Song of Sorcery (6 page)

“Yes, thanks.”

She poured a little white powder into his tea and it turned a soft toffee brown. He tasted it. “That’s amazing.”

“Glad you like it.”

They passed that day and the next pleasantly enough, once more reaching a village and scattered outlying houses by the middle of the third day. Colin remembered as much as he could of unicorn lore, and entertained Maggie with all the stories and songs he could think of concerning the mystical beasts. He even made up a unicorn song, on the spot, which delighted her so much that she managed from somewhere to produce an excellent meat pie for lunch and fresh peaches for dessert. Colin hadn’t eaten so well since he left East Headpenney, and fitted the long discourse he was delivering, on the difficulties of keeping the proper dramatic tension present in one’s lyric while doing an appropriate number of aesthetically correct doo-dahs in the music, in between appreciative slurps and gobbles of peach flesh and juice. He quite forgot to wonder where she found peaches six months before they would blossom and nine months after they should have rotted, or how she had dried them to include pits and all.

“About that song you don’t like, for instance, Maggie,” he said as an example. “There
is
something about it that bothers me.”

Maggie, who could only stand so much jargon about someone else’s specialty, shot her peach pit into a puddle of water. “There’s a great deal about that song that bothers ME, minstrel,” she said.

Ching was giving his full attention to his lunch of reconstituted trout heads and had not so much as a glance to spare them. Cat music tended to consist of one pleasant long hum of lyric and he saw no need at all for any other kind.

“Well, I
know
, that, of course, but what I mean is, there’s no proper
ending
at all. It’s anticlimactic, don’t you think?”

“I certainly hope so,” she replied. She would hate to think it would all end like that—with Winnie riding off for no good reason with some grubby gypsy while her bewildered husband rode home scratching his head. She began to see what Colin was talking about.

“Just so. Well, I’m actually very glad, indeed, you had me come along to protect you on this journey. Perhaps our investigations will suggest a more poetic conclusion.”

“Oh, please,” Maggie groaned. “Not one of those where he cuts out her true love’s heart and hands it to her in a cup of gold, following which she either dies of despair or he cuts her in half and then throws himself upon his own sword in remorse. I’m ever so tired of that one. It’s Gran’s favorite.”

“Hardly surprising,” Colin mumbled, dousing the fire with a cup of water from the puddle and commencing to pack things back onto the horse. “Your grandmother is a—er—temperamental lady, isn’t she?”

Maggie grinned evilly. “You think
she’s
bad, you should hear her and Aunt Sybil go on about the REST of the family! I believe Aunt Sybil’s cottage is supposed to be an inheritance from a great-great-granddam who was fond of luring children up to the house to snack on a bit of roofing. Then there was Great Grandma Oonaugh. Now
there
was an old horror!” But she said it, Colin thought, with the same pride others might display in royal ancestors.

“You hardly ever hear of any really wicked witches anymore.” Colin said. “Since under King Finbar’s rule, criminal offenses are prosecuted equally, whether of magical or nonmagical nature, and are tried by a group of the offender’s peers, I suppose there’s not much percentage in doing anything really awful. Your ancestors may have been a bad lot, but you’re really very nice, now that we’re better acquainted.” She gave him a sharp look, as though she were about to take offense and he hastened to explain. “I mean, even UNICORNS like you, and I guess one has to be pretty pure of heart for that…”

“Hearts apparently have little to do with it,” she said with more objectivity regarding unicorns than she’d shown since just before Moonshine had declared himself smitten.

“And then you did catch your cat and stop him from—you know—”

“Oh, that. Well, I suppose Gran must be right. She says our bloodline has become increasingly impure in the last few generations. She likes Dad well enough, you understand, thinks he’s wonderful and all that.” She swung up into the saddle after settling Ching in his basket on the pack horse. “Probably because he was such a raffish sort in what the two of them refer to as his misspent youth.” She smiled. “I suppose it just wasn’t misspent enough, and I got tainted by his decent side.”

“What sort of witch are you then, exactly, if you don’t consider it impertinent to ask?”

“You hadn’t noticed?” She gave him a queer sidelong look, and clucked to her horse, kicking its sides with her soft-soled boots as they clopped back out into the muddy road again.

“No.” Colin followed behind her, leading the pack horse.

“I’m a hearthcrafter. Where do you suppose the warm fires and fresh fruit have been coming from?”

“I wondered,” he admitted, digesting this new information as they rode off downhill again, the muddy road little more than a track through spreading marshy meadows and newly lush hillocks that gradually gave way to a few sparse slim trees flush with new green leaves. “It seems very useful then if you can do all of that.”

“Oh, aye, it’s that,” Maggie said, making a face. “That’s what Gran says too—but I’m afraid useful doesn’t really do me all that much credit in our line of work. It takes passion and power, Gran says, to be a really first-class witch, though I think at times she only says that to justify her beastly temper. No one has ever accused me of lacking that sort of passion either—but Aunt Sybil’s got a lot stronger magic than I do, and she’s a far more placid person than Gran or I either one—I suppose it comes of knowing what to expect. You’ll probably really like her.” She looked at the tortuous track ahead of them. “It’s still quite a ways though, I reckon. I don’t suppose you’d know that song about the silly nobleman who died of indigestion from eating eels, would you?”

Colin did know the song about the nobleman, a fellow named Lord Randall, and the song about the fiddle and the wind, which was one of his own personal favorites, and the one about the laddie-cut-down-in-his-prime. Maggie sang along in a voice low and rough for a woman, but with a lot of power and vitality, and she was even very often on key. She expressed a strong preference for murder ballads and the popular songs women sang over the loom or field hands sang while doing whatever there was to do in the field. When Colin tried to introduce an occasional romantic air, she interrupted him with a request for a work song sung by bandits as they plundered helpless villages. If he tried to ignore her long enough to finish a chorus of one of the charming love ballads he preferred, the black and white cat made it a point to rouse himself long enough to produce a terrible yowling. It seemed that any tender emotions the lady had were addressed exclusively to unicorns, and other expressions thereof were not to be tolerated.

By the time they camped that night, the minstrel had exhausted his repertoire of murder ballads and was considering applying for a teaching position at the Minstrel Academy, where he would present a course on the musical proclivities of the Northern Sorceress Personality, a subject he now felt he possessed more expertise in than he really cared to.

A technically impossible evening meal of Queenston Quiche, artichokes in almond sauce, and chocolate fudge layer cake, served with a blue wine equally correct with meat or fish, and equally delicious with either, helped to alleviate some of Colin’s artistic aggravation, not to mention his empty stomach and dry throat. As he was hoarse from singing, he limited his musical endeavors that night to a soft lament played on his fiddle while Maggie, arms clapsed about her knees, stared into the fire, rocking a little in time with his playing. Ching sprawled at her feet as comfortably as though on his favorite rug beneath his mistress’s loom at Fort Iceworm.

The morning again just missed being rainy, the sky the color and texture of raw wool, with the sun invisible except as a light patch stifled by bales of clouds. Damp and subdued and tired of being threatened by the weather, neither Colin nor Maggie felt like singing or talking or doing anything but sitting half-slumped in their saddles, absorbing bumps and uneven jarrings as their horses plodded down the mushy trail. It took Colin a few minutes to notice when his horse stopped.

“Oh, no,” Maggie said, drooping wearily forward on her mount’s neck. Stretching out before them was a vast sea of swirling, frothing water. Debris, natural and manmade, swept along in the churning muddy flood, and trees caught up in it genuflected at its perimeters. How they could have dozed without hearing the roar and rumble of those waters was amazing.

“It wasn’t like this when I came north,” Colin said. “It doesn’t look the same at all.”

“This IS the Troutroute River, then?” Maggie asked.

Colin nodded. “According to the maps—and I remember the path this far too, but the bridge that was here is gone.”

“How are we going to get across, then?”

Ching growled low in his throat and hopped down from his perch, stalking forward to crouch low on the path ahead of them. Except for his growl, his total green-eyed concentration was fixed on the flood. With a whip of his tail he stood up and turned to Maggie. “Well. If that doesn’t beat all. This is the first time I EVER saw a dragon climb a tree.”

“What?” she asked, a little snappish at being interrupted while she was trying to plot how they were going to cross. She personally was not overly fond of large bodies of water, and Ching was even less enamored of it than she. There were far too many trees on and just beneath the surface, and the water was far too fast to make swimming even a fleeting consideration.

“Maggie, look out there!” Colin pointed. “There’s a dragon in that tree.”

“Silly creature,” sniffed Ching, cocking his ears again for a moment. “She’s crying for help. Of course she’s stuck. Any dragon dumb enough to go out in THAT stuff.” He shuddered with revulsion. “And then climb a TREE it—well, she deserves to be stuck.”

“Can’t she fly out?” Maggie shielded her eyes with her hand to try to block out the sparkles of light bouncing off the water to obscure her vision.

Ching was still for a moment, listening, for he seemed to need to cock his black ears even to hear with his mind. “She’s moaning something about her wings being tangled.”

“Still don’t see why she doesn’t fly out, great beast like that…” Maggie said, riding a few paces up, then back, to get a better view of the dragon.

“At least we won’t have to worry about a dragon as well as a flood.” Colin shivered and dismounted. “Perhaps your sister would appreciate your visit more later, when she’s—you know—had more chance to adapt to the nomadic life.” He really didn’t expect her to insist that they sit to wait for the flood to subside, which would surely take at least days, if not weeks. And they definitely could not cross it, which would be at worst a sodden death, and at best a dreadful way to treat his instruments. “We could try again later—maybe in midsummer?”

Maggie only favored him with a venomous look and dismounted, first continuing her shoreline inspection of the stranded beast on foot, then plopping down onto a fallen tree trunk. Cupping her chin in one hand, she stared moodily out at the flood, plucking angrily at the tall grasses that grew around her with the hand unoccupied with chin.

Ching joined her, settling his white stomach onto the soft, mossy covering of the log. “Well, witch, what now?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen this sort of thing before. This
is
the first journey I’ve taken more than a day’s ride from home, after all, and I can hardly be prepared for everything.” She gnawed a grubby and already abused thumbnail. “Wish I had some of Gran’s good strong transformation magic, instead of just hearthcraft. I could change these horses into whales or something. As it is, we’re as stuck as that dragon.”

“I suggest we give up.” The cat closed his eyes and looked away.

“No, really, Ching, what can a hearthcrafter do in this kind of situation? I could spin a rope, but we’d never make it all the way across the river.” She reached out and snapped off one of the tall reeds at the edge of the torrent.

“Don’t be silly,” the cat scoffed. “What would I do with a rope anyway? Walk tippy-toe across it, or hang by my tail?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie snapped, nettled by the cat’s sarcasm, her inability to produce a solution, and the party’s generally negative attitude. “But I’m sure not going to carry you.” She curled her lip at the water. “I’m not all that fond of that stuff myself, you know. If my magic didn’t require extensive contact with scrubwater, I’d probably be as likely to melt of it as Great-Grandma Oonaugh.” She twined a second weed around the first and forced them into a rough coil in her hand.

The cat swatted at the end of the reed that protruded from her hand. “Going to make a bathing dress of these, witch?”

“Take a swim, Ching. Maybe I
will
,” she stared at the reeds, replying to the concept of constructing reed bathing dresses, not to the swim. “Minstrel?” she said.

Colin hoped she had decided after all that they would turn back, now that he had patiently given her time to reflect on the impossibility of their situation. He expected she, as would any reasonable person, would reach the obvious conclusion. “Yes?”

“Help me pick some more of these rushes, please.”