Fortunately, the dragon was so surprised that they did not incinerate immediately when she breathed on them, that she completely forgot she outweighed them by a few hundred stone, and had sharp claws and teeth as well as fire-breathing potential.
For a witch, Maggie was very adept at being self-righteously indignant, and when she had spit out the river water, she took advantage of the dragon’s confusion to display her talent for invective. “Ching,” she ordered, “will you tell this foul-mouthed, fetid-breathed, carrion-eating crud that she is the most ungrateful, rude and—and not a very nice creature at all!”
“I will not.” The cat sat upright, tail curled sedately around his front paws. “So far, she looks on me as not quite bite-sized. I have no desire to jeopardize our relationship by conveying such irresponsible messages.”
“Some familiar you are. You’re supposed to protect me.”
“Only from—ahem—a fate worse than death. Other perils, up to and including death, were not in my job description, particularly at the cost of my own tail.”
Maggie threw up her hands. “I’m surrounded by cowards!”
“I beg your pardon!” bubbled Colin, still dripping from saving her life. “Now who’s the ungrateful crud! My hands will probably take weeks to heal well enough that I can play bar chords again.”
She shot him a look of simultaneous apology and annoyance. She wished he would not pick such awkward times to be sensitive. If she couldn’t enlist the cat’s help he wouldn’t have to worry about playing his bar chords.
“Now just how was it you were planning to negotiate with this eternally grateful creature?” Colin pestered. Not having heard the remark about dinner, he remained more unalarmed than he should have been.
“Ching can talk to him, you see…”
Colin looked at the cat, who was yawning, and at the dragon beside him, who was concentrating on puffing up and down the scale of dragon puffs, forte to pianissimo, trying to rekindle the fizzled flame. “I’m not sure communication is the key—I can talk to a Brazorian bandit, too, but that hardly means he’ll refrain from skewering me—”
“Precisely,” she said, hastily returning her attention to the cat. “You ought to be ashamed, Ching. I’ve helped take care of you since you were a kitten.”
“Yes, wasn’t I cunning?” He licked a paw clean of an imaginary speck.
“You were. You were the most promising of the litter—your mother, Sacajawea, was the loveliest, loyalest, most magical of all familiars—many’s the time I held you both purring in my lap and fed you dainties from the banquet table and told you…”
“Oh, very well. You’ve made your point. But I will not insult this discriminating creature. Perhaps if you prepare some food for her which will provide a nutritious alternative to yourselves as a main course, she’ll accept it in your stead. She’s missed her last feeding, she said. She’d have gobbled me up, bite size or no, but says she finds a cat who speaks impeccable dragonese a diverting novelty.”
Maggie didn’t wait for the cat to finish his long-winded speech before she rummaged into the foodbag and came out with a piece of dried venison that, with a bit of stretching, became a whole deer, considerately roasted for the flameless dragon. After four more such delicacies, the dragon daintily mopped her long, royal-blue snout with a ruby-colored forked tongue, and settled back with a gale-force sigh against a convenient grove of trees.
Colin released the breath he had been holding during the exchanges that passed from Maggie to cat to dragon. He had watched his companion address the cat, who had of course said nothing in reply, but had flicked his whiskers and twitched his tail tip occasionally. The cat had then turned to rub against the dragon in a most affectionate manner, after which performance Maggie had produced the miraculous venison, the dragon had devoured it, and the dragon had retired to leave the cat gnawing at the meat left clinging to the shards of bone overlooked in the dragon’s glutting. The cat could obviously converse with Maggie, and through the cat, Maggie could converse with dragons. That was all very well and good, but it did make him feel slightly left out, but since he was also evidently to be left out of the dragon’s diet, he found it fairly easy to reconcile himself.
While he and Maggie changed into dry clothing, the cat chatted casually with the dragon.
“It’s quite a touching little story, really,” Ching informed them as they emerged from the woods, fully prepared to run back to the cover of the trees at any sign of hostility or renewed appetite from the great beast. The cat assured them that they were safe, as the dragon had pronounced herself quite well fed for the time being. “Poor Grizel,” Ching mewed his most plaintive, “has had a simply dreadful time.”
Dragons are notoriously long-winded, being so full, generally, of hot air, and Ching had begun to fancy himself a raconteur, so what with the cat’s speech having to be translated for Colin after it had already gone from dragon to cat to Maggie, the narrative became somewhat garbled at certain points. Nevertheless, what Grizel actually said was interpreted as the following, in as near to the dragon’s own mode of expression as is possible to relate:
The Dragon’s Story
“I never thought of myself as the suicidal type, not even when I found myself tumbling down the river, but I suppose I must have been, a little bit, to have sought a cave so near the river’s bed, when for eons and eons that particular cave has been flooded at the same time every year.
“The heart, alas, knows no season when it’s breaking, and I heeded neither spring nor flood—I almost wish your violent agitation of that branch out there had not freed my wings and claws. For though I was able, having recovered my senses, to swim here, where I encountered this charming little furry friend and was given the benefit of your hospitality,” (she licked her snout in remembered appreciation) “you have freed my body, but not loosed the chains that bind my heart.
“Of course, I might at any time prior to my entanglement in that tree have swum to shore. But I was asleep when the floodwaters filled my cave, and before I had quite gathered my faculties, I was struck behind the ears with a portion of a nearby mountain, which must have become dislodged in the flood. At least, I suppose it had to be something as substantial as that, for I am quite well armored, you know.
“Oh, yes, we dragons are almost completely protected externally, but ah, the searing pain that can burn within! I see you appear puzzled, but it is true, my friends, it is indeed true that we, too, have feelings that cannot be shielded by our scales, and bear passions hotter than our own fires. Though the flood has extinguished one flame, that other within me burns like a torch I carry—for him. And I had always considered myself to be such a cool-headed sort!
“Ah, but that was all before I met—him. If only you could see him! A dragon is surely just a dragon, you may say. How quickly your preconceptions would melt away if only you could see my Grimley! Brilliant red-orange scales glittering in the sun! The liquid reptilian grace of him as he sails through the Southern Aurora! The sensuousness of his slither when he turned to sear me with that earthquaking smile from those hypnotic garnet eyes of his! Ah, Grimley, Grimley, my heart, my flame, my own!”
(For a moment she seemed quite overcome, but was finally able to proceed in a calmer fashion.)
“We were very happy for a while—he scarcely left my side, nor would he allow me to hunt for myself, but fed me from his own snout the choicest morsels. We were so blissful! How could we have quarreled and parted over such a small thing? I tell you, I am quite, quite bereft! Absolutely bereft. I simply felt, you know, that it was demeaning to my darling to let that MAN choose what he ate from our range, instead of raiding the herds and villages at the dictate of his dragonly will. He took my concern amiss, and called me a little hothead who had no concern for the security of our future offspring. And I—oh, the terrible things I said—still… I feel, you know, that I must resolve in my own heart this matter of dragonian dignity. On the river, as it all flashed before me in the extremity of my need, I decided that if I should be freed, I would fly to the east to consult our great queen. Perhaps her wise counsel could heal those harsh words. If our queen agrees with me, then I shall return with her to my love in a blaze of glory, and how can he deny me then? If not, I shall crawl all the way back home and beg his forgiveness.”
(Another flood impended, as the great dragon tears rolled off her snout and down her stomach, further saturating the sodden ground surrounding her. She sniffed a giant sniff and continued.)
“At any rate, I drifted unconscious downstream after the mountain hit me, until I became entangled in that tree, as first you beheld me. Although I possessed the strength to free myself, I was afraid of injuring my wings, which are ever so fragile. Then, when you people were playing about on that rope, you jarred the tree loose that had pinioned my wings, and set me free, and—and here I am—flameless, loveless wretch as you see me!”
Colin, his poet’s sensitivity aroused, had quietly drawn his fiddle from his bag and was playing a little lament for the creature as she finished her tale.
Uncomfortable with the surfeit of sentimentality, Maggie squirmed a bit, but did feel sorry for the beast. She was actually, objectively speaking, an attractive thing. From royal blue snout to spiked and slender tail tip, her color altered many times to blend from blue to turquoise, aquamarine, and other blue-green distinctions, to sea green, and mist green, and forest green, and emerald green, to finally tip her membranous wings and frost her spikes with a chartreuse of the same beautiful shade as her big, limpid eyes, pools of misery that were, as has been mentioned, quite overflowing.
Maggie let out a long breath and rolled up her sleeves. “I can do something about the flameless part of her problem, at least, if she will promise to help us,” she told Ching. “Tell her that if she will fly us across the river, I can help her by restoring her fire.”
The cat relayed the message, and Grizel pronounced herself quite amenable to flying them across, all except the horses.
She would not have been able to provide such ferry service, she told them, if it were not for Maggie’s generous offer. She asked Ching to explain that dragons fly not only by means of their wings, which were insubstantial compared to the rest of a dragon’s bulk. The fire-breathing mechanism created a cavity of hot air within, that served as a buoying agent. Maggie looked down the dragon’s open mouth and concentrated on her hearth-building spell. Soon Grizel was smoking cozily away.
Colin, meanwhile, unsaddled their horses and gave them a smack on the rump to send them home, so that they might reach safety before Grizel’s next feeding time. Maggie joined him in making packs of their belongings that they strapped to their backs. Ching settled himself on top of the pack Maggie wore, and Grizel knelt, allowing them to mount above her wings upon her neck and shoulders.
They felt the air rush up at them as they rose faster and faster and higher and higher. Maggie had to catch at her skirts to avoid having them singed by the backlash of the dragon’s flame. Below, the river rushed heedlessly on. They sailed a dizzying height above the trees, and could make out, just beyond them, fields plowed in patchwork patterns.
Extending her feet, then gradually folding her wings as she damped her flame, the dragon brought them to a safe landing at the edge of a forest clearing.
“Farewell!” she saluted them. “I cannot go near the town in daylight for fear of my life. You have fed me when I hungered and enflamed me when I languished, and I shall ever be your friend, but I ask you grant me one final request.”
The people asked the cat to tell the dragon they would be glad to grant the request, and of what did it consist?
“That if you meet my Grimley before I do, should you survive the experience, you would tell him that his Grizel burns for him still and repents her inflammatory words and—and that I shall return to him anon!”
* * *
Aunt Sybil was slogging about in a puddle of syrup, trying to re-shingle her house with fresh gingerbread cookies. Maggie and Colin had smelled the cookie fragrance as soon as they’d left the highway just past the village and turned off onto the path, which a child had eagerly volunteered to show them. The child also volunteered to guide them to the aunt’s house, but, as it appeared a fairly uncomplicated journey, they declined.
“Little chap seemed disappointed,” said Colin.
“His folks wouldn’t like him coming along, I think,” Maggie said. “They surely must remember the previous tenant of Auntie’s house. Great-great-great-Grandma Elspat liked children—but not in the conventional sense. It’s a wonder the rest of the Brown line continued—I believe, you know, that it was no little woodcutter’s daughter that did her in. Gran said it was her own daughter, to save herself. It will be interesting to see the place.”
“But you—uh—your current aunt—she doesn’t—indulge?”
“In gobbling children? Oh, no—but she keeps up the original architecture, I understand, so that they’ll come out to see her, and she can treat them. With her specialty, she gets rather lonely.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, she sees the present in her crystal ball.”
Colin scratched his head and for a moment seemed to accept this, then said, “Huh?”
“She sees the present in her crystal ball,” Maggie repeated.
“Why does she need a crystal ball for that? Most of us see the present without one.”
“Well, yes, but Aunt Sybil, you see, doesn’t have to be present to see the present. I mean, she can see what’s happening to OTHER folk now… not just herself—you understand?”
“I guess so.”
“That’s why she has no neighbors. In the old days, I guess, she might have been actually persecuted. People like a witch who can look into their private lives far less than one who eats their children. Though of course, if she accepted all the consultations for that sort of thing that are available to her, from what Gran says I suppose she could have a house of gold, instead of gingerbread.”
It was then that they rounded a turn in the path and saw the clearing containing a house, which was not charming at all, but appeared to be the victim of some natural disaster, the roof half off, the walls slanting in, and the door ajar on its jamb. An elderly woman, who at first glance looked to Colin alarmingly like Maggie’s grandmother, was occupied with a bowl and spatula, and had a pile of cookies the size of dinner plates on the ground beside her. The entire woods smelled like a bakery.
Ching jumped down from Maggie’s back and raced to where Sybil was working, where he began mewing raucously and rubbing himself against her, before sitting down to clean the syrup from his paws. Sybil turned a beaming face to them, so pretty and friendly and benevolent that the resemblance to Maggie’s grandmother was all but obliterated for Colin.
“Maggie, darling, and Colin! I am so pleased you’ve made it with no further trouble! I nearly burnt the gingerbread when you fell in the river and the dragon got loose!” She had set down the bowl, which Colin could now see contained fudge icing, and, after wiping her hands on her ample apron, embraced them both.
“Auntie, what’s happening to your house?”
“I tell you, dear, I was about to send to your Gran and see if she would like a guest ’til high summer. Have you ever seen such a sticky mess?” They both agreed that they had not. “You should know, Maggie dear, since I have no daughter of my own, I had intended to pass this place to you, but the practical problems of a house made of sweets far outweigh the security of owning one’s own home.”
Surveying the ick and goo, Maggie certainly understood what she meant. She bit her lip for a moment, then picked up a shingle and bit that instead slowly, chewing carefully as she circled the house, noting that even the foundation of peppermint stick logs was sagging and melting into the ground around the house. “May I use your oven?” she asked finally.
“Oh, of course, darling. You must be famished.”
“We are, a bit. But if you’ll find something for Colin and Ching, I’ll undertake the repair of the cottage for you.”
“Could you do that, dear?”
Maggie shrugged. “Well, it’s a bit trickier than preparing a banquet for 1500 after a lean hunting season and a drought, but if you have the raw ingredients, I can tackle it.”
It took even Maggie’s magic the remainder of the light part of the afternoon to make the required candies and shore up the foundation, shingle the walls, and patch the roof with fresh sugar wafers. Fortunately for her, the power that defined her hearthcraft talent as that of hearth and housework took the term housework literally, so that it included a bit of light carpentry.
Colin and Aunt Sybil sat on stumps in front of the house, drinking tea and munching the fresh roofing material, watching Maggie apply the fudge at strategic points so that it could spread itself before she applied the shingles.
“I only tuned in when you children were in the river, young man,” said Sybil conversationally, “Have you known my niece long?”
Though Colin’s experience was limited, it was not so limited that he had never before heard that tone of voice from fond female relatives of unmarried girls. “Er—not that long. We’re traveling together on official business actually—Sir William’s orders.”
“I see. Maudie’s message hinted that there had been some unpleasantness?”
“Message, ma’am?”
“My familiar, my budgie bird, flies messages between us sometimes—to keep in touch, you know.”
“Isn’t that a little awkward, considering?” He nodded to Ching, asleep in Sybil’s lap, face nestled in his front paws as completely at home as though Sybil were his sister.
“Oh, Ching knows he mustn’t be naughty and bother Budgie. Maudie has made that quite clear.” She stroked the cat’s spotted fur. “Our mother wouldn’t have needed a budgie for her messages, of course.”
“She wouldn’t?”
“Oh, no. She could talk to you plain as day through HER visions. She talked Maudie all through birthing Bronwyn, even though she had to be in Queenston just then.”
“Bronwyn?” Colin asked, sipping his tea. Maggie certainly had an extensive family. More of them just seemed to pop up in conversation all the time.
“Maggie’s ma. Lovely girl she was, Bronwyn.”
“It seems like Maggie has an awful lot of relatives, and they’re all ladies. Tell me about Bronwyn, will you? Maggie talks about distant ancestors, but hasn’t said much about her immediate family, other than that she’s frightfully worried about this one sister who doesn’t seem to be entirely a sister.” He felt a bit guilty for taking advantage of Maggie’s doing a favor for her aunt to pry, but he had a vested interest in this venture in that his life was at stake. He felt, under the circumstances, he really ought to have the whole story. Besides, it could add immeasurably to the background he needed to improve that song…
Aunt Sybil was a kind person and a lonely one; however, she was not stupid. She gave him a hard look from under her brow that considerably heightened her resemblance to her sister. Maggie, having finished the foundation and the walls, and having patched the hard-candy windows with an extra shingle or two, had climbed the ladder her aunt used to climb to her bed-loft. With this she mounted the roof. She was again applying the fudge as binding material in strategic places so that it would spread itself properly to be ready for the application of the sugar-wafer roof tiles. “Well, young man, I can understand your curiosity. I suppose I can tell you something now, but the rest I’ll save ’til Maggie’s done there and we can all have a bit of supper. There’s a lot she doesn’t know, either, that I think she ought…”
“Any enlightenment you can provide would be appreciated, ma’am,” Colin said. He had finished his tea and roof tile and had taken his guitar from its bag. He strummed lightly the strings as he fingered the keyboard. It kept his hands limber.
“I suppose Maggie has told you that she is a love child?”
“A—? Oh, yes, she did. I thought that was a little strange, because she and Sir William and everyone else acted as though she is a legitimate heir.”
“She is, she is. But only because Sir William chose to acknowledge her, when he married her mother.”
“I think you had better explain about that part.”
“Well, let’s see, now. How it was that Willie Hood, Sir William that is, and my niece, Bronwyn Brown, were fond of each other from—oh, from when they were little bitty tykes. Childhood sweethearts, you might say. But Old Tom Hood, Willie’s father, he had grand ideas, you know. He never did take to Willie being so sweet on the village witch’s daughter. I lived there then, with Maudie, my powers not being so well developed at that time as they are now. Folk could stand to be around me then. Our mother lived here with our little brother, Fearchar, and they were both querulous, discontented folk mostly, not easy to be with. So I lived with Maudie and her little girl, and often this little lad, Willie Hood, was there to play. Stop that, kitty!” she cried, as Ching jumped off her lap and ran after a bird. He did desist, but not without an unkind glare before he sat down to wash his paw. Sybil tried to pick up the thread of her story. “Oh, my dear, now, let me see, where was I?”
She found a bit of metal wire in her pocket and began to twist it as she continued. “Oh, yes, Willie Hood. He did come to visit, but Himself, Sir Thomas, didn’t like it. So he arranged a marriage with some foreign faery folk who had a daughter with a dowry so large as to buy title to all the Northern Territories for Willie.” She crocheted the wire with her fingers into a double-linked ring. “If he’d been a braver boy, I suppose Willie might have taken Bron and run off—but they were only sixteen years old or so then, and he was fond of his father, for all that he was an old rogue. And Bron wasn’t so sure that she wanted to run off and marry anyone, even Willie. Not that she didn’t care for him, but she still hoped then to see her own talent blossom into some sort of respectable witchery, and there was only Maudie and me could teach her. She didn’t mind not marrying, like some craftless village lass might, of course. Few of us have married, in the Brown line. I believe Elspat was wed to an ogre for a short time, if you could call such a union a marriage, and later there was Bron herself, but that’s all I recall.”
“Surely that’s a little unusual?” Colin asked. He put a hand across the strings to stop their vibration. “Most ladies need a husband to protect them and provide for them.”
Was there a hint of mockery in that gentle, dimpled smile? “And that’s what you’ll do, I’m sure, young man, when you marry. Protect and provide for your wife.”
“Well, minstrels don’t marry, as a rule. At least not until they’ve retired from the road and obtained positions as professors,” he explained. “It’s too difficult being on the road all the time, giving all your attention to music, to really be seriously involved with somebody—and girls take a great deal of involvement.”
She laughed outright this time. “Dear, dear lad, you have just made my point for me! Boys take a lot of involvement too, that a witch may not have time for. Bronwyn was a sweet, dear girl, but she never really developed her powers before she died, because she was always spending so much of herself on Willie. Do you think Maggie’s craft,” she nodded at her niece, still busily shingling the roof, “takes less of her than your music does of you?”
“Er—I suppose not, but Maggie’s—”
“Maggie’s very like we all have been, even Bron. Which was why, as I was saying, she told Willie to never mind, she didn’t care if he married Ellender. She even went to the wedding, pregnant and all. Her uncle was furious.”
“I can see his point.”
“Yes, I guess you could. Maudie was a bit put out too, but she’d raised Willie as much as Tom Hood had, and was delighted she was going to have a grandchild. The only time it looked as though there might be trouble was right after the wedding—Willie became genuinely attached to Ellender, the faery bride, and stayed away for a time from Bron. But faeries—and Ellender was a good quarter-blood faery, it was easy to see that—they smile and nod a lot, and are ever so lovely to look at while you’re speaking to them, but you go away feeling that you’ve been talking to yourself. Have you ever noticed that?”
“No’m, I can’t say as I’ve met many, at least not that close to the old blood.” There had been a girl in East Headpenney, though, that, try as he might, he could never compose a really decent song about her, for all that she had long blond hair, big blue eyes, and all the really admirable feminine attributes.
“I see that you have.”
“What?”
“I don’t need my crystal ball to see what’s so close to me, laddie. Why do you think I must bide alone?”
She went on. “At any rate, for whatever reason, Willie soon was coming back to the cottage, and asking after Bron, and bringing Maudie a bit of this or that from the castle gardens for her crafting. Pretty soon it was as though the wedding had never taken place.”
“Didn’t people talk?” Colin asked, again remembering East Headpenney.
“I suppose they might have, but they were careful not to let Sir William Hood hear, if they did. For he was now Sir William. Sir Thomas, having wickedly succeeded at separating the children, as he thought, had taken to his bed. Folk were careful not to let Maud or Sybil Brown hear either, and I hear many things that are not meant for me to.
“Well, they certainly must be a high-minded lot of villagers to not be right in the middle of it, nevertheless. In East Headpenney there’d have been an awful scandal.
“It’s amazing how fair and generous folk can be when faced with their own mortality. It’s the uncertainty, I’m thinking, that adds a spice to life, keeping a body more immediately concerned with his own problems than other folks’. Even a loose-tongued person who knows that he might wake up as a crow can find his own fate a good deal more absorbing than his neighbors’.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
She nodded wisely. “Brewing beer and mixing healing herbs is the least of the good that Maudie does for that village.” She stuck the wire back in her pocket. Maggie was now circling the house, hands waving designs in the air in front of her. She appeared to be mumbling something, but her voice was too low for Colin to hear. “What surprised everyone most, though, was when Bronwyn was birthin’ Maggie—what do you suppose?”
Colin looked at Maggie. Obviously the birth had taken place. What else, then, could be the punch line? He had to admit he didn’t know.
“Why, Her Ladyship, Ellender, came trippin’ down from the castle to the cottage, is what! Maudie nearly threw her out at first, but I could tell she meant no harm and made Maudie let her in. Do you know, young man, I think that right there is where Maggie and Winnie got to be such great friends?”
Colin, having no idea what she meant, nodded and kept quiet, and hoped she’d elucidate so that he wouldn’t have to seem ignorant.
“Ellender was pregnant at the time, poor thing, and her people, the foreign faery folk I was telling you about? They’d sent her some special elixir for labor pain. Faeries intermarrying with mortals had caused some difficulties with the birthings, but this elixir was to make it all seem like a walk in the garden. Bron’d been having a hard time of it, you could hear her hollering all about, I would imagine. Clear to the castle, probably, which must have been what brought Ellender down.” Tears began to gather in her eyes. “Do you know—um—in spite of what Maudie could do, none of her medicines were of any help to Bron, and she could give her nothing more without harming the babe and—do you—” she stopped for a moment to compose herself. “Do you know that that silly faery lass gave Bronwyn her elixir? Just a bit at first, but as it only helped some, she gave her more and more, ’til it all was gone.”
“That was certainly a very kind thing to do.”
“It was kinder than that. Her own folk never got more elixir to her before little Amberwine was born, and she died herself giving birth. That was when Bron moved into the castle to care for little Winnie, along with Maggie, and when a decent time of mourning passed, Willie married my niece and acknowledged Maggie as well.” The old lady was quiet for a time. Maggie had disappeared into the house, which caught the last pink rays of sundown on its soundly wafered roof, as tight and neat and pretty a cottage as any made of more conventional building materials.
“In East Headpenney, people would have said Bronwyn personally saw to it that the lady would die in childbirth so she could take over and be a wicked stepmother and…
“If anybody had said such a thing, they’d have had the whole clan down on them, particularly young Winnie, for Bronwyn was the only mother she knew. Funny, you know. I myself wouldn’t think being a crow would be such an awful thing, but—”
“I take your point.”
* * *
“Oh, Auntie, that was so good,” Maggie sighed, leaning back in her chair.
“Your voice is a bit crackly, dear,” said her aunt. “Care for some honey in your tea?”
“Don’t mind if I do, at that.” She cleared her throat and rubbed her arms with the opposing hands. “I’m so hoarse and weary from all that spell-casting, I couldn’t boil water for tea right now.”
“Well, it certainly looks lovely, darling. I appreciate it so much. Under normal circumstances it’s an enormous chore to keep this old place up, but with all this rain I was quite sure I’d finally be forced to move.”
“Just don’t let the children eat at it anymore, Auntie. You’ll have to keep a conventional cookie jar for that, I’m afraid. I put such a strong preservative spell on it, it will be quite inedible.”
“Don’t worry about it, dear. It was a wicked idea to begin with, that has deteriorated into being merely frivolous. I’ll be glad to have a roof over my head that won’t turn to goo. When mother and Fearchar lived here the two of them could keep it up—he was rather handy as a boy.”
“Tell me about Uncle Fearchar, Auntie,” Maggie said. “None of the villagers seem to know much about him, and Gran never speaks of him at all.”
The old lady didn’t say anything for a moment as she cleared the table and poured the tea. Ching was stretched full length in front of the embrous hearth fire, dying now that it was not needed for cooking. The evening sky had been clearing as the three people and Ching had come into the cottage for dinner, and the night was warmer than it had been at any time on their journey.
“I was going to mention Fearchar anyway, Maggie. Colin and I were having a talk while you were working and, as I told him, I wanted to tell you one or two family things that might be—painful—for Maudie. You may think that I’m an interfering old woman—” she held up her hand to ward off Maggie’s protestations. “Yes, you well may. Quite a few do. But someone with my talent—to see so much denied the rest of you—it may be arrogant of me, but I feel that I have an obligation to give you some advice, to make things easier. And I’ll do a sighting, as well, of course, but we can do that later.”
She stared for a moment into her earthenware cup. “You see, dear, there was a quarrel, years ago, before you girls were born, and Fearchar left, and we haven’t heard from or seen him since.”
“Not even you?”
“Well, I did for a while, actually, but it wasn’t a very good contact—a lot of static, you know, interference—’til finally I could scarce see him at all.”
“He was—somehow, do you think he was blocking you?”
Her aunt nodded sadly. “I think so. He was most upset when he left—it can’t have been easy for him, the first boy in our long line of females. And then, mother died just before.”
“Before what, Mistress Brown?” asked Colin, as the old lady was looking increasingly embarrassed. She looked, in fact, as though she wished she had not opened the subject and was reluctant to continue.
“Before Willie and Ellender.” They nodded at her encouragingly, and she went on. “I told you, Colin, that folk in the village thought little and said less of Maggie’s mother being with child and her love wedding another. That was very true. Our brother was not so prudent.”
“Being family, of course…” Colin began.
“We realized that, and that it was hard on him, particularly since he had always rather looked up to Willie—tagged along, making a regular nuisance of himself when he visited us at Fort Iceworm, he did. But he took on so long and so loud and in such a temper, that it was all Bron and I could do to calm Maudie. See, Fearchar challenged Willie to a duel, of all the silly things, for the ruin of his niece—and he no more than thirteen years old—when anybody could see she was not ruined, being a bit more than she was, rather than a bit less.” She turned to Maggie and smiled. “Your father made some mistakes when he was young, but he’s a good man, for all that. He just told Fearchar in front of the whole tavern that he wouldn’t fight him, and that was that. Fearchar called him a coward and slapped him publicly, and Willie just nodded and went back to his brew. The men at the tavern said Fearchar would have jumped onto him anyway and given him a thrashing, but they held him off. Finally he had to go away. Then he starts in pestering Maud to change Willie to a hare, saying he was like a hare because he was scared, y’know, to fight Fearchar. Maudie wasn’t happy about the wedding, nor about Bron being so sad with missin’ Willie, but she weren’t daft.”
“Gran would never do anything to hurt my Dad!” Maggie said stoutly. “And she told me herself Mama wouldn’t elope with him so he wouldn’t have to marry Ellender. What was all the fuss?”
“Just as I said, darlin’. Your uncle didn’t see things that way. He kept pestering your Gran for that spell ’til she finally told him if he didn’t be still she’d turn him into a magpie. That was when he left.”
“Sounds like everybody should have been relieved, to me,” said Colin.
“It was quieter,” Sybil admitted. “But it was a shame too. He was a disappointed young man, not yet come to his powers, and mother only barely in the ground. He felt we’d all disgraced him and turned against him. I trust the years have shown him better.” She poured a little more tea and said, “So I was thinking, dearie, that if your travels looking for Winnie take you to Queenston or thereabouts, you might ask after him. That was where my last sighting of him was.”
“Of course.” Maggie stretched and yawned, and in her stretch her eyes fell on her pack, hanging from a nail on the wall. “Oh, Auntie, I brought you a present.” She got up and fetched the trap, setting it on the table before her aunt, who pounced on it.
“An iron trap!” her breath sucked in and she clicked her tongue, “Oh, child, where did you get such a wicked thing?”
“Colin took it off the foot of a rabbit. He said he thought it might have been set by the same man who shot at my dad last winter; the rabbit said so, I mean.”
Gingerly, Sybil carried it to a little cabinet next to the fireplace. Inside this were metal-working tools, a small anvil, hammer, and tongs among them, along with some others Colin didn’t recognize.
“I’d pity the bandit that thought to rob your life savings!” Colin said. “Who’d ever think you were a blacksmith, ma’am?”
Aunt Sybil dimpled with pleasure as she returned to the table. She carried a crystal globe with her, about the size of a small pumpkin. “Metalwork is a hobby, really. I don’t get to use my craft professionally as much as I would like—a body has to be scrupulous with a gift like mine, or cause a lot of damage.”
Maggie laughed, a bit rudely, Colin thought. “Auntie, you must be the first one in our entire family to seriously worry about her magic causing damage!”
Aunt Sybil looked at her for a moment. “Not quite the first, child, nor the last, either.” She sat down and placed the crystal before them. “I suppose it comes of being able to live other people’s lives, second-hand though it is. It’s a hard thing to hurt someone you understand. Troubles the sleep. So I do my metalwork when I can get metal, and peek a bit for the fun of it between serious craftwork commissions, and with that and keeping this old cottage together, I do keep busy.”
“Can you show me what’s happening to Winnie now?” Maggie asked, leaning forward and looking into the blank glass.
“To be sure, to be sure,” replied her aunt, turning the ball over in her hands and looking deeply into it. What at first appeared to be a stray flicker from the candle stirred in the center of the ball, to gradually grow into a bright glow that began suddenly to fragment, sending motes of colored light dancing about the room.
“Ah, yes,” said Aunt Sybil with satisfaction. “I believe that must be it.”
All they could see was the image of a dagger, glittering nastily through the rainbow lights. Slowly, that moved away, and a throat came into view, slender and pale, and above that and around it, a swath of cornsilk hair. Long, tapering fingers with broken nails dragged the hair back, and a pair of sleep-dazed, startled green eyes peered out through the parted curtain of hair.
“Out, you hussy!” hissed a voice behind the dagger. “Leave this camp at once if you want to stay alive and pretty!”
Amberwine gulped. She was not used to threats. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“Oh, I’m sure you do that, my fine fancy lady. But begging is for honest gypsies, not faithless false trollops such as yourself! Out with you!” The voice turned into a black-haired woman, who leaned into the range of the glass, the better to menace the shrinking Amberwine. Except for the color of her hair and the green of the dress she wore, the second woman’s image was indistinct.
Aunt Sybil frowned and put fingertips to her forehead. “Let me just see now if I can fine-tune this.”
“Ooooh, Auntie!” Maggie’s nose nearly touched the glass in her anxiety to see more. “You’ve got her! Poor Winnie, what an ugly customer that old bat is!”
Colin and Sybil each touched Maggie’s shoulder, and she scooted back so they could see.
Sybil’s breath hissed out in surprise. “Well, I’ll be burned. If it isn’t that charlatan, Xenobia. I might have known she’d be behind this sort of thing.”
“Xenobia?” Maggie asked. “Who’s she?”
“She’s beautiful,” sighed Colin, evidently not referring to Xenobia, who was flashing her knife in glittering arcs at Amberwine, who finally had wakened to her danger and was reaching to pull on her boots before making an exit.
“Not so fast, my lady,” said Xenobia. “You can just leave those behind to pay for your keep.”
Amberwine complied, but said, “Quite a costly straw pile you have here, your highness. Four gold rings, a silk dress, a fine woolen cloak my sister wove for me, my moonstone necklace, and a good gray mare. Now my fine leather boots.” She stood up barefoot in her shift and Sybil gasped.
“Consider it your dowry for coming away with my son, girlie!” laughed the other woman. “Pity you couldn’t hold him, weren’t it?”
“Pity my husband didn’t kill him when he found us together on the moor,” Amberwine replied over her shoulder as she hurried out into the dimness beyond the glass. “And me along with him.”
The dagger flashed as Xenobia threw it, and the glass went dark.
“Get it back, Aunt Sybil!” cried Maggie.
“I’m trying, child, but violence disrupts my concentration—ah, here…” The rainbow colors danced briefly to show Amberwine hurrying down a path. Still vibrating in a tree she had just passed was the gypsy dagger.
“Perhaps we should start tonight,” Maggie said. “She seems to be in terrible danger.”
“Yes,” Colin said. “Perhaps we should. For that lovely lady to be so mistreated by that AWFUL witch—oh, excuse me, I do beg your pardon!”
Aunt Sybil grinned at him. “The false part of your statement, lad, is that Xenobia is not a witch at all. Doesn’t even have the second sight a lot of her people have. She’s just a charlatan who calls herself Queen of the Gypsies.” She turned to Maggie. “How long has your sister been missing, now?”
Maggie shook her head and looked at Colin, who replied, “From the last full moon to this, from what Giles said, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps half again that time since I met him and Maggie and I started this journey.”
Sybil nodded. “Good. Then it could hardly be the gypsy’s child.”
“Child?” Maggie asked.
“Haven’t you helped your granny midwife, girl? Your sister is at least five months into her pregnancy.”
“I thought they’d been feeding her well—she did look a bit stout.”
“I didn’t think so,” said Colin.
“As for leaving tonight, that would be foolishness. You’re weary to the bone on my behalf now, dear, and both of you on foot. Rest well this night and you’ll make up your lost time the quicker for it.”
“I don’t think I can sleep,” Maggie said. “Poor Winnie!”
“Chingachgook is having no problem on that score,” said Sybil, nudging the cat, still stretched out in oblivious repose, as she returned the glass to its place above the hearth.
“Odd name for a cat,” Colin remarked, fingering his guitar as he always did when distracted or confused.
“It’s a family name,” Sybil replied. “Handed down from one of our distant ancestors, a foreign sailor. Legend has it that he was a savage warrior from far across the seas who wooed and won, or was it the other way around? one of our early ancestresses. Some of our elder kin once bore his peculiar names, but as we’ve tried to become more—Argonian—we’ve passed these names on to our familiars instead. Except it’s difficult to keep calling a budgie bird Osawatomie all the time, so I just call him Budgie.”
Maggie had jumped up and begun pacing. “How can you talk of such things at a time like this! We’ve simply got to find Winnie. Pregnant! Poor dear, I’ve got to get to her now and take her home. If she’s so far gone as you say, Auntie, it can’t possibly be that cursed gypsy’s. Perhaps—no, oh, I hope we can find her before something terrible happens.”
“Settle down, dear. Really, you children must be off to bed.”
“Sit down, Maggie,” Colin encouraged. “Here, I’ll play us a lullaby.”
He did so, and halfway through the lullaby, which was a long, monotonous musical recitation of King Finbar’s coronation address, Maggie was climbing the ladder to the loft. Colin himself was yawning, as was Aunt Sybil, who rubbed her eyes and beamed at him. “You are a very talented young man. Are you by any chance of siren descent?”
“I don’t know. I’m an orphan, actually. I was raised by my Uncle Jack and Aunt Fiona in East Headpenney. Of course, Uncle Jack wasn’t really my true Uncle—he was cousin to my father or somesuch thing. At any rate, he didn’t like to talk about my folks much.”
She got up and went to her metalworking cabinet. “East Headpenney is a charming place. I was looking at the harvest there last autumn. Very well, they did.” She smiled. “Play one more, dear. I’ll cast a little spell of enhancement, just the standard one, and with your ability you should be able to put yourself to sleep with it. I must stay awake tonight and make a little going-away present for Maggie, but I’m sure if you sing The Minutes of The Seventh Tribunal that would do the trick for you.” After casting her spell, she stuck bits of cloth in her own ears.
He did as she suggested, and it worked so well that neither he nor Maggie were wakened by the firing, hammering, and polishing of metal that went on throughout the night.