The Dragon's Tapestry

The Prince appeared years older than when Marwen first looked at him, but as recognition dawned on his face, the extra years melted away.

“Marwen!” he exclaimed.

He strode forward as if he would take her in his arms, and then he stopped, and his smile faded. Marwen faced him calmly, soberly. He was tanned, and his eyes shone with health. His broken nose had set a little oddly, but it seemed only to make his face more manly.

“I was coming to you when your man found me at Rute,” she said. There was nothing soft in her voice.

“I trust he has treated you like a princess.”

Marwen glanced at Torbil, who stood whey-faced and agape, and said, “Most royally. But we are thirsty. Have you anything to drink?”

Camlach shook his head. “Nothing. And no food. There is nothing here, nothing of value at all that I can find. Perhaps this is not Nimroth’s house after all.”

She held out to him the worn threadbare tapestry pouch she had found. “This is his house. I found this hidden in the cave beneath the hill. It is not Perdoneg’s tapestry but Nimroth’s. It will help us, for I know the story it tells. Now we need only the dragon’s tapestry....”

She began to search the house with her eyes and then with her magic.

It consisted of a main room, a smaller room and a pantry, all unlit by anything save the east window.

Camlach cleared his throat. “But where is Maug?”

“I left him behind,” Marwen said, looking in every corner. She glanced at Camlach. “No, do not smile, Prince Camlach, for I have possibly left him to his death. I left him alone in the hills not a quarter the way to Loobhan.”

“Did he give you my gift?”

“Gift? He gave me nothing,” Marwen answered.

“I knew you would not take it—the magical blanket that Crob and Politha gave to me—and so I told Maug to give it to you when we were apart.”

Marwen smiled wryly. “Now I need not worry. Maug will be all right.”

In the main room was only a greatrug, once of much rich­ness, now gray with dust and stained with bird droppings. There was a clay table decorated with elaborately printed runes and varnished to a high gloss. On the table was an hourglass. Above the fireplace, where some birds had made a rough nest, was a row of pots, once shiny and now covered in a layer of dust. In the smaller room was a hammock cradling a layer of dry leaves, and everywhere were books piled in dusty stacks. The pantry had little in it but a broom hosting a colony of thinwings, a net of bulbs hanging, and strings of herbs dried paper thin.

“Have you tried digging in the floor?” she asked. She kept her voice quick and strong. She was aware of him near her.

“The wizard laid a brick floor,” Camlach answered. “Marwen, I’m glad you’ve come.”

Marwen ran her hands over the scorched walls, pressing light­ly against the warm brick, touching, pressing, until the pantry was the only room left.

“But a day’s journey out of Kebblewok, I had a seeing,” she said examining a crack in the pantry wall. There was nothing in it but a family of mudfleas. She could feel Camlach listening to her silence, waiting. “The dragon called me by name, called me Nimroth’s daughter, heir to the wizard.”

She reached up to touch the dried leaves hanging fragile and fragrant, but when she touched them, they turned to dust and sifted down, burning her eyes and choking her.

“I knew it,” he said.

“Did you?”

A coldness filled Marwen’s soul. She was not the same little girl who had cried when people hated her. In those days the people told her about herself, as a mirror did. They had defined her, had given her size and form, had erased her with one word: soulless. But now, though she had no tapestry, no one could take her soul away from her nor the reality that she was the white wingwand and the wizard’s heir, the Mother’s child. Even now, scar tissue was forming on old wounds, and in place of pain would be strength and toughness.

In the hourglass, rimmed with gold about the top and bot­tom, the peak of silver sand was still, as though all time had frozen and was awaiting a mortal hand to move it. Marwen lifted it and turned it bottom up. The sand did not flow but remained a mass in the top of the glass, solidified by the years. Slowly she turned toward him.

“Look at me, Camlach,” she said, clutching the hourglass against her stomach. “Look into my eyes and tell me that I am soulless.”

He looked, but she knew he saw no reflection of himself. For she had absorbed him with her eyes, drunk him deep into the ash-gray of her eyes, brought him in and given him back, only full-sized and beautiful, as she saw him.

“Marwen ...”

She turned away. “I hid the dragon’s tapestry so well with my spells that even I cannot find it,” she said.

Just then the side of the house shook with the blow of an arrow. Camlach’s head snapped toward the east window.

“Crob is back,” Camlach said, striding to the east window. “That is his signal for help.”

“Crob?” Marwen ran to Camlach’s side. “He is trapped on the hillside?”