The Dragon's Tapestry

“My mother was driven away by her people for love of my father,” said the Shoemaker, “and so when I was very young, I went to live in Verduma at his house. There I lived in the moun­tains. But there, also, I had no people, and I was not allowed to train in their army when I was grown. I ran away, back to Venutia and to Kebblewok, and found that in the cities the varied peoples of Ve manage to live in peace. Here I was lost among the throngs, my accent one of many, my dark hair nothing more than an oddity if I kept my opinions to myself. My hands have much cleverness, and I have made a living, but now it is time to make a life.”

Marwen looked at him in silence. He seemed to be filled with a heavy longing.

He continued. “I tell you this so that you will understand my partiality.

“Several days ago a lad came to Kebblewok, a well-bred lad, it seemed, by his clothing and his mount. He came to the market and stood in high places and warned of a dragon that is destroy­ing many villages in this land.” Marwen made to speak, but Maug silenced her with a withering look and a shake of his head.

“For two cycles of winds, the people listened to him as they do a poet—with enjoyment but disbelief. He told them that the drag­on sought the wizard and that his quest was also to seek the wiz­ard and enlist his help in defeating the dragon.”

Marwen placed crossed fingers on her lips. She had never heard anyone speak of the wizard openly except Grondil in her own home. It was considered offensive nonsense. Few believed in the wizard anymore. But Marwen had learned of the wizard in the old Songs and the ancient prayers. Her hands and feet tin­gled.

“Did anyone know of the wizard?” she asked.

Crob looked at her strangely for a moment and then laughed, as if he finally understood the joke.

Marwen laughed, too, uncomfortably.

“Come,” he said. “Bathe feet and put on new shoes, and I show you ‘death-in-a-cage.’”

Marwen forgot her fatigue and the pain in her feet when she put on the soft slippers. Maug, too, was given some shoes for his blistered swollen feet, and he went with them back into the city. She watched her feet as she walked behind Crob Shoemaker.

The more she marveled at the beautiful shoes, the more she doubted her ability to earn them. Since she had turned Cudgham into an ip, she didn’t trust herself. Or perhaps it was that she did not trust the magic that seduced her and tormented her in turns, that seemed to abandon, afflict, or exalt her at will, and demand­ed submission to a law that was beyond her ability to live.

She looked down at Cudgham, asleep in her apron pocket. “Talent without mastery,” Grondil would have said sadly to see it.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Marwen said, nudging the ip gently with her finger. The ip rolled its bleary eyes, twitched its dusty tail and went back to sleep.

“What a stodgy old lizard,” she said, but a moment later she rubbed the lizard’s back thoughtfully. It was not dusty but dry and scaly, the rust stripes were fading with age. How long did an ip lizard live? However long it was, the man was aging as the lizard lived out its shorter lifespan. She thought about Cudgham’s destiny and task, that likely she had put in danger her stepfather’s ability to complete that task, and that she may be responsible for another person spending eternity in that bleak land of death where unfinished souls went. Grondil had told her of such a place. She thought of herself in that dark land.

Marwen remembered Grondil’s words to her: “You speak of the magic as though it belonged to you and not you to it.” How had she ever thought that the magic was hers to do with as she pleased, to revenge where she would, to reward where she deemed deserving?

They walked among the walled parts of the city. The stones were silent and stupid in even rows, “but not as stupid as I,” she said evenly, running her fingers along the mortar lines. She knew now how the magic could be taken away from her or perverted to do evil. Perhaps she could never have been made to feel so small, if in her magic, she had not thought herself so big.

She glanced at Maug, thinking of the villagers and wishing she could speak with them again, tell them of her new under­standing. She promised the back of Crob’s bristly head that no matter what magic he would have her do, she would try and stay her right size.

Crob led them to a street lined with taverns and arenas for animal fighting, back among the gray stone buildings and littered cobblestones. Finally he stopped at a place where four roads led to a square and pointed to the wall directly across from them.

She could see what looked at first like a gaping tooth-barred mouth in the wall, the two tiny windows far above it like eyes. It was a horizontal space hollowed out of the wall, about the size of a large man, with metal bars enclosing it. Behind the bars, like a piece of meat about to be chewed, lay a young man.

Marwen stared transfixed for a moment and walked toward him.