Soldiers and citizens flocked to the hill as word spread that Perdoneg had been vanquished, but Camlach would not allow them to see her. Only Torbil did he allow to kneel silently before her, professing his service and devotion in a gruff stammering voice.
Marwen was weak and dizzy, so much of her powers had she expended. But it was not only fatigue that filled her. She was mortally sick.
She lay in a pool of light that poured in the east window, and Camlach sat beside her, giving her sips of water. His face was drawn and dark and his mouth grim.
“I mourn Crob,” Marwen said.
Camlach didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “He came home to die. He told me. I didn’t believe him. I have learned about belief today. I have learned from you, Marwen.”
Through the window, norwind blew cool and constant, silvered with floating ash. Camlach leaned down and kissed her, a sad, hard, and needful kiss that made dying impossible to understand. He gathered her up in his arms and crushed his face against her hair.
“I want to live,” she said, suddenly angry. “I want to live.” She felt a cold numbness in her hands and feet, and far away, above the sounds of the gathering crowds without, she could hear music. The Taker’s music.
The door of the house burst open, and Camlach leaped to his feet.
“My orders were to allow no one to enter!”
It was Torbil with the dusky figure of the Oldwife of Rute at his side.
“Forgive me, Lord, but this woman has come. She is the only believer I know, and I thought perhaps she could help.”
Vijocka did not wait for permission from the Prince but walked regally to Marwen’s side. Without speaking she ran her hands lightly over Marwen’s body, stopping briefly at her forehead, breasts, and abdomen.
“Get me fedderweed,” she ordered, “and water, good water, from the spring in the bowels of the hill. And bring to me from the fruit of the tree.”
Torbil stumbled through the doorway in his haste to obey the Oldwife, and Camlach fell back to give her room.
“Can you help me?” Marwen asked. Her throat was swelling, and the numbness had reached into her shoulders and hips.
“The only reason you are still alive is because of the power that is in you,” Vijocka said. “I have no spell that can aid you, but when magic fails, there is still skill.” All this she said while her hands worked steadily on the building of a fire. She stopped for a moment, looked at Marwen and then bent her face closer. Her voice was so soft it was heard by only Marwen.
“An Oldwife dies with dignity, a wizard with greatness of soul. Thou art both. If my art and thy magic should fail, die thou likewise.”
Marwen closed her eyes slowly and then opened them and, with every effort of her will, nodded once.
Vijocka tended the fire quietly, taming it until it was hot and even. When the cavewater boiled, she set to steeping the silver-green fedderweed. The steam of it filled the shack with an acrid earthy smell. Into the tea Vijocka sprinkled some juice from the white fruit in her hand. By the time she offered some of it to Marwen, the girl’s lips had become numb, and the liquid dribbled down her chin as she drank. Vijocka took the rest of the bitter tea and flung it on the fire with a quick prayer. Then she began to hum and then to sing, as if remembering a lullaby from her youth.
“I have done all I can,” Vijocka said then. “The Taker decides now.”
Camlach and Torbil seemed far away, though they only sat against the wall on the other side of the room. It was the Taker who filled Marwen’s hearing and vision, for as Vijocka washed her face caressingly, the old crone shuffled through the door. The men obviously saw nothing, but when Vijocka bowed low and moved away, Camlach stood slowly. Marwen could hear his breathing coming quick and shallow, and the whisper of his sword as it was unsheathed. The fire smoked cold.
Marwen saw the Taker more clearly now than she had ever seen her before. Her slippered feet were yellow like sunbutter against the dirt floor, but now Marwen saw that they did not quite touch the ground as she hobbled along. Around her thin shoulders her green dress hung like a garment on two pegs.
Her hands, knots of knuckle and bone, appeared as though she carried something in them, grasped together before her as they were. Her apron was the blue of the noonmonth sky, and where she had knotted the apron strings at her waist, the bow hung down like a transparent wingwand in flight. Brown and crinkled in silent laughter was her face, and Marwen could see that her eyes were the color of the mist on sunrising. Always her head nodded in mindless agreement.
Marwen could not speak, for the illness had bound her tongue, but she kept her eyes open and her thoughts serene. She could feel her spirit struggling to be free of a body that was dying.
The Taker approached with her clasped hands outstretched, in the manner of beseeching, and when she was close to Marwen, she stopped still. Her toothless gums opened and closed, but no words did she speak.
“This is strange,” Vijocka said, and Marwen saw her come forward, close to the Taker’s hands. “What message, Mother Taker?”
The Taker knelt painfully before the dying fire and put her hands into the ash. With her stiff hands she worked the gray ash and the thin threads of smoke that rose into the shadow of something familiar, the ghostly image of a woven picture, the spirit of a tapestry. Marwen’s tapestry.
She knew it immediately, that it was her own, as one would know the reflection of one’s own face in the water. She tried to cry out, but she had no voice, and her lips would not move.
Vijocka knelt before the Taker so that the tapestry was before her eyes, and she began to memorize each image that shifted like sunlight on water between the Taker’s outstretched hands. Marwen could see blue and white moons in a black sky and fountains of flowers: humelodia, ice gozzys, and stempellows. In the center of her tapestry was a mountain, a high snow-veined pinnacle of rock like the mountains she had seen far to the north of Rune-dar. Beneath the mountain was a white wingwand in flight, a key, a tree with white fruit, and ... a crown. Running the length of the tapestry was a single thread, the lifethread, the color of a summersun sky. At the top, like a border, was the sign of the staff, the wizard’s sign.
Softly murmuring to herself and outlining with her finger, Vijocka went over each symbol once, twice, three times before the Taker slowly folded the image into nothingness and lamely doddered out the door.
Vijocka watched her leave and then, her voice breaking, said, “The Mother has decided, Marwen. You live.”
From that moment on, Marwen gained feeling and strength quickly. Now the future was not a wilderness of fear but a road with a clear direction and landmarks along the way. True, at the end of the road would still be the Taker, but Marwen had seen her eyes, that they were not the color of a blood-drained evening but the color of the mists at sunrise. She would remember that. The next windcycle, Camlach called for a feast in Marwen’s honor in the dry hills near Rune-dar, and she stood before the throng briefly as they cheered her. But the songs were irreverent and bawdy, and Marwen thought that though they were glad to have Perdoneg conquered, still they did not believe in the magic or revere the wizard. Nevertheless, the story of the dragon and Marwen spread quickly and was put to song and embellished until it became more than it had been in reality.