The naked boy shook his head. “That one don’t have a name. Flew into the herd during the storm. Could be bad luck, but,” he winked and grinned, “too late now.” He led the three beasts they had chosen away from the rest of the herd and pocketed the money Camlach gave him. “The folks is as good as the people, now,” he said, and he sauntered back to the herd, wielding his prodder like a cane.
The beasts were hungry. Their antennae drooped. Crob shook his head and ran his hand over the blistered hocks and hinds of his animal. He was sweating. “This one—I am not sure she can carry very fat me.”
Camlach examined his animal in disgust, then looked up at the dirty lad. “I ought to teach you not to cheat your betters,” he said.
“Who is better, scarface?” the boy said laughing, and then he stopped. His prodder fell to his side. “Say, don’t that scarface look familiar?” In the next moment he was gone, running on bare silent feet.
“I don’t like that lad. We should be swift,” Crob said.
Marwen patted her wingwand. It was a docile creature, and, though its backfur had been fouled by the black greasy rain, it was by far the best of the three.
“Mothball is your name,” she said.
“Look, she has never been clipped,” Camlach said, reaching under Mothball’s wing, but as he did so, his hand brushed Marwen’s hand.
Marwen stood still. She did not look at Camlach. But the hand Camlach had touched trembled and from that one touch the blood rolled in her veins like some scalding magic.
Camlach, too, was still. “She may be a wild wingwand or one half-tamed that escaped,” he said. “She may be hard to control.”
Marwen said nothing.
“Were it not for your magic, Marwen, I would be dead,” he said, moving closer. “Come to me when you have your tapestry.”
“I will not come,” she said.
His face was quiet, but his eyes were filled with the look of one who had wakened to find his dreams are not real.
“Come,” he said again.
“If I have any pride I will not come,” she said, but the blood-magic made her shake her head and smile. “So expect me.”
“Guards!” hissed Crob.
Maug leaped onto Mothball.
“Ho! You! Halt!” A tangle of soldiers ran with heavy booted feet toward them. One of them was a guard that had watched over Camlach when he was entombed.
Marwen mounted the wingwand in front of Maug. Camlach was still watching her, smiling. “Watch, Prince,” she said. “Watch how I fly this wild wingwand.”
“Fly! Fly!” Crob called to Camlach, but the Prince was watching her. Mothball bucked once and then rose into the air, flying south and east.
Below her, Marwen could see the soldiers were almost upon Camlach, and his wingwand was slow in takeoff. Marwen whispered a spell into the wind, a spell for strength to his beast and Crob’s. Then they, too, were airborne.
The rain had turned the brown muscled hills green.
The solid gray sky closed the world in like a vast empty skull, with low-floating cloud like bits of white matter still clinging to the bone. In the east a vein of bloodred sunlight oozed through on the horizon, and the wind blew, moaning and uneasy, like the ghosts of bad dreams.
Before, Marwen had always felt healing and happiness in the hills, and she had milked their magic into her being. But these hills withheld their power, as though they would force her back. When Mothball landed to eat near a spring, Marwen stayed close to the beast, feeding her flowers—fon and bugboots, and gall-pollen where she could find it. Maug hovered nearby like a shadow, silent, dark, and distorted, until she sent him away to look for more treats for Mothball. He disappeared over a hill, and Marwen filled her lungs with air.
“Such a sorry thing you are, Mothball,” she said. “Eat, eat.” Her words seemed muffled and her voice small on the far-stretching slopes. There was not another man or beast for as far as the eye could see, and Marwen had never felt so alone.
As Mothball grazed and Cudgham-ip harvested insects, Marwen rested on the hillside beside the spring. She thought of Camlach and that, if only she could believe it, he loved her. Her own love for him was emerging from her heart as a brilliantly-hued newborn wingwand emerges from its shell. She thought of Grondil and ached for her council. She rolled onto her stomach and pressed her cheek against the earth. She stretched out her arms and grasped the earth with her hands, remembering the dragon like a great winged cloud, blacker than the storm clouds, moving across the sky and speaking her father’s name.
“Oh, Mother,” she whispered into the dust, “beautiful One Mother—the Oldwife Grondil told me that I was promised to you and to your children, the gods. But what am I that you should want me? Could it be that I am...?” She stopped, unable even to say the words. “I am small, Mother, and weak, and I am lost, knowing not the way I should go, nor what I should do, having no tapestry.”
For a long time, Marwen lay very still, listening. She heard the pulse of the earth’s heart far beneath her and remembered a time when she had wondered if it beat for her. Then her life had only one course. Now the future had become shrouded. It stretched before her, vast and pathless, every direction ending in fear and failure. Then she had dreamed of finding a wizard who did not exist; now she sought in reality a wizard who was afraid to free the dragon and who might, wonder of wonders, be her father. Then she had one passion—her magic; now there was also Camlach, he a prince and she, or so Camlach thought, a soulless one. Perhaps they were right, perhaps she had been without her tapestry so long that her soul had blown away on the wind, perhaps it was her soul that piped tunelessly in the folds of the hills. She listened, her eyes dry.
After a time she lifted her head. She had heard this lilting tuneless voice before. It was the clear water of the spring. Remembering the advice of the grandfather stone, she crawled to its edge and looked into its depths, and in a moment, bright and bold, beneath a quivering layer of water, appeared a three dimensional world of mountains and sky and grass and flowers. Marwen cried out in wonder and reached down her hand to touch the little weedsheep that grazed on the mountainside, but her hand entering the water disturbed the picture, and it vanished in ripples.
“No, come back,” she laughed, and when Cudgham-ip came close to the water to drink, she shooed him away. She stayed very still until the water was as clear as a mirror, and the little world was again beneath the surface of the spring.
There was a shack on the mountain slope. Flowers grew wild around the shack, in the windows and on the roof, and Marwen could see each tiny flower in exquisite detail. In a moment her eye was drawn elsewhere, for a party of wingwands came flying with great speed over the lower end of the slope. Riding the beasts were fighting men, the King’s soldiers, Marwen thought, for their shields and cloaks bore the King’s insignia. Almost all carried at least one passenger—village men, women, and children. The soldiers dismounted in a field of yellow flowers at the base of the hill and helped their riders down. Marwen saw that the people the soldiers helped were hurt and wounded. Her delight turned to horror. They had been burned. Marwen could see a mother whose hands were white as wax, the fingers mere stubs, holding and stroking and speaking softly to her child as it wailed in pain. She watched as a soldier spread a cloak over the hairless head of a girl about her own age who had died.
The tiny soldiers in the watery picture herded the group of peasants into the middle of a circle that the wingwands had formed. The soldiers drew their arrows as over the top of the mountain flew an enormous creature of august beauty. Its shape was lizardlike, its scales silver-black, reflecting the summersun into a thousand, thousand rainbows. Beneath the creature’s diaphanous taloned wings, the mountain seemed shrunken and insignificant. “Perdoneg,” Marwen whispered, and her breath ruffled the surface of the water. From the dragon’s mouth came a curl of blue fire, and its eyes glowed and faded like burning embers as it looked on the huddled group below it.