explained somehow; Jacy had special knowledge of fishing; Jacy had a woman’s feel for a gift. But to have coffee with her in Polly’s place. Why?

I had signed up for three new classes through community education this term, but I always signed up for classes. Hugh hadn’t wanted me to work when we married, and I was satisfied not to. Instead I taught myself the intricacies of housekeeping and mankeeping and cooking, which were not overnight things to learn, but now I had them mastered and had time for other things. I took classes: two of them this term were night classes, which meant I left him to sketchy dinners and his own company twice a week. Was that enough reason for him to slip my knots?

I waited for him to come home that evening, even though I should have packed my portfolio for life drawing class and left before he pressed the garage door opener.

Hugh came into the kitchen from the garage. I studied his dark suit, his strong, square hand around the handle of his briefcase, his dark hair disarrayed because he pulled it when stuck in traffic, the shadows under his blue-gray eyes: my first thought was fondness.

“Oh! Nu! Still here?” he said.

He must have seen my car in the garage. “Why pretend surprise?” I asked, more direct than usual. I did not want to take the time for our usual dance.

“I know you have class tonight. I thought maybe one of your friends picked you up.”

“This is only the second week. I have no friends in class yet. I understand you’ve been more friendly than you should be, though.”

A flush of red touched his cheeks and was gone. “We said long ago that we would keep our old friends.”

“And make new ones? The rule was we could keep our old friends, but the new ones we would make together or not at all.”

“That was the rule,” he said. “You break it every time you take one of these classes.”

“Those aren’t real friends. Those are driving-together-and-discussing-class-material friends. Any of them I want to keep, I introduce to you. And you always say no. And I always listen.” On occasion, I had listened with regret. I liked a boy from madrigals class. Hugh nixed him, and I unknotted him; not the easiest unlove I had ever done, either, since the origin of his attraction was natural rather than induced.

“I’ve known Jacy longer than I’ve known you.” Hugh set his briefcase on the kitchen table and ran his hand through his hair.

“Have you?”

“We went to grade school together.”

I twisted my hands in my lap. He had never told me. We told each other things of this sort; it was part of our pact.

Our pact. Established in passion, a heat I thought would never die. Where had it run to? It had drained from us both as surely as snowmelt leaves mountains in summer.

Eventually, I said, “If you have something to say to me, I wish you would just say it, rather than sending my friends as your messengers.”

“I have nothing to say to you except what’s for supper?”

A chill lodged in my heart. I opened the freezer compartment of the fridge. “You decide.” I grabbed my portfolio and left.

That night at life drawing class we had a male model, a man who drove city busses during the day. He was an older man, in his fifties at a guess, with a black beard streaked with white, his hair thinning on top. He had folds of fat at his waist and kind eyes, and I liked drawing him much more than I had liked drawing the model last week, a Greek god who could not hold a pose more than a minute without wavering, and when I complained, he moved even more to spite me.

I laid down line with my darkest, fastest pencil, trying to be pleased with the exercise, the model, everyone else in class looking at skewed views of this same pose, our instructor walking around to stand behind us for a while, then leaning forward to discuss technique with us when she sensed an opening.

I laid down line. I could not stop thinking about the early days with my husband, how we had pledged our lives to each other, so deeply had we felt our love, how we had bound ourselves tight, thinking that what we wanted at the time was what we would want always.

Now a small brown woman whom my husband had known before he had met me inched between us, though truth to tell there was a big enough gap between us that anyone could have fit into it.

“Ouch,” said the model, dropping out of pose and clapping a hand to his buttocks.

I looked at my picture, realized I had laid down the line of his buttocks with too much heat in my hand. Smoke rose from the page. My face burned. I touched the paper with my ice hand.

This should not have happened. I had locked all these touch powers away when I had woven the vows that bound me to Hugh. Something had broken, and now my vows were coming unthreaded.

I had done nothing. Hugh. It was Hugh.

“Cramp?” the teacher asked the model.

The model nodded. What else could he say? Or maybe he had experienced it as a cramp. He wouldn’t have a mental opening to experience a line of fire along his buttocks; what couldn’t happen couldn’t be called by its true name, a human law that allowed me to operate within this realm without too much risk of discovery.

I set down my pencil and clasped one hand in the other, letting my hands speak to each other until both were in the middle of their range.

I came here to find friends I could not discover where I lived before, and I had made these friends: Marie, Anika, Polly at college, young, naked, trusting as unfledged birds who opened their mouths for whatever a parent would put inside. I had shaped myself by learning what had shaped them, and how they operated in their worlds. Anything they did that produced a reaction I liked, I learned to do. They fed me a human character. I learned from the other people we spent time with, as well. The dorm, the cafeteria, classes, fraternity parties, football games, bars, the student union, road trips over the breaks. It was my perfect nursery.

I watched my three friends fall in and out of love, and practiced a little myself. I met boys and enjoyed them, but none touched my heart.

It was four years later, after we had left college for the world, that Anika introduced me to Hugh. When I first saw him, I felt a flare of heat that surprised me, and I judged I had waited long enough to try the rest of the accoutrements of love. I dropped some of my walls and let love consume me.

It seemed to me that Hugh too lost himself in love. We were both mad in the best ways.

“Nuala? Something the matter?” asked my art teacher.

“My hands hurt.”

She rubbed my shoulder. “Maybe you were holding the pencil too tight.”

I smiled at her and picked up my pencil, then flipped to a fresh page. The model had dropped into a new pose, and I hadn’t drawn a line of it. These were five-minute poses, and I had no idea how much longer I had with this pose, so I scrawled lines quickly, flowed in the outline of where the model was. Pencilwork was one form of knotwork, though I had not let myself play with that before. I tried to keep these parts separate: knotwork from what everyone else did here. One of my vows to myself when I bound myself to Hugh had been that I would remain undiscovered.

“Wow,” said the teacher. “I’ve never seen you work so fast and well.”

I glanced over my shoulder at her, then looked at my drawing. I had let some of the other world out of my fingers, the merest caress of that which speaks touch-power. I set down my pencil again.

“Don’t stop,” said the teacher. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your process.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m having trouble concentrating.”

The madness had seeped out of our marriage so slowly I hadn’t noticed it leaving. One day I woke up after Hugh left for work, and I knew I didn’t care if I saw Hugh again that day. I couldn’t remember the last time joy leapt into my heart at the sight of him. I still had my vows and agreements, though, which I must honor, or I feared I would dissolve. So I looked around for other things here that could excite me. Classes woke up a sleeping part of me for moments at a time. Friends helped too. I settled into an existence that was gray with small spikes of color here and there. It was enough.

So I thought. Eventually, Hugh would die; my vows would end, and I could choose where to go next, whether back to my home where I could live as myself, to a new world, or somewhere else in this world, perhaps to find someone else, perhaps to try a different kind of sharing, a shorter one, or a more intricate one, or a more unbalanced one. The possibility of finding joy again existed. I had found it once.

Waiting has always been one of my skills.

I was not willing to wait while my husband betrayed me in public. Perhaps I could have let it go if he had been discreet. If he had been discreet, and our vows dissolved because of his actions, I could have moved on. But to do it so all my friends knew. This seemed a deliberate act.

If he had nothing to say about it, I wondered if perhaps Jacy would tell me something.

“Maybe you should always draw when you’re having trouble concentrating,” the art teacher told me. “This is wonderful.”

“It’s a mistake.” I ripped the page off my easel and tore it to bits, severing the lines and their touch-power. Who knew what they had already carried to the model? At least he didn’t seem to be suffering.

Or did he? He had held the pose surprisingly well for a long time while I thought things over. When I ripped up the page, he collapsed and breathed hard for a moment. He shook his head like a bull shaking off a bee, then slapped his face.

“You okay?” the teacher asked.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” the model answered. “Hot flashes, then this weird paralysis. Maybe I better take a break.”

The teacher checked the clock. Half an hour earlier than the model’s scheduled break. “All right,” she said. “Everybody take ten minutes and then come back. Nuala?”

I closed my pad. “I better go home,” I said. “I’m not feeling well either.”

Hugh would not be expecting me home for forty-five minutes or an hour. I couldn’t decide if I would rather surprise him or wait. In the end, I stopped for coffee at the 24-hour coffee shop and sat in a booth, thinking about what to do.

I went to a phone booth and checked the listings, found Jacy Hines. I called her number and she answered.

“This is Nuala. May I come and see you?”

She hesitated. I waited.

“Let me meet you somewhere,” she said at last. I wondered if Hugh were there with her now.

I told her where I was, and she came fifteen minutes later. She wore a brown jacket over a dark orange dress, and black tights and shoes. She looked small and comforting, like someone I should like for a friend.

We both got coffee and sat across from each other in the booth. I waited.

She had drunk half of her coffee when she finally spoke. “What do you want?”

“What are you doing with my husband?”

She stared into her cup. “He said you wouldn’t mind.”

“You have been misinformed.”

She glanced up then, and I drew that look on the table top with my darkest pencil, letting touch-power enter her outline.

“You see,” I whispered when I knew I had her attention, that her gaze would not waver, “I made promises when I married him, and he gave me promises in return. Are his promises mist? Does that make mine water, to melt and flow instead of staying hard as ice?”

“He said you were no longer sexual with each other.” Her whisper was strained.

“I don’t remember by whose desire.” I rubbed my fingertips over my forehead.

“Do you want him still? I didn’t know.”

“I am bound to him by vows I hold sacred.”

For a moment she said nothing. “I’m sorry.”

“He has drawn you in. Does that mean I pull you farther into our vows, or that I let go of our vows?” I got a different pencil out of my box and drew carefully on the portrait of Jacy, added lines of warmth where I had learned they would most affect a human. She twitched and shuddered as I worked, and red flowed across her face.

“What are you doing?” she asked in an agonized whisper.

Another touch there. Three tweaks. I slid my eyes sideways, watched her shudder again.

“Whatever I like.” I watched her for a while, left her suspended almost all the way to where she would find release, not quite there, just the itchy anxious side short of it. Then I touched my drawing, and she shook and shuddered, her breath panting in and out of her. Finally she melted back against her bench.

I traced the lines of my picture with summon power until the picture released the tabletop. It eased into my hand. Jacy’s shoulders shifted. “What are you doing?” she whispered again. A tear leaked from one of her eyes.

“Knotwork.” I tied the lines of her drawing in several complicated knots and slipped it into my pocket. This was so easy for me that I knew my vows had indeed melted. Since I had not stepped outside them, I knew Hugh had destroyed them.

Did I want to reinstate them? Or should I leave him now? I ran my fingers over the small knot of lines in the bottom of my pocket. Jacy jumped and twitched.

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t do that.”

I rubbed the warm places in my knots with the ball of my thumb. She leaned back, eyes closed, mouth open. Low gasps rang from her. I rubbed slower, then faster, until she melted down under the table. People at nearby tables watched her when her gasps grew loud enough. “Stop,” she moaned. I gave her lines one last rub, and she cried out, loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear.

I took my hand out of my pocket. I finished my coffee. I glanced at the waitress, who came over to me after a couple minutes.

“Is your friend all right?” she asked as she refilled my cup.

“She’s fine.” I pointed to Jacy’s cup and the waitress refilled that too, and went away. I poured two creams into Jacy’s coffee, as I had seen her do when she first sat down. I sipped my coffee. Then I leaned down and spoke under the table. “You can come out now.”

She had curled into a ball. “I’m never coming out.” Tears streaked her face.

“You can come out, or I can make you come out.”

She rubbed her eyes. A little later she crept out from under the table and settled herself in her seat. People stared. She looked toward the wall, her cheeks flushed.

“Drink your coffee.”

She drank. “What do you want?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He said—”

I nodded. I dropped money on the table to cover our coffees and a tip. “Let’s go.”

She collected her purse and her jacket from the bench and tried to stand. Staggered.

I slipped my hand into my pocket and stroked strength into her lines. She straightened, took a deep breath, and followed me out of the restaurant.

“Are you a witch?” she asked in the parking lot.

“Not exactly.”

“But you can make me feel things.” She blushed again.

“Did you like it?”

She stared at the ground. She shook her head. She smiled a tiny smile, the smile one smiles for oneself. “I can never go into that restaurant again.”

“Let’s go back right now.”

She touched my arm. “Please. Don’t.”

I stared at her hand until she dropped it. “Please,” she whispered.

I cupped her knotwork in my hand. She tensed.

“Let’s go to your apartment.”

She relaxed.

I let her drive us in her car.

My husband’s scent was in her living room.

It was a small and comforting place. I sat on her brown velvet couch, and she dropped into a red armchair across a walnut coffee table from me. Bookshelves lined one wall, most of the books hardcovers and well worn. A plant stand held a number of leggy, healthy plants. A red and blue persian carpet the size of a bathroom stall in a hotel covered a patch of floor between furniture.

Brown velvet smelled of my husband, his satisfied scent.

“I bound myself to him, and he to me,” I told Jacy.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. He acted as if there were nothing between you anymore.”

“When I met you, you didn’t smell like a threat.”

She shook her head. “I never thought of it. I was surprised when he came into my office and asked me to help him evaluate a portfolio. He’s my senior. I thought perhaps he was grooming me for a higher-level position. I thought it was because of my merits. Then he kept asking my help. Things that seemed natural at first, and then things that seemed outside our jobs. Step by step he walked me away from what I thought was right, and I did not notice. Until one night we were up here together. I thought we were talking about work. And then it was different somehow. He sat close to me. I’ve been alone a long time. People don’t see me that way, and I—I’m so sorry, Mrs. Breton.”

“I don’t know if that’s my name anymore.”

She covered her face with her hands. “I never meant—I don’t know how it happened. I should have listened to Barry. He told me to stay away from Hugh. But it seemed like nothing at first, so innocent. I am such a fool. I am deeply sorry.”

“Was he here tonight?”

She lowered her head. Her lips tightened.

“Why did he make your relationship public?” I wondered. “If he doesn’t mind my taking classes—if he knows it means he can see you—why let me find out about it?”

“I don’t think that’s right,” she said in a low voice. “I think he minds.”

I slipped my hand into my pocket, cradled her lines inside it. “Does he speak to you of me?”

Her gaze fixed on my hand in my pocket. She was frightened. “Sometimes,” she whispered.

“What does he tell you?”

“He says you don’t care about him anymore. That you’re gone a lot. That he’s a passionate man and you no longer want him.”

I tried to view this as Hugh did. Had he told Jacy his own truth? I was not gone a lot. Perhps twice a week seemed like a lot. Perhaps he resented the time I spent with my friends while he was at the office. Did I signal Hugh that I no longer wanted him? We climbed into bed and went to sleep. We never turned to each other anymore.

All the knotwork I had made with Hugh was what we had woven together; in my vows I had decided that I would not hold him in my hand the way I held Jacy now. That was part of the risk and wonder of our marriage for me. Where I came from, one wove knots on knots. That was what one knew: the skill of the knotmaker determined who ruled the connection between any two people. I had come here to find something new.

No knots but first knots. Shelve that skill and try something new. So I had new skills, but it was time, past time, to reclaim the old ones.

I took Jacy’s knotwork out of my pocket and sat with it in my hand. She shivered and leaned forward to look. “Is that me?” she asked.

“It is not you, but what I use on you. We spoke of this when we first met.”

“We did?” She reached out a hand, touched the edge of her knot, jerked the hand back, her eyes widening. “I felt that.”

I smiled at her and drew a finger along an edge, watched as she straightened. This was a stroke up her side. She stared at me. I stroked down her other side. She glanced at her side, then at me.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “How can you do that to me?”

“Fair has nothing to do with it.” I had woven myself tight in a lace of rules, played at being one of them. All of that was gone.

I set Jacy’s knotwork on the table between us and leaned back against her couch. Again I smelled my husband’s satisfaction.

All his actions told me that he wanted everything to change. Did he want to go back to what we were? Did he want to move on, join with Jacy and abandon me? He was no longer the person I married; and nor was I the person who had married him any longer.

What did I want?

I thought of my friends, the knots we had tied in our lives where they intersected, our weekly lunches, our telephone conversations, our movie dates, the occasional friend emergency where we met one or two or three or four together, to comfort someone in trouble. I thought of my studies, the greatest of which was my study of how to mimic a human, all the rest subsidiary. I thought of the pleasures Hugh and I had shared, how they had swallowed every other consideration until I had thought nothing else mattered.

I took a pencil out of my purse, pulled out my grocery list, flipped to a blank page, and drew Hugh.

I had never knotted him in this way before. I had knotted spirit in him, but never body. I had abdicated that power after our marriage.

This time I drew on all my memories of our days and nights, on how I had touched him everywhere, and how he had touched me. I drew his spark points and his dull points, the parts of himself he groomed and those small spaces that escaped him.

I left these lines blank, open to whichever power I would choose to pour into them when I was ready. I took out the other two pencils and laid lines on top, the warmth lines, the pain lines. I turned my husband from equal to object.

I dropped the pad on the table beside Jacy’s knotwork.

“What is it a picture of?” she asked.

I startled. I had forgotten she was there.

I turned the pad so she could see it better and looked at her, my eyebrows up. How well did she know Hugh?

Her eyes shifted as she studied the knotwork. Slowly a frown pulled the edges of her mouth down. “Is it—” She sat back suddenly, eyes wide, cheeks pale. “This is Hugh?”

I smiled.

“What are you going to do?” she whispered.

“I don’t know yet.” I leaned forward and picked up her lines. She hunched her shoulders, then relaxed them, but bit her lower lip. I set her knotwork on top of the picture of Hugh’s, wondering what would happen. Hugh’s work was not active yet; I had not powered it; but Jacy knew what it was.

Her lines curled away from the image of Hugh’s. No attempt to tangle.

Jacy and I stared at one another.

“You renounce him?” I asked.

“I never meant.… I can’t stay with someone who betrays someone else that way. I trusted what he told me, that you wouldn’t mind. He lied to me. I don’t want a person who does that.”

I lifted her knotwork, held it between my hands and talked the knots into dissolving, let the power loose. Some of it came back to me, and some went into the air.

I rubbed my hands against each other, then took a napkin from my purse and wiped off the stain.

“What?” Jacy said. She patted her chest, her face. “What?”

I showed her my empty hands.

She heaved a big sigh and smiled at me. “Thank you.” Then she frowned. “What do you want me to do?”

“I have let go of wanting to dictate your actions.”

“But with Hugh—”

I picked up my pad and looked at my knotwork. “I don’t know what I want.” I lifted a finger of my fire hand and held it just above the knotwork, ready to charge the picture with power. “What would you do if you were me?”

She shook her head.

“What is the human response?” I asked.

She swallowed. “There is no one answer. Some wives look the other way and nurse their pain. Some talk it over with the husbands and decide that they can work it out. Some leave. Some kill their husbands.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “Forget I said that!”

“Among my people, killing another is a sign of lack of imagination. So many other things are more satisfying, and hurt more.”

She dropped her hand from her mouth, clasped her other hand in it. “Where do you come from?”

“Somewhere else.”

She frowned, then crossed her arms, hiding her hands in her armpits. “Why did you come here?” she whispered.

“To learn.”

She stared down at her feet for a moment, then gazed at me again. “Does Hugh know what you are?”

“No.” I had let him bind me, but had not told him what powers I gave him, what powers I gave up. I knew, and that was enough.

“He’s an idiot,” Jacy said.

I cocked my head and stared at her.

“Did you try to keep what you were a secret from him?”

“I became something else in the framework of our marriage. I gave up my powers. How could he know what I was when I wasn’t myself?”

“You said we talked about the pictures—the strings?—when we first met?”

“Knotwork,” I said.

“Knotwork. Like macrame?”

“I don’t know that word.”

“What do you remember about that conversation?”

I thought back to the party. So many drunk people. I don’t like talking to drunken people. They don’t make sense, and they don’t remember what they said later. It’s as though the conversation never took place. So why have it take place?

Only if I want information, and by that time I was not looking for information about my husband’s daytime environment. I was content to own the sphere of home.

At the party, Jacy had held a glass, and only took little sips. So I talked to her. She spoke to me about coffee grinders in supermarkets, which ones had the best blends and which blends were not good; and we spoke of knotwork. “You told me who everyone in the room was, and how they were knotted to each other.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “I didn’t call it that, though, did I?”

“I don’t remember. That’s how it made sense to me, so that’s how I remember it.”

“Knots are—” she began.

The phone rang. It sat beside the couch. I looked at it, then at Jacy. She licked her lip and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

She listened a moment, then said, “I don’t think—”

She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “Hugh.”

“What does he want?” I whispered back.

“To come over.”

Strange feelings eeled through me. I picked up my drawing of my husband and nodded to Jacy.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said into the mouthpiece, “but if you really want to—”

She listened a little longer. “All right.” She hung up the phone and looked at me. “He said you should be home by now. He said you should have a little of your own medicine. If you’re going to make him wait, he will make you wait.”

“He’ll make me wait while he’s with you.”

She nodded. “I don’t think he would have heard me even if I said no. I’ve never heard him talk like this before. If I had—”

I waited.

She twisted one hand in the other, shook her head. “I would suspect that there was something else going on, something I wouldn’t like. Obviously there’s still an emotional charge. He still cares, or he wouldn’t want you home on time.”

“I heard you went shopping for my birthday present together,” I said.

Her face went crimson. “He told me you liked silver,” she whispered, “and that if I picked it, it would be better. Something delicate, Celtic knots, he thought, but he said he didn’t know what looked good.”

“Did you find me something good?”

She ducked her head, twisted her hands. After a moment, she nodded.

“Thank you.”

A knock on Jacy’s door, then the sound of a key in the lock. I lifted my knotwork from the table and touched both ice and fire to it.

“Jacy?” Hugh said. All he saw was her. He came across the room, stooped beside her armchair, and kissed her. Her hands clenched on the arms of the chair. “Honey?”

She lifted one hand and pushed his face away until he could not help but see me. He straightened. “Nuala.”

“Hugh.” I stroked summon power into my drawing until it pulled free of the page, and then I knotted it. The knot for power over another’s body. The knot for power over another’s speech. I hesitated a moment, thinking of other knots: power over another’s heart, power over another’s mind, power over another’s spirit. Without the knots, I could still stroke the pain and pleasure lines, manipulate the knotwork and cause strong but temporary effects, as I had with Jacy. With the knots, my power would be absolute, unless the person I knotted had his own knot power. I did not think Hugh had such power.

I looked at my husband. Great sadness struck me. I still loved him. Just the sight of him made me soft and fond, even here in the apartment where he had taken another woman in the way he had promised he would only take me.

I did not put the other three knots into my work. There was always time for that if I needed it.

“Nuala, what are you doing?” Hugh asked, an uneasy edge to his voice. He gripped Jacy’s shoulder.

“I am choosing a future for us, my love.”

“What do you mean?”

I looked at the knotwork I held, the complex and the simple parts, a diagram of my husband, by necessity flat where he had depths, no true image of all there was about him, but true enough that I could capture him in it.

“By betraying me, you have set me free. I don’t know what I want from this freedom. I will discover it.”

“Honey—”

“Don’t call me by the same name you use for her.”

He glanced down, saw that he had his hand on Jacy’s shoulder, that she glared up at him. He sucked air in and released her.

Jacy rose and came to sit beside me on the couch. “You told me she didn’t care anymore, Hugh,” she said. “You lied.”

“Do you care?” Hugh sat in the chair Jacy had left.

I said, “I do. I would never have left you as long as you lived.”

“But we had nothing left.”

“We had everything. Some parts of it were asleep. Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to wake them?”

“Didn’t I? All those nights I reached for you, and you turned your back.”

Had he reached for me? I remembered his touch on my shoulder, on my back. I had cherished that touch, but hadn’t thought it meant anything more. Had it been a request? We were speaking different languages with our bodies, after those years when we had known without words what would please the other and ourselves. When had we lost our language?

“I thought you just wanted to touch my back. I didn’t know it was a request for something else. Why didn’t you say something?”

“I thought you were telling me it was over.”

“That’s so strange,” Jacy said. “You don’t talk with words?”

“Everything with him is a dance,” I said. “He approaches what he wants, but he never says it out loud. This is not my first or second or even third language. Sometimes I know what he wants, and sometimes I get tired of trying to figure it out and give up.”

“I can’t talk about these things,” Hugh said.

I looked at the knotwork in my hands. There was the knot I had put on his speech. If I twisted it one way, words would spill out of him. If I kinked it with skill, they would be words I was interested in hearing.

“Do you know what she’s holding?” Jacy asked Hugh.

“Knitting?” Hugh guessed.

Jacy reached into my hand and stroked the knotwork. Hugh jerked, clapped a hand to his side. Jacy pressed a different place, and Hugh clapped his knees together. “What are you doing?” he asked in a choked voice.

“You don’t know what you’re touching,” I told Jacy.

“Yes, but this is fun.” She touched the knot for speech.

“I am so confused and scared,” Hugh said. “I wanted something to happen, but I didn’t know how to direct it, so I flailed around and tried things, and this is what happened, but what is it? I don’t understand it, and I’m terrified.”

Jacy lifted her finger and looked at me, then frowned at Hugh. “What do you feel for Nuala?” she asked, and touched the speech knot again.

“She frightens me and I love her. I know she has a secret life she will never share, and I’m jealous. I think she’s leaving me. I think she’s found someone else. I think she no longer likes me. I want to hurt her. I want to wake her up and make her remember what she’s losing. I want her to come back. I want her to notice that I’ve left. I don’t know what’s going on in her head.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“I can’t ask questions like that. I’ll get smacked.”

“Smacked by who?”

“My mother will hit me if I ask for anything. She always says no questions, no wishes. Every answer is a smack.” Hugh writhed in the chair, covered his mouth with his hands. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

Jacy jerked her finger off the knot.

Hugh collapsed, breathing hard. “What are you doing to me?”

I closed my hand around my knotwork, then opened my hand again and stroked lines. Hugh settled back. His breathing eased.

“Whatever I want,” I whispered.

After a moment he opened his eyes. A tear ran across his cheek. “Nuala, what is this?”

“Ah, husband, this is my secret side, the side I gave up to be with you, but since you left me, I reclaimed it.”

“I haven’t left you.”

“You broke our vows. You left me.”

“I wanted to stir things up. I wanted things to change between us.”

“You got your wish.” I glanced at Jacy, who had been used like an instrument. My husband had made her an object and a weapon, just as I had made him. Once you make a person an object, everything changes between you. The climb back up to person is much harder than the first climb.

Jacy had made that climb.

I studied the knotwork. I could use it to bend Hugh any way I liked.

If I bent Hugh, would I want to go home with him? If all that he was was what I chose—I could choose good things. I could tie knots to make him trustworthy and loyal. But I would always know that I chose it, and in time I would not be able to tell what was left of who he had really been.

“Nuala,” he said.

“Hugh. Now that you’ve changed everything, what do you want?”

He groaned. “I want to go back to when things were good between us.”

I glanced at Jacy. She frowned.

“What do you want?” I asked.

She slumped back against the couch and sighed. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

Cupping Hugh’s knotwork in my left hand, I sketched another Jacy with my right. She straightened as she watched. Her tongue darted out to lick her upper lip.

I charged the work with both hands to encompass her complexity.

“What do you want?” I asked her again.

“Not to be lonely,” she whispered, and then, “I want to learn what you know.”

Happiness heated my chest. I began to see work I could do, a direction I could go; stay here, keep Hugh, learn new things. The old vows were gone. I was through playing fair.

I set aside the knotwork of Jacy. “Watch carefully,” I told her. She bent her head over my hands as I manipulated Hugh’s knotwork. “This is the knot for power over another’s heart. This is how you stroke it when you want him to be true.” We both studied what I had done, then looked across the table at Hugh.

Heat had kindled in his eyes. He leaned forward, his gaze fixed on my face, and I felt my own heat rise within. He wanted me, and that excited me.

We couldn’t go back, but we could go forward into a second love. I could add Jacy into the mix, and make Hugh like it.

I would bend him in increments. I might lose who he had been, it was true; but who he had been had chosen to betray me.

I could always bend him back.