“Did he give you my gift?”
“Gift? He gave me nothing,” Marwen answered.
“I knew you would not take it—the magical blanket that Crob and Politha gave to me—and so I told Maug to give it to you when we were apart.”
Marwen smiled wryly. “Now I need not worry. Maug will be all right.”
In the main room was only a greatrug, once of much richness, now gray with dust and stained with bird droppings. There was a clay table decorated with elaborately printed runes and varnished to a high gloss. On the table was an hourglass. Above the fireplace, where some birds had made a rough nest, was a row of pots, once shiny and now covered in a layer of dust. In the smaller room was a hammock cradling a layer of dry leaves, and everywhere were books piled in dusty stacks. The pantry had little in it but a broom hosting a colony of thinwings, a net of bulbs hanging, and strings of herbs dried paper thin.
“Have you tried digging in the floor?” she asked. She kept her voice quick and strong. She was aware of him near her.
“The wizard laid a brick floor,” Camlach answered. “Marwen, I’m glad you’ve come.”
Marwen ran her hands over the scorched walls, pressing lightly against the warm brick, touching, pressing, until the pantry was the only room left.
“But a day’s journey out of Kebblewok, I had a seeing,” she said examining a crack in the pantry wall. There was nothing in it but a family of mudfleas. She could feel Camlach listening to her silence, waiting. “The dragon called me by name, called me Nimroth’s daughter, heir to the wizard.”
She reached up to touch the dried leaves hanging fragile and fragrant, but when she touched them, they turned to dust and sifted down, burning her eyes and choking her.
“I knew it,” he said.
“Did you?”
A coldness filled Marwen’s soul. She was not the same little girl who had cried when people hated her. In those days the people told her about herself, as a mirror did. They had defined her, had given her size and form, had erased her with one word: soulless. But now, though she had no tapestry, no one could take her soul away from her nor the reality that she was the white wingwand and the wizard’s heir, the Mother’s child. Even now, scar tissue was forming on old wounds, and in place of pain would be strength and toughness.
In the hourglass, rimmed with gold about the top and bottom, the peak of silver sand was still, as though all time had frozen and was awaiting a mortal hand to move it. Marwen lifted it and turned it bottom up. The sand did not flow but remained a mass in the top of the glass, solidified by the years. Slowly she turned toward him.
“Look at me, Camlach,” she said, clutching the hourglass against her stomach. “Look into my eyes and tell me that I am soulless.”
He looked, but she knew he saw no reflection of himself. For she had absorbed him with her eyes, drunk him deep into the ash-gray of her eyes, brought him in and given him back, only full-sized and beautiful, as she saw him.
“Marwen ...”
She turned away. “I hid the dragon’s tapestry so well with my spells that even I cannot find it,” she said.
Just then the side of the house shook with the blow of an arrow. Camlach’s head snapped toward the east window.
“Crob is back,” Camlach said, striding to the east window. “That is his signal for help.”
“Crob?” Marwen ran to Camlach’s side. “He is trapped on the hillside?”
“The dragon torments the city of Rune-dar when he is not flying in the south inner lands. He thinks the people there must know something of the wizard. I asked Crob to bring the sick and young from there to this house, thinking they would be safe here.” Camlach’s face was pale. “My brother is coming southward from Duma with fresh fighting men and stronger weapons. I had hoped he would be here by now.”
They watched as the dragon’s shadow circled around them, rippling black over the slope. At the foot of the hill, Crob and the small group of villagers crouched.
The dragon blocked the sun like a black cloud, and Marwen saw it for the first time with her mortal eyes. She was mesmerized. Its wings were like veined sails on huge bones, full of bloody magic. Its neck arched in a dark ageless pride, and from its mouth it vomited a bright hot wind.
Camlach unsheathed his sword.
“What are you doing?” Marwen asked.
“Crob will die and the people with him. He was following my orders.” Marwen watched aghast as Camlach stood in the doorway taking several deep breaths and then ran with all his strength down the hill, shouting challenges and insults to the dragon as he went. Torbil cursed and followed at his heels. Perdoneg laughed, and a star of fire blazed from his mouth. The wind throbbed drumlike beneath the beast’s immense wings, and on the ground below, Marwen could see the dragon’s thin black shadow darken the faces of the villagers. There was a gleam of arrows in the sun, needlelike against the dark scaly hide of the dragon’s belly. Marwen stopped breathing as she saw the creature descend, roaring his anger and filling the sky with an ash-flaked heat. One man fell, engulfed in flames, twisting and writhing silently in fire. All around him the villagers screamed. Clutching their faces, falling on their children, they let the man die, the man Marwen knew was Crob.
She ran from the house on to the crest of the hill.
“Perdoneg!” she cried. “I am Marwen, daughter of Nimroth. I have come.” Though her voice could not have carried, the dragon hovered, spun about and bucked, and began to fly toward her, forgetting his play with the terrified villagers and with Camlach.
Marwen ran back into the house, stood in the center of the room and clamped a hand over her mouth, quelling her nausea, swallowing her screams. Perdoneg’s tapestry was here. She could feel its potent magic. But she had covered it too well with her own spells, spells on top of Nimroth’s spells, layers of magic like dust, like fine ash.
She threw her arms into the air and then bent them over her head as if to protect it from descending flames. She felt a cooling sweat on her forehead. From a great distance away, it seemed, Marwen heard the dragon’s voice like wind in a canyon, “Come to me Marwen. You are mine.”
She looked up, trying to breathe normally, feeling the magic flood through her soul like music, a heavy horrible music, a strain remembered from a nightmare. “I need to know where the tapestry of Perdoneg is,” she whispered aloud into the deepening dimness of the house, for Perdoneg blocked the sun from the window. “What spell? What spell?”
But there was no answer, no spell, no answer. The greatrug was beneath her feet felt cool and silken, and her legs tingled weakly. Her head felt heavy on her neck. She sat on the rug, seeming to float gently down.
And so now all was lost. Perdoneg would take her to his kingdom of lost and unfinished souls, and then he would return and rule all of Ve. Sometimes light and truth prevailed, and sometimes in the ages of man, dark and untruth prevailed. Her name would go down forever in the songs that survived as the last of the wizards, the wizard who failed before the magic of Perdoneg. And she would live the long night of death with the vision of good gentle Crob burning to bones before her eyes. In that moment she almost wished she were soulless.
“I am waiting, Marwen, daughter of Nimroth,” the dragon hissed with a voice like a hailstorm.
She groaned and lay on the greatrug, pressing her face into its dusty threads. Before her eyes, woven into the rug, was the image of a white wing.
She touched it. She brushed at it, pressed it with her hand.
She sat up quickly, her heart pressing against her breastbone. Wildly, roughly, she brushed the dust away and scraped with her fingernail at the hardened skin of bird droppings until a white wingwand appeared. More frantically she beat at the dust until it choked her. She could see some of the designs in the rug.