“Being family, of course…” Colin began.
“We realized that, and that it was hard on him, particularly since he had always rather looked up to Willie—tagged along, making a regular nuisance of himself when he visited us at Fort Iceworm, he did. But he took on so long and so loud and in such a temper, that it was all Bron and I could do to calm Maudie. See, Fearchar challenged Willie to a duel, of all the silly things, for the ruin of his niece—and he no more than thirteen years old—when anybody could see she was not ruined, being a bit more than she was, rather than a bit less.” She turned to Maggie and smiled. “Your father made some mistakes when he was young, but he’s a good man, for all that. He just told Fearchar in front of the whole tavern that he wouldn’t fight him, and that was that. Fearchar called him a coward and slapped him publicly, and Willie just nodded and went back to his brew. The men at the tavern said Fearchar would have jumped onto him anyway and given him a thrashing, but they held him off. Finally he had to go away. Then he starts in pestering Maud to change Willie to a hare, saying he was like a hare because he was scared, y’know, to fight Fearchar. Maudie wasn’t happy about the wedding, nor about Bron being so sad with missin’ Willie, but she weren’t daft.”
“Gran would never do anything to hurt my Dad!” Maggie said stoutly. “And she told me herself Mama wouldn’t elope with him so he wouldn’t have to marry Ellender. What was all the fuss?”
“Just as I said, darlin’. Your uncle didn’t see things that way. He kept pestering your Gran for that spell ’til she finally told him if he didn’t be still she’d turn him into a magpie. That was when he left.”
“Sounds like everybody should have been relieved, to me,” said Colin.
“It was quieter,” Sybil admitted. “But it was a shame too. He was a disappointed young man, not yet come to his powers, and mother only barely in the ground. He felt we’d all disgraced him and turned against him. I trust the years have shown him better.” She poured a little more tea and said, “So I was thinking, dearie, that if your travels looking for Winnie take you to Queenston or thereabouts, you might ask after him. That was where my last sighting of him was.”
“Of course.” Maggie stretched and yawned, and in her stretch her eyes fell on her pack, hanging from a nail on the wall. “Oh, Auntie, I brought you a present.” She got up and fetched the trap, setting it on the table before her aunt, who pounced on it.
“An iron trap!” her breath sucked in and she clicked her tongue, “Oh, child, where did you get such a wicked thing?”
“Colin took it off the foot of a rabbit. He said he thought it might have been set by the same man who shot at my dad last winter; the rabbit said so, I mean.”
Gingerly, Sybil carried it to a little cabinet next to the fireplace. Inside this were metal-working tools, a small anvil, hammer, and tongs among them, along with some others Colin didn’t recognize.
“I’d pity the bandit that thought to rob your life savings!” Colin said. “Who’d ever think you were a blacksmith, ma’am?”
Aunt Sybil dimpled with pleasure as she returned to the table. She carried a crystal globe with her, about the size of a small pumpkin. “Metalwork is a hobby, really. I don’t get to use my craft professionally as much as I would like—a body has to be scrupulous with a gift like mine, or cause a lot of damage.”
Maggie laughed, a bit rudely, Colin thought. “Auntie, you must be the first one in our entire family to seriously worry about her magic causing damage!”
Aunt Sybil looked at her for a moment. “Not quite the first, child, nor the last, either.” She sat down and placed the crystal before them. “I suppose it comes of being able to live other people’s lives, second-hand though it is. It’s a hard thing to hurt someone you understand. Troubles the sleep. So I do my metalwork when I can get metal, and peek a bit for the fun of it between serious craftwork commissions, and with that and keeping this old cottage together, I do keep busy.”
“Can you show me what’s happening to Winnie now?” Maggie asked, leaning forward and looking into the blank glass.
“To be sure, to be sure,” replied her aunt, turning the ball over in her hands and looking deeply into it. What at first appeared to be a stray flicker from the candle stirred in the center of the ball, to gradually grow into a bright glow that began suddenly to fragment, sending motes of colored light dancing about the room.
“Ah, yes,” said Aunt Sybil with satisfaction. “I believe that must be it.”
All they could see was the image of a dagger, glittering nastily through the rainbow lights. Slowly, that moved away, and a throat came into view, slender and pale, and above that and around it, a swath of cornsilk hair. Long, tapering fingers with broken nails dragged the hair back, and a pair of sleep-dazed, startled green eyes peered out through the parted curtain of hair.
“Out, you hussy!” hissed a voice behind the dagger. “Leave this camp at once if you want to stay alive and pretty!”
Amberwine gulped. She was not used to threats. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“Oh, I’m sure you do that, my fine fancy lady. But begging is for honest gypsies, not faithless false trollops such as yourself! Out with you!” The voice turned into a black-haired woman, who leaned into the range of the glass, the better to menace the shrinking Amberwine. Except for the color of her hair and the green of the dress she wore, the second woman’s image was indistinct.
Aunt Sybil frowned and put fingertips to her forehead. “Let me just see now if I can fine-tune this.”
“Ooooh, Auntie!” Maggie’s nose nearly touched the glass in her anxiety to see more. “You’ve got her! Poor Winnie, what an ugly customer that old bat is!”
Colin and Sybil each touched Maggie’s shoulder, and she scooted back so they could see.
Sybil’s breath hissed out in surprise. “Well, I’ll be burned. If it isn’t that charlatan, Xenobia. I might have known she’d be behind this sort of thing.”
“Xenobia?” Maggie asked. “Who’s she?”
“She’s beautiful,” sighed Colin, evidently not referring to Xenobia, who was flashing her knife in glittering arcs at Amberwine, who finally had wakened to her danger and was reaching to pull on her boots before making an exit.
“Not so fast, my lady,” said Xenobia. “You can just leave those behind to pay for your keep.”
Amberwine complied, but said, “Quite a costly straw pile you have here, your highness. Four gold rings, a silk dress, a fine woolen cloak my sister wove for me, my moonstone necklace, and a good gray mare. Now my fine leather boots.” She stood up barefoot in her shift and Sybil gasped.
“Consider it your dowry for coming away with my son, girlie!” laughed the other woman. “Pity you couldn’t hold him, weren’t it?”
“Pity my husband didn’t kill him when he found us together on the moor,” Amberwine replied over her shoulder as she hurried out into the dimness beyond the glass. “And me along with him.”
The dagger flashed as Xenobia threw it, and the glass went dark.
“Get it back, Aunt Sybil!” cried Maggie.
“I’m trying, child, but violence disrupts my concentration—ah, here…” The rainbow colors danced briefly to show Amberwine hurrying down a path. Still vibrating in a tree she had just passed was the gypsy dagger.
“Perhaps we should start tonight,” Maggie said. “She seems to be in terrible danger.”
“Yes,” Colin said. “Perhaps we should. For that lovely lady to be so mistreated by that AWFUL witch—oh, excuse me, I do beg your pardon!”
Aunt Sybil grinned at him. “The false part of your statement, lad, is that Xenobia is not a witch at all. Doesn’t even have the second sight a lot of her people have. She’s just a charlatan who calls herself Queen of the Gypsies.” She turned to Maggie. “How long has your sister been missing, now?”
Maggie shook her head and looked at Colin, who replied, “From the last full moon to this, from what Giles said, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps half again that t
ime since I met him and Maggie and I started this journey.”
Sybil nodded. “Good. Then it could hardly be the gypsy’s child.”
“Child?” Maggie asked.
“Haven’t you helped your granny midwife, girl? Your sister is at least five months into her pregnancy.”
“I thought they’d been feeding her well—she did look a bit stout.”
“I didn’t think so,” said Colin.
“As for leaving tonight, that would be foolishness. You’re weary to the bone on my behalf now, dear, and both of you on foot. Rest well this night and you’ll make up your lost time the quicker for it.”
“I don’t think I can sleep,” Maggie said. “Poor Winnie!”
“Chingachgook is having no problem on that score,” said Sybil, nudging the cat, still stretched out in oblivious repose, as she returned the glass to its place above the hearth.
“Odd name for a cat,” Colin remarked, fingering his guitar as he always did when distracted or confused.
“It’s a family name,” Sybil replied. “Handed down from one of our distant ancestors, a foreign sailor. Legend has it that he was a savage warrior from far across the seas who wooed and won, or was it the other way around? one of our early ancestresses. Some of our elder kin once bore his peculiar names, but as we’ve tried to become more—Argonian—we’ve passed these names on to our familiars instead. Except it’s difficult to keep calling a budgie bird Osawatomie all the time, so I just call him Budgie.”
Maggie had jumped up and begun pacing. “How can you talk of such things at a time like this! We’ve simply got to find Winnie. Pregnant! Poor dear, I’ve got to get to her now and take her home. If she’s so far gone as you say, Auntie, it can’t possibly be that cursed gypsy’s. Perhaps—no, oh, I hope we can find her before something terrible happens.”
“Settle down, dear. Really, you children must be off to bed.”
“Sit down, Maggie,” Colin encouraged. “Here, I’ll play us a lullaby.”
He did so, and halfway through the lullaby, which was a long, monotonous musical recitation of King Finbar’s coronation address, Maggie was climbing the ladder to the loft. Colin himself was yawning, as was Aunt Sybil, who rubbed her eyes and beamed at him. “You are a very talented young man. Are you by any chance of siren descent?”
“I don’t know. I’m an orphan, actually. I was raised by my Uncle Jack and Aunt Fiona in East Headpenney. Of course, Uncle Jack wasn’t really my true Uncle—he was cousin to my father or somesuch thing. At any rate, he didn’t like to talk about my folks much.”
She got up and went to her metalworking cabinet. “East Headpenney is a charming place. I was looking at the harvest there last autumn. Very well, they did.” She smiled. “Play one more, dear. I’ll cast a little spell of enhancement, just the standard one, and with your ability you should be able to put yourself to sleep with it. I must stay awake tonight and make a little going-away present for Maggie, but I’m sure if you sing The Minutes of The Seventh Tribunal that would do the trick for you.” After casting her spell, she stuck bits of cloth in her own ears.
He did as she suggested, and it worked so well that neither he nor Maggie were wakened by the firing, hammering, and polishing of metal that went on throughout the night.
6
“Remember, dear,” Aunt Sybil told her as Maggie tucked the magic metal mirror into her apron pocket. “I could only give you three visions, so use them wisely to find your sister.”
Maggie hugged and kissed her aunt one more time, then Sybil embraced Colin as well before the young people and the cat set off back down the path to the highway.
It was a long way to Lord Rowan’s hall, and longer still on foot. Determined as Maggie’s heel-and-toe stomp approach to getting to their destination was, Colin had to hold back his long-legged stride to avoid leaving her behind. By suppertime the first night both, of them were exhausted, and sat glumly nursing their blisters by the side of the road. They were unwilling to make even a small detour now to find a private place to camp for the night.
“Your aunt is a lovely old woman, Maggie,” Colin said, painfully easing off one of his boots. “But I can’t help wishing she could have loaned us something more immediately useful than a magic mirror—say, seven-league boots, for instance.”
Maggie clenched her teeth and fought back the tears that lurked just under her eyelids as she removed her own boots. “I wish we at least had some of Moonshine’s healing water, so our feet would be fit for travel tomorrow. We should have gone back to that village we passed just before Auntie’s house and bought horses.”
“That’s what I wanted to do, if you’ll recall, Mistress Brown,” griped Colin. “But, no, you didn’t want to spend the time.”
“If we come to another place tomorrow, maybe we can buy a horse.”
“A horse?”
“Dad didn’t give me enough money to buy a lot of horses on this trip, since he supplied us with some. Do you have enough for another?”
His eyes fell under her challenging stare. “No.”
“Oh, don’t look so put-upon. We can ride double or take turns. I didn’t intend to hog it all for myself.”
Colin poured a little water from his waterskin over his sore feet, then passed the water to her. “I hope your sister appreciates all this worry and pain on her behalf!”
“She—oooh, that hurts!—she will. She’d do the same for me, or have some knight or other do it for her, at any rate.” She had finished bandaging one foot, and bathed the other from the waterskin before bandaging it as well. “If you knew her, you wouldn’t mind this so much, really.”
Remembering the green-eyed, pale haired, lithesome-though-pregnant vision, Colin nodded. “I suppose not.”
“Here,” Maggie said, finishing her own feet. “Put your foot up here and I’ll bandage it.”
“My boot won’t fit tomorrow with all that under there.”
“So tomorrow we’ll take it off. Tonight it’ll keep from rubbing your blankets.” As she wrapped she continued. “The thing about Winnie isn’t so much just that she’s lovely, or charming, or any of that stuff.”
“It helps,” Colin groaned.
“I guess it might, for you. But—you remember the unicorn?” Colin said that, naturally, he did. “Well, Winnie’s a bit like him. She makes you feel good—as if you’re very important to her. Of course, I know I am—we’ve always been friends since we were babies. But she makes everybody feel that way.” Colin appeared skeptical of such boundless grace. Maggie continued, determined that he should understand. “Many’s the time when I was small I was teased by the other kids because I’m different, being a witch, and dark, and all. Gran couldn’t turn every child in the village into something animalistic—the little brats would have loved it! And Gran couldn’t understand why I wanted to be like them anyway. She thinks we’re a lot better, and, though I agree now that it would be boring to be the same as everyone else, I felt differently then.
“They all wanted to play with Winnie, of course, but she’d turn her back on them in a minute if they didn’t include me. She always listened to me, even if she didn’t understand all of the witching stuff. She cared about it because I do. When Dad gave us a tutor and classes in how to be ladies and have manners and social style and such, Winnie didn’t even need to be taught, but I could never get the way of it. She’d coach me extra so I wouldn’t look the fool in front of Dad, then make jokes about how silly the whole thing was, anyway.”
Colin withdrew his freshly bandaged feet and Maggie looked down for a moment at her rough, dirty hands. “I’ve missed her a lot, Colin. I could only stand for her going away because she really seemed to swoon over Rowan, once she saw him, and would have a lovely big house and meet all those court people. I was planning to go visit her this summer, if it hadn’t been for Dad’s accident and Gran needing me at home.”
The minstrel was not wholly convinced. “I find it hard to imagine such a virtuous person as you are saying she
is doing what she did.”
“I didn’t say she isn’t an ass sometimes,” Maggie admitted. “If she had to run her own household and do all the chores without the benefit of servants, it would have been impossible for her. She’s good with servants though. They all like her, and she knows how to get what she wants from them. She’s just not very good at handling any sort of unpleasantness. People are never unkind to her, so I suppose unkindness isn’t very real to her.” She winced, remembering the vision in the crystal, and continued in a smaller voice. “She’d rather just go to sleep and forget about it than have to face doing something to make someone unhappy. That always has made ME unhappy. I could never see why she’s not better at making decisions. She said she didn’t have to be because I did it so well.” She frowned. “That’s why it’s difficult for me to credit your song. If she were to go off with someone, it might be for a little while, on the spur of the moment, while she could still see the turrets of her own home across the moors and know it was all very safe and romantic and fun. But to leave altogether? Without asking anyone or packing anything?”
“People do change,” Colin said gently.
Ching came bounding out of the woods with a rabbit in his mouth.
“The gnome would throttle you, but thanks,” Maggie said, accepting it.
“Excellent,” Colin said. “I was getting sick of gingerbread.”
They passed through a small village the next day, and were able to purchase an aging plow horse who had not yet been killed for his meat. They rode double ’til Ching conveyed the message that the horse was going to lay down and not get up again if one of them didn’t dismount. Maggie was restless anyway, and took the first turn walking, and in this fashion they progressed surely, if not swiftly.
The conversation had been far from lively, Maggie brooding over her sister’s condition, desperate enough now to be considered a plight, Colin humming and nodding to himself in the throes of a fit of creativity.
Finally, after many miles had passed, he asked, “Here, now, Maggie, what do you think of this?”
Song of Sorcery Page 8
