She sighed. As much as she wanted the sweater to be done and perfect, finishing it also meant that Felix would be leaving to serve in the Entrelac Army. It would be lonely without Felix. The sweater was the best way she could make his time serving their country more comfortable. She resisted the urge to knit in protective spells; his armor would take care of that.
“Hey there!”
Wren looked up and smiled as Olivia joined her in the library’s craft room. She met with the knitting group weekly. It was a easy way to take her mind off of Entrelac things and stay connected to earth. Nebraska and Entrelac were literally worlds away from each other. Most of her family didn’t understand her obsession with synthetic fibers (most of the knitting group didn’t either), and preferred importing natural yarn from Entrelac. But for Wren there was something intriguing about acrylic. Magic reacted differently to it than it did with natural fibers. Analyzing the differences was a hobby of hers. Of course, her knitting group was oblivious to this. Entrelac didn’t exist for them.
“What’re you working on?” Olivia plopped down next to her and started digging her own project - brightly colored cabled yoga socks - out of her bag.
“Sweater for Felix.”
Olivia laughed, “You sure about that? Aren’t you afraid of the sweater curse?”
Wren’s needles stopped. “Curse?”
“You haven’t heard of it?” Olivia adjusted her yoga socks and started knitting. “If you make your boyfriend a sweater, the relationship is doomed.” She grinned, “My cousin did that twice and lost both of them.”
“How does it work?” asked Wren, setting the sweater down in her lap. She was always weary of earth superstitions. Everyone laughed at her, but when she knew that simple things could have an impact (burying a griffin feather in a home’s foundation kept it strong ), she felt it best to proceed with caution.
Olivia glanced at Wren’s face and laughed, “Oh don’t take it too seriously. It’s just a thing. I mean, it takes so long to make a sweater that by the time people are done, the likelihood that the relationship has run its course is pretty high. But you and Felix - you guys have been together for a while, you’re probably fine.”
A few other knitters arrived at this point and laughed along with Olivia. One insisted that the sweater curse had struck her just two years ago and the others teased her about it. While everyone remains lighthearted, Wren began to rethink her idea. “Maybe socks would be better,” she muttered. Although what she would do with a sweater’s worth of yarn afterwards she wasn’t sure.
“Make him socks and he’ll walk away!” Olivia said brightly, “Face it, you’re stuck no matter what you do. Make him the sweater. At any rate he’ll appreciate it. I don’t know any other guy who actually knows anything about knitting.”
Wren smiled. Learning to knit, and thus do magic, was a given for anyone from Entrelac. Even though she’d grown up on earth where knitting was practically a female-only craft, she always found it odd that more men didn’t knit. “What about a scarf… Are there any problems with scarfs?”
An older member of the group walked in and overheard her, “Last I checked scarfs aren’t problems, they’re opportunities. What’s going on?”
Olivia answered, “She’s trying to avoid the sweater curse.”
The older woman laughed, “Honey, I made my boyfriend a sweater with more cables than you could shake a stick at, before he even thought about marriage. We’ve been married thirty years now. Make the sweater and don’t listen to the nay sayers.”
Wren picked up her needles again feeling relieved. It was just another earth superstition then. She laughed as everyone teased her about being worried and kept working. There was nothing to correspond to it in Entrelac’s magic. Besides, as desolate as the Broken Rib Mountains were, they weren’t on earth. Surely the superstitions wouldn’t follow Felix from one world to another. As she chatted with the group, the conversation changed and the sweater curse was forgotten.
*
Wren passed through the portal from earth to Entrelac, the magic brushing against her like loose threads. Her parents were close behind her. They stood in the courtyard of a repurposed palace. It had once been an extravagant getaway for the nobility. Since the fall of the monarchy and the rise of the democracy, it had been turned into offices, and served as a portal to earth. Felix would be waiting for them. Wren’s heart fluttered and she hugged the package close. The sweater had been finished the week before and she couldn’t wait for him to see it. They went through customs, not unlike an airport, but with magic it was much faster. And as last, there he was.Grinning, she ran to him and he scooped her up into a hug. They didn’t break apart until her parents joined them. She blinked back tears. It would be silly to cry now, while he was still here. “Here,” she handed him the tissue-paper wrapped package.
“You didn’t have to,” he said smiling as he fumbled with the paper.
“Yeah. Just like you don’t have to go. I did it anyways.”
He pulled the sweater out and his smile widened. “Another one of your experiments?”
“No. Sorta. I mean, it’s acrylic, but I’ve done the spell before. I wouldn’t send you off with something that would malfunction.”
“I’ll take very good care of it,” he promised. “I got something for you too.”
He pulled something out of his pocket. It was a silver necklace with a yarn ball and needles making a heart. Her throat caught and she swallowed hard. She wouldn’t cry until after he left. “It’s perfect.”
“Hold it up to your ear.”
She did, and nearly lost her resolve to not cry. It was a spell recording of his voice saying, “I love you.” Over and over again.
“I love you too,” she whispered.
“And he’ll be back before you know it,” her father said cheerfully. “We’ll all miss you Felix. But there’ll be a victory dinner ready and waiting for you.”
“Already looking forward to it,” Felix replied. “The Broken Rib is a pretty quite area. The royalist forces don’t get up there much. I’m sure you’ll all have more excitement then I will. Come on, my parents are waiting for us.”
They walked holding hands, and talking of his assignment. When he came back they could start planning a wedding. They would have to decide whether to live in Nebraska or Entrelac, whether to buy a house or build one, what kind of griffin feathers would be buried in the foundation. (If they stayed in Nebraska - how they keep the neighbors from noticing they were digging around the foundation just to add some strange looking feathers.) But those where all questions and plans for later. For now, they enjoyed the moment.
*
Wren and her mother sat side by side at the kitchen table with two boxes of tissues and a soggy pile beside them. “You need to go to the knitting group,” her mother said. “You’ll have to face them sometime. The sooner you go, the fewer questions they’ll have.”Wren wiped another tissue across her eyes. “I know. I just - Is it really best to say we broke up?”
Her mother nodded gently, “We don’t know how many royalists are here. If we tell the truth - it might be enough for them to match things up and find us. Felix wouldn’t want his death to endanger you.”
Wren nodded. The news had come a few weeks ago. No one knew why the royalists had attacked Felix’s post. The royalists had been repelled, but at a great cost. Felix hadn’t survived. The sweater had been returned with the news. Wren couldn’t look at it. Even worse was that she couldn’t explain to her Nebraskan friends the grief she felt. It was just going to look like one really bad break up. She packed up her project bag, discarding the matching sweater she had been making for herself and replaced it with a hat. Hats were mindless. With a deep breath she left.
She was late. “Where’ve you been?” called Olivia as she walked in. “It’s been two weeks. We were beginning to think you eloped or something.”
Carefully Wren sat down, trying to keep her emotions in check. She should have stayed away. “No. No elopement. He - we broke up.”
There were cries of sympathy and immediate hugs. She floundered through their questions. Felix had gotten a job opportunity in another state and they’d decided they couldn’t do long distance. Several of them quickly made snide remarks about Felix’s lack of manners, unknowingly beating on her already bruised heart. “The sweater curse strikes again!” said Olivia lightly, tying to add some humor to the situation.
Wren’s heart clenched. She’d forgotten about the sweater curse. Could it be? No one on earth really believed it, but they didn’t believe in magic either and that was real. Perhaps the acrylic yarn mixed up with her magic had brought the curse to life. If so - then it was her fault Felix had died. She fled from the knitting group. They couldn’t understand her reaction, but she didn’t care.
Safely home, she threw herself on her bed and wept. When she finally looked up, her eye fell on a ball of innocent acrylic sitting on her nightstand. She flung it to the other side of the room and glared at it. Why had she been so obsessed with it? Starting today she would get rid of every skein of acrylic she had ever touched. Then she sighed and dragged herself off her bed and picked the ball up. There was only one way to know if the sweater curse was real. She had to study it. Examine the yarn, the needles, the magic, everything. It could be her life’s work. She might never know. But trying to find out - even if it led to the conclusion that she really had cursed her love - was better than fearing it.
Wren worked late into the night, one hand writing notes, while the other pressed Felix’s necklace to her ear and listening to his voice whispering over and over again, “I love you, I love you, I love you…”
Prompt: Old Wives' Tales.