Song of Sorcery (23 page)

“The sorcerer was sweet as honey. ‘I only promised to relieve him of it, dear lady, Come now,’ he says, ‘why should a traveler like yourself be needing extra possessions to cart around? I’ll just keep it safe for you as a memento of this lovely party and this charmin’ native ritual of yours. Someday, maybe, when I’m sure of your friendship and loyalty, I may let you have it back.’

“Xenobia didn’t say anything to that, and he raps on my cage.I knew I was more bear than man already, for he smelled delicious. ‘By the way, Highness, the lady was not exactly playing fair with you. She neglected to tell you the rest of the antidote, as I’m bound by the spell to do. If, having been freed by those other conditions she mentioned, you manage to recover this little trinket,’ he flashed the prism again, dazzling my eyes and taunting Xenobia, ‘so your son can be as dreary as most young men, you will regain your human shape. If you don’t die of old age in that bear body first!’

“Then I’ll be if he didn’t mount on a great black swan and fly away before Xenobia could be at him again.”

“I must say,” Maggie admitted through her yawn, “that was an amazing story.” Her eyelids had been getting ever heavier as the bear’s deep voice growled on. The bear prince raised his great shaggy head from her lap, and if a bear’s tiny eyes could look solicitous, his did.

“Ah, gurrrl, and you listening to my tale after being up all night and none of the sleep you natural folk need. You’re in sore need of hibernation.” He rose to his hind paws again and looked around, then dropped once more to all fours. “You nap a bit and I’ll keep watch. I doubt any of Xenobia’s tribe have lingered in the area, but we’ll wait for nightfall to move along all the same.”

“You’re the prince,” Maggie agreed, snuggling down into a nice grassy place and immediately falling asleep.

14

Due To The Magical Nature of This Tale Chapter 13 Has Been Omitted

Awakening in his comfortable room at the Queenston Inn, the homey weight of Ching’s purring body stretched across his legs, Colin felt like crying. His body ached all over from wielding the great sword, and from riding in one day the day-and-a-half distance from the gypsy camp to Queenston. He had actually allowed himself to be so panicked by pursuit as to take Davey’s word for it that Maggie was safe and likely on the road ahead of him. He had half-killed his horse galloping down that forest path in hopes of catching up with
 
her.

For the first league or two that flew beneath his horse’s hooves, he had expected to rein in at any moment to hoist a brightly clad figure up behind him. Instead, the path had been empty, the town at the hour of his passage had been empty, and the highway beyond the town leading to Queenston, while not empty, had not led to Maggie either.

He hadn’t really supposed she’d get so far ahead as to reach the highway on foot before him, but nonetheless her absence upon it caused
him
to feel empty. It was by then too late to turn back, or to slow down, for the gypsies would have recaptured their mounts and been after him if that was their intention. He could not take the chance that it wasn’t.

So today he was less weary, but sore of mind and body, and a day behind from sleeping through it if he could judge from the ruddy sunset pinking the lace curtains that hung at the window.

He was hungry too, and had no assets except a sword that didn’t fit him, his musical instruments, the clothes on his back, and a borrowed cat. He also had a lack of bright notions how to proceed with keeping his promises to Maggie and to Zorah.

Ching raised his black-masked face from his kneading front paws, green eyes slitted with contentment.

Colin idly scratched behind the cat’s whiskers. “At least you’re in a good mood. We’d best get to work, however, before they throw us in prison.” The cat didn’t look particularly worried. Having no purse, he could hardly be held responsible for bills. Colin walked to the window to get his bearings. The capitol swept down to the brilliant water of Queenston Harbor, whose garden of masts and spars was outlined in sharp detail against the mountains. The sunset frosted the upper peaks hovering protectively around the harbor with strawberry ice. “Ah, well,” sighed Colin as he pulled his boots on, “at least if we don’t come up with something here they’ll only jail us—if they catch us. This is a nice place. Some inns, I understand, they’d simply cut our throats and be done with it.”

Fortunately, temporary impoverishment was one contingency the academy had trained him to contend with. Guitar strung across his back, and fiddle under his arm, he held open the door of the room for Ching to stroll through. “Now, cat, I promised you you’d never go hungry, didn’t I? How does some nice fish sound?” Ching gazed raptly up at him for a reply.

Hoping not to meet the landlord, Colin slipped softly down the stairs, and for a change luck was with him. He breathed more deeply when they had put several streets between themselves and the inn. The salty, fishy smell of the harbor tanged at their noses, and Ching padded along in a positively frisky fashion.

Colin soon thought it prudent to lift the cat to his shoulders so he could ride between the guitar and Colin’s neck. The capitol of Argonia was much busier than it had been when the third-class apprentices from the Minstrel Academy had visited their hall there years before.

Even now, in early evening, merchants and sailors and servants and nobles streamed around him, bartering and buying right in the middle of the street. Heavily laden wagons pulled by horses or oxen parted the stream of passers-by as a boulder parts a stream of water. Carriages, gilded and probably belonging to noble court officials and administrative personnel, clattered by, heedless of the traffic, and Colin shied, nervous of so much activity after the relative peace of the highway.

He ought to have expected it would be busier, though, with the tribunal convening in only three months. Servants would be renovating their masters’ and mistresses’ townhouses, merchants would be heavily stocking their inventories, and, naturally, more ships would be required to bring the goods.

Country folk would be coming to town looking for work more lucrative than farming to see them through the coming winter. And curiosity-seekers would be trying to find a good place to stay before everyone else got moved in. For everybody wanted to know what would happen when the elder statesmen of Argonia met to nominate Finbar the Fireproof’s successor to the crown of Argonia.

Finbar had been one of the best kings ever to rule, and one of the most colorful. The Minstrel Academy was one of the King’s many educational advances, and had been founded some fifty years ago, shortly after Finbar had accepted the crown. Tax reforms, improved farming methods instituted by wise men sent abroad specifically to study advanced foreign techniques, the abolition of differences in the criminal code between magical and non-magical folk, and a general attitude of reason and tolerance had been the result of his rule.

But Finbar, once the most stoic and courageous of princes, was finally growing old. Some said old before his time, as an unfortunate consequence of his family history. He came from a family of performing magicians, whose talents included not only Finbar’s own penchant for swallowing flaming swords (which made him virtually dragon-proof) but also being sawn in half, lying on beds of nails, sticking swords into boxes containing themselves, and other uncomfortable occupations. Even those who did not agree that the king’s premature infirmity at the age of eighty-six resulted from his magic had to admit that his perilous ancestral talent had cost him his heir to the throne.

His descendants were less powerful than he, as he was less powerful than his ancestor who could climb invisible ropes into the stratosphere. The two young princes, in trying to live up to their father’s prowess, perished rather messily while attempting to master one of the more advanced skills practiced by him. The princess did happen to have a little talent for eating fire, but after the demise of her brothers she decided to retire from public life and become an illuminator of manuscripts.

Some folk were uncharitable enough to intimate that a monarch with somewhat less magic and somewhat more mortal strength and horse sense might be a wise choice at this time.

At any rate, the economy of Queenston was flourishing if the reigning monarch was not, and it was not easy for a man with a cat on his shoulders and a fiddle under his arm to elbow his way through the throngs that crowded the streets and waterfront.
 
Here there were fewer nobles and rich merchants,
 
and more longshoremen, sailors, and the ladies who profited by their company.

He was about to ask one of these people where he could locate his dinner when his nose located it for him. Rancid grease, frying fish, sailors whose bodies touched water only when a wave washed across the deck of their ships, and the mingled stench of first- and second-hand ale and foreign tobacco told him he had found a place to earn his meal and
 
rent money even before he heard the clamor of voices and the rattle of cutlery from within.

He could see very little as he entered the inn, for two reasons. The first was that a friendly pre-dinner brawl was in progress and people were flying in and out the door on their knees and by the seats of their pants in confusing profusion. The second reason was that the smoke from both pipes and unattended oil lamps clouded the entire establishment with a haze of blue-gray fumes. Colin thought perhaps the patrons were so glad to see the place after months at sea, they probably considered the fumes atmospheric.

Ducking the airborne diners, he made his way to a chair in the corner of the room where he could have his back against the wall and avoid being jostled from behind. Ching jumped down from his shoulder and went to investigate the fish smells emerging from behind the bar. Colin unlimbered his bow.

For a time he played to himself, building his courage, and no one could hear him over the brawl. But the first of the brawlers to decide to sit and nurse his wounds over another flagon sat near him, listened to what he played, applauded loud enough even to be heard over the din, and bellowed a request. This innovative pastime quickly became fashionable among his fellows, likewise seeking less painful diversion that would allow them more drinking time.

Requests were loud and competitive, and almost led to another brawl, until someone decided to influence Colin’s choice with a copper coin. Someone else decided that what one copper coin could do, two copper coins would do better, and so on. By the time he had enough to buy his dinner Colin was thoroughly enjoying himself.

All of the sailors had voices, a few of them good, all of them lusty, and they brought the same enthusiasm to the singing that they had to the brawling. Their favorite songs were bawdy and very long, since on shipboard it was a common pastime to sing and to add new verses, appropriate to the current situation, to old songs. Colin was on the sixteenth verse or the eighteenth, he wasn’t sure which, of the one about the selkie who outwitted the sea serpent and seduced the siren, when the first of his listeners called the innkeeper for a pint for the fiddler.

As the evening wore on and the smoky room changed from an overall illuminated gray to an overall illuminated black, frequent calls of “Landlord, t’lad’s dry! Ale!” reverberated through the room along with the clanking of flagons and the singing. Then Colin was good for another forty verses, and after the first few times was amazed at how harmonious the chorusing of the sailors had become.

When the second gallon had poured down his throat, a man with a striped cap and an eye patch produced a concertina and another man produced a hornpipe, and then it didn’t matter if Colin sang or not, as everyone else was making music, even if they weren’t all singing or playing the same song.

As the night wore on and day approached, Colin was still singing and yarning at the table occupied by his most fervent and intoxicated supporters. The minstrel listened to their stories and thought he’d never heard anything so wonderful, or met such fine, brave, intelligent, altogether splendid fellows in his life.

There was a lull in the conversation then as all of them took a pull at their flagons and he told them about his own adventures. When he’d finished, several pints later, his face was wet with tears. “…and so I lost dear, dear li’l Maggie…” and a couple of the tears slid over the lip of his flask.

“There there, lad, you’ll dilute the ale,” said the concertina player, thoughtfully mopping Colin’s face with his striped hat, and then blowing his nose on it before replacing it on his own head.

“Ah, you loved the lassie, didn’t you, lad?” asked a tender hearted old soul, the boson of the ship they all crewed on, and a former pirate.

“Well, she made excellent stew…” Colin said wistfully, the tears still flowing freely. “But I left her in the wood. Couldn’t find her. Nothin’ left of her a’tall but her pussy cat.” The originator of the ribald remark that followed that statement was awarded a scathing look by Ching, who was filled with fish given him by the friendly cook in the kitchen and perched once more on Colin’s neck.

When the laughter died away, someone else said, “Sign on with us, then, lad.”

“Can’t. I’ve all this unfinished business. Got to find ’er ladyship for Maggie, and get the gypsy’s heart from t’ sorcerer for Zorah, like I told you.” He started bawling again at the impossibility of it all, then brightened. “I say, you lads wouldn’t know where I could find any bad sor—sor—men witches, would you?”