“I have no tapestry to prove such a thing,” Marwen said.
Vijocka looked at her but with the eyes of one who is seeing the past. Her hands rested still and spellwise on her knees. “The house of Nimroth, the poet, is not many miles north of here,” she said. “When I was growing and serving my apprenticeship, he would come of a year and sing and tell his tales and then be gone again for many suns. As a girl I remembered his visits with joy, for they were holidays, and the work would be put aside to listen and dance to his music, even by my mother, the Oldwife.
“One day I became ill, so ill that even my mother could not cure me. She had not always treated her calling with respect, but she loved me and searched the lore books day and night for a spell that would abate the fever that burned my life-fires lower each day. Finally I became delirious. I remember that, as my mother cast herself across my bed, weeping, a woman appeared inside the room. Old she was, wrinkled and crippled with years. Her shoes were the yellow of the sun, and her apron shone with the blue of heaven. She beckoned to me, and I longed to go to her. And then something happened: Nimroth, the poet, appeared in the open door of our house, only his face was not smiling and innocent as I remembered it from days past but sad and full of wisdom, and in his hand was a staff that glowed with a radiant white light. Gently, lovingly, he put his hand round the old woman’s shoulders and led her out of the house.
“Thereafter I returned to good health. My mother had been asleep with sorrow when all this happened, and so I carried my secret alone, letting it ripen inside me, leading me deeper into the magic. Nimroth did not speak to me of it when he came to the village as a poet, though sometimes he caught me looking at him. Then he would stop smiling, and the wisdom in his eyes would shine.
“One day he came through our village and to my window. He was going away, he told me, for a long time, perhaps forever. I offered to provide him with an heir (though shyly and clumsily), but he merely smiled and seemed glad to know that I had not forgotten or thought it was delirium that day when I discovered he was the wizard. He told me that the dragon Perdoneg was growing in power, that one day he would escape his prison and come seeking to kill the wizard and his heir. He told me that if the wizard and the heir were killed, there would be no peace, neither in this life nor the next. He explained that what he was about to do would thwart the dragon. Then he would speak no more of it. I fed him and he left.”
Vijocka drained her bowl.
“But now, my friend, if you would so honor me, I will share your sadness. Tell me how you come to be without your tapestry, and if I have any magic to help you, I will.”
Marwen spoke haltingly of how her mother, Grondil, had hidden her tapestry so that the people would not offer her, a nameless orphan, as a gift to the Taker. She did not weep when she told Vijocka of her life as a soulless one, but she wept as she told of her joy when she discovered that she did have a tapestry.
“But it was destroyed,” Marwen said glancing toward her apron pocket.
“Was there no witness to your tapestry?” Vijocka asked.
“None at my birth and only one after.” She drew Cudgham-ip carefully out of her apron pocket and placed him on the ground. He yawned and blinked his bleary eyes and slowly began moving about the room, devouring insects that hid among the wild flowers. Marwen followed him with her eyes. “This is my stepfather, Cudgham. He showed me where my tapestry was hidden, and before I could see it, he thrust it in the fire. In my rage I cast a spell on him that did this. Later I tried to reverse the spell, but I could not.”
Vijocka watched the ip crawl about the room, his legs heavy and slow, his tongue quick.
“To reverse the spell, you must forgive him,” Vijocka said at last.
Marwen stared. She felt the heat rising in her face.
“Then he must remain always an ip,” she said slowly.
“Time is not your friend,” Vijocka said. “If you truly mean to do battle with Camlach against Perdoneg, likely you will die.”
“Yet I cannot forgive. Because of what he has done, I am doomed to live in torment.”
“We give ourselves up to torment, Marwen,” Vijocka said. “You cannot have forgotten that. If the spell is reversed, he can stand witness while I make you a new tapestry.”
Then Marwen was angry and her voice was sharp.
“What if he refuses? He burned it once, he may have some reason for not wanting me to have a tapestry. What if he lies, if he witnesses wrongly?”
“He tells me nothing,” Vijocka said calmly. “By way of a spell, I can know his mind concerning the tapestry. If he does not cooperate, return him to his ip form if you wish.”
The wind blew through the east window and carried the word wish off to be dropped on some soul far away.
Know his mind? Marwen had never heard of such a spell. To know the mind of another would certainly be great magic. She caught herself gaping and closed her mouth with a snap.
“Give me this spell,” she said.
“It is for all to know,” Vijocka said easily, gesturing toward her collection of lore books. “It is in the Songs of the One Mother, and its success depends only on the wielder of the words.”
Restraining her greed to know, Marwen calmly opened the pages of the ancient book. It was almost the same as her own, lacking only the pictures of dragons that had been drawn in the margins. “I will see my tapestry in Cudgham’s mind myself,” Marwen said. Vijocka’s finger stretched in one long plane to point out the passage. Marwen read and read again. She closed the book and said the words aloud.
She looked up and saw herself reflected in Vijocka’s dark eyes. The fear that suddenly sped through her veins like cold spring-water did not show, did not radiate from her like dark wings. Then she realized that it was not fear that coursed through her body after all but magic. Her bowels burned with an ice-born heat, and her mind filled with windsong. She felt the earth spinning beneath her, alive, not beastlike but womanlike. A whole and beautiful being whose tapestry was the sky and whose spirit blew like wind and cloud over its body of mountains and swelling ocean. And she knew that it spun for her and for all the children of the earth. She touched the mind of the One Mother and worshipped her.
Marwen reeled and felt Vijocka’s cool strong hands helping her to lay on the greatrug.
“Your mind is the tool,” Vijocka whispered in her ear. “You must use it, focus your thoughts. If you let your thoughts run free, you will not succeed. Think of the mind of the ip, of your stepfather. But be sure you are strong.”
Marwen reached out tendrils of thought toward the green and rust-striped lizard that crept on the floor beside her. Her vision clouded, as if breeze-blown mists were before her eyes. She felt her legs grow heavy, as though she herself were in the form of an ip, and she felt her tongue flick out as quickly as a flame leaping, felt herself floating as sparks and cinders on the wind.
Something was wrong. There was a tearing noise behind her eyes, and the sound of wind in her throat. She knew she was no longer in the mind of the ip. A deeper wish had transported her to a mind more powerful, a mind of darkness and misery, a mind bubbling with hot black magic.
When next she could see again, it was through the eyes of the dragon.
Perdoneg was unaware that he had been violated, Marwen knew. Marwen had come into the heart of the dragon’s psyche, and there, all around her like a raging storm, screamed the words, “My tapestry ...”
She was in the dragon’s mindbeing, its thoughts whipping and blowing like grass before the wind, like sand in a windstorm, and hate and fear squalled together in a tempest of emotion. Always at the center, like the eye of the hurricane, were the words, “My tapestry ... my tapestry ...”