Authors: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
“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 began 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.
6
“Remember, dear,” Aunt Sybil told her as Maggie tucked the magic metal mirror into her apron pocket. “I could only give you three visions, so use them wisely to find your sister.”
Maggie hugged and kissed her aunt one more time, then Sybil embraced Colin as well before the young people and the cat set off back down the path to the highway.
It was a long way to Lord Rowan’s hall, and longer still on foot. Determined as Maggie’s heel-and-toe stomp approach to getting to their destination was, Colin had to hold back his long-legged stride to avoid leaving her behind. By supper-time the first night both of them were exhausted, and sat glumly nursing their blisters by the side of the road. They were unwilling to make even a small detour now to find a private place to camp for the night.
“Your aunt is a lovely old woman, Maggie,” Colin said, painfully easing off one of his boots. “But I can’t help wishing she could have loaned us something more immediately useful than a magic mirror—say, seven-league boots, for instance.”
Maggie clenched her teeth and fought back the tears that lurked just under her eyelids as she removed her own boots. “
I
wish we at least had some of Moonshine’s healing water, so our feet would be fit for travel tomorrow. We should have gone back to that village we passed just before Auntie’s house and bought horses.”
“That’s what I
wanted
to do, if you’ll recall, Mistress Brown,” griped Colin. “But, no, you didn’t want to spend the time.”
“If we come to another place tomorrow, maybe we can buy a horse.”
“
A
horse?”
“Dad didn’t give me enough money to buy a
lot
of horses on this trip, since he supplied us with some. Do you have enough for another?”
His eyes fell under her challenging stare. “No.”
“Oh, don’t look so put-upon. We can ride double or take turns. I didn’t intend to hog it all for myself.”
Colin poured a little water from his waterskin over his sore feet, then passed the water to her. “I hope your sister appreciates all this worry and pain on her behalf!”
“She—oooh, that hurts!—she will. She’d do the same for me, or have some knight or other do it for her, at any rate.” She had finished bandaging one foot, and bathed the other from the waterskin before bandaging it as well. “If you knew her, you wouldn’t mind this so much, really.”
Remembering the green-eyed, pale haired, lithesome-though-pregnant vision, Colin nodded. “I suppose not.”
“Here,” Maggie said, finishing her own feet. “Put your foot up here and I’ll bandage it.”
“My boot won’t fit tomorrow with all that under there.”
“So tomorrow we’ll take it off. Tonight it’ll keep from rubbing your blankets.” As she wrapped she continued. “The thing about Winnie isn’t so much just that she’s lovely, or charming, or any of that stuff.”
“It helps,” Colin groaned.
“I guess it might, for you. But—you remember the unicorn?” Colin said that, naturally, he did. “Well, Winnie’s a bit like him. She makes you feel good—as if you’re very important to her. Of course, I know
I
am—we’ve always been friends since we were babies. But she makes everybody feel that way.” Colin appeared skeptical of such boundless grace. Maggie continued, determined that he should understand. “Many’s the time when I was small I was teased by the other kids because I’m different, being a witch, and dark, and all. Gran couldn’t turn every child in the village into something animalistic—the little brats would have loved it! And Gran couldn’t understand why I wanted to be like them anyway. She thinks we’re a lot better, and, though I agree now that it would be boring to be the same as everyone else, I felt differently then.
“They all wanted to play with Winnie, of course, but she’d turn her back on them in a minute if they didn’t include me. She always listened to me, even if she didn’t understand all of the witching stuff. She cared about it because I do. When Dad gave us a tutor and classes in how to be ladies and have manners and social style and such, Winnie didn’t even need to be taught but I could never get the way of it. She’d coach me extra so I woudn’t look the fool in front of Dad, then make jokes about how silly the whole thing was, anyway.”
Colin withdrew his freshly bandaged feet and Maggie looked down for a moment at her rough, dirty hands. “I’ve missed her a lot, Colin. I could only stand for her going away because she really seemed to swoon over Rowan, once she saw him, and would have a lovely big house and meet all those court people. I was planning to go visit her this summer, if it hadn’t been for Dad’s accident and Gran needing me at home.”
The minstrel was not wholly convinced. “I find it hard to imagine such a virtuous person as you are saying she is doing what she did.”
“I didn’t say she isn’t an ass sometimes,” Maggie admitted. “If she had to run her own household and do all the chores without the benefit of servants, it would have been impossible for her. She’s good with servants though. They all like her, and she knows how to get what she wants from them. She’s just not very good at handling any sort of unpleasantness. People are never unkind to her, so I suppose unkindness isn’t very real to her.” She winced, remembering the vision in the crystal, and continued in a smaller voice. “She’d rather just go to sleep and forget about it than have to face doing something to make someone unhappy. That always has made ME unhappy. I could never see why she’s not better at making decisions. She said she didn’t have to be because I did it so well.” She frowned. “That’s why it’s difficult for me to credit your song. If she were to go off with someone, it might be for a little while, on the spur of the moment, while she could still see the turrets of her own home across the moors and know it was all very safe and romantic and fun. But to leave altogether? Without asking anyone or packing anything?”
“People do change,” Colin said gently.
Ching came bounding out of the woods with a rabbit in his mouth.
“The gnome would throttle you, but thanks,” Maggie said, accepting it.
“Excellent,” Colin said. “I was getting sick of gingerbread.”
They passed through a small village the next day, and were able to purchase an aging plow horse who had not yet been killed for his meat. They rode double till Ching conveyed the message that the horse was going to lay down and not get up again if one of them didn’t dismount. Maggie was restless anyway, and took the first turn walking, and in this fashion they progressed surely, if not swiftly.
The conversation had been far from lively, Maggie brooding over her sister’s condition, desperate enough now to be considered a “plight,” Colin humming and nodding to himself in the throes of a fit of creativity.
Finally, after many miles had passed, he asked, “Here, now, Maggie, what do you think of this?”
He sang:
“When they came to the gypsy’s camp
The lady met his mother.
She said ‘This is no gypsy girl
You’ll have to find another.’”
Maggie shook her head. “I don’t think so, Colin.”
He looked offended. “Why not?”
“It sort of spoils the drama, don’t you see, for him to have a mother. Evil seducers
never
have mothers, do they?”
“Artistically speaking, it’s a toss-up who seduced whom, isn’t it? Now, don’t be angry. I’m thinking of this in terms of preserving the essence of the tale for posterity.”
Promenading along in front of them, Ching smirked a great cat smirk and said from over his shoulder. “Another crack like that and he can forget about having his own posterity, eh, witch?”
“Okay then, how about this verse, Maggie?” Colin persisted, attempting to save himself from another tirade. “It ought to work up some popular sympathy for our side:
“A beggar lassie, dressed in rags,
Still in her heart a lady,
She mourns the day she heard his song,
The song of Gypsy Davey, the song of Gypsy Dave.”
“It has possibilities,” Maggie admitted. “Still, I hope you won’t be stuck with such a gloomy ending, even though that’s the sort people like Gran prefer.”
“Maybe I can come up with something better when we’ve talked to Lord Rowan,” he said.
“You’ll have to do most of the talking, you know.”
“I will?” He was unsure whether to feel pleased at being assigned an important role or wary of assuming any responsibility in the matter beyond being General-Protector-Against-Bears and Chief Observer.
“Well, I hardly think my brother-in-law-is going to lay out a feast and spread the red carpet, as it were, for the bastard sister of his defected wife, do you?”
“I guess not.”
* * *
Since leaving Sybil’s cottage the days had been uniformly as sunny and clear as before they had been dreary and damp. Hills and forests and forested hills rolled gently back from the road. Wildflowers began to show themselves overnight, embellishing the carpeting of tangy new grass with clumps of blue and purple and yellow and pink and white, mixed and scattered by the roadside and upon the waving meadows. People and houses and roads branching off theirs appeared with increasing frequency. Soon they left the main highway and began having to ask the way to Lord Rowan’s private estate.
The road that was pointed out to them led down the thickly populated valley, pleasant with fresh-plowed earth and neat stone houses. Maggie was continually delighting in some new aspect of the southern springtime. At Fort Iceworm it would still be as dim and dank as when they had set out on their journey.
The valley road began a gradual climb that nevertheless nearly finished off the old horse. Their feet had hardened slowly enough, spelling riding with walking, that both Maggie and Colin were now able to walk all the time, and lead the horse, who carried only their packs and the cat, when he chose to ride.
The next valley beyond those hills held the majority of Lord Rowan’s vassals, those wealthy ones with good, arable land. The remainder of his holdings was comprised of the rocky hills and mountains of the Argonia-Brazoria border. Only a few scattered villages could be found in all those tortuous peaks and plunging canyons, but it had been the task of the Lords Rowan since the birth of Argonia to patrol those high hinterlands, and to this the greatest part of his time and effort was devoted.