“No, nothing of the magic,” he said. His voice was not happy any longer but gruff and choked. His head shone with sweat.
“Give it to me,” she said, trying to stand up. “I don’t believe you.”
Cudgham’s eyes flickered from Marwen to the tapestry and back to Marwen. He rolled up the tapestry clumsily and held it tightly in two fists.
“Ye promised,” he said. “Ye said ye’d do for me—cook for me, clean and mend for me, and give me a little of your magic. Say ye promised.”
Marwen stared at him for a moment. What he was saying seemed garbled like a foreign language. She felt herself gag.
“I must seek the magic,” she said. “I know it is in my tapestry, give it to me!”
She lunged and felt Cudgham’s heavy fist striking her face. She felt no pain. Her vision blurred, but what he did next, she saw clearly enough. In two movements he strode to the fire and thrust the tapestry into it. The threads were oily and aflame before Marwen could scream. She ran toward the fire feeling as though she ran in a dream, straining every muscle only to move as a bug in honey. Cudgham grabbed her from behind and was holding her. “Ye would have broken your promise if I’d given it to ye, I knowed it. But ye can make yerself another. I will be witness, if ye stay with me.”
From the fire came a sound like hissing laughter as the flames devoured her tapestry.
Something snapped in her. With all her strength she freed one arm and raised it high.
“Dur! Moshe! Ip!”
She screamed the spell, a frightful sound in the house of Grondil who had never raised her voice.
Suddenly she was freed, and she turned.
Her eyes were blinded for a moment by the light of a new flame, and then she could see a thin column of green smoke rising from the body of a creature that crawled on the floor. She looked to the fireplace where the last of her tapestry was being consumed and back to the creature that crawled between her feet: an ip lizard, green and rust-striped, deadly poisonous.
A heavy lead-bone weariness enveloped her. She was strangely unafraid. She stroked the ip’s dry rough back and touched its mouth. She picked it up by the tail, dropped it into her apron pocket and watched it roll itself into a leathery ball and go to sleep. It did not poison her as she thought it would.
Chapter Four
In the darkness of a soul's worst sorrows are found great treasures of self-knowledge, if one has the courage to look for them.
When the villagers found her, she was sifting through the ashes with the hearthspoon, singing the spells of coming together and of finding, her face and hands gray with fine powder. Marwen did not seem to hear or see them and did not resist when they forced her to come away.
They laid hands on her and brought her before the Council, a group of village women who sat in a row like podhens on a roof. Marwen sat on the ground before them, rocking gently and whispering the words of a spell over and over. All around her, at a respectful distance, were gathered the villagers, some laughing and some talking angrily among themselves. The children played chasing games, and mothers passed out sweets to bribe them into stillness. The laughter of the children began to draw Marwen out of her trance. As she surfaced, a squeezing pain in her upper chest gripped and grew more intense until it seemed it would suffocate her.
Lirca and Dalett were whispering and staring at her with wide-eyed fascination. Into the village yard, Leba had her mother, Sneda, carried, where she lay drooling and moaning. Leba’s face above her was full of malevolence.
Gumbe Clayfire stood with his arms across his huge stomach and triumph in his smile. Only Master Clayware looked sad and older.
Maug stood apart from the crowd, tossing and catching rocks that, when he missed, fell close to Marwen.
The Council head rose, and everyone gradually fell silent.
“Marwen, apprentice to Grondil, this Council has been called to accuse you. You will listen, and before we pass sentence, you may speak.”
The Council head was Merva Leatherworker, sister to Srill. She rarely spoke to Marwen except when Marwen came to cast spells on her kitchen garden, and when she did speak, she would often smirk and say, “You look nothing like your mother. Pray you have not her evil heart as well.” Now she looked pleased, as though it were a great relief to have this opportunity to vindicate her family’s shame.
“You are accused of using your magic to a dark end, Marwen: that is, the living death of Sneda Shoemaker. You are also accused of the death of Grondil Oldwife. Let the witnesses testify.”
One by one members of the village came forward: the women who had seen Marwen cast the spell on the knife, the many who had heard Marwen and Grondil whispering the Taker’s name and Leba who reported her mother’s condition in great detail. When Merva spoke again, her voice was calm. “It is obvious to me that the Taker came to retrieve the life that you robbed, and somehow you tricked her, tricked her again into taking Grondil’s life instead of your own,” Merva said.
The villagers all murmured their agreement. One of Maug’s rocks fell on Marwen’s back with a soft thud. “I could turn you into an ip,” Marwen thought. “I could turn you all into...” Just then a man came running to Merva and whispered something to her. She looked at Marwen.
“Where is Cudgham Seedmaker, girl?”
Marwen felt Cudgham-ip’s warm heaviness in her lap, sleeping as he was in her apron pocket. Horror at the enormity of her deed chilled her. It was true. She was soulless, an empty shell with no purpose at all on Ve save to cause hurt at every turn.
“I do not know where my stepfather is,” she whispered.
Leba’s voice screeched near her. “Liar! You have probably killed him, too. I have seen you repel his attempts to be an affectionate father. Do witches have hearts?” She spat on Marwen’s face.
Marwen felt the saliva slide down her cheek, warm and thick. It was true, she was a liar. But she did have a heart. She knew she did, for it was heavy and swollen in her breast, and she knew it must burst at any moment. She sat in the dust unmoving.
Merva was speaking again, but Marwen did not hear. Remembering the Tenets of the Tapestry, she whispered a brief spell for help and understanding. She looked up at the villagers. One by one she looked into their eyes, and this time she saw what lay raw behind them: fear. They were afraid of her, they had feared her power as a child and the power she would have as Oldwife. But more than that, they feared her as a soulless one, as one born without a tapestry.
A glimmer of hope flashed in the wash of her despair like a bright fish swimming upstream in Stumble Brook. She was not soulless. Not anymore. She had a tapestry, Grondil had made her a tapestry after all. One who lost the tapestry and who died before it could be remade was destined to be lost or to suffer in the lands of the dead. But suffering was better than not existing at all, she thought. She looked around at the villagers, compassionate in her new hope. In her they saw all the dreadful possibilities of their own lives. She thought of Grondil, gentle as she touched a sore with her finger, and her heart swelled so full there was no room left for hating.
“And so, Marwen, by law, you have the opportunity to speak,” Merva was saying, each word like the crack of knife against bone. “Begin.”
Marwen stood. She wiped the spittle from her face, but it mixed with the ash and streaked her skin with two black stripes. She looked over to the hills and garnered strength. Perhaps her tapestry had a spirit of its own, perhaps if they killed her, she would find it while she wandered in the dead hills.