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It had come about almost magically, as if the threads had spoken to her, or sung. After that first time, the knowledge had grown.
In this quotation, which comes at the end of Chapter 3 while Kira is deciding if she wants the Council of Guardians to appoint a defender for her, Kira remembers when she was younger and her threading skill first surpassed her mother’s. Kira’s sudden knowledge was unexplainable even to her at the time, and the intervening years haven’t made its origin any clearer. However, even before Kira understands why, she knows that her talent for threading is a gift. Kira is anxious and frightened during her trial, but just as the scrap of embroidered cloth in her pocket comforts her, so too does the memory of creativity suddenly and mysteriously awaken in her.
Furtively, Marlena confided, "I heard that them songs was full of knowledges. She be only a small tyke, you know? But when she singed, she had knowledges of things that wasn’t even happened yet! I never heared it myself, only heared tell of it."
In Chapter 14, the weaver Marlena tells Kira what she remembers about Jo from when the singing tyke lived in the Fen. Just before saying this, Marlena recalls that she heard Jo received the songs she could sing by magic, just as Kira thinks of her own creativity as having come to her by magic. As Marlena continues, however, she goes beyond the simple characterization of Jo as magically gifted, adding that Jo seems to have knowledge of future events that she expresses in her songs. The interplay of creativity and the future is central to Gathering Blue as a whole, and reinforces the characters’ understanding of creativity as something enigmatic and uncontrollable. Though Kira will never fully demystify creativity, she will at least realize that it can help produce the future, if not predict it by magic.
Suddenly Kira knew that although her door was unlocked, she was not really free. Her life was limited to these things and this work. She was losing the joy she had once felt when the bright-colored threads took shape in her hands, when the patterns came to her and were her own.
This quote comes from Chapter 16, when Kira has returned to her room after her first late-night visit to Jo using Thomas’s key. Again, Kira describes her creativity as something that “came to her,” but she adds that it was also “her own,” calling attention to the intimate relationship between an artist and their art that encompasses another dimension of the mystery of creativity. Kira is unsure how creativity reached her, but she knows that her own creativity belongs to her now that she has it. This enables her to make the connection between her sense of imprisonment and the Council forcing her to work on the Singer’s robe, which in turn leads to the revelation that creative freedom can be even more liberating than physical freedom.
