Song of Sorcery (18 page)

From what he remembered of his instruction in gypsy culture, designed to give him background for the music he was learning, the constant traveling kept them hard at work maintaining a semblance of order to their home life, and left little time for the eternal dancing popularly believed to be their main occupation in life, besides stealing. Consequently, the only time they really danced much was at their entertainments, at festivals and fairs, and whenever they were allowed near enough to a village to interact with its people.

Whatever these dancers lacked in beauty or skill they made up for in sultry appeal and enthusiasm, and in spite of himself Colin found his hands getting quite sore from clapping time to the complex rhythms of their music. He started to dig out his purse to throw a few coins himself, but found someone had been there before him. He hoped Maggie’s resources would be adequate for the rest of the journey. It was, after all, her sister.

As the final dance tune began, the girls grabbed some of the townsmen and pulled them up to dance with them in crude imitation of the folk steps the gypsies had displayed. As the last notes died away, the girls sat down next to their erstwhile partners, in order to relieve them, Colin felt sure, of whatever coins they had not extracted by their performance.

Again the musicians began playing popular songs, and once or twice Colin found himself playing a solo part. It was Davey, apparently flattered, who introduced the song about himself and Lady Rowan.

They were into the second verse when a drunk hollered, “Hey, Gypsy. How about that? What happened to her highfalutin’ ladyship, anyway?”

Davey stilled his strings with one hand and the other musicians stopped playing, as well. He paused, caressing his chin with his fingers, appearing to weigh the question carefully. “Now, you know, I really couldn’t say, boys. That was a nice girl, a beautiful girl, but hardly up to one of our little gypsy temptresses, eh?” He hugged the girl beside him, the same one who had earlier brought him the message from his mother. “No. Really, friends, she was as charming as could be, but we couldn’t keep her here forever. Mum had to run her off, finally. Stole things, if you know what I mean.” He led the crowd in an uproarious laugh. Colin felt nauseated. A tap on his shoulder and a hiss in his ear prevented him from an indelicacy.

“Can you get them to play for me?” It was Maggie who hunched down, unnoticed, in the darkness behind him.

“Sure,” he said, too glad to create a diversion from the present line of discussion to question her more closely.

“Something fast, slow, then fast again, in their type of music,” she said.

Colin raised his bow, tucked his fiddle under his chin, and hesitated only a moment before sweeping into the lead-in of one of the more classical pieces of gypsy dance music. The other musicians seemed as happy to play, and stop discussing Davey’s love life, as he was, and joined in quickly. The hand drum beat rhythmic counterpoint to the whining, interwoven harmonies of the two fiddles and Davey’s guitar.

The opening chords were fast, as Maggie had requested, and she used them to come whirling out before the fire, an emerald and golden dervish casting her own dancing shadows under a pale yellow moon.

Colin was suitably impressed. For the first time since he’d met her, he realized she certainly was very much a witch indeed. As surely as Granny Brown had transformed him into a bird, Maggie had transformed her prosaic assistant scullery maid self into a seductress to be reckoned with.

For only a moment she paced the measured beat with saucy thrusts of her hip, her fingers snapping in time. The lack of the silver finger cymbals worn by the gypsies didn’t trouble her, it seemed, and she made an instrument of her own hands and body. Colin decided she was manifesting musical talent after all. Flowers appeared and disappeared in the tossing dark waves of her hair as she whirled. Her skin was less like the satin which was the popular conception of ladies’ skin, and more like burnished metal, as it sheened with her perspiration. Her bosom rose and dropped sharply in time with the drum, while her mid-section did something serpentine and her shapely legs, apparently unhampered by the bright skirts molding against them, pranced and twirled and wove their own patterns in the circle beyond the campfire.

As the music slowed, becoming almost sinister in its insinuation, her arms joined her torso in the undulations and Colin was reminded of the cat having a nice stretch, or so he told himself. He was trying to believe her dancing was a musical interpretation of the cat or a snake or a variation of the folk steps the women had done earlier. Following the sequence she had requested, using his instrument to guide the others, he found it difficult to keep his mind on anything but his friend’s disturbing behavior.

What bothered him most was not the antics she was performing with her body, but the way her eyes first locked on Davey’s to hold his as she executed a turn. Her head and upper body strained backward to maintain the contact as she danced, then, emerging from her turn, she let her eyes slip slyly away. A phantom smile played on her lips, which seemed somehow redder and more lush than Colin remembered, but that might have been a trick of the full moon.

Davey was apparently as enchanted by all of this as anyone, and watched her with a sort of predatory possessiveness while he continued to fondle the girl at his side.

The tempo picked up, and her steps again became more prancing, hips keeping time, fingers clicking, rib cage bobbing to the music. The eye contact changed too, and she gave the gypsy only an occasional smile, then slipped away to bestow a full-blown silent laugh on another member of the audience. It was difficult to tell who was mesmerizing whom, but a glimmer of understanding began to dawn when Colin noticed Davey’s hawklike attentiveness become irritation on the occasions when her attention was elsewhere.

With a drum roll, the music ended, and Maggie sank from a graceful turn to her knees, arms extended, palms up. She was pelted with the coins not already gleaned by the pickpockets, as the townsmen and gypsies both applauded.

Colin was working at fighting off a sense of betrayal. While this was certainly an interesting side to her personality, he trusted better the one he thought he already knew. If his suspicions were correct, this scheme of hers was more harebrained than the one that nearly got them drowned in the Troutroute. He had better catch up to her quickly, and let her know why what he suspected she planned was futile.

His opportunity dissolved as Davey, dumping the girl who had leaned heavily against him during the dance, rose to his feet with a feline flourish and offered his hands to Maggie.

She smiled and accepted the courtesy, rising to her feet with his help.

Colin fumbled into action and dashed over to the pair, who seemed in immediate danger of disappearing into the shrubbery. “Ah, Magdalene, my dear, you did join us,” he said. He considered clapping her on the back but decided against it. “Davey, this is my friend Maggie. I was telling you about her earlier.”

Davey didn’t break eye contact with her as he replied. “Ah, yes. The shy one.”

Colin’s laugh was shaky as he sought to keep the conversation from degenerating into nonverbal communication.

“Oh, she is, aren’t you Mag! But—er—a real trouper.”

“She certainly appears to be,” said a woman, emerging from the bustle of the departing crowd. It was Xenobia, the woman in the crystal. Now her hair was smoothly tied into a crimson kerchief, which was trimmed with the same coins that adorned her ears and neck. The coins represented so many different countries and denominations that Colin felt sure she could have easily been some kingdom’s national treasury.

He saw Maggie’s face as she recognized her sister’s green silk gown bulging to encase the gypsy woman’s pudgy body. The green silk didn’t quite manage to be a decent covering, so the woman had piled a purple and orange flounced skirt on top of it.

Although it was well known that a person’s wickedness was reflected in the face as age advanced, Xenobia had few wrinkles, and her nose, while straight and proud, was not prominent. In fact, she still bore the vestiges of beauty, an effect spoiled only by her garish clothing and harsh expression.

“Mother,” Davey said jovially. “This is my good friend, Colin. I told you of him earlier and this—”

“Yes,” Xenobia said succinctly. “My son, I would talk to you. Come to my wagon. I have this problem I want you to help me with.”

“Of course,” Davey replied, piqued at the interruption. “In a moment.”

“Now,” said Xenobia.

Davey shrugged and smiled at Maggie. “Now.” He repeated it with an air of resignation, and ran a finger down Maggie’s arm. “You don’t leave, eh?” He strode away after his mother.

“Whew,” said Colin. “That was close.”

“Yes, I almost had him,” she snapped. “Colin, why did you have to interrupt?”

“You should have seen yourself!” he said more vehemently than he had planned to. It occurred to him that he sounded priggish. “I mean, alright, so you were beautiful, but
where
did you learn to dance like that? not from your grandmother, I’ll wager.”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” she replied hotly. “It is part of the ceremony of welcoming young witches to adulthood, and we do it every year at our Sorcerous Ceremonials, so there!”

“I guess that
would
get them into adulthood fast, alright, if they do it the way you did.”

“It is a beautiful and meaningful ceremony, I’ll have you know—” the witch began her retort but was interrupted by Ching sliding between her ankles.

“It seems to me that that silly minstrel is more concerned with your virtue than I am, and I’m the chaperone! You’d better come out with it, witchy, and tell us what you’re up to.”

“Very well, then,” she said to the cat and turned to Colin with exaggerated patience. “I thought I would make him fall in love with me, then I could reject him and give a little of the anti-love potion to his other conquests and leave him to their mercy. That’s little enough revenge for what he’s done to Winnie.”

“That ought to do it, for sure,” he admitted.

“So you think he is?”

“Is what?”

“Is in love with me, of course.”

“No. Heat, maybe.”

She looked mortally offended. “Well, how would you know anyway? Is it so impossible?”

“Oh, don’t pout, Maggie. Ordinarily, of course, it wouldn’t be impossible. If we had that whole silly village following you like puppy dogs I wouldn’t be the least surprised. But in his case it is impossible. That fellow can’t give you his heart, because he hasn’t any.”

“Excuse me? Would you repeat that?”

“I said he hasn’t any heart. One of his childhood sweethearts has become disenchanted enough with the present Davey to try to persuade me to help her do something about it so she can return him to what she insists was his former perfect self. She told me the whole story.”

“Which is?”

“His mother had the heart removed when he reached puberty.” He was about to explain further when Xenobia and Davey reappeared.

Xenobia smiled. “Here we are again. It didn’t take long at all, now did it? I trust you will stay with us tonight?” Maggie noted that the hissing element in Xenobia’s voice that had so impressed her through the crystal was actually a lisp. It was somehow more unpleasant than the hiss.

“As a matter of fact,” Colin said, not caring at all for the gypsy woman’s manner, “as a matter of fact, we must be getting on. There’s a fair at Queenston market in a day or two where we’re supposed to perform.”

“Odd,” said Xenobia, still smiling. “I heard of no fair. We naturally couldn’t allow you to travel so far at night, could we, son?”

“No, indeed.” He circled Maggie’s waist with an embrace that appeared affectionate, but which she found painful. “I choreograph the dance numbers for our entertainments, you know? I intend to persuade you to share a few of those beautiful dance movements with me, my dear, you know what I mean?”

There was no need for all of this horrible cat-and-mousing, Colin thought indignantly. A ring of shadowed faces and the occasional glint of moonlight off metal, barely visible behind Xenobia and Davey, undoubtedly accounted for the prickles running up his spine.

“Oh, I’ll gladly show you those steps, Great Gypsy Prince,” replied Maggie. Colin groaned inwardly. “Great Gypsy Prince.” Now really! “But in privacy, please. You know already how shy I am.”

He laughed what to Colin was a very nasty laugh, and led her off to the woods.

“Here,” his mother cried after him, apparently unable to bear the pretense that theirs was just a friendly little seduction. She tossed him a length of leather rope, which she had concealed in the folds of the garish skirt. “Tie her up when you’re done with her, or you won’t get your rest.”

“Who said I plan to rest?” grinned the gypsy with a moonlit flash of white teeth, his jewelry jingling against his bare chest as he leaped to catch the rope with one hand while retaining a firm grip on Maggie with the other. The rope apparently dispelled any illusions Maggie might have had about making matters go according to her plan, for she yelped indignantly as the gypsy began once more to propel her toward the woods. Colin urgently wished for Lord Rowan’s second best family sword. He might have at least looked sufficiently frightening to wipe the smile off that ogre’s face, even if he couldn’t wield the thing properly.