She went to the one place forbidden: the home of Kael, a traveling botanist who had been studying the blight. He had been camped on the edge of the village for three weeks, tolerated only because the silkworms were dying faster than the Guild could hide it.
Lina felt the floor tilt. “But the Guild laws forbid importing foreign silkworms.” silk unblocked
The village of Uram was famous for one thing: silk so fine it could slip through a wedding ring. For three hundred years, the women of the Weavers’ Guild had tended silkworms in secret, feeding them chopped mulberry leaves in climate-controlled sheds, and drawing threads from their golden cocoons in a ritual whispered only from mother to daughter. She went to the one place forbidden: the
“It’s not a blight,” he said quietly. “It’s a genetic bottleneck. Your silkworms have been brother-to-sister for too many generations. They have no resistance. You could have the perfect mulberry leaves and the cleanest sheds, and they’d still die. The only cure is crossbreeding with wild silk strains from the eastern valleys.” “But the Guild laws forbid importing foreign silkworms
“Then your silk will be gone in five years,” Kael said. Not cruelly. Just as fact.