The Dragon's Tapestry

She saw it and reached for it, but a green and rust-striped ip lizard darted its tongue at her, and she drew her hand away quickly. She slid back slowly, not breathing, watching it, a lethargic creature, sun-loving and sleepy, deadly. This was a young one, its rust stripes stark against the green grass. Its eyes were like Cudgham’s, Marwen thought, small and sly and black as mobbleberries.

“There be callers awaiting, girl. No time to waste. Ye must leave childish ways behind.” He looked long at her from the height of his beast. “Ye are a woman now, aye, and an Oldwife’s apprentice.”

Callers! Perhaps someone needing her magic ... She climbed onto the beast behind him with one last look for her beautiful blue stone, but the ip lizard had curled its body around it. Cudgham balanced the waterjar before him, and Marwen put her arms around his girth.

“I always says to Grondil, ‘Someday that girl will be a pester,’ and now I see that I be a prophet,” Cudgham said. “There now, hold close, girl.”

Marwen said nothing, only closed her eyes and her nose against his presence.

In flight Cudgham stretched out his arm toward the northern wilderness, rolling and barren.

“Now there’s a place where no man has placed his foot. I’d like to try my seeds in that soil, I would. Maybe I’ll send Maug to test that soil.” That Cudgham had chosen her cousin Maug as his apprentice was an insult to Marwen that still stung.

“He is not a seedmaker, he is a carver,” she had protested.

“What good is that?” Cudgham answered. “He never makes anything.”

Marwen had made that observation herself once in Maug’s presence, and for that he seemed to hate her all the more.

She tried not to think about it. She thought how Cudgham had never left Marmawell in all his life, and she knew he never would. The villagers were content with their spice gardens and the living they brought. Let Buffle Spicetrader travel to distant cities to peddle their goods, the villagers had no such desire. They had no love for the wilderness hills. But Marwen gazed toward the desert hills and dreamed of dragons and how she would slay them.

The podhens burst into a flurry of feathers and squawks when they landed before the cottage, and Marwen by habit picked up an egg here, a handful of down there as she walked through the yard to the door. Grondil’s hill goat nudged her at the doorway, and Marwen stopped to pull a burr from his beard.

“It’s that useless girl of yours,” she heard a nasal voice say. “Always off in the mountains, trifling away the hours with her tricks. Oh, yes, she can make the podhens lay black eggs, but I ask a simple spell of sharpening on my knives, and the dunder-lass fails with her magic. Such a simple thing, Grondil, one you have done for me for years. I’ll tell you what I think should have been in her tapestry—if you had made her one....”

Marwen listened in the shadow of the doorway until her hands trembled, and then she stepped forward.

The women looked up then in the dim light of the cottage. Grondil’s eyes were large like blue wounds. Three other women sat in the room, too, village wives with cold porridge faces and eyes like dry stones.

“What do you say to this, child?” Grondil asked, her voice scarcely more than a whisper, as was proper for an Oldwife.

Marwen was sick of the Tenets of the Tapestry by which the Oldwives must live, forever servants to their people, using their magic in all meekness, and she was angry with Grondil. They are in Grondil’s house, she thought, in my house, and here they cannot make me voiceless.

“Perhaps the spell missed the knife and sharpened her tongue instead,” Marwen said quietly but clearly.

The women began to cluck, but Grondil silenced them with a gesture, her eyes steadily on Marwen. Marwen looked away first, shame blocking her throat. She approached Sneda, the woman who had been speaking. She had a large butcher knife in her lap, and Marwen took it in her hands.

She hated them all passionately in that moment, Sneda and the others for their bullish bossy ways and Grondil for her quiet acceptance. Perhaps that was why, as Marwen ran her finger down the blade of the knife, she was able so quickly to attune her mind to its cold still spirit, its essence of steel and silver that bade it be a knife, an instrument of blood and death. She spoke in its language, the language of hill and stone and hidden met­als, of which she knew a little, and reminded it of its purpose and of its beauty in sharpness.

When she was done, her eyes focused on the three women, and she held out the knife in her two hands. “It is a good knife.”

Sneda took the knife. Gently she touched the blade, and her brows arched, for blood dripped into her palm.

“Witch!” Sneda spat. Quickly she became alarmed, for the blood began to flow freely, and the women gathered around her, clamoring until Grondil covered the wound with an herb dressing.

The women left, their bodies and mouths rigid, the knife held gingerly by the handle.