The Dragon's Tapestry

Grondil stopped. She did not look at Marwen but down at her hands. Marwen saw they were trembling and stared at them until Grondil stuffed them in her apron pocket where she fin­gered something nervously.

“It is not only because of Sneda, child,” she said quietly. “You have robbed the Taker. She will be back. A life she was sent for, a life she will have, and now it will not be Sneda’s life but another she seeks. The Taker is old, caring not for youth, and blind, caring not for beauty. You should have been the Taker’s baby, but I hid you from her. Now you have touched her, and she will know where to find you. But she can be slow. You will go. Soon. Now.”

Grondil walked past her into the yard. A herd of wingwands grazed on the near slope and Grondil pointed.

“Of my three wingwands, I give you one. Choose your mount and return to me for your pack.” The sun shone in her eyes clear as water. “I must give you something else before you leave.”

“Who will apprentice me?” Marwen asked again weakly, but Grondil had already turned away.

She walked numbly toward the wingwand herd straggled on the slope, some eating, some sleeping, some uncurling their tongues into the shallow Stumble Brook. Grondil’s house was on the outer yarding of the village, and so Marwen avoided pass­ing all but Tamal Deathsayer’s house. She stopped, remember­ing the day Grondil had cured his child’s fever and how he had smiled at her that day. But not since. No one noticed her, for they were busy rethatching the roof, and the straw dust billowed like yellow smoke. She touched the house as she passed, the mud bricks warm as flesh. The wind on her face chilled her teeth, sucked at the hem of her shift.

“It is time I left,” Marwen said aloud, so that her ears might agree with her mouth. “My magic has surpassed that of Gron­dil’s. I have tricked the Taker. I will not cast spells on knives and kitchen gardens. I have heard Grondil sing of the wizard in her prayers, and if he is a fable, I will know of it before the Taker leads me to her land. Perhaps, for me, the wizard will have a see­ing and give me a tapestry....”

Thus Marwen consoled herself until she was among the herd. The wingwands had never seemed so large before. They lifted their wings in the blowing wind and snorted against the grass. Three of them turned and walked toward Marwen. She stroked the wing of Sheerpaz, tickled the rough cere at the base of Broomstraw’s antenna and ducked under Nightshade’s enor­mous girth. She checked their shelljoints for parasites with an experienced eye.

The wingwands had become Marwen’s friends when, as a child, she had played alone in the fields and hills. The creatures did not know that she was a soulless one, that she had no tapestry. At one time, when she had become aware of her magic and that it gave her power the other children did not have, she had used it to try and win the love of her peers. Then, instead of just fearing her, they also despised her. With time she had learned to embrace her loneliness and treasure it. Even so, there had always been Grondil and the wingwands.

It was a great thing to inherit a wingwand. Few families in the village owned one, and only the richest had two or three. In Marmawell their beauty was more prized than their usefulness. Only Trader Buflle ever used his beast to travel great distances, and it showed. The muscles at Peggypin’s wingbase were thick and bulbous, and her left eye ran with green fluid from an infec­tion, a bit of dirt that had cut into her eye when in flight. On the slope newborn Butterbug looked like a yellow sundewsie with its petals fluttering in the wind; his mother, Rue-the-day, catching the pink rays of the Morningmonth sun like a stempellow in bloom, moved away from Marwen without alarm, calling her baby after her.

Plumbumble was Grondil’s favorite and Rainbow, Cudgham’s. Of Grondil’s three, that left Opalwing. She had a long slender body, cream-colored, but her wings were her great beauty. Almost transparent, they fanned out like iridescent veils, shattering light into soft prism shards. Marwen had rarely ridden her, for she was young and somewhat skittish, but Grondil had told her long ago that one day Opalwing would be her own, that she had chosen her especially for Marwen, had sent Buffle Spicetrader on a long search for her. Marwen spoke softly in the beast’s own language, and Opalwing sidled away. Again Marwen spoke to her, let the beast taste her skin, stroked her antennae until she was calm.