Waukrife Alec (working title - any suggestions?)
an excerpt

The sun-room was cool and fresh, the windows admitting not only sunlight but wisps of breeze that teased at hair and gowns and twitched Sasseenjar's embroidery silks from her hands. Cathrin found herself folding and re-folding her hands, fidgeting at having nothing to do. Ordinarily she would not have been so restless, but Sasseenjar had unpacked her embroidery frame and her silks and was stitching busily, leaving Cathrin nothing to do but to feel idle. To keep from overt rudeness, she leaned close to look at the work.

At first she could make no sense of it. Sunlight danced from gaudy colors and dazzled off patches of the linen still blank and empty. Slowly she traced the shape of a tree, the leaves picked out in blue-green that put her in mind of a fish's scales. Red-gold fruits peeked from among the leaves, and birds feathered in fire-bright orange flitted up from it. A four-legged something in violet bounded up from underneath it, and Sasseenjar worried her lip in concentration as she picked out a smaller long-eared shape, in soft rose-pink, close by the tree's shade. The stitches were finer than her smallest fingernail, but they blended to a marvelous degree, so that at a little distance she only saw the whole.

"So many of them!" she marveled. "But I will confess, I do not understand the picture."

"Thirty-eight thousand and fifty-five of them," Sasseenjar announced grandly. Then the solemn mask fell away and she giggled. "I could never count them, but it sounds a fine grand number, does it not? It is Before the Doom of Denryu."

Cathrin kept her admiring smile while she unriddled that statement. "That is...an Aswari legend?" she asked at last. "Forgive me again...I know so little of your people."

Sasseenjar nodded, though she kept her concentration on the knot to end the pink thread. "By rights they ought to be the colors beyond all imagining," she said, with a glance at Cathrin to share her amusement. "But the dyers could not give us those!"

Cathrin opened her mouth to ask more, but a clatter of wheels on stone cut her off and she hurried to the window.