Peace had returned to the temple on Wheat Street after its frantic morning. There was just Hella, the widow, the cats, the silverfinches and the sunshine. The widow cast a sly sideways glance at Hella after the dust and the silence had settled.

"It wasn't my place to criticise when everyone was working so hard, but this whole fish charming plan is a waste of time."

"Why?" Hella asked listlessly. She honestly hardly cared at the moment.

"Because Findil has taken his fish away to deeper and cooler waters," the widow said. "The Nephatar fleet is fishing in the wrong places and the best charms in the world aren't going to fix that."

"Findil? I don't understand. It is Doloph now. The 7th of Doloph. What has Findil got to do with it?"

Hella felt slow and stupid.

"Not Findil the month," the widow replied with a tinge of exasperation. "Findil the Old God. The one for whom the month was named. One of the first Gods. The God of Fish. To think that in a city they call the City of Fish, there are none who honour his name anymore. No wonder he has taken his fish away!"

From somewhere inside her robes the widow extracted a scrap of fabric which the priestess now recognised; she'd not had a chance to look at it closely before. The old woman unfolded it on her lap and stretched it over her knee, studying it critically in silence. She gave a sigh of frustration as she pushed her fingers thoughtfully into the mesh and contemplated a rip close to one of the edges.

"Why is this hairnet so important to you?" Hella asked, her curiosity aroused despite herself.

"Well, it is a very old net for a start," the widow began carefully. "It's a family heirloom you might say. It's made from materials you can't get so easily these days. They are no ordinary fabrics. The threads are twisted skeins drawn from triple moonlight. The different colours of Lumina, Celestria and Triquetra are blended in the weave and the knots that hold it together are tied tightly with starlight. I've had it for a very long time. It was a present from my husband."

"What happened to it?"

"I'd rather not talk about that," the widow said. "It was most unfortunate. But I can say it isn't merely a hairnet. It has other uses if it could be repaired and ones that could help this city far more than this musical fish charming nonsense."

Now Hella really was intrigued. The old woman had shown them quite a range of skills in the short time she'd been a guest at the temple, from cooking to healing, to making great bargains in the market place and fixing the cooling pot. If she said this hair net could be useful, Hella was inclined to believe her.

"And you need hair to repair it?"

"Yes. It's hard to explain but it's a temporal thing. It's what the resonance demands now to be in sympathy with the original design intent. It needs to be hair donated voluntarily and I can't use my own."

"So aren't you going to ask me?" Hella queried, since this was what she had been expecting, but to her surprise the widow looked shocked.

"Oh no! I don't mean to sound blunt, Hella," the widow said, "but your hair isn't really suitable. You see Jodyth's hair has the silver colour of Lumina and Gemulae has hair as golden as the sun. Their hair is thematically in tune with the net. But your hair... Your hair is honest Earthengrew hair, brown as the richest Myruthean soil and lovely in its own way, of course, but not for my celestial net..."

That was a bit too much for one day. Her precious flute at the bottom of the ocean, rejected from the temple trio's trip, threatened with rejection from the Harmonic Order , and now even the widow who she had started to think of as her friend didn't want her hair, whilst that hussy Gemulae went flaunting her golden locks in front of half the fishermen of Laque. Hella felt her throat close involuntarily in a way that triggered another deep ache in the infected tissue, but self-pity wasn't in her nature. She wasn't going to cry again!

"W... who are? Who are you really, though?" she challenged.

"Who am I? Who am I really? It's no great mystery, you only had to ask, but none of you did until now. Does this look more familiar?"

The world blurred momentarily in a way Hella put down to a side effect of her illness, and she blinked in feverish astonishment for she was now face to face with a much younger woman who seemed to have taken the widow's place.

Hella and the Widow

"No? I don't always choose to look so old."

"I don't know much about mages or witches. I'm sorry if I offended you," Hella said, for she was suddenly a little afraid.

"Mages? Mages! Pah! This isn't some parlour trick you know," and now the widow definitely sounded indignant. "Still, what can you expect in a city that doesn't seem to have heard of Findil! Did my dream cats not give you a massive clue?"

"Errmm...." Hella wracked her brains trying to recall what little she knew about the Old Gods . "Are you P... Pruth?"

"Pruth! Yes, Pruth! At last! And even if everyone else seems to think I'm no more than the name of the last month of the year, I'm here to tell you I'm not! And I want to help, except I can't seem to find anyone suitable to give me their hair."

Hella swallowed painfully, then in a low and diffident voice she offered up a suggestion.

"I don't know anything about arcane resonance and sympathetic seeds, really I don't and I'm sorry if I'm speaking out of turn," she began humbly, "but when you say you are seeking a repair that is thematically in tune with the net, well that is a musical idea, isn't it? I do know about music."

"Go on," the goddess said.

"Harmonious outcomes don't all arise from complementary notes. You've heard of counterpoint? If you can't find hair colours to match those in the sky, then perhaps you can set the colours of the sky against those of the earth, making the one contrast with the other. Is that not a divine harmony too? Does that not make good music and perhaps a working weave for your hairnet?"

The widow was silent for five whole beats and then her face shone with an enormous grin. "You know you're right Hella, you're absolutely right! Why did I not think of it? We can use your hair, Earthengrew girl. We can!"

To suggest the repair was not the same as to design it, and to offer hair was not the same as to give it, Hella realised as the afternoon wore on. The donation began with five carefully selected long clean cuts, which provided five long hanks of hair and left her with a very short crop exposing the nape of her neck and her ears, like a freshly sheared lamb. 

Given the size of the net, the priestess couldn't imagine why any more of her hair would be needed but piece by piece it vanished into the structure of the net as the widow demonstrated patience, impressively fine motor control, sharp vision and arcane enchanting skills to thread and tie it between the unbroken segments, exactly where she wanted it to go. 

The work took place on the floor of the main stage, where there was a large flat surface with good light coming in from the windows in the west wall, and as it proceeded Hella noticed something strange. Spread out over the stone, the hairnet began to look bigger than it first appeared. Then a LOT bigger. Even if the topology of the net was preserved (which was far from clear), there was some supernatural geometry at work beyond the limits of natural elasticity. 

By late afternoon, Pruth's net covered the whole stage and was spilling out over the sides. She moved to another window, where she cast great lengths of mesh up into the upper corners of the temple building, using Nyx and Myx as helpers. The cats seemed to think that playing with the net was a game. They dabbed at the white drapes and they shot behind the temple pillars, chasing one another and sometimes vanishing into smoke to reappear up in the roof spaces. It all seemed outwardly chaotic and yet they never tore the fabric and they somehow served their mistress well for all their superficial disorder, spreading the net for her as she worked on it.

The Net of Pruth is Repaired

At last the goddess clapped her hands to bring her cats to heel and sat back. "It can unfold much more if I want it to," she said in answer to Hella's unspoken query, "but this is large enough for the level of detail the repairs require. There's no need to stretch it any further for now. It's almost finished. All the main ties are secured, but if you look closely here can you see these little knots that hold the secondary threads? Yes? We should weave more of your hair into each one of these all across the net."

"It's too short," Hella said, fingering what was left of her hair.

"It doesn't need to be long," the widow answered, perhaps deliberately misunderstanding Hella's real concern. "Come on, we will shave it all off and it will be just the length that is required!"

So they did. And later every scrap was carefully collected and cast into the net, where each tiny curl twisted and tied itself in position, guided by the spells of the goddess and the enchanted nature of the net itself which was now attuned to Hella's hair and incorporated it easily.

They had barely finished when they heard the other priestesses at the side door. In a twinkling, Pruth made a gesture that collapsed the net back to the size it had been at the start, looking once again like no more than a hairnet, which she pocketed with a smile. She changed back into the form of the old widow woman.

Hella was suddenly self conscious. She instinctively pulled a hood over her head to hide what had been done just as Jodyth and Gemulae came through from the refectory.

"How did it go?" she ventured.

"Not as well as we all hoped," the senior priestess grumbled. "Might be even worse than last time to be honest. Ravella sings alright but she never stops talking and she has such an annoying laugh. It would have been better with you."

"Ravella is just a little bit irritating," Gemulae confirmed. "But I don't suppose we can blame her for the fish charming failing. Nothing much in the nets at all, although Maris has still sent us a little something from the crab cages for our trouble. He was very disappointed that you weren't there," she added slyly. "He wanted to come round and see you today but Jodyth told him he couldn't."

"I don't want you disturbed when you're recovering," the old priestess said. "He's a nice enough young man and of course you must see him and thank him for rescuing you, but the temple is our home and a sanctuary for spiritual contemplation. He shouldn't come here uninvited when you're not feeling well."

That seemed a bit overprotective to Hella but Jodyth meant well enough, she was sure and there was something in what she said. That was the moment when Gemulae noticed Hella's missing hair. Of course she knew immediately what had happened to it and gave the widow a dirty look. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed, pulling back the hood on Hella's robe. "There's nothing left of it! You're completely bald. Just as well we didn't let Maris come here. You'll want to let that grow back before you see him."

"It won't grow back," the goddess said, addressing Hella. "Not on your head anyway. That's not how the repair works. It grows in the net now. It's an organic part of the structure. It draws directly from the roots of your follicles and binds ever more tightly with the threads of moon and starlight. You're going to be bald now. Always."

"Oh!" Hella hadn't anticipated that. She'd assumed her donation was just the hair that had been cut. Her shock must have been obvious.

"Perhaps I didn't explain that part very clearly," the goddess conceded, seeing Hella's reaction. "It's your fault really," she continued, perhaps a little defensively, addressing both Jodyth and Gemulae. "With a relatively short cut from either of you, the net would have been mended much more easily. You would have kept the rest of your hair. But it was only Hella who offered me hers, and with hers the net had to be repaired in a different style. A more complex one. Counterpoint. And I needed all her hair. Forever."

"That's outrageous!" Gemulae complained on her friend's behalf, but it didn't matter. The deed was done and nothing anyone said afterwards could change it. In any case, arguing with a goddess was going to be pointless, although Pruth did not seem inclined to reveal her identity to the others and Hella felt it wasn't her place to make the introduction when the widow appeared to prefer anonymity.

In the end it came down to Hella to calm the explosive indignation of Gemulae and the less vocal glares from Jodyth and restore the harmony of the temple.

"Let's not argue," she said firmly. "Not when this might be my last night at the temple. If I'm going to be evicted by the City Harmoniser in the morning, I'd like us all just to enjoy a peaceful evening and some good food. You know, I may have lost my hair but I think my voice is coming back and my appetite too. Didn't you say we have some crab? Anyone know any good recipes for crab?"

"Ah Findil's little sentries," the widow smiled. "If you'll all help me I can show you a very good way to cook them with a splash of lemon juice and some parsley, which I know you have in your larder because I bought it yesterday."