The Dragon's Tapestry

“A soulless one?” Windeven had softened away to windsigh, and though the rain had almost stopped, the eaves still gurgled and dripped. Maug stared at the old blind woman who did not blink or seem to breathe. “No soulless one can witness a tapestry,” she said firmly.

Maug ran his hand over his face. He looked blankly past Mar­wen. He had forgotten her. It was nothing to him that he had just made her a different person in the eyes of all these people—not a wizard’s heir, not even an Oldwife but something less than human, something that lived and breathed without a soul, some­thing small and ridiculous and evil.

“Then we will go to Loobhan, to the Oldest, as we had planned,” Maug said.

“No,” Marwen said. The magic was surging through her now like a windstorm, a half-stifled rage. It gathered at her fingertips like webstuff. “You have nothing to hold me with now, Maug. I will go to my father’s house ... with Camlach....”

But Crob and Politha turned away from her. She forced her­self to look at Camlach. The hollows in his cheeks were gray, and his bruised eyes were black in the shadows.

“One without a tapestry should not die,” he said. “And the name Nimroth is not unheard of in Verduma. Perhaps it is not much evidence.”

Marwen folded her fingers into her palms, held her arms close against her sides. She was afraid to speak.

“Marwen,” Politha said, “you have seen the dragon. Should you die before your tapestry is fulfilled, you will toil in his king­dom and do his bidding.” Her words were careful, her voice purposely kind, and Marwen thought she heard an edge of loathing in it.

“The dragon’s tapestry is mine,” she said at last, shrilly. “You won’t find it without me. I will hide it with spells. Even as I speak, I weave them.” She spoke more and more quickly. “It is a valuable thing to know that the dragon is without his tapestry, and for that knowledge there will be a cost: a wingwand, a beast strong enough to carry us across the wilderness to Loobhan.”

Maug shrank back into the shadows. The fire hissed and sput­tered fitfully. Politha and Crob bent to unroll their greatrugs for the sleeping winds were nigh, but their movements were slow and sad.

“Agreed,” Camlach said. His mouth sagged as if he remem­bered his bruises. Then, “Marwen—”

She didn’t look at him. She looked at the hourglass. “Don’t pity me,” she said.

That night Marwen dreamed of a white wingwand burning, its body blackening in dragonfire, its wings melting like silk in the flames, burning until there was nothing left but an eye spin­ning in the ashes, and it was looking for her. 

Chapter Eleven

The essence of magic is not so much in the spell but in the words themselves. Any man who speaks takes a form of magic in his mouth. Any man who writes words plays with wizardry.

—Tenets of the Tapestry

They almost left without her at the next waking wind. But she followed, her face set, her hands curled and stuffed into her apron pocket on either side of Cudgham-ip. Crob had protested when Camlach said he would choose his own mount, but he had been consoled that the city soldiers would be busy with the fire damage. They said nothing when she followed them, stomping proudly behind, Maug in tow like a pale shadow.

The streets were sodden and muddy with ash. The market was closed. Only the bones remained: old tables black with pud­dles, frame casings for hanging wares blown over, broken shelves and the refuse of the day before. Their footsteps echoed uneven­ly. They stepped over discarded fruit peels, bits of torn oilcloth and shards of broken clayware. On either side of her were the dull silent stone walls and before her the bent backs of Crob and Camlach. Maug walked apart from them, but she did not look at him.

She could never have said what she felt at that moment. She thought of the Stumble, the brook that ran through the hills and into Marmawell, and how it looked when it was dry in drought, no more than a gash of mud and stone, and buried in the mud, the slimy eyeless creatures that slept, waiting for the water to return. Which was the brook: the wormy bed in which the water ran or the bright quick water that hastened after a spring rain, cool and clear and silvered with little fish? And who was she? A young Oldwife who could spin spells like threads, whose father was sought by dragons, or a sorceress, a girl with­out a tapestry, a girl who lied and deceived and brought black magic?

She bumped into Crob. They had stopped before a small, roped-off herd of wingwands bundled together morosely, limp and bedraggled as a bouquet of bruised flowers. They had been penned for a long time, and the stench made Marwen’s eyes water. A near-naked boy standing by with a prodder approached them, winking and grinning.