Song of Sorcery Read online

  “I don’t see how he can carry that,” Maggie said.

  “Right!” barked Rowan, springing off again to return with the scabbard, which he plopped on the table. He sat again, drawing his chair up to the table once more, beaming like an excited child. “It’s my second best family sword, y’know. Figure if you’re off to find my wife you may as well have my sword to help you wade your way through her admirers. We Rowans are a warrior clan, really, descended from a rowdy bunch of fellows called frost giants from someplace past the Sea of Glass. Since we’ve been in Argonia there’ve been so bloody many heroes on both sides it’s difficult to say who’s bravest, but it’s generally agreed that my sword, Owd Gut-Buster, belongin’ formerly to that famous berserker, Rowan the Rampager, is the best. This one,” he glowed with pride as he reached across the table to finger the sword as it lay in front of Colin, “is the legendary Obtruncator. Owner was not only a fella of great bravery, but possessed the most marvelous restraint and foresight of all the Rowans before him.”

  “What was his name?” Colin asked.

  “Rowan the Reckless.” He placed the sword in the scabbard. “I’m considered somethin’ of a sissy by the chroniclers of my family, I would suppose, but most of the heroes, you must understand, served as one-man fronts in some king’s war. I’m the first to be considered for nomination to the throne itself. Bumple came here to pledge himself to me before the fact. When you’ve gone I’m going to have to ride over there and make amends, I guess. Can’t just go discarding peoples’ allegiances if you’re going to be in politics.”

  “You’ll make a splendid king, I’m sure.” Maggie said it politely, but was surprised to find she felt considerable conviction behind her statement.

  “Damn right, I would,” agreed Rowan. “Doesn’t look too well, actually, though, Bumple says, what with her potential royal highness not exactly givin’ me what you might call her vote of confidence.” A few minutes passed in silence, then His Lordship banged the table as he got to his feet. “Well, lad, I’d best show you how to use this second-best family sword, eh?”

  “Thank you, m’Lord, I’m sure, but really—”

  “Oh, yes, and Maggie darlin’, you’d best have this along.” He tossed her a sheathed dagger. “All the gypsies carry at least one, and you oughtn’t to be unprotected.” The hilt was notably unencrusted with gems, but was made of a beautiful purple-colored wood, and appeared quite sharp enough to slice anything requiring slicing. Maggie devoutly hoped she could confine its use to game meat and fresh fruit.

  7

  Colin groaned with pain as he half slid and half fell off his horse and onto the ground, where he lay like a freshly landed trout. A long night filled with too much wine and not enough sleep had been followed by the unsoothing clang and banging of Gut-Buster and Obtruncator as Rowan attempted to teach him the rudiments and a few of the finer points of swordplay. At least as far as Colin could tell, it was all rudimentary, and though he felt the point often, he didn’t find it particularly fine. This got his day off to an inauspicious start. Maggie’s insistence that they leave immediately because she had been unable to use her aunt’s gift to locate Amberwine from within the castle had not been a welcome development. It had become even less agreeable when the decision was made by Maggie and Rowan that in order to keep to a minimum the effect of the rowan trees upon her, Maggie was to ride Rowan’s swiftest steed at maximum speed out the west gate of the castle and across the moors. Colin was to trot behind with a packhorse and a fresh mount to replace the lathered one that would carry the heavily veiled Maggie away from her nemesis. That was all very well for Maggie, but Colin hardly felt up to walking on tiptoe very quietly, much less trotting.

  Neither had his sacrifice of his own best interests in order to preserve hers met with deep appreciation and profound gratitude. Maggie was turning the mirror over in her hands, staring at it moodily when he rode up, and she continued to be quiet and uncommunicative, nodding or shaking her head or answering in the shortest possible fashion when he addressed her, if she answered at all.

  Now that he was finally allowed to rest his throbbing head and aching limbs, he was prodded out of his misery by Maggie who said, “If you don’t want any of this, I’ll give the rest to Ching.” He looked up. She was seated on her bedroll, toasting her toes before one of her fuel-less campfires, eating a wing of the roast pheasant that turned on the spit, dripping juices into the flames with a sizzling pop that even sounded delicious.

  After feasting on the rest of the bird, two potatoes with fresh herbed butter, and half a loaf of hot bread, Colin thought he might survive after all.

  With surprise, he saw that Maggie had spread his cloak across her knees and was reweaving one of the assortment of rips and tears and holes that were its only adornments.

  “Thank you,” he said. “But you don’t have to do that.”

  “I like sewing,” she replied without lifting her eyes. “It calms me.”

  “Well, if it’s calming you want, listen to this!” In spite of his afflictions, new verses for the song about Amberwine and the gypsy had been worming their way in and out of his aching brain all day long. He fetched his guitar down from the horse and sang:

  “Go saddle me my good gray steed

  The brown is not so speedy

  And I’ll go racin’ ’crost the moor

  To overtake my lady.

  “When he saw the man who wronged him so

  His anger it did kindle,

  But thinkin’ on his lady’s love

  His wrath did slowly dwindle.

  “How could you leave your house and land

  And all the wealth I gave ye?

  How could you leave your own true love

  To ride with Gypsy Davey?

  “Oh, what care I for house and land

  Or all the wealth you gave me.

  I’m goin’ now, my own true love,

  To ride with Gypsy Davey.”

  “Then I’ll put those other two verses I sang earlier toward the end. What d’ya think?” Colin asked, looking up expectantly. Maggie was staring off into space again, ignoring her needlework. When she saw him watching her, she quickly brushed her face with the back of her hand and leaned down to bite her sewing thread in two. “Well?” Colin asked again.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Oh—the song. Very good, Colin. You really do have a talent.” It was the longest sentence she’d said all day. He was about to ask her if she’d like to discuss what was troubling her or if perhaps he was mistaken and she was merely practicing to enter a religious order under a vow of silence, when she added another comment. He grinned with relief and with the realization that for a change he was actually glad to hear her say something. “But how do you know Winnie’s side of the conversation?”

  “A combination of research and poetic license. Ludy, the serving maid, was listening at the door when Rowan told Cook what happened on his ride.”

  “I think he showed remarkable restraint for someone with his background, don’t you?” She rewove one of the few places on the cloak that had remained intact.

  “Well, he came off all right in the song, I suppose…”

  “He’d make a handsome king,” she said.

  By returning his guitar to its sack, Colin was able to conceal his frown. Rowan had been decent enough to him, but Maggie was acting, now that he thought about it, a lot the way she had after meeting the unicorn. While Rowan’s horns were of another variety, they apparently troubled him enough to cause him to pay a lot of unsettling attention to ordinary brown-haired girls like his susceptible sister-in-law. It would have pleased Colin a lot better if the bereaved, deserted husband had just gone on bereaving and left his own traveling companion out of it.

  “Why don’t we try the magic mirror again, Maggie? We ought to find out if we’re headed in the right general direction before we go much further.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I wonder w
hy it wouldn’t work this morning. Toads! I thought if Rowan could just SEE Winnie he might—oh, I don’t know what I thought.”

  “He did try that once to get her back,” Colin reminded her, disliking Rowan even more because fairness forced him to defend the fellow.

  “I know. Where shall we start?”

  “Where your aunt left off.”

  Maggie had pulled the mirror out of her pocket and polished it. She held in her mind the image of Amberwine and of gypsies, the latter image provided by the village fairs and her imagination freshly fueled by Colin’s song. As the rainbow lights flashed away in the darkness, two indistinct pictures, one superimposed on the other, appeared in the mirror.

  “Hmmm, let me try to clarify that,” she said, and focused on her sister as she had last seen her, tousled and troubled and burdened by pregnancy. The gypsy wagons that had hung ghostlike over the mirror faded, and Maggie and Colin almost wished them back to hide the ugliness of the remaining image.

  Amberwine huddled by a stone wall, her hair tangled in a mat that covered her face, so that it took Maggie a while to be certain that it was indeed her elegant sister who swatted the flies away from the sores that covered her arms and thin, bare legs. Her ribs showed sharply above her swollen stomach. As the sounds of a marketplace rattled through the mirror, Winnie suddenly sat up straighter and shoved a handful of hair back from her red, swollen eyes with one sharp combing motion. A peddler’s cry sang out over the other noises, and Winnie got to her feet, pulling the remnants of her shift over as much of herself as they would cover. The cry was repeated, and Maggie almost lost the picture in her surprise. “That’s Hugo’s cart!” she said, as it came into view, immediately in front of Amberwine.

  At first it appeared as though Winnie might try to round the corner of the building and escape the peddler’s notice, but then she seemed to change her mind and drew herself to her full height, managing to look regal and somehow, Colin thought, ethereal and heart-breakingly beautiful, for all her dirt and mats and sores.

  “Why, my Lady Amberwine,” exclaimed Hugo, as though he were greeting her in her father’s kitchen garden. “Whatever are you doing here in Queenston?”

  Though Maggie had difficulty with them, the social graces and their attendant poise had been Amberwine’s by birthright, not education alone, and had never deserted her. Now, as ever, she was cool. “Oh, hullo, Hugo. How nice to see you here. I don’t suppose you’d have a frock and a bit of bread or something today I might charge to Daddy’s account, do you?”

  The peddler’s tone was sweeter than Aunt Sybil’s house. He waved a cutely admonishing finger at her. “Now your ladyship knows I have nothing fine enough for the likes of you on MY humble cart.” He gave Amberwine a chance to interpret this as a rejection of her thinly-disguised petition for help, then said, “Actually, ma’am, I’ve been sent to look for you. Your father is staying here with a distant relative of your stepmother’s. If you wouldn’t mind riding in my modest wagon, I could take you to him.”

  Amberwine was cool, but not that cool. Tears of relief and gratitude washed her lovely face. “At last. Oh, Hugo, I don’t know how to thank you,” she started babbling, “if father will only forgive me, perhaps—”

  She stopped herself from talking by fairly dancing onto the cart. “Is Maggie along? Will I see her?”

  “Old Hugo has all kinds of surprises for you, my Lady, if only you’ll just settle yourself so we can get on now,” he said, as though coaxing a child.

  “Oh, certainly, to be sure, oh, my, yes,” she wriggled around and signaled to him that she was ready for departure.

  “That slimy bastard!” Maggie yelled, as the mirror went dark. She thrust it rudely back into her pocket. “How fast can we get to Queenston from here?”

  “It’s about a week’s hard ride, at least. Maggie, what did he mean about your father being there?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a lie, of course. What can that vile worm be up to, anyway?”

  “Can he have passed us while we were at the castle?”

  “Perhaps—or else—”

  “Or else what?” he asked, hoping she wouldn’t insist they ride all that night to get to Queenston the earlier.

  “Or else that explains the iron trap, and why our horses were stolen. But why would Hugo be the villain Rabbit saw shoot Dad’s horse? And how could he move so quickly? You yourself said a week. The man must not sleep.” She sighed and bit her thumbnail before spreading her blankets. “We have to though. And the horses need a rest.”

  Colin swallowed his own questions about the vision and with weary relief spread his bedroll on the ground.

  8

  They never reached Queenston.

  Colin, whose ear could pick a birdsong out of a thunderstorm during an earthquake (if a bird should be so unwise as to be present and singing under such circumstances), heard the music hours before they reached the gypsy camp.

  By the time Maggie heard it as well, they had spotted the gaudily painted wagons competing with the wildflowers for sheer colorfulness in the wood-bordered meadow.

  At the top of the meadow they stopped their horses and watched the late afternoon activity of the gypsies. Townspeople from the village which lay nearby were scattered among the gypsies, having their fortunes told, Maggie supposed, or perhaps naively imagining they could get the best end of a trade for the gypsy horses which were tethered close by one of the wagons. Babies squalled and children ran naked among people, livestock, and wagons. The flash of bright, cheap cloth and the glitter of a golden earring or a gold coin necklace occasionally danced across their field of vision before being blotted out as the wearer disappeared behind a wagon or hunkered down to barter.

  The predatory gleam in Maggie’s eye, and the determined compression of her lips as she surveyed the scene boded no good to Colin. Gypsies were scarcely known for their tractable dispositions either, and he and Maggie could not count on strange townspeople to extricate them from any difficulty Maggie’s temper brought upon them.

  Ching sat up on his pallet and viewed the camp with precisely the same attitude he displayed toward birds. Maggie smiled suddenly, a lazy, preoccupied smile, and nodded, leaning over to scratch the cat’s ears.

  Hoping that the smile meant her mood was improving, Colin said, “Maggie,” in his best tone of gentle but firm reasonableness. “That is no place for you. You are far too emotional about this situation, and will undoubtedly cause those people to do us some injury if you let your temper get the better of you. You can’t do your sister any good then, can you?” He ended on a note slightly more confident than the one he’d started on, and stole a glance from his alert, eyes-forward posture, to see how she was receiving his speech.

  To his utter astonishment, the predatory stance and the probably even more troublemaking smile had both disappeared, and it was a mild Maggie who sat on the horse beside him, her head lowered, eyes downcast, hands meekly folded atop the pommel of her saddle. Ching had rolled over on his back and was watching them, upside down, purring sincerely.

  “I—uh—I feel,” he finished lamely, somewhat deflated by the lack of anticipated opposition, “that an objective party such as myself is the proper one to do the reconnaissance. Besides, gypsies are pretty musical. They’re not so apt to mind a minstrel.”

  “Of course not, Colin,” she readily agreed. “A minstrel’s pocket’s as easy to pick as anyone’s.” The momentary sharp look that accompanied that statement was quickly veiled by lowered lashes. Colin was simply grateful that she wasn’t making a scene. “I really think you’re probably quite right,” Maggie continued. “As you say, I do get upset. So perhaps Ching and I will stay here in this part of the meadow.”

  “What will you do?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Oh, pick a few wildflowers, gather a few herbs Gran was wanting at home. So you just run along and find that awful gypsy—but watch out for his nasty mother.”

  “Right,” he said, still puzzled, but getting ready to
take advantage of her uncharacteristic fit of good nature to click to his horse and be off.

  “Good-bye!” she waved gaily to him, though he still sat beside her. In order not to feel ridiculous, he rode into the camp.

  * * *

  A small, grubby boy ran up to him as he stopped beside one of the wagons on the fringe of the camp. “Honorable Lord!” the youngster yelled loudly as he bowed low and grinned, “I will keep your splendid animal and treasured possessions from all harm while you enjoy the hospitality of my home and converse with my elders, you know what I mean?”

  Colin knew. “How could I possibly repay you for such thoughtful service, young squire?” he replied with insincerity to match the urchin’s own. He knew exactly how.

  “By crossing my palm with a small coin or two, or a large one if you prefer, oh, not for me, but for my aged mother and fourteen younger brothers and sisters,” he replied. It must have been a remarkable family for him to have fourteen younger brothers and sisters, Colin thought, as the boy himself was scarcely more than seven or eight years old.

  “Of course,” he said, flipping the coins to the child. Two wagons away, a woman with the raven gypsy hair and skin darker than Maggie’s switched her scarlet flounced skirt back and forth the same way Ching would switch his tail as she watched the transaction with an interest not wholly economic. Her lava-black eyes infected Colin’s pores with a humid pre-perspiration warmth.

  Very conscious of those eyes, Colin cradled his fiddle under one arm as he sought the source of the music, a task made more difficult by a sudden lull in the performance, whether or not occasioned by his arrival, he had no way of knowing.

  Children clung to his britches and shirttail as he walked from wagon to wagon, seeking the musicians, who were not occupying the bare meadow grass within the ring of wagons, as Colin had half expected. There were women poking in a cooking pot over a central campfire, and some others tending a spitted animal roasting over a pit, but they were old and unattractive, and in no way musical-looking, though he admitted he could have been fooled. Actually, the children weren’t the only ones enjoying the novelty of being with peculiar-looking strangers. Colin had sung a lot of songs about and by gypsies, but like many of the other things he had sung of at the academy, gypsies were not something of which he had any firsthand knowledge. He’d sung of rowan trees too, but how good had he been at recognizing them? They’d practically had to kill a friend of his before he even knew what they were. The same ignorance held true of court life (except for a brief field trip to the minstrel hall at the capitol), the seas beyond the Gulf of Gremlins, war, bandits, True Love, ogres, flying carpets, and princesses. And of course, any number of other things, though he had been able, in the course of this journey, to cross dragons, unicorns, gnomes, and knights off his list. Even in East Headpenney they had had a witch, though she was of little real use that Colin could see, her main talent being the ability to communicate with dead people. Because of that talent of hers, he had met a lot of ghosts, but on the whole, he thought with satisfaction, gypsies were far more colorful and exciting. He sort of hoped this might be the wrong gypsy camp, or that if Gypsy Davey were here, Amberwine would, in spite of the evidence of the magic mirror, be with him. While Amberwine and Maggie were being reunited, Colin could befriend the people of the caravan, who would recognize him as a good and honest man and a great artist, and trot out all their best folk stories and songs to tell him, which he would take back to the academy and for which he would be given all sorts of praise and respect and a professorship with tenure (which he would humbly decline, of course, preferring the true troubadour’s life on the open road).