The Dragon's Tapestry

Chapter Fifteen

"I am sorry,” the man was saying to Vijocka. “How was I to know the lass had an ip for her familiar?”

Vijocka was not paying any attention to him. Her arms were around Marwen, consoling her. Marwen was not aware of sad­ness. Inside her was a horrible darkness, but she could not name it sadness. Having Vijocka’s arms around her felt good, and she ached for Grondil’s touch and longed to be with her.

“I said I was sorry and that is a better apology than more deserving ones have received. Now, Oldwife of Rute, the Prince sends for you, for he has need of your magic.”

Marwen looked up.

“Camlach?”

The soldier named Torbil glared at her with black eyes. “I like not the sound of his name in your mouth, Venutian wench.”

Vijocka began to protest, but Marwen stopped her with a ges­ture.

“I am Marwen Oldwife. I will go with you in place of Vijocka.”

“I go with no Venutian witch.”

“Silence!” Vijocka said. “If Camlach is in need of magic, her’s is the greater.”

“Nevertheless ...”

“I will not go,” Vijocka said. “My own people need me. Take Marwen or take no one.”

The soldier cursed into his beard and turned away from the window to wait for Marwen impatiently.

“Go quickly,” Vijocka said. “I will do the rights for Cud-gham-ip.”

Marwen nodded but did not move.

“Is there no hope now, Vijocka? Can I never have my tapestry?”

Vijocka paused before she answered. “I know of no way, but perhaps you will find one. You are the wizard’s heir.”

Marwen stood unmoving until Vijocka pushed her gently out the door. “Hurry,” she said, her voice hushed, urgent. She walked with her to the wingwand fields where the soldier waited.

Cullerwind wailed in the hollows and blew Marwen off bal­ance. The dark clouds in the north had dispersed.

“Take fresh beasts and leave your own here to rest,” Vijocka said.

She introduced Marwen to a sleek young beast, grass-green with black wing markings. “This is Fallspar, and this is Grafewing,” she said giving the soldier a heavy-set male with mottled blue and gray wings.

She took Marwen aside just before she mounted.

“Take care. You hold a prince’s heart in your hands if I am not amiss, and that is a great power in itself.” Marwen remembered Camlach climbing up the hill, foolishly, bravely before the dragon’s eyes, and she thought what a great thing it would be to hold that good heart as her own.

“Truly, Vijocka?” She wondered why this belief came harder to her than any other now.

The Oldwife nodded. Torbil grunted impatiently. Marwen waved and signaled the wingwand to fly.

“Go with the blessings of the Mother!” Vijocka called as they rose into the air.

The green wings of Fallspar met at the top, enfolding Marwen in an envelope through which the noonsun shone, then dropped until they met at the bottom revealing to her a panoramic view of the land that changed with almost every other wingbeat.

Fleshy pale-leafed weeds, almost as high as her waist, grew profusely on the foothills far below. They were the largest vege­tation Marwen had ever seen, and she wondered at the sight.

Her wonder soon faded, however, when, after traveling through nuwind, they rounded a low soft-sloped mountain and came in sight of true mountains. With each wingbeat they loomed larger, and Marwen had to remind herself to breathe. Depthless and hazy they seemed from this distance, layered shades of lavender, flat and sharp-edged. Below them was a hill unremarkable by comparison.

When they landed on the lower reaches of the hill, Marwen discovered she had underestimated the size of the pale plants. Their tender green fingers reached almost to the height of her breast. Yellow blooms like rings of jewels adorned the tallest. She felt as small as a hearthcat hiding in the grasses.

“What is this plant?” Marwen asked as the soldier placed socks on the wingwands’ antennae.

“Fedderweed,” he said gruffly. “It is poisonous. It seems to be good only to provide cover.”

The wingwands ignored the fedderweed and grazed on the grass that lay crushed and blown beneath like old yellow hair.

“I have never seen such large flowers....” Marwen said.

“Silence!” the soldier growled, crouching in the weeds. He pointed to the hill that rose before them. “See there. That is Perdoneg’s favorite sleeping place, around the top. He is gone now, but your voice is loud enough for a dragon’s ears to hear all the way to the border.”

The hill looked familiar to her and beautiful but for the black­ened patches where the grass had been burned away.

“Where is Prince Camlach?”

The soldier nodded toward the hill.

“Near the top of that hill is a house that Perdoneg continues to spare.” Marwen looked in the direction that Torbil gestured. Nestled in a dimple of the hill near the age-worn summit was the small house of clay and straw bricks, thatch-roofed and snug, just as she had seen it twice before. She could see only vaguely the wild flowers that grew over the fence, around the doorway of the house, and out of the coping stones, the delicate color of flowers that grow without seeding in wild places. But all around the yard, where flowers had been when Marwen had had the seeing in the well, was a black charred scar, and in soft dark lumps on the slope lay the roasted remains of the weedsheep that had once grazed there.

Torbil was whispering, a sound like rolling gravel. “He senses when anyone comes near it and kills all who approach. How the Prince got up there only the Mother knows. Crob has gone to bring some of the women and children from Rune-dar to the house, but before he left he sent me for the Oldwife of Rute.

His message to her was: ‘There is some magic in this house. Come help us find it.’ I am to go with you to the house.”

Marwen could hear the fear in his voice. If she failed, he, too, would die.

But Marwen was not afraid. From the beginning of time, she had been meant to see this house, to go into it, and to find its secret—the power that preserved it from Perdoneg’s fire. Still the gods did not love the foolish and would expect her to use good sense. She could not risk walking boldly up the side of the hill, for the wings of the dragon were swift and silent, and if he were not here now, he could be in the next breath.

Marwen knelt before a particularly large fedderweed, its branches reaching out like thin arms, its fleshy leaves finely veined.

“Hail, lady fedderweed, dressed in green lace and jeweled in gold. I am Marwen Oldwife of Marmawell, daughter of Nimroth, the wizard who once walked among you. I need your help.”

Immediately the wind sang softly through the plant’s leaves. Marwen listened, and it seemed after a time that she heard, beyond the fair song of the fedderweed, a deeper voice, a richer song. She began to walk toward the sound.

“Come,” Marwen whispered to the soldier. He stood staring as she walked a few paces and then, bending low, he rushed to catch up.

“I do not hold with any Venutian sorcery,” he said behind her.

She gestured to him for silence. The song was one of great beauty and sadness and pain. It became louder as they came closer to the hill. They circled it to its northern slope.

Marwen’s thighs cramped, walking hunched as she was, but the song grew ever nearer and stronger. At last, when they were practically at the foot of the hill, Marwen saw the singer.

She had no name for what she saw, and she stared open­ mouthed. It was not grass or flower but a god of soil and stem, nevertheless. Beside it she felt soft and young. The soldier looked at her and said, “Tree. It is called tree.” Then he thought for a moment and added, “There are trees in the mountains, but this one comes from a place where there are many such giant plants, and the wingwands could fit into the palm of your hand. Or so the legend goes.”

Its huge stem was covered in tough brown hide, and its limbs were muscular and tuberous. One of the large branches, a frac­tion of the tree itself, had been torn away, leaving an open white wound and the remaining branches cupping cold sky where once had been living green.

Marwen shook her head in disbelief and walked slowly toward the tree. It smelled clean like rain, sweet like the earth, and in its wind-frayed leaves, the breezes tossed and played. Among its leaves were white fruit bearing down the branches.

“By the gods—Perdoneg! He’s back!” Torbil whispered fiercely, his voice just short of shrieking. Marwen glanced upward a moment to the north sky where the sun burned hot and bright on the scales of a great winged creature. Before it flew a frantic group of wingwands and riders. She looked again at the tree.

“Ah,” she said softly, circling the tree and touching it gently with her fingers.

“Hide us,” Torbil said desperately.

Behind the tree the hill rose sharply upward, and where the tree’s feet were rooted in the earth was a small cave.

“We’ll be burned alive,” he said. “The dragon can smell human flesh a furlong away.”

“There,” Marwen said pointing to the cave. “This is the gift the tree gives.”

She bent and hunched into the cave. It was cool and moist. In only a few paces, Marwen was forced to go on hands and knees through a tunnell-like aperture that opened suddenly to a large womb of blackness. Somewhere off to her right, water fell and splashed her with points of cold.

The soldier had followed behind, his huge hot breaths on her heels, but he had stopped and now was lodged in the tunnel.

“My shoulders won’t go through,” he grunted.

“Hush,” Marwen whispered. “This is a sacred place. If you can­not come in, you are not meant to be here. Stay and wait for me.”

With a grunt he pushed his way through at last, leaving shreds of shirt and skin clinging to the rock.

Marwen held out her hands, palms together, and whispered an incantation. Slowly, between her palms, a cool white flame grew until, carefully, she pulled one hand away, and the flame nestled brightly in the other. It illuminated a stone stairway before them.

“Great Mother!” exclaimed the soldier, and Marwen knew from the tone of his voice it was a prayer and not a curse. The cave was a large vault of red granite that glittered from floor to ceiling in Marwen’s bit of werelight, but more beautiful still was the waterfall shrouded in a soft mist.

Lying beside a rock basin filled with water was an old tapestry pouch.

“The house must be at the top of the stairs,” said the soldier. “Come. Once in the house, we are safe.”

“Wait,” she said. She hunched down to look at it more close­ly. Embroidered into the pouch was a dragon without eyes, writhing in the wind.

“Great Gods! What are you doing? Come!” He grabbed her arm, but she wrenched it from his grasp without looking away from the pouch.

Her fingers jumped when she touched the pouch, alive as it was with magic. Carefully, the thin old threads grasped in her fingers, she pulled the top right corner of the tapestry out. A tree had been woven there, a tree with white fruit, and against the tree leaned a staff. Nimroth’s tapestry, not Perdoneg’s. So fragile were the threads that they began to tear beneath her gen­tle touch, and she tucked the tapestry back into the pouch.

It had been left here for her by her father. He had gone to his death without his tapestry so that she would find it, though she did not know why. Marwen felt herself growing heavier and lighter all at once. Her soul was sinking close to the earth, acquiring weight and substance, and at the same time becoming tiny as a wind-borne seed, thin as the wingscale of a wingwand.

“Come, there is no time,” Marwen said quietly. She closed her fist on the werelight, snuffing it. They climbed the stone staircase in silent haste and in darkness, going straight up as if in a long narrow chimney. At last Marwen felt a bit of wind on her face and saw a patch of light above her, round and blue as a moon.

The man below her was becoming claustrophobic and swore at himself at close intervals, finally cursing Marwen as well.

“If Perdoneg hears you, one breath of his fire down this hole will roast us both,” Marwen whispered. As if in testament, the moon of light above went out briefly, eclipsed by dragon-dark­ness.

“Can’t breathe,” he muttered, and then he was quiet.

The hole emerged into a grotto. She pulled aside a curtain of flowers and saw that they faced the east window of the little house. It was not far to the doorway of the house but far enough to die. The air of noonmonth felt thick and warm in her mouth after the cool thin air of the cave. With a brief prayer, Marwen picked up a pebble from the floor of the cave, kissed it and tossed it through the window. The soldier entered the grot­to then, sweating and bloody, filling almost the entire space with his body. It was he that Camlach saw when he peered out the window, and he to whom the Prince gestured.

“Great gods, the dragon is above us!” Torbil half-whispered, half-shrieked.

“Do as I say,” Marwen said.

The soldier nodded, gripping his sword hilt convulsively.

“Hold this tapestry pouch with me, and when I say, run.”

She pictured the blind dragon in the wind, the blind dragon of the tapestry pouch. She whispered her strongest spell of hid­ing and slipped through the curtain of flowers. “Run!”

Like phantoms they darted around the corner and into the door.

A roar like a winter wind filled their ears, and the straw-chinked bricks around the doorway glowed with flames. A figure was beating out the glowing straw with his cloak. Torbil joined him, but Marwen stood still, feeling the power in the house like a heavy quiet as her eyes adjusted to the dimness. Soon there was the smell of smoke and baked mud but no more flames. Perdoneg would not or could not destroy the house.

The two men stood panting, their faces streaked black and their hair gray with ash and soot, before Camlach finally looked at Marwen.

The Prince appeared years older than when Marwen first looked at him, but as recognition dawned on his face, the extra years melted away.

“Marwen!” he exclaimed.

He strode forward as if he would take her in his arms, and then he stopped, and his smile faded. Marwen faced him calmly, soberly. He was tanned, and his eyes shone with health. His broken nose had set a little oddly, but it seemed only to make his face more manly.

“I was coming to you when your man found me at Rute,” she said. There was nothing soft in her voice.

“I trust he has treated you like a princess.”

Marwen glanced at Torbil, who stood whey-faced and agape, and said, “Most royally. But we are thirsty. Have you anything to drink?”

Camlach shook his head. “Nothing. And no food. There is nothing here, nothing of value at all that I can find. Perhaps this is not Nimroth’s house after all.”

She held out to him the worn threadbare tapestry pouch she had found. “This is his house. I found this hidden in the cave beneath the hill. It is not Perdoneg’s tapestry but Nimroth’s. It will help us, for I know the story it tells. Now we need only the dragon’s tapestry....”

She began to search the house with her eyes and then with her magic.

It consisted of a main room, a smaller room and a pantry, all unlit by anything save the east window.

Camlach cleared his throat. “But where is Maug?”

“I left him behind,” Marwen said, looking in every corner. She glanced at Camlach. “No, do not smile, Prince Camlach, for I have possibly left him to his death. I left him alone in the hills not a quarter the way to Loobhan.”

“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.

On her hands and knees, forgetting to breathe or speak, Marwen ran her hands over the rich pictures that some skilled hand had woven: the white wingwand circled in ice gozzys, the flower of death; the staff also circled in white ice gozzys; the symbols of the skull, bloodpetal and witchwafer.

She pushed the table aside. It toppled over.

“This is not a greatrug,” she cried aloud to no one. “This is Perdoneg’s tapestry!”

Perdoneg was waiting, hunkered on the hill, when she walked out the door of the shack. At the bottom of the hill, the wingwands, laden with frightened people, flew into the air like light soundless birds, fleeing. Camlach and Torbil were creeping up the hillside, and Marwen lifted her left hand to stop them. The heavy tapestry, draped over her shoulders, trailed behind her in the dust. In the dragon’s shadow, the house shrank into twi­light, and before his dark beauty, Marwen was a pale phantom. In her right hand, the hourglass gleamed with a dull silver light.

Perdoneg’s yellow eyes met hers lustfully. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, his great tooth-filled jaw went slack.

Marwen’s voice sounded small and weak in the face of the dragon, but she could not raise it. “Yes. You are not mistaken, Perdoneg. This is your tapestry.”

His body quivered and a foul smoke began to seep from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. Claws huge and curved slid in and out of their thick sheaths. His tongue shone like char­coal and lolled in a black mouth.

“So, it has not been destroyed,” Perdoneg said. His neck and back rippled and arched in triumph, and within his belly Marwen could hear the bubble and belch of tar and smoke.

“You know your tapestry cannot be destroyed by anything save your own dragonfire,” Marwen said, and she pulled the tapestry closer about her body.

“I can kill you still,” he hissed. “I need not burn you. Long have I awaited this moment.” The pupils in his deep yellow eyes spun black and hideous, and Marwen looked beneath them and into his hot mouth.

“It is my gift to interpret the tapestry, Perdoneg. Before you kill me, I will do this for you,” she said in a still quiet voice. Per­doneg answered nothing.

“At your birth you were promised in your tapestry that you would kill a wizard and his heir, and rule over a new age in which the dragons would once again prevail. Failing this, you must continue to dwell in the prison to which Morda-hon sent you in ages past.”

“I will not fail,” the dragon hissed, and a thread of blue flame licked dose to Marwen. “I will kill you with claw and tail, and then I will seek your cowardly father, and he, too, will die. Evil must have its time and its place in the world or that which is good dies, too.” The scaly hide over his haunches trembled and twitched in anticipation.

Marwen nodded slowly. “But your time is not now, Perdoneg. You have come in body and pursued me with fire, but your magic you cannot use. Your tapestry is unfulfilled, and so your magic remains trapped in the lost lands. Furthermore, your tapestry will not be fulfilled.”

She held up the hourglass so that the gold base faced the dragon, mirroring his leering face full of aged yellow teeth. She made a spell for seeing, a long-worded difficult spell that sapped the magic from her as with a great sucking mouth. She could taste the saltiness of her own sweat on her lips. Perdoneg’s fires burned quiet.

Slowly an image moved in the gold, vague at first, then more clear, until, reflected in Perdoneg’s huge black pupils that dilat­ed and contracted unceasingly, she could see the image of a man walking. His head was bent and bearded with days, and his feet moved with a dogged painful plodding toward a land shrouded in mists and twilight. The land of the dead. The man bore a staff, and on the crook of the staff were runes spelling a name: Nimroth.

“Seventeen years ago,” Marwen whispered dryly, “Nimroth left his house and traveled by foot across the empty hills until he came to the town of Marmawell where lived a young and fair maiden named Srill. She knew she bore the wizard’s heir, but her secret died with her. While the child was yet a babe in arms, Nimroth crossed the border of the land he was seeking, the land of death. He walked into that land with eyes open, knowing well the way, as all wizards do.” She dropped the hourglass suddenly, as if it had taken all her strength to hold it up to that point. She forced her spine to straighten.

“You will not kill Nimroth, Perdoneg, for he is already dead. Your tapestry remains unfulfilled. Go back to your prison.”

There was a silence as before the crack of lightening and then a scream like wind in fire vibrated the ground beneath her feet. “A trick!” he screeched. “It is a trick.” His head writhed back­ward, and in his chest Marwen could hear a roar like wind in a chimney. Fire vomited from his mouth with blinding brightness until the sky darkened with smoke, and Marwen coughed and cowered in the doorway.

“You know it is no trick, Perdoneg,” Marwen cried. Her voice was trembling so that she scarcely recognized it. She swal­lowed hard. “But if you need further proof, I have it. See.” Without thinking, with shaking fingers, she took the richly woven tapestry pouch off her shoulder. Out of it she drew Nimroth’s tapestry, her father’s tapestry, and laid it, narrow and old, upon the ground before the dragon. She stared at the wondrous beautiful tapestry, the tapestry that spoke of foiling evil and defeating dragons and of walking open-eyed into death. She did not look up. In a moment the colors of the tapestry dimmed, and the threads loosened and filmed over with dust. In another moment it began to darken and shrink.

“You know this is Nimroth’s tapestry, don’t you, dragon. See, see how it blackens and shrivels and dissolves to dust before your eyes, as Crob’s body on the hill is black and shriveled and returns to dust. As Nimroth is dead, so has his tapestry passed away.”

By the time she was finished speaking, only the lifethread remained among the dust, warped and wrinkled as a worm. She stood and lifted her arm high, standing almost on tiptoe. She was elated, stunned, shaking with her own power. “Go, dragon, back to your prison,” she commanded in the language of cre­ation, not knowing she knew the words. Perdoneg’s body thrashed, and his tail thudded upon the ground again and again and again, until Marwen’s teeth seemed to loosen in her jaw, and she shrank under the protection of his tapestry. Finally his violence eased, and he brought his head close to hers, a great head full of teeth and tongue and mucous-filled eyes and nostrils crusted with carbon. Marwen choked in the burning stench and shrank back.

“Yes, I, too, am ruled by the law of the tapestry,” Perdoneg hissed, “but my magic is great and cannot wholly be ruled by either tapestry or wizard. Before I return to my prison, a spell I cast upon you unto death, one slow and sure so that you may see the Taker coming from afar, remembering that you have no tapestry. And when you come to me in my kingdom, your suf­ferings will not end.”

In one wind-filled beat, Perdoneg lifted his weight on great wings and rose into the air.

In three wingbeats he was gone.