Song of Sorcery (3 page)

“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. Chingachgook, 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

Maggie was so anxious to get away from the village that she left Colin and the pack horse far behind in the first half hour on the road. After a long frozen winter at Fort Iceworm, it was a joy to splatter over the muddy tracks and splash through the pools left by melted snow from the last storm a month earlier. She scarcely noticed the nip at her ears as her mare’s gallop created a wind for them.
 
Her woolen cape tugging at her as it billowed out behind her back made her want to sing from exhilaration. The smell of the new, tender grasses, the smell of anything at all after a sub-zero winter of buried vegetation and frozen noses, was sweeter by far than any of the perfume worn by the ladies at Winnie’s wedding. Even under a dull gray sky, the colors of spring were dazzling after the stark blacks and endless expanses of everlasting white. Mostly there was green, of course, but there were also redbirds and bluebirds and an occasional brave blossom of yellow or purple.

Her neighbors, whom she did spare a glance as they leaped into drainage ditches to escape being mowed down as she sped past, were also colorful. After nine months of black and deep indigo and brown that they wore against the cold, it was good to see the dark coats finally exchanged for the women’s costumes of red and gold skirts, blue or yellow blouses, and white embroidered aprons and kerchiefs. Most of the men dressed more soberly even now, a plow being less kind to white aprons than a butter churn, but Maggie knew that soon on market days they would be slipping over their smocked homespun shirts felted vests embroidered in the most outlandish scenes and hues their womenfolk could devise. The more fantastic the embroidery, the more fantastic the man, folk said, for what woman would ruin her eyes doing such work for a nincompoop?

It wasn’t until she had to wait for a flock of sheep to dawdle across the road that the minstrel, panting and red-faced, galloped up on his mud-flecked buckskin horse. Ching, being jounced unmercifully in the basket he occupied atop the pack horse, yowled filthy feline curses.

Colin struggled to contain his ire as he reached the witch and her sweating chestnut mare. “Your pardon, milady, but if you try to maintain this pace, you’ll kill your beast before we reach the next village.”

As the thorough tongue lashing she was receiving from her grandmother’s cat began to sink in, Maggie bit back the angry retort she’d meant for the minstrel, and instead nodded meekly and gently urged her horse forward as the last sheep passed.

Encouraged by this apparent acceptance of his authority, Colin added generously, in the grand language he’d been schooled to use with the aristocracy, “We troubadours are well versed in the ways of the road. Pray let me be your guide, milady.”

“Oh, pray go soak your head,” Maggie replied, unable to control her temper this time. “There’s only this one bloody road south from here to the Troutroute River, according to Dad’s map. What’s there to know, anyway? Look,” she pointed to a red bag tied in the fork of a tree. “The path is even protected with medicine bundles. Probably as exciting as a walk around the barnyard.”

Colin didn’t know what to say. How could
he
tell this pushy female, who even though she wasn’t anywhere near being what he would call sweet and innocent, nonetheless seemed pretty naive, what the perils of the road were? Fresh from the Academy this spring, he truthfully hadn’t experienced a great many of them himself. He was sure there were some, however, as his fellow students from parts of Argonia more exotic and sophisticated than East Headpenney, where he’d been raised, had told absolutely harrowing tales. And the history the masters gave in Lyric Appreciation classes, he felt sure, was not born of the sort of conflict, be it magical or unmagical, that could be warded away merely by hanging a medicine bundle in a tree fork. But go tell that to Mistress Know-it-all.

So they jogged along in silence for a long while. The dull clop of the horses’ hooves and the occasional jangle of the strings on Colin’s instruments as he shifted weight in the saddle were the only sounds. They had quite passed all the farms that surrounded Fort Iceworm, and were negotiating the more rugged, unmaintained track that was the South Highway when Maggie, who had been sneaking an occasional guilty side-long glance at Colin’s tight-lipped face, cleared her throat.

“Lovely day, isn’t it?”