Grondil’s eyes filled briefly with light and then looked away. She sighed and seemed old to Marwen. “They say there is no wizard, Marwen, that the Songs are mere rhymes and fables.” She was quiet for a time, her hands still.
Marwen knew what the people said and believed, but the Songs were more real to her than the people, and she remained steadfast. Grondil held her doubt in her heart like a stillborn child, a sadness ever to mourn and wonder. But with every word people spoke about the wizard being gone from Ve, Marwen felt that when she found him, he would be more entirely hers.
Grondil knelt before her and with her finger drew in the hard-packed dirt floor the shape of an hourglass.
“When you were a child,” she said, “you thought, as I did when I was young, that as you grew in knowledge and magic, you would be able to do anything at all with your power. But see here—it is like the hourglass: the higher your powers, the narrower become your options to use it, for you come to know that every slight breath of magic moves the winds and the world. If you are gifted, Marwen, you will go through this narrow opening. You will be frightened in that time to use your power at all. And then one day, the Mother grant it, everything will open up before you, and you will be free because you will not want to use your magic for anything but good.”
Marwen heard her voice but not her words. She watched the thick-veined fine-boned hands that had woven many tapestries before Marwen’s awed eyes, the quick and clever fingers that had patiently taught, over and over, the knots of the loom, that had taught her to make sophisticated patterns by transferring threads from one shed to another.
“Why?” she whispered. “Why, Grondil, was there no tapestry for me?”
Grondil eyed the east window, rose from the floor and sat on her stool. With one motion of her foot, she erased the picture in the dust, then tucked her feet beneath her sheath. Nervously she fingered something in her apron pocket.
“Without a tapestry, the people of the village felt you could be exempted from being given to the Taker. Some felt it may be an insult to the Taker to leave a soulless one. I have explained this to you before. But...”
“But what?” Marwen asked. She had heard this “but” unspoken for years. Now for the first time Grondil had said it aloud. “But what?” she repeated.
Grondil could not answer her, for Sneda’s youngest was at the east window and there was need in her eyes.
“Grondil, Oldwife of Marmawell, let your hands be blessed,” the child said according to ritual. “Come with healing. My mother is hurt.”
Chapter Two
The windows of Ve are like eyes: you may look in if you wish, but then you bear a responsibility.
Everyone who had looked in at Sneda’s window was there now, in or out of the house, their heads bobbing and weaving to see. Marwen could feel the eyes of the crowd on her back as she and Grondil passed through. They felt ungentle, but she had almost become used to that. It was the silence that was strange.
In the crowd was Maug who sneered and made jokes about Marwen whenever she passed so that all the boys laughed. It was he who dared Bero to throw an egg at her and he who had laughed Klawss to scorn when he was the only boy who danced with Marwen at the Sunrise Festival. It was Maug who made lewd remarks about her growing breasts. She felt small and stiff in her place beside Grondil, knowing his eyes were upon her.
Master Clayware was there, also, quiet and nearly hidden at the rear of the crowd, leaning upon a cane, his white hair covered by a dark hood, his spine curved. Since she was a child, he had always had a kind word for Marwen, and once he told her that her mother had been the most beautiful maid in the village. Beside him, whispering in the old man’s ear, was long-apprenticed Gumbe Clayfire whose blond hair hung in oily strands around his ears and in his pale-lashed eyes. Gumbe was father to Maug, husband to Merva Leatherworker, Marwen’s aunt. Merva had never forgiven the Council for allowing Grondil to keep her sister Srill’s baby, the baby who was her family’s shame. Perhaps that was why Merva had worked so hard recently to become the head of the Council.
The villagers shuffled aside reluctantly for them. Sneda was lying on the dirt floor in a pool of blood that still pulsed weakly from the stump of her forearm where her hand had been. Beside her lay the knife that Marwen had sharpened only hours before, and next to that lay the white and lifeless hand that had been amputated.
Sneda’s oldest daughter, Leba, extended a dry chapped finger and pointed at Marwen. “There’s the weirdy witchett that hurt my mother, the very one.”
Marwen felt the unkind eyes of the people touch her like cold fingers.
“Hush,” Grondil said. She knelt, touched Sneda’s face and gently lifted the wounded arm. “Find me clean linen,” she said to Leba who stood biting her red raw hands until the cracks split and bled. The girl went searching.
Leba was a leader among the girls Marwen’s age, accepting into her circle of confidantes only those select few who had a measure of breeding or beauty or wealth. Leba had none of these, but she had wisdom in the matters of people and knew at a young age how to exercise her power. Marwen had never been included in Leba’s circle. One thing had saved Marwen’s skin growing up, and it was that Leba and Maug hated each other more than they hated anyone else.
“This one is too late for spells,” Grondil said. “But when magic fails, there is skill,” and while Marwen stood frozen in place by cold eyes, Grondil worked. Once Marwen bent to help Grondil, but Leba hissed, and the cold eyes, like fingers, pulled her up, squeezed and pushed at her. Grondil did not seem to notice, but Marwen sensed that it was Grondil who kept the fingers from becoming fists.
The smell of blood was strong. Marwen gazed at the knife, touched it with her mind and searched for any evil she might have left without knowing. She felt gall rise in her throat. There in the essence of the knife, woven among its point and blade, was the anger that Marwen had felt for Sneda when she sharpened the knife. Quickly Marwen looked up, searching for some distraction that would ease her nausea. Only the grains of sand in the hourglass moved, sifting to the bottom of the glass. She remembered the Tenets of the Tapestry, its counsel that the Oldwife be at peace with all men and women.
A mumbling half-blind old woman was slowly working her way through the crowd to Sneda’s feet. She was clothed strangely in a dress of rough green weel, clouted at the elbows and cuffs and tattered at the hem. Her apron, no less stitched and worn, was the blue of hot sky, with handprints of flour like clouds. On the old woman’s feet were yellow slippers. In this tiny village, Marwen was sure she had never seen this grandmother in all her life, and yet no one else in the room seemed to take notice of her or even see her. Marwen could not stop staring at the old woman’s free, her cataract eyes the color of ice, her skin falling like spidersilk, taut over the bones and drapey in the hollows.
“Who are you?” Marwen whispered.
The old woman did not speak, but she smiled sweetly at Marwen, nodded inanely and, with a wrinkled splotchy hand, made an arthritic pointing gesture at Sneda.
Grondil looked up and saw the old woman.
And then she did a thing Marwen did not understand at first. Though the Tenets of the Tapestry demanded that the Oldwife be soft-spoken and of gentle heart in all her dealings, never did they require that she be servile. Yet, before this old woman, Grondil bowed.