In the warm soft light of the dawnmonth, the dew burnished the slopes of grass and gleamed on yellow beegems. Even the insects flew past her swift and straight, their flight purposeful in the dawnspring morning. Marwen faced the wind, which blew straight and hard and low along the ground. She spread her arms and knew she was the first obstacle the wind had met for many furlongs, and so it would know it was wind again.
She could scarcely remember now the long months of winter-dark. It seemed to her as if her life had begun only this day, for at last Council Grondil had kept her long promise to make Marwen her apprentice when she came of age in her sixteenth sun. Grondil was the Oldwife of Marmawell, one of those women in whose order was found the last vestiges of magic and power in all Ve. Their task as Oldwives was to weave the tapestry for each child at birth, their gift to interpret the tapestry for all who asked. In each town and village, the influence they wielded was great, for their hand was over wedding feast and mourner’s fast alike.
No one in Marmawell dared murmur when Grondil announced her intentions and her adept. From the time Marwen had been a young child, she had shown a predilection for magic: a pink flower stroked into purple before the eyes of the other children, a dream come true, pictures fashioned of hearthsmoke that vanished but not before all had seen. None dared murmur, for Grondil loved her young charge, and there would be no swaying her. Many whispered among themselves that the girl was unseemly in the use of her talent, but, if the truth be known, they feared her precocity. A few grumbled that it would be bad luck, that she was not Grondil’s true daughter and that she had no tapestry to validate her calling, the people of Ve being of long and lawful tradition. They said she had no tapestry at all and thus no soul—what could the magic be in the hands of a soulless one?
But it was done and Marwen rejoiced. Her hand went down to the beautiful tapestry pouch at her side. At one’s apprenticeship, one was considered old enough to carry the tapestry, and Grondil had put many hours of work into Marwen’s pouch. Marwen had been so long among the villagers without a tapestry that the villagers scarcely thought it worth quarreling about when she had begun to wear the pouch with nothing to put in it, though some had glowered and gossiped.
“Someday,” Grondil whispered when she had tied it to Marwen’s waist, “someday may it be filled.”
The waterjar became heavy on her shoulders, and at the top of the next rise, she stopped to rest and breathe in the scent of the village spice gardens far below.
From here the round thatched roofs of the village looked like burrs on the smooth sinews of the valley foothills, but Marwen preferred the way the village looked in winterdark. Then the thatched roofs, glowing with firelight and light pouring from the east windows, looked like bleeding moons.
From further up the hill near Stumble Brook, Marwen could see two girls her age walking and sharing the load of their water-jars. She had played with Dalett and Lirca when she was younger, but they had run away from her since they were old enough to understand the word soulless. She watched them approach.
They didn’t look at her. They circled around her and giggled and whispered. Marwen made her face still as stone and tried to swallow the dryness in her throat.
When they were past, she reached into her apron pocket and touched the Songbook, which contained all the spells and enchantments of Ve. While other children played, she had mastered the names of hill and stone more quickly than any other names, and the names of the grasses and the flowers, and the names of the waters: rain water and dew water, snow water and the water of Stumble Brook. Marwen whispered a brief spell. Lirca tripped on a rock and tumbled, spilling her water. Dalett cooed and comforted her friend, and shared her water with her. They didn’t look at Marwen. They didn’t suspect her. For them she didn’t exist. Marwen wanted to cry out, “I did it! It was me, my magic.” But she could not. She was voiceless, soulless. She was nothing, and her tricks meant nothing.
After they were out of sight, Marwen removed the book from her apron pocket, the leaves crackling with age. In the margins a poet, Grondil told her, had made hand drawings of dragons. She touched the drawings with her finger, traced them over and over. “Trouble up north,” she had heard some of the villagers whispering lately, “dragon trouble.” But others scoffed, for no dragons had flown in Ve for many generations. When Marwen was a little child, Grondil had often comforted her during Ve’s long winters of darkness by assuring her that dragons only lived on the isles of the sea, far away from the shores of Ve. As Marwen gazed at the dragon drawings, the beasts frozen in fierce stillness, she thought that the poet had not imagined but seen, and she believed.
Nuwind passed and windsong began to blow. Greedily she read and memorized a few spells and enchantments that went beyond her level of learning. From the Tenets of the Tapestry every child was taught, but only the Oldwife read the Songs of the One Mother. Grondil, she knew, would be worried. “Too soon,” she would say, “too much knowing and too little discretion.” But Marwen could not stop herself. The words filled her up and gave her shape, and the empty places felt less empty. After a time a delicious sleepiness spread to her limbs, and she lay back on the grass. She could almost feel the world spin beneath her like a vast and immortal beast, and she wondered if it was for her, also, that the beast lived. Here in the wash of windsong she could find her magic. From the time she was a child, she had known this power, this passion that Grondil had taught her was called magic. It was her friend, a guide for one who had no tapestry, a soul for one who had no soul.
In Grondil’s lap and before Grondil’s loom, in Grondil’s arms and in the arms of the magic, Marwen was god-given and talented, the magic’s maiden, Grondil’s only love. In Grondil’s house or alone in the mountains, Marwen felt as big as a world, powerful and important and beautiful. But the moment she went into the village, she shriveled, her back stooped and she became awkward and stupid. When the villagers looked at her, they cast a spell with their eyes, and she became as small and insignificant as a dust mote, light and almost invisible, as empty and dark as her tapestry pouch.
Marwen opened her tapestry pouch. It wasn’t completely empty. Carefully she took out a small stone she had found, almost perfectly round and blue as a summersun sky. She had shown it to Grondil who told her how it had been pushed and scrubbed and squeezed for a thousand years to be so round. If she had a tapestry, Marwen thought, it would have one blue thread the color of her stone. To wish for more would be greedy. She closed her eyes, rubbed its smoothness and tried to remember its exact shade of blue.
She felt a sudden pain as the stone was knocked from her hands. Marwen swallowed a cry and sucked hard on her knuckles.
“I might have knowed ye’d be idle, ya limpsy lollabed. Up! Up!” It was Cudgham Seedmaker, Grondil’s husband. Marwen scowled at him. He was a goatish man who wore his shoes on the wrong feet when they wore out to make them last longer and who had a fair reputation for never having said a true word in his life. He and Grondil had often argued over her because he defended the village children who tormented her. Once Marwen had overheard him laughing as some adults told of their children’s pranks against her. He had blamed it all on Grondil’s method of upbringing. Of late he had taken an interest in her upbringing and sometimes found her alone in the hills.
“But my rock ...” Marwen said.
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.