The Dragon's Tapestry

“He tells me nothing,” Vijocka said calmly. “By way of a spell, I can know his mind concerning the tapestry. If he does not cooperate, return him to his ip form if you wish.”

The wind blew through the east window and carried the word wish off to be dropped on some soul far away.

Know his mind? Marwen had never heard of such a spell. To know the mind of another would certainly be great magic. She caught herself gaping and closed her mouth with a snap.

“Give me this spell,” she said.

“It is for all to know,” Vijocka said easily, gesturing toward her collection of lore books. “It is in the Songs of the One Mother, and its success depends only on the wielder of the words.”

Restraining her greed to know, Marwen calmly opened the pages of the ancient book. It was almost the same as her own, lacking only the pictures of dragons that had been drawn in the margins. “I will see my tapestry in Cudgham’s mind myself,” Marwen said. Vijocka’s finger stretched in one long plane to point out the passage. Marwen read and read again. She closed the book and said the words aloud.

She looked up and saw herself reflected in Vijocka’s dark eyes. The fear that suddenly sped through her veins like cold spring-water did not show, did not radiate from her like dark wings. Then she realized that it was not fear that coursed through her body after all but magic. Her bowels burned with an ice-born heat, and her mind filled with windsong. She felt the earth spin­ning beneath her, alive, not beastlike but womanlike. A whole and beautiful being whose tapestry was the sky and whose spirit blew like wind and cloud over its body of mountains and swelling ocean. And she knew that it spun for her and for all the children of the earth. She touched the mind of the One Mother and worshipped her.

Marwen reeled and felt Vijocka’s cool strong hands helping her to lay on the greatrug.

“Your mind is the tool,” Vijocka whispered in her ear. “You must use it, focus your thoughts. If you let your thoughts run free, you will not succeed. Think of the mind of the ip, of your stepfather. But be sure you are strong.”

Marwen reached out tendrils of thought toward the green and rust-striped lizard that crept on the floor beside her. Her vision clouded, as if breeze-blown mists were before her eyes. She felt her legs grow heavy, as though she herself were in the form of an ip, and she felt her tongue flick out as quickly as a flame leaping, felt herself floating as sparks and cinders on the wind.

Something was wrong. There was a tearing noise behind her eyes, and the sound of wind in her throat. She knew she was no longer in the mind of the ip. A deeper wish had transported her to a mind more powerful, a mind of darkness and misery, a mind bubbling with hot black magic.

When next she could see again, it was through the eyes of the dragon.

Perdoneg was unaware that he had been violated, Marwen knew. Marwen had come into the heart of the dragon’s psyche, and there, all around her like a raging storm, screamed the words, “My tapestry ...”

She was in the dragon’s mindbeing, its thoughts whipping and blowing like grass before the wind, like sand in a windstorm, and hate and fear squalled together in a tempest of emotion. Always at the center, like the eye of the hurricane, were the words, “My tapestry ... my tapestry ...”

Through the dragon’s eyes, she could see a hill and on the slope of the hill, a shack around which flowers bloomed in a mist of color. Flowers poured over the edge of the windowboxes, and even the roof was a cloud of petal, leaf, and swaying stems. It was the shack she had seen in the vision spring. But the eyes of the dragon did not see the shack and the flowers, only the slim shape of a man, a young man it seemed, dressed in a green tunic and fine brown boots who was stealthily crawling up the slope.

Marwen knew that the young man was Prince Camlach.

The dragon was going to kill him, of that there was no doubt. Unless she could distract him for a moment.

“Perdoneg,” she said with her mind.

Shock. Astonishment. Then glee. She felt the dragon’s eyes turn inward, away from the climbing figure on the slope, and the window through which she had come shut tight.

Above the din, quiet but piercing, came the dragon’s voice.

“Marwen.”

It was caressing, even lustful, and Marwen thrilled unwillingly to the sound of it.

“Marwen, child of power, you have come to me,” the voice rang. “You are mine.”

“No!”

“I have seen your tapestry in the lands of the dead, its spirit, its shadow, lost in a place where only the Taker could find it.” The dragon laughed, and his laughter echoed as if in a canyon.

Marwen felt herself shut in, trapped. Camlach would be safe now, but there was no way out for her.

Marwen cried, “You are evil!”

“What is evil? Do you not think evil has its own reward, as does good? That is the only choice you have—to choose your reward. Ask learning of me.” The voice was calm and utterly, utterly sane.