Our stepmother cursed my siblings while I slept one night.
I woke to desperate, strange sounds coming from the courtyard.
There was a note pushed under my door.
I hope this is enough. Aliandra’s writing, accented by a single gold feather folded into the paper.
Father stood in the doorway leading to the courtyard, transfixed.
The sounds came from the four swans in the courtyard. My siblings, for once in a form they couldn’t shed.
Aliandra cursed them, then flew away.
For days I hoped she’d contact me. Explain. How did she do this, and was there a catch? Would it fade?
I don’t think she predicted it would be me who got caught.
The curse didn’t fade.
When Father got over his shock he built them a fine glass aviary, determined not even this would diminish our family’s reputation.
But when a deal went badly, or a competitor got ahead of him, I saw him watch them, resentful at losing their talents.
He watched me like this was my fault. His anger wasn’t a thing of violence, or volume. It was silence, and a lack of attention.
He and I spoke only of work. As the only one of his children without a beak he gave me more responsibility, including errands that took me out of the office and sometimes even out of the city. Even though the latter meant the constant accompaniment of a Fabric Guild watcher, to ensure I maintained the necessary secrecy, I was grateful to see new places.
I never went near the aviary. For a time, I thought I was free of them.
Yet one morning, after a return home delayed by muddy roads, I slept later than usual.
I woke to swans at my window.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Their beaks against the glass, summoning me.
It was easy to tell myself I was happy for them to be cursed, but I still moved toward the window.
The sound intensified.
I paused.
I was the only one of us who couldn’t transform myself into animals. Instead I had the thread magic. Fabric and dye and mordant spoke to me, and I could work them to my will.
My siblings liked to shift so they were faster than me, so they could chase me and corner me and remind me of what I couldn’t do. They would snap and snarl, but never bite. They knew my fear was more powerful than my pain.
Now they were at my window, again demanding my obedience.
The window glass cracked, spiderwebbing in the lower right corner. They changed their angles to work the weakness.
“Stop.” I raised the window. They flew in.
They’d gotten their way again.
They encircled me. One lunged. I cried out, stepping back only to be wrapped in wings. There was nowhere to go. Everything was feathers, and the touch of hard beaks to my forehead, a headache blooming in response.
At their touch I saw what they meant me to see, nearly drowning in their wings and wants.
I saw a pale, purple-silver plant, blooming in shadows. I saw, as they forced me to see, the thread that could be drawn from such a plant, and the power it would hold. Like the thread mages of legend, who could sew disguises impenetrable by all but the fiercest magics.
The wings were ready to break me if I resisted.
I saw the reversal they wished for, which only my hands could bring them.
Aliandra cursed them because she saw what they were willing to do.
I think our mother saw it too, which is why she flew away from us so many years before.
It began with Father and Aliandra coming home drenched in spring rain, despite the amber-colored parasol they shared, and locking themselves in the office. Curtains hung over the doors and windows, crafted of silk Father had worked to keep sound inside.
My siblings and I were united in our curiosity. They didn’t even bother chasing me off.
An hour later Aliandra opened the door, looking weary. “Your father wants you to join us.” She gave me a look I thought was supposed to make me feel better. “Except you, Galie.”
My siblings, superior, sailed inside. The door closed.
I felt trapped, hovering in the hall. What if they decided they wanted me? Would they think me pathetic?
It was another game, another reminder I’d never be one of them. It still hurt, even if I’d gotten better at not crying.
I couldn’t leave as Mother did. The Guild did not allow fabric mages to leave without burning out both their magic and their memories. I could leave, but only without all of myself.
And here, my father’s daughter, I could work for no other house. I’d be rejected if I tried, assumed to be his spy, or just because no one wanted to be on his bad side.
I couldn’t even sit as I waited in the hall, I was so tense. And none of them would be thinking of me. Maybe Aliandra. That wasn’t enough.
Father came out of the office first, and didn’t acknowledge me. Then my siblings streamed out, head bent towards one another.
“What is going on?” I stepped in front of them.
Annoyance passed between them. Clare, the oldest, was closest to me, and her eyes had the look they got before she shifted.
I braced myself.
“One of Father’s employees has betrayed us.” Her voice implied my standing in her way was nearly as much of a slight. “We will not let this go unpunished.”
“You’ll tell the Guild,” I said. “They’ll punish them like they punish anyone who betrays them.” I said it because it seemed natural, yet their expressions made it seem the furthest thing from truth.
“We will deal with it,” Clare said.
The next day, they did.
I was in the office, thanking one of the junior clerks for a report they’d compiled on our dye stores.
There was a scream.
The clerk’s pen shot across their page, marring their figures. They looked at me like I had answers but I only shook my head, suspicion sickening my stomach.
I dropped the reports on the desk and moved toward the sound. One of the storeroom doors was open, unusual as we normally kept them closed to protect the products inside.
A man stood in the corner, surrounded by uncaring bolts of fabric, eyes wide. My siblings faced him.
There was so much fabric in there, all of its thread calling to my magic. I could do something about this. I splayed my fingers, reaching for the power in the threads.
My siblings ignored me. The energy I recognized meant an upcoming transformation pulsed around them.
The air shifted, but then instead of rippling through my siblings the energy shot toward the cornered man.
His screams split into multiple voices as his shape changed, too fast to fix my eyes on, rushing from one form into another and another and another.
My siblings held a cage. It was barely large enough for him as he was wrenched from one half-completed creature to the next.
I ran out of the room.
They brought the prisoner home to Father. He was proud.
Aliandra watched, tight-jawed, but didn’t comment.
They placed the cage in the entryway of the business, for all to see.
The screams stopped eventually, but he was there for seven days before he died.
Not even my siblings could make him suffer forever.
They burned the body in the cage, and the smell was worse than anything from the dye yard.
Aliandra laid her curse three days later.
I knew the plant my siblings ordered me to find. I’d seen it only one place, and I had no wish to go there, but the sound of feathers propelled me.
The elegy stones rested on a plateau, overlooking the sea, at the city’s edge. The soft scents of flowers and leaves navigating the change of seasons filled the air.
We’d been taught to grant the stones respectful distance, but there I was, wondering if the fabled, dormant magic within them would lash out at me.
It was hard to look at them for long. Even quite close, I couldn’t tell if there were patterns pressed into them, or if those were merely the scars of years beneath wind and rain.
The flowers rested in one stone’s shade, the darkness like a warning to reconsider what I did. The wind soughed, a song in an unfamiliar language, morphing as it passed among the stones.
I knelt, reaching. Pushed magic into my hands, toughening my skin so the poison in the plants’ spines wouldn’t reach me.
I knew our family’s business well enough to know when the spindles and looms were unused. By sacrificing sleep, I could use them unremarked.
But my magic could only do so much. Each day it grew harder to keep the thorns from piercing my skin. Welts raised on my hands and wrists. I could and did wear gloves, but it was hard to mask pain in my hands, so often used without thought. I gained a reputation as a light eater as holding utensils became difficult, and was thankful for the mugs of rich, nourishing broths our cook sent to my room every night. I wondered how much she knew.
Most nights, my siblings would fly past my room, honking. Reminding me.
I made the garments they demanded. Magic aside, it was my sloppiest work. I took no care for flattering their figures or hiding seams.
They flew through my open window, postures affronted, like they couldn’t believe how long I’d made them wait.
I placed the shirts on their back, and murky light spilled from the cloth. Wind raced over my skin, and I imagined it carrying a thin, distant laugh.
When the light faded my siblings stood in front of me, human once more. Yet Tiron, the youngest, snapped as my tired hands fumbled his shirt, and it draped improperly over his wings.
The light around him was different, as if a drop of dark liquid intermingled. He regained his human form but for his left arm, which remained a wing.
He lunged at me but Clare stopped him, though she glared at me afterwards.
“Just leave me alone,” I said. I wanted to sleep, and then wake to a day without thorns and pain.
They left me, then.
But it wasn’t over.
Father threw parties for days, celebrating the miraculous lifting of the curse. My siblings never mentioned my part, preferring to let rumor paint them too powerful for Aliandra’s curse to hold.
But as the hubbub of their return began dying in favor of daily life, I happened upon them in conference in an unused room of the house.
They whirled, anger bright in their eyes. I tensed, ready to run. Yet none of them…
“You can’t shift.” I said.
Tiron’s snarl confirmed my guess.
Did Aliandra know this would happen? Bitterness burned through me, thinking she suspected my siblings would force me to help them.
I interacted with them as little as I had to. There was much work to keep me busy, and sleep to catch up on.
But then, after several days of being absent from the house, my siblings returned. The city’s inhabitants streamed behind them like a veil, everyone’s attention narrowing in on our house once again.
My siblings carried a cage with them.
Inside was Aliandra.
They couldn’t harm her as they wanted. Their power to transform was gone, and with it their power to transform others.
But they kept her captive, a warning to others who might cross them.
Try as I did, I couldn’t free Aliandra. The cage was metal, containing nothing my magic would work on. I brought her food, and blankets when the night chilled, and hated how useless I was.
Several days after my siblings found her, I noticed the office was oddly silent. The clerks glanced at me like I should have known why. I finally asked Rina, one of the senior clerks. She tensed, not speaking, but slid a piece of paper in front of me and then darted away.
It was a bulletin from the Guild, the sort the office received almost every day. My eyes fell on my family’s name in large, flowing letters.
I looked up, and every face in the room quickly stopped watching me.
The bulletin was a declaration, of my siblings’ intention to take the Guild’s leadership for themselves.
A meeting was to be held, for the formal show of thread magic that was the only way to earn such rights.
This was impossible. My siblings didn’t have thread magic. I chilled, thinking they might use me as a proxy, but then I saw the smaller text at the bottom of the page and suddenly felt too sick to notice the cold.
We believe the city exerts too much control over the Guild’s ability to do business. Only by working as one can we demonstrate to the city how dearly the loss of our labor will hurt.
Our aim in this declaration is to prevent the good mages of the Fabric Guild from being unmade by forces they are currently unprepared to defend against.
A final line indicated our father supported them in this claim.
The city depended on the Guild, which was why the organization was so strictly governed. Once a mage pledged themselves to the Guild, spells were placed on their hands to keep them from writing secrets down, and their movements outside the city were limited. We were the city’s treasure, and like most treasure the city considered it imperative that we weren’t stolen.
Yet my siblings held the rest of the Guild tight with fear. Everyone knew what they did to the man who betrayed our father. No truth I might speak would change that. And if the entirety of the Guild resisted the city’s dictates…
Soon there would be nothing to sell. Without profits coming in, the merchants would have to pull from the banks, and all whose salaries depended on the trade would suffer.
It would only take days before the city felt the bite of my siblings’ plan.
“Let Aliandra go,” I asked, not for the first time. I said nothing of the meeting, or their bid for power.
Clare shook her head, as she always did. I frowned, and she leaned closer, the crisp notes of her perfume too strong. “You’re our sister,” she hissed. “You’re no better than we are.”
I heard the unspoken threat, and knew it was time to make my move.
“Spare her,” I said, “and I’ll get you your powers back.”
She stilled, eyes searching me.
“I’ll make you new shirts,” I continued, “I’ve figured out how. Then you can transform yourselves again, and anyone who stands in your way.”
I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about how the shirts worked on my siblings, reweaving their shapes. And about Tiron’s remaining wing, knit tightly to him.
I didn’t return to the elegy stones. This time I used linen, sturdy and fine.
I was their blood, and their flesh. To work upon them as I needed to, I must use myself.
I shaped the shirts, infusing them with twists of my magic, drawn from deeper than I’d ever needed to pull before. My deepest self, shaped to fit snugly within the threads.
As I worked, patches of my skin turned to fabric. Delicate, interwoven threads where there should have been flesh. One patch on my right hip, another on the inside of my left arm. The faintest itch or dryness now scared me, worried more thread would take me over.
But I asked too much of my thread magic for it not to demand recompense.
The patches spread. Where they covered my joints they were oddly loose, like moving too fast would detach them, flinging parts of my body away from me. As I worked on the new shirts, stitching my way into numbness, the patches ate at me.
I’d made the fabric hungry, and I was all they had.
One night, I dreamed the fabric overpowered me. I screamed, but it wouldn’t let me out. It covered every part of me, and then the threads burst outward, and all of me was gone.
Before the meeting, I had appointments of my own to keep.
The shirts were almost done. I’d promised to give them to my siblings just before the meeting.
Merchant Kren, another Guild member, lived only a short walk away. I’d send him a note the previous day, requesting this meeting. His response had been prompt and curt. We both knew he couldn’t afford to say no to one of my family.
The room where we met was small, but well appointed. Bowls of dried roses covered up the smells from the dye yard.
I sat in the chair Kren offered, upholstered in cream silk. I adopted the posture Father taught us, upright but not stiff. Indicating my respect for Kren, but also that there was no possible way things wouldn’t go as I wished them too.
He took the chair opposite, and I felt the small pulse of power he drew from the chairs’ silk. A good idea, to fill your home with fabrics that gave you strength.
I spoke before he could. “I want you to help me defeat my siblings.”
Most of the Guild members were on time, filling their seats while I searched their faces as discreetly as I could. I’d spoken to so many, but none had given me a definite answer yet.
My siblings arrived, in the new garments I’d made. The grey linen caught the candlelight, filling the cloth itself with luminescence.
I’d retaken all of their measurements, draping each precisely. They were as flattering as could be, accenting the curves and lines I knew each sibling preferred.
Once I would have been proud of what I’d made, but this day I was numb.
Threads of my magic, of myself, stretched invisibly between us.
I shifted, patches of fabric chafing my skin.
They paused in the room’s center as chatter fell away, looking pleased. The candle-flicker against their clothes made them seem ethereal.
I rubbed my fingers against my wrist, where threads were overtaking bone. I needed to remind myself I was real.
Clare spoke. “We are here to prove our strength, and our right to lead this Guild.”
I stood. “No.”
Tiron spun, his mouth open in outrage, but then I pulled on the threads and their transformation began.
I pushed off my coat and turned my wrists upwards. Astonishment buzzed through the room at the sight of thread-patches covering more of my skin than my thin dress did.
My siblings’ forms blurred, and laughter poured from them, as wings and claws bled in and out of their bodies.
The cruel laughter of tormentors, knowing the balance between pain and fear.
I let the threads spring from beneath my skin.
A million tiny spears of red and orange and silver left my body. My muscles weakened but the threads held me up. I couldn’t waste any of my strength on myself if this was to work.
A shout startled my tired eyes wide open.
Around the room, four Guild members stood, Kren and three others I’d asked for help. They held tight to multicolored pieces of fabric, from which impossibly long threads arced out toward my siblings. Their faces were fixed in determination and fear as their magics crashed clumsily together with mine.
The light around my siblings paled, held in by the thread magic I’d trapped within their shirts. Their faces were twisted in anger, and I staggered, catching sight of the bones in my arms. They were visible with the loss of my thread-skin, shot through with red and silver like an infection.
I focused all my will on anchoring the spell I’d hidden in the cloth, unwinding my siblings.
Yet Clare broke free, flying toward me, her wings atop a wolf-like body, fur crosshatched grey and red.
I’d given her a path to me.
She snarled, her jaw somewhere between human and canine, snapping in my face. I shoved my hands upwards into her neck but I wasn’t strong enough to combat her.
She wrapped her limbs around me as I struggled to keep my face away from her mouth. Her teeth scraped the bridge of my neck, hot and acid-sharp, her spit burning my eyes.
Feathers burst from my skin, snapping threads.
A sound that wasn’t human ripped out of my throat, and I thrashed, as much from confusion as the desire to hurt her.
My hands were gone, replaced by wings.
We both paused, shocked by my transformation.
Threads ran through my wings, like I was a stuffed toy, whimsically decorated with a pattern nature never used.
I pushed forward, driving Clare back into the spell the others still held fast. She cried out in pain.
Strangely, I felt no guilt. She didn’t deserve my empathy anymore.
I tried calling to the other thread magicians but could only squawk. Instead I spread my wings. I was an impossible confection of feather and fabric but my magic survived.
I wove myself back into the spell, the others’ strengths welcoming me in. The light burned brighter.
Clare roared, and the others lashed at the spell with claws as sharp as betrayal.
Power cut through me and I collapsed.
I was myself. No feathers, no threads.
Guild members hovered around me as I woke. There was a soft blanket under my head, and another on top of me.
I rose with them watching me, though their eyes often flicked to the room’s center.
My siblings waited there, the magic I’d created fainter, but still holding them fast. They bore no trace of the shirts I’d made them, and not a single feather.
My breath caught at their anger, plain and sharp, old instinct making me afraid.
But I also saw those who’d helped me, still anchoring the magic.
Yet my sense of my own magic was altered, so drastically I was unsure how much, if any, still remained. I felt scorched, though I saw no burns on my skin.
I moved toward my siblings, sensing some part of them had been burned away as well.
First, I needed to release Aliandra. If my siblings refused to help… I was not alone, here in this city. Though I wasn’t sure how much longer I could bear to stay.
One way or another, my family needed to discover who we were, when feathers and threads no longer defined us.
Devan Barlow is the author of An Uncommon Curse, a novel of fairy tales and musical theatre. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in several anthologies and magazines including Solarpunk Magazine and Diabolical Plots. She can be found at her website https://devanbarlow.com/ or on Bluesky @devanbarlow.bsky.social. She reads voraciously, and can often be found hanging out with her dog, drinking tea, and thinking about sea monsters.