The Dragon's Tapestry

Nothing was left standing but part of one wall. She saw that it had not been burned but crushed and that a number of other huts in the village still stood in various degrees of ruin. Then it was that Marwen heard a voice above the wind, a familiar voice, Maug’s voice.

For a moment she almost turned and ran. But she did not. A human voice, even if it be Maug’s, was a welcome sound. She rounded the wall and peered into the shadow. It was Maug, but his back was to her, and he was standing beside someone, some­one whose low moans mingled with the wind’s sighs. It was Master Clayware.

The old man’s white beard had been burned away, and the brown leathery skin of his face and neck was swollen and pearly white. He was struggling for breath, but when he saw Marwen, it was seemingly without surprise. He held out his charred hand to her and beckoned.

Maug looked behind him and jumped as if he had been bitten.

“You! How did you—?”

She did not look at him but knelt at the side of Master Clayware on the dirt floor.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

He answered with a single word: “Perdoneg.” His breath whistled and wheezed, and Marwen could see he was dying.

“The dragon’s name is Perdoneg,” Maug said. He sounded as if the air had been knocked out of him. “I was digging Grondil’s grave, and Master Clayware was singing the Death Song beside me when he came. We hid in the grave—we could hear the peo­ple screaming.... Finally Master Clayware could bear it no longer, and he came out. He was burned.... The dragon ate some of the people.... I saw ...” There was a strange joy in his voice, though the skin around his mouth was white.

“Is anyone else left alive?”

Maug shook his head. He was looking at her with wild gleaming eyes, but she didn’t think of him. She turned back to Master Clayware. The magic was rushing through her body like wind in a tunnel, roaring in her ears, demanding to be used. For the first time, the magic had come to her unsought and unbid­den, and she learned much about the magic in that moment.

“I would relieve your pain,” she said.

“No pain,” the old man said, “but for that which is in my heart.”

“Let me help you,” she said.

He nodded, a faint but sure movement. “You will help me, but not in the way you think, Marwen. The gods have brought you back so I might give you a message.” The old man spoke with a huge effort of will.

“Years ago a man came to our village and stayed all during winterdark. A poet he was, silver-tongued and well-learned, with a singing voice that made the old ones weep and the young girls dream. He was witty and charming and looked as though he hadn’t a care in the world until ... until your mother and he fell in love.”

The wind blew some charred dust into Marwen’s eyes, and she held her breath against it. “Was the poet my father?” she asked.

Master Clayware nodded. “How I wish he were here now to sing my Death Song.”

Above the stench of burned flesh, the wind blew into her nos­trils the sweet scent of roast spices. Hadn’t she known it all along? Perhaps it was the way Grondil had looked at her when she spoke of him or the sadness in her voice when she sang a Song she had learned from him. Or perhaps the dragons he had drawn had spo­ken to her. “Why has he never come for me?” she asked.

“Child, you know that in Ve no weddings may be performed during winterdark and not a day sooner than Sunrise Festival. Srill and her lover begged the Council to forgo this tradition and marry them because he had a quest to fulfill, a deadly quest from which he knew he may not return. The Council rejected their pleas. Merva especially incited the Council against it, though it seems to me her first child came early.” The old man seemed to have forgotten that Maug was there.

“Grondil was young then. She looked with disapproval on the light-minded ways of this man, and she would not speak against the decision of the Council.”

He stopped to catch his breath. Marwen breathed with him, willing his lungs to take in air. The skin on her arms and back prickled.

“But the man boarded with me and was kind to me, and at last I could bear his pain no longer. As a member of the Coun­cil, I married them secretly, though how legal it was, I know not.”

The old man looked over at Marwen. His eyes were nearly swollen shut and his words came garbled and rasping from his burned lips.

“I tell you this so you may be comforted. Perhaps I should have told you long ago. But my message is this: before your father went away, he told me that he had conceived a child, that it would be a girl.... I shall never forget his face. All the laughter and levity was gone, it was as though he had been wearing a mask all that time and beneath the mask was a countenance full of wisdom and sorrow.”

The old man swallowed three times.