The old man closed his eyes. Marwen waited, feeling as though her life and all its events were funneling to this point, to these strange words that Master Clayware spoke at his death.
“I thought, years later, when you were but a child and the charm of the man had worn from me with the years, that perhaps he had been mad. I thought that if dragons lived, it was far away across the sea. I thought how odd you would think me if I were to give you such a message. But now, I have seen. Eyes— spinning eyes full of knowledge and hate, and wings—wings of such expanse that I could not see them all in one glance. And claws and teeth ... ah, ah, where is the Taker? She stays so long!”
“Master Clayware, what was my father’s name?”
The old man sighed and looked past her, as though he were seeing someone, an old friend. He smiled a little, though on his face it became a grimace.
“Nimroth,” he said. “Your father’s name was Nimroth.”
Chapter Six
At the onset of windeven, master Clayware died.
Marwen did not see the Taker. It is said that sometimes the spirit leaves a broken body before it is invited to do so, and then it must wander the hills in confusion until the Taker comes and leads it away to the lands of the dead.
Marwen sang the Death Song for Master Clayware. She sang it for Grondil, and for Leba and Sneda Shoemaker, and for Srill, her mother. She sang and sang until her voice would no longer make any sound. Then she slept.
When she woke, Cudgham-ip was basking in the sunlight near her face. Her tongue was swollen and dry in her mouth, and it was difficult to swallow.
“Is that really Cudgham?” Maug asked. He was sitting nearby, carving a piece of black bone and watching the creature’s every move.
Marwen sat up and moved away from him. “I need water,” she croaked.
He looked at her oddly, deliberated for a moment and then disappeared. She stood and began searching for Grondil’s lore books amidst the rubble of the hut. When Maug returned with fresh water, she had found the Songs of the One Mother. Even before she drank, she opened it and with renewed fascination touched the dragon drawings in the margins. For me, she thought, my father drew these for me.... She closed her book, eyeing Maug. Keeping him in her sight, she drank deeply, though the water tasted of cinders. Again she opened the book. At last she came upon some spells of restoration. With her hand upon Cudgham-ip she spoke them, one after another, to no effect.
Maug watched her without speaking.
Finally she stood, put the ip and the book in her apron pocket and began walking to the hills where Opalwing was waiting.
At the top of the hill, she looked back to see her village for the last time. Maug was following her. He did not try to hide, and she waited for him.
Where his brass-colored hair touched his face there was a line of pimples, and below that his pale blue eyes were wet and red-rimmed.
“Don’t go without me,” he said.
“Why would you want to come with an ugly like me?” she asked.
Maug looked down and shrugged, and Marwen felt ashamed. To leave him here without a wingwand was to sentence him to death. He made an odd sound, and Marwen thought perhaps he was weeping.
“I have no tapestry,” he said.
She stared at him.
“When the dragon came, I was digging Grondil’s grave. It was fitting to take off my tapestry pouch,” he said.
“It was burned in the fire?”
He nodded. “You saw it once, Marwen, my cousin, not many years ago. You could stand as witness for me.”
“Yes, I remember. You were taunting me, and you dangled it in front of me.” She remembered vaguely the images of a star, a floxwillow and a spoon.
He looked at his feet and shrugged again.
“Of course, I don’t remember it,” she said, “but it is only a moderately difficult spell to bring it to mind.” She looked directly into his eyes, feeling herself turn pink. “If I wanted to.”
“By the gods, Marwen ...”
“Now you know how I feel!”
His lips twisted scornfully. “It’s not the same at all. I will have neither work nor friends until my tapestry is remade, and I must be careful not to die. But you—you are soulless.”
Her throat closed around her protests. He had no reason to believe her, and it was enough for her just to know that she did have a tapestry and a soul.
“I will not tell,” Maug said, “if you promise that the first Oldwife we come to, you will witness my tapestry.”
She nodded, and with that pact they began to walk the tawny hills inland.
At nuwind they came upon Opalwing butting and pawing hungrily at the wiregras “So that’s how you got back so fast,” Maug said. “Thought you might have used magic.” He snorted, and Marwen resisted the urge to strike him. She turned to him, chin and chest thrust out.
“I’ll sit forward,” she said. “You may hold on however you wish. Just don’t touch me.”
“Gor, who’d want to,” he retorted but without conviction, as if he didn’t even care enough to fight with her.
With the roughest start Marwen could get out of Opalwing, they began their journey toward Kebblewok.
When they stopped to give Opalwing a rest, Marwen roasted some stickstem roots, which Maug devoured peel and all. They had salvaged two jars of oatbeer and some burned bread from the ruins, but they were saving them. For a long time, they did not speak, though Marwen smiled at him once or twice. Whether she was afraid of him or whether she had some childish need to have him like her, she did not know. When he finally spoke, she started a little.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
She tried to hold the food in her cheek so that she could speak with her mouth full. “Grondil told me once that if I kept the rising sun to my right and the norwind blowing into my face, that I should come to the city of Kebblewok.”
He nodded. “And then?”
Marwen let the dry nutty-tasting meat of the root slide warm and heavy down her throat. She did not know where she was going. Her future spread out before her like the endless rolling Hills on either side, without lane or landmark. Grondil was dead, and now, strangely, she longed for her father, Nimroth, who had loved her after all. She felt stripped of purpose. All that was left was her strange inheritance, the dragon’s tapestry. But before that she must have her own.
“I will go to the Oldest in Loobhan. Perhaps she can help me discover the spell to change Cudgham back so he can witness my tapestry. And after that I think I shall seek my father’s house,” she said. Nimroth—a strange name, she thought, one I have never heard before.
Maug looked at her shrewdly. “You don’t believe that stuff, do you? Master Clayware’s babblings? Surely he was delirious.” Marwen coughed as some of the root went down the wrong way. When she recovered herself, she said,”You do not believe?” Slowly, deliberately, his eyes full upon Marwen, he shook his head.
It was while they were eating that they felt a charge in the air, as though a storm were gathering. Marwen looked about her. The sky toward the sea was glowering, but in the east the sun lay like a pink egg in a nest of golden clouds. Below it the land was barren.
She ignored the feeling for a time as she ate, but when the hair on her forearms raised, she jumped up, dropping her root. She looked around for Cudgham-ip, but he was a little way off, near where Opalwing grazed. Then Marwen saw her. The Taker.
Her head was bent, her white hair like bits of cloud or cotton. Her apron glowed brilliant blue like a shred of summer sky, the stitches of patchwork like birds in flight far off. As she walked with halting deliberation toward Marwen, she muttered and mumbled and chortled incoherently.