Song of Sorcery (15 page)

“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 why 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 it 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 towards 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 first-hand 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).

Just as he was accepting the Minstrel’s Medal of Merit from Master Minstrel Peter, he tripped and fell sprawling, face first, catching himself hard on his left side to avoid damage to his fiddle.

“Sorry,” mumbled the person over whom he had tripped, languidly drawing her feet closer to her and covering them with a full blue skirt. Her mood appeared to match her attire. Ignoring him as completely as though
he
were a ghost, she sat with her head resting against the splintery rough wood of the wagon, the pretty head drooping as though her neck were inadequate to support it. Though the neck was long and graceful, it appeared to Colin to be in no way insubstantial, however. It was draped with beads and coins that jangled distractingly as the girl heaved a desolate sigh. Her chin pointed up but her mouth pointed most emphatically down, and he watched a tear balance, glistening, on the end of her nose before skipping over her lips to slide down her chin and trail off behind her ear.

“It was my fault. I ought to look where I’m going,” he said, feeling embarrassed to be relatively tragedy-free in the face of such evident misery. “Beg your pardon, but could you tell me where the musicians are? I play the fiddle,” he held it up, his credentials, “I thought, you know, they might let another fiddler sit in.”

She jerked her head to the left. The children who had been following him had joined a group of people, liberally sprinkled with dogs, who leaned, sat, or lay in a loose cluster around five men, and around one man in particular.