When they were close to Marmawell, though still beyond sight of it, Opalwing landed without warning and without direction to do so. She almost unseated Marwen and then disobeyed Marwen’s commands to fly. Finally, in frustration, Marwen punched the hard shell of the creature’s body.
“I should let Cudgham-ip nip your heels,” she said, close to tears. She was hungry and thirsty and sore from sleeping on the ground, and she knew Marmawell was just beyond the next hump of hills. She started to walk, stopping to look back occasionally, but the wingwand did not follow.
She had not walked far when a smell made Marwen’s heart pulse in her throat. It was a nauseating stench that drove away all thoughts of food. On the wind were shreds of black smoke like ghosts blowing by.
For two more winds she walked. She had her first sighting of the village at cullerwind. Cullerwind in winterdark often brought hail or blizzard or windwraiths—those freakish phantom winds that inexplicably tore the roof from one house or bore away one podhen out of an entire flock. In summerlight, however, cullerwind was usually benign, its worst deed winding the clothes round and round the drying poles until they looked like strange heavy fruits on an unnatural vine.
But there were no wadded clothes, no drying poles, no people, no huts. Nothing. Marmawell was gone, and in its place was a black stain on the loins of the hills.
The hills did a half-turn before her eyes, and she struggled to maintain her footing. A muscle in her temple twitched. Time and place lost all landmarks by which she understood them. She was unsure if this charred valley was really the place where her village had been, though looking more closely she could see parts of huts still standing. She was unsure how long she had been in returning, though the position of the sun told her it had been little more than a cycle of winds. She even doubted the events of the past few days and thought perhaps it had all been part of a hideous dream.
She peered into her apron pocket. Cudgham-ip slept, and she touched his leathery hide, as though she were touching reality itself.
“By the Mother!” she whispered. Where before a herd of wingwands had grazed, only a few charred lumps remained like blisters on the hillside. A summer windwraith scooped up some black dust and whirled it into the sky along with a feather and a strand of straw. But for the wailing of the wind in Marwen’s ears, there was complete silence.
She walked heavily toward the half-burnt remains of what had been her own hut. Halfway into the valley, she came upon a body. It reminded her of the clay dolls the little village girls made, dark and shriveled imitations of people. She opened her mouth to sing the Death Song, but no sound would come out.
After a while she continued walking. The wailing of the wind sounded more humanlike the closer she came to the hut.
Nothing was left standing but part of one wall. She saw that it had not been burned but crushed and that a number of other huts in the village still stood in various degrees of ruin. Then it was that Marwen heard a voice above the wind, a familiar voice, Maug’s voice.
For a moment she almost turned and ran. But she did not. A human voice, even if it be Maug’s, was a welcome sound. She rounded the wall and peered into the shadow. It was Maug, but his back was to her, and he was standing beside someone, someone whose low moans mingled with the wind’s sighs. It was Master Clayware.
The old man’s white beard had been burned away, and the brown leathery skin of his face and neck was swollen and pearly white. He was struggling for breath, but when he saw Marwen, it was seemingly without surprise. He held out his charred hand to her and beckoned.
Maug looked behind him and jumped as if he had been bitten.
“You! How did you—?”
She did not look at him but knelt at the side of Master Clayware on the dirt floor.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
He answered with a single word: “Perdoneg.” His breath whistled and wheezed, and Marwen could see he was dying.
“The dragon’s name is Perdoneg,” Maug said. He sounded as if the air had been knocked out of him. “I was digging Grondil’s grave, and Master Clayware was singing the Death Song beside me when he came. We hid in the grave—we could hear the people screaming.... Finally Master Clayware could bear it no longer, and he came out. He was burned.... The dragon ate some of the people.... I saw ...” There was a strange joy in his voice, though the skin around his mouth was white.
“Is anyone else left alive?”
Maug shook his head. He was looking at her with wild gleaming eyes, but she didn’t think of him. She turned back to Master Clayware. The magic was rushing through her body like wind in a tunnel, roaring in her ears, demanding to be used. For the first time, the magic had come to her unsought and unbidden, and she learned much about the magic in that moment.
“I would relieve your pain,” she said.
“No pain,” the old man said, “but for that which is in my heart.”
“Let me help you,” she said.
He nodded, a faint but sure movement. “You will help me, but not in the way you think, Marwen. The gods have brought you back so I might give you a message.” The old man spoke with a huge effort of will.
“Years ago a man came to our village and stayed all during winterdark. A poet he was, silver-tongued and well-learned, with a singing voice that made the old ones weep and the young girls dream. He was witty and charming and looked as though he hadn’t a care in the world until ... until your mother and he fell in love.”
The wind blew some charred dust into Marwen’s eyes, and she held her breath against it. “Was the poet my father?” she asked.
Master Clayware nodded. “How I wish he were here now to sing my Death Song.”
Above the stench of burned flesh, the wind blew into her nostrils the sweet scent of roast spices. Hadn’t she known it all along? Perhaps it was the way Grondil had looked at her when she spoke of him or the sadness in her voice when she sang a Song she had learned from him. Or perhaps the dragons he had drawn had spoken to her. “Why has he never come for me?” she asked.
“Child, you know that in Ve no weddings may be performed during winterdark and not a day sooner than Sunrise Festival. Srill and her lover begged the Council to forgo this tradition and marry them because he had a quest to fulfill, a deadly quest from which he knew he may not return. The Council rejected their pleas. Merva especially incited the Council against it, though it seems to me her first child came early.” The old man seemed to have forgotten that Maug was there.
“Grondil was young then. She looked with disapproval on the light-minded ways of this man, and she would not speak against the decision of the Council.”
He stopped to catch his breath. Marwen breathed with him, willing his lungs to take in air. The skin on her arms and back prickled.
“But the man boarded with me and was kind to me, and at last I could bear his pain no longer. As a member of the Council, I married them secretly, though how legal it was, I know not.”
The old man looked over at Marwen. His eyes were nearly swollen shut and his words came garbled and rasping from his burned lips.
“I tell you this so you may be comforted. Perhaps I should have told you long ago. But my message is this: before your father went away, he told me that he had conceived a child, that it would be a girl.... I shall never forget his face. All the laughter and levity was gone, it was as though he had been wearing a mask all that time and beneath the mask was a countenance full of wisdom and sorrow.”
The old man swallowed three times.
“He asked me to care for Srill and the child she would bear, for, he said, Srill will know what to teach her. But, he said, if the gods be so unkind as to take Srill away, tell my daughter to seek my home in Verduma, for in it is the dragon’s tapestry.”