Song of Sorcery Read online

  Down come our faery lady… down come the faery maid.

  “She come trippin’ down the stairs

  Her maids were all before her

  As soon’s he saw her pretty face

  He cast some glamourie o’er her.”

  Sir William opened his eyes. A gypsy man had wreaked a great deal of havoc in the village two festival seasons ago by absconding simultaneously with two of the estate’s dairy maids, sisters whose soiled state Sir William had had to launder with generous donations to their dowries so they could be safely wed before they whelped. If the fella’d charmed a faery he must be quite the charmer indeed—the faeries were so enchanting themselves, they generally saw through the glamourie of others.

  The minstrel dropped the peasant role and became the gypsy, insinuating himself into the lady’s romantic imagination. Casting Maggie as the lady, his passionate glances totally confused the expression of polite attention she had maintained. Trying to stare down the minstrel’s false gypsy as she would her grandmother’s cat, she found herself annoyed that she was unable to look away when she wished.

  “Will you forsake your husband dear,

  And all the wealth he gave ye?

  Will you leave your house and lands

  To follow Gypsy Davey—to ride with the Gypsy Dave?

  Maggie flushed, her dark skin burgundy with befuddlement as the minstrel released her eyes to become narrator again.

  “She dressed herself in her gay green cloak

  And her boots of finest leather,

  Then mounted on her pony fine,

  And they rode off together.

  “Late from huntin’ came Lord Rowan,

  Asking for his lady.

  The one did cry and the other reply

  ‘She’s gone with the Gypsy Davey—rode away with the Gypsy Dave.’”

  Intricate minor patterns wove through the main theme, invoking hoofbeats fading away from the lady’s fine home across the moors. The minstrel didn’t look up from the guitar again until the last keening notes quivered off his strings to die in the stillness around him. Sir William’s face was a most alarmingly unhealthy eggplant color, and the resemblance between Maggie and her grandmother was suddenly uncomfortably apparent.

  “Well, Dad,” she smiled around sharp white teeth, “What d’you think? Boil him in oil, or flay him alive?”

  What had Colin’s masters taught him at the academy? In dealings with aristocrats, when in doubt, grovel. He knelt so fast he banged his knee on the floor. “Your pardon, m’lady, Sir William. I only did as you asked. I meant no offense, and can’t think why the tune has given it. I’ll never play it again—ever.” In your vicinity, at least, he added to himself, searching for an exit as Sir William’s skin regained its former pallor.

  “Perhaps you should choose less exotic material in the future, lad,” the old knight advised drily, “or not mention names in your ditties. The Lord Rowan cuckolded in your song, unless of course there’s another one, is my son-in-law, married to my younger daughter, the Lady Amberwine.”

  Colin gulped, his eyes darting furtively to the leaded glass window and back to the long flight of stone steps they’d mounted coming to the tower room.

  “Who was this fellow with the stuffy nose who taught you that song?” Maggie asked.

  “Minstrel Giles, m’lady?”

  “I was wondering if he’d like that nose removed?”

  “Maggie!” snapped Sir William, “You’re scaring the lad to death, you little heathen. He said it wasn’t his song.” He turned more kindly to the minstrel, who by now was perspiring profusely. “Sorry, son.” He jerked a thumb at his glowering daughter. “She’s a terrific girl, really, just awfully fond of her sister, as we all are around here.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand this at all. Winnie—Lady Amberwine—is not at all your average running-off sort of girl. She’s too considerate for that type of thing. To just leave without explanation! No letter to us! Even if she didn’t like her husband, which I could have sworn she did, she’d hardly have placed her family in such an awkward spot without giving us fair warning—”

  “Fine lady, indeed, noble sir,” the minstrel agreed emphatically, “I’m sure she’s a fine, fine lady.”

  “Too right, she is that.” Sir William’s hands tortured the bedclothes for a few moments before he turned his baffled and miserable face to Maggie.

  She leaned down and hugged him. “Aw, Dad, of course she is. She wouldn’t just go gallivanting off with the first passing gypsy—you know very well she can hardly decide which gown to wear to breakfast in the morning without consulting every servant in the house, and me and Gran besides. She certainly wouldn’t be able to bolt altogether on the spur of the moment like that! It’d take her a week to pack!” She glared again at the cowering Colin. “Must have been one of His Lordship’s enemies paid that Giles fellow to make up that awful song.”

  Colin gulped and waggled a tentative index finger for attention. “Begging your ladyship’s pardon,” he began, not really wishing to call notice to himself again, but equally reluctant for Giles to suffer the consequences of his own silence. “Giles confessed that he only gave the tune a bit of a polish—it was actually a popular creation.”

  “Common gossip music, then, eh?” Sir William looked even older and sicker than he had looked when Colin came into the room, and he had appeared twenty hard years older than Maggie’s grandmother then. “Maggie, what can be going on with the girl?”

  Maggie looked down, shoving her fists deep into her apron pockets. “I don’t know, Dad.”

  “You remember that nasty gypsy fella running off with Mullaly’s daughters and nearly emptying my wallet trying to save their foolish reputations?”

  “Yes, Dad, I remember. Betsy and Beatrice Mullaly are as bovine as their charges, though. Everybody knows that. Winnie’s got more sense.”

  “I think so. I don’t know. I wish I had my legs under me, so I could go see Rowan and talk to him myself.” He made an impatient attempt to rise. Maggie gently pushed him back onto the bed.

  “That’s no good, and you know it. I’ll go talk to Rowan.”

  The old man looked at her for a long time, then closed his eyes and sank back against his pillow. “Of course you will, lass. You’re the only one who can, I suppose.” Then opening one eye he looked at her again, more sharply. “You’re not thinking of going alone, of course?”

  She shrugged. “Why not? We can’t have it all over the territories what I’m up to if there’s nothing in it. I’ll be all right. I’ve got my magic to protect me, after all.”

  He snorted. “Hearthcraft, hmph. All very well for running the castle or tavern, but what are you going to do if you meet a bear, girl.”

  “Very well, then,” she conceded, trying not to allow their disagreement to tire her father any further. “I’ll take the mockingbird, here, with me.”

  The pronouncement came as a complete surprise to Colin.

  Sir William peered closely at him. “Oh, then if a bear comes along HE sings the creature sweetly to sleep with a bloody lullaby, and you turn it into a great bloody hearthrug?” He ran a hand through his thinning hair, grayer since the accident. “Ah, well, he’s responsible to his guild for his conduct, and if he’s with you I can at least be quite sure he won’t be spreading that song about. I suppose it wouldn’t be wise to have any of the local guard go. I doubt any of them would purposely slander your sister, but people don’t seem to be able to forego telling everything they know, nonetheless.” He sighed once more, deeply, and capitulated. “He’ll have to do, I guess.”

  “Good.” She kissed her father’s cheek again and rose to her feet. “I’ll just go put binding spells on the cleaning I’ve already done, and enlarge the larder a bit, before I talk to Gran about handling anything that comes up while I’m gone.”

  “That should be exciting,” Sir William mumbled to her back as she swept through the door ahead of Colin.

  2

  Maggie
was unalarmed to hear the Territorial troops marching in close order drill, accompanied by professional mourners keening for the dead and wounded, as she entered her grandmother’s cottage. She recognized the tromping of the marchers as her gran’s heavy-handed double beat on the loom batten, which always sounded like an advancing army, complete with fife and drum corps, and the keening sound as the old lady chanted a song in the ancient tongue to make the work less tedious.

  “Maggie, darlin’!” Her grandmother exclaimed, raising her legs past the edge of the loom bench and twirling around on her behind to face her granddaughter. “I’m so glad you’re here! Now you can do this nettlesome chore and I can stir up that batch for Betsy Baker.”

  “Funny, I was just talking about her.” She picked up a shuttle, changed the shed with a tromp on the foot treadle, then clucked her tongue at her grandmother. “Really, Gran, look at all these broken warps you’ve left hanging. It’ll never hold up this way!”

  Gran regarded her through the measuring glass she held at eye-level, slowly pouring a smoking yellow fluid into it. “You, my dear, are the home economist. I am the alchemist. I’ll stick to my own field any day. All those itty-bitty threads—bah!”

  “Well, I’ve yet to see you turn tin into gold,” Maggie replied, her thumb and forefinger lightly spinning the broken ends together again. With the mending spell she was projecting from beneath her conversation, the warps should be stronger when she had respun them than they were originally.

  Gran added an iridescent blue powder to the yellow fluid, and curls of green smoke interlaced with the yellow wafting toward the string-tied bundles of herbs that hung so thickly from the ceiling that Maggie sometimes felt she was walking upside down in a meadow. “I have always considered that a very silly practice, Magdalene. Tin is much more useful.” Gran always put on her most dignified air when practicing her craft. Maggie had received instructive lectures at these times, surrounded by noxious fumes and falling bits of materia medica from the ceiling, and was always addressed during these sermons as Magdalene, her full name, which she particularly disliked.

  Turning on the bench to face her grandmother’s back, Maggie leaned against the front beam of the loom, her right foot swinging, rumpling the striped rug she’d woven for Gran’s floor. She’d have to reweave another bald spot, she noted. Gran was always spilling something caustic and burning it, or the cat was kneading it bare. “I’m going down south, Gran.”

  “So Ching told me.” She set the beaker of liquid down and faced her granddaughter. “Don’t you think it’s Amberwine’s business who she chooses to go with?”

  “I suppose so.” Maggie frowned at her nails and tried to explain the uneasiness she had felt since hearing the minstrel’s song. “But she’s not like us, Gran. I mean, she was always having to remind me to stop and think how what I was doing was going to make other people feel—she never just DOES things.”

  “You think she was coerced?”

  Maggie nodded. “Or something like that. Or Rowan’s mistreated her—though I rather think she’d have been back home by now if that were the case. Anyhow, whatever she’s doing, she won’t mind a visit, will she? And I shall finally see somewhere besides this stupid village. Do you know, one of the guards who accompanied Rowan to the wedding told me the flowers are already out down there this time of year?”

  “That’s not all that’s out, dearie.” Gran regarded her severely. “Our climate may be inhospitable a great deal of the year, but it does serve to discourage a lot of the nonsense they put up with down south. I had a message from your Aunt Sybil only a month or so ago, that she had seen bandits from across the Brazorian border destroy a mountain village right near Rowan’s territory. And there’s dragons and werewolves and ogres and pirates out there as well,” she sat down, wearied by the length and import of her list, “and lions and tigers…”

  “Don’t forget the bears,” Maggie said drily.

  “And bears. And don’t you laugh at me, my girl. Even a unicorn can be very dangerous, if startled. Worst of all, though, are the people. Witches and wizards can be very territorial, so you’d best be a bit more polite to strange magicians than you are to your old granny. And men, of course. Speaking of which, Magdalene, I do not think your father very wise to send you off with that scandal-mongering Songsmith character.”

  “Don’t be silly, Gran. He’s just a musician—he doesn’t have any magic at all.”

  “Don’t be silly yourself. You don’t know if he has any magic or not, and he’s a man, isn’t he? How do you suppose there got to be more of them than there are of us, and why do you suppose our powers are getting weaker every generation?”

  “Surely this is not MY Grandmother Brown getting all moralistic with me?” Maggie grinned.

  Granny looked embarrassed. “Of course not, you impudent wench. But pairing off, if done at all, should be done only after your powers are fully developed and tested. Your poor mother never did amount to anything, witchwise, getting involved so young and all…”

  “Now don’t go blaming Dad…”

  “I’m not. I’m hardly the bigot some folks are, but…”

  A playful rapping at the door interrupted her, and there was no waiting for her to grant entry before the door opened and a round face topped by a thatch of white hair peeped around the door at them. The face leered, and a matching set of rosy fingers waggled at them. “Good day to you, Goodwitch Brown, Mistress Maggie. May I come in?”

  “Appears to me you’re already in, Hugo,” Granny said. “What can I do for you?”

  The man seated himself in Granny’s only other chair, a rocker. He grinned, showing a collection of teeth in every known metal. “Well, I’m only just up to the north, Goodwitch, and I thought I’d pop in and get a bit of my usual.” His watery blue eyes strayed to Maggie and overstayed a welcome they’d never had to begin with.

  “To be sure,” said Granny, climbing onto her narrow bed to reach a row of handmade jugs on the shelf above it. She had to sniff several before selecting one.

  Hugo followed her movements for a moment before licking his lips and addressing Maggie.

  “Well, Mistress Maggie, I understand you’re taking a nice trip.”

  “News certainly travels fast.”

  “I suppose you’re going south to visit your lovely sister?”

  “Toads! Does the whole village know already?” Maggie was annoyed. Not only had she hoped to keep her mission a secret, but she particularly did not want a gossipy old goat like Hugo the Peddler to know her business.

  “No, no, no. Never fear, dear lady. I won’t tell a soul. You know I’m quiet as Medusa’s boyfriend when it comes to a lady’s private secrets, eh? But I was taking a new hammer over to the smith, and he told me you were journeying tomorrow, so naturally I just assumed…”

  “Here you are, Hugo.” Granny poured a little of the powder from the earthenware jug into a paper, folded the paper with great ceremony, and presented it to the peddler. “Six coppers, please.”

  “Six!” Hugo protested while unclasping a neat brocade coin purse he carried at his belt. “It’s gone up, has it? I remember when it was two.”

  “Inflation,” Granny said cheerfully, tucking the money in the pocket of her skirt. “The cost of practicing witchcraft these days! I couldn’t begin to tell you how that drought last summer cut into my profit margin. Some of my most valuable plants were scorched, and probably won’t even come up this year at all…”

  Hugo was backing out the door, tipping an imaginary cap as he left. “Yes, well, goodbye, ladies.”

  Maggie let out a whoop of laughter. “Oh, Gran, how COULD you? Six coppers for that rubbish!”

  “It’s all part of the charm, dear. Good magic always is better if it costs something more than the client can comfortably afford.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Impotence. You can come in now, darling.” She cooed the last in a tender voice never heard by anyone in the village, including Maggie. Chingachgo
ok, her black and white cat, leaped into the room from the windowsill, and onto her lap.

  “Well, I may have need for some of those powders myself.”

  “I thought you might, so in my antique wisdom I have prepared a couple of things for you.”

  “Such as?” Maggie sat down abruptly on the weaving bench as Ching launched himself from Gran’s lap to her shoulder. Gran pulled her own braid forward and carefully extracted seven long hairs from it. “Here, you’re the weaver, plait these into a chain, and wear it round your neck.”

  “In order to do what?” Maggie’s fingers flew through the loops of hair, and she plaited the chain closed in an intricate invisible knot behind the curtain of her otter-brown hair.

  “Make yourself more clearly understood, of course,” purred Ching, bumping her cheek with his head.

  Maggie started, but, seeing her grandmother’s smirk of satisfaction, resigned herself. “I suppose having Ching along will help me talk with the larger non-human types. But I hope I won’t have to hear the horse complain about his sore feet and the bad grass?”

  “Not unless you ask Ching, dear. I should think that with no one but that maudlin minstrel along, you’d be happy for intelligent company.”

  “Yes, Gran.”

  “Speaking of intelligent company, you’d better stop and see Sybil on your way, or there’ll be another rupture in the family tree.”

  Maggie wriggled with impatience that caused Ching to abandon her shoulder. “Gran, it may be urgent that I reach Winnie!”

  “All the more reason that you see Sybil.” She thrust a thonged leather bag at her. “Here’s your medicine pouch. Now run along. I’m sure the estate will take care of itself.”

  “It’ll have to,” Ching muttered, settling his chin on his front paws and wrapping his tail around his nose.

  3