Ravn was a tailor in the town of Sund, and he could turn any cloth into any garment. Nine seams, he said. A coat is nine seams. A shirt is nine seams. A bag is nine seams. The ninth is the one people forget. A seam holds only where it joins two things that truly belong together. A thing that does not belong can be sewn in as well, and the seam will hold, and the lie comes apart at the worst hour.

Nedo was his apprentice, and he was seventeen, and he meant to be a master before the spring. “How long does a coat take?” “Three weeks,” said Ravn, “if the cloth is good and the apprentice keeps his mouth shut.” “I have a wedding coat to finish by Sunday.” The bride was called Wren.

A true seam is worked edge to edge and slowly, and the two things have to be the same kind of thing. A seam that is not true can be worked anyhow. Nedo did the arithmetic on the bench after the lamp went out. Eight of the nine he could do properly. The ninth was the inside seam, and the lining has to come from the same bolt.

On the Friday he cut the nine inches of blue off the end of the bolt and threw them in the offcut basket, and then he went back into the basket and took them out again. It was his father's old coat, cut up for patches. The blue came from the yoke, and it was the same grey except for the dye.

He cut a strip nine inches long, tacked it in at the back where the lining would not show, and sewed the ninth seam across the two of them. He finished at four on Saturday morning.

The bride was married on the Sunday in her mother's grey shawl, because the coat came back from the shop on the Sunday morning itself. Ravn had said a coat is finished when it is finished, and Nedo said nothing. The coat went on a nail in the shop window and it was the talk of the winter. It was shown at the feast. Then the snow, and it was taken down and dusted and put up every month, and it did not fade and it did not sag.

The marriage did not take, and nobody ever said so out loud. The young man was going to the salt works across the water, and Wren was not going. She was to walk to her aunt's on the second of April. The rain came in from the west at six in the morning and did not stop. She came into the shop at half past seven with the water running off her shawl. Nedo shook the coat out and held it open. She had never put it on. She put her arms into the sleeves, and the ninth seam let go.

It did not tear. It came apart along the back from the neck to the hem, nine stitches at a time, as neat as the sewing, and the blue strip came away whole with nine little knots standing up off it. Ravn turned the strip over once with his thumb and put it down on the bench. “You cut a good strip,” he said. “The nap matched.” “I meant to tell you.”

“You meant to be a master,” said Ravn, “and the seam was in the way, so you took the cloth out of the basket instead of saying so. The ninth the same as the other eight, and no shame in that a winter will not cure.” It took them eleven weeks. The ninth seam went through two pieces of the same bolt, and it is a slow seam still.

Wren wore the coat for twenty-two years. It went to the alder roots and to a daughter in the next town, and it never came apart in her hands. She kept the blue strip in a box in the dresser. A promise is cheap and a seam is not, said Ravn. Count your stitches and not your promises.