Its huge stem was covered in tough brown hide, and its limbs were muscular and tuberous. One of the large branches, a fraction of the tree itself, had been torn away, leaving an open white wound and the remaining branches cupping cold sky where once had been living green.
Marwen shook her head in disbelief and walked slowly toward the tree. It smelled clean like rain, sweet like the earth, and in its wind-frayed leaves, the breezes tossed and played. Among its leaves were white fruit bearing down the branches.
“By the gods—Perdoneg! He’s back!” Torbil whispered fiercely, his voice just short of shrieking. Marwen glanced upward a moment to the north sky where the sun burned hot and bright on the scales of a great winged creature. Before it flew a frantic group of wingwands and riders. She looked again at the tree.
“Ah,” she said softly, circling the tree and touching it gently with her fingers.
“Hide us,” Torbil said desperately.
Behind the tree the hill rose sharply upward, and where the tree’s feet were rooted in the earth was a small cave.
“We’ll be burned alive,” he said. “The dragon can smell human flesh a furlong away.”
“There,” Marwen said pointing to the cave. “This is the gift the tree gives.”
She bent and hunched into the cave. It was cool and moist. In only a few paces, Marwen was forced to go on hands and knees through a tunnell-like aperture that opened suddenly to a large womb of blackness. Somewhere off to her right, water fell and splashed her with points of cold.
The soldier had followed behind, his huge hot breaths on her heels, but he had stopped and now was lodged in the tunnel.
“My shoulders won’t go through,” he grunted.
“Hush,” Marwen whispered. “This is a sacred place. If you cannot come in, you are not meant to be here. Stay and wait for me.”
With a grunt he pushed his way through at last, leaving shreds of shirt and skin clinging to the rock.
Marwen held out her hands, palms together, and whispered an incantation. Slowly, between her palms, a cool white flame grew until, carefully, she pulled one hand away, and the flame nestled brightly in the other. It illuminated a stone stairway before them.
“Great Mother!” exclaimed the soldier, and Marwen knew from the tone of his voice it was a prayer and not a curse. The cave was a large vault of red granite that glittered from floor to ceiling in Marwen’s bit of werelight, but more beautiful still was the waterfall shrouded in a soft mist.
Lying beside a rock basin filled with water was an old tapestry pouch.
“The house must be at the top of the stairs,” said the soldier. “Come. Once in the house, we are safe.”
“Wait,” she said. She hunched down to look at it more closely. Embroidered into the pouch was a dragon without eyes, writhing in the wind.
“Great Gods! What are you doing? Come!” He grabbed her arm, but she wrenched it from his grasp without looking away from the pouch.
Her fingers jumped when she touched the pouch, alive as it was with magic. Carefully, the thin old threads grasped in her fingers, she pulled the top right corner of the tapestry out. A tree had been woven there, a tree with white fruit, and against the tree leaned a staff. Nimroth’s tapestry, not Perdoneg’s. So fragile were the threads that they began to tear beneath her gentle touch, and she tucked the tapestry back into the pouch.
It had been left here for her by her father. He had gone to his death without his tapestry so that she would find it, though she did not know why. Marwen felt herself growing heavier and lighter all at once. Her soul was sinking close to the earth, acquiring weight and substance, and at the same time becoming tiny as a wind-borne seed, thin as the wingscale of a wingwand.
“Come, there is no time,” Marwen said quietly. She closed her fist on the werelight, snuffing it. They climbed the stone staircase in silent haste and in darkness, going straight up as if in a long narrow chimney. At last Marwen felt a bit of wind on her face and saw a patch of light above her, round and blue as a moon.
The man below her was becoming claustrophobic and swore at himself at close intervals, finally cursing Marwen as well.
“If Perdoneg hears you, one breath of his fire down this hole will roast us both,” Marwen whispered. As if in testament, the moon of light above went out briefly, eclipsed by dragon-darkness.
“Can’t breathe,” he muttered, and then he was quiet.
The hole emerged into a grotto. She pulled aside a curtain of flowers and saw that they faced the east window of the little house. It was not far to the doorway of the house but far enough to die. The air of noonmonth felt thick and warm in her mouth after the cool thin air of the cave. With a brief prayer, Marwen picked up a pebble from the floor of the cave, kissed it and tossed it through the window. The soldier entered the grotto then, sweating and bloody, filling almost the entire space with his body. It was he that Camlach saw when he peered out the window, and he to whom the Prince gestured.
“Great gods, the dragon is above us!” Torbil half-whispered, half-shrieked.
“Do as I say,” Marwen said.
The soldier nodded, gripping his sword hilt convulsively.
“Hold this tapestry pouch with me, and when I say, run.”
She pictured the blind dragon in the wind, the blind dragon of the tapestry pouch. She whispered her strongest spell of hiding and slipped through the curtain of flowers. “Run!”
Like phantoms they darted around the corner and into the door.
A roar like a winter wind filled their ears, and the straw-chinked bricks around the doorway glowed with flames. A figure was beating out the glowing straw with his cloak. Torbil joined him, but Marwen stood still, feeling the power in the house like a heavy quiet as her eyes adjusted to the dimness. Soon there was the smell of smoke and baked mud but no more flames. Perdoneg would not or could not destroy the house.
The two men stood panting, their faces streaked black and their hair gray with ash and soot, before Camlach finally looked at Marwen.
The Prince appeared years older than when Marwen first looked at him, but as recognition dawned on his face, the extra years melted away.
“Marwen!” he exclaimed.
He strode forward as if he would take her in his arms, and then he stopped, and his smile faded. Marwen faced him calmly, soberly. He was tanned, and his eyes shone with health. His broken nose had set a little oddly, but it seemed only to make his face more manly.
“I was coming to you when your man found me at Rute,” she said. There was nothing soft in her voice.
“I trust he has treated you like a princess.”
Marwen glanced at Torbil, who stood whey-faced and agape, and said, “Most royally. But we are thirsty. Have you anything to drink?”
Camlach shook his head. “Nothing. And no food. There is nothing here, nothing of value at all that I can find. Perhaps this is not Nimroth’s house after all.”
She held out to him the worn threadbare tapestry pouch she had found. “This is his house. I found this hidden in the cave beneath the hill. It is not Perdoneg’s tapestry but Nimroth’s. It will help us, for I know the story it tells. Now we need only the dragon’s tapestry....”
She began to search the house with her eyes and then with her magic.
It consisted of a main room, a smaller room and a pantry, all unlit by anything save the east window.
Camlach cleared his throat. “But where is Maug?”
“I left him behind,” Marwen said, looking in every corner. She glanced at Camlach. “No, do not smile, Prince Camlach, for I have possibly left him to his death. I left him alone in the hills not a quarter the way to Loobhan.”