Authors: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
“Winnie, if you’re so glad to see me, then whatever was all that stuff about slaying you?”
“Slay me? What stuff? I must have had a nightmare or something. I haven’t slept at all well since I left the castle, you know. I’ve been feeling so awful about what I said to Roari. I don’t know why I said that. Roari must be very put out with me for being so pert when he asked me not to ride off with that gypsy. He was right, of course, as usual. Davey was a dreadful person, and that mother of his! I can’t think why I went with him—something about that song—oh, well, I’m sure Roari won’t stay upset with me after the baby’s born, do you think?” She dragged from behind the screen a flame-colored dress. “Now this would look lovely on you. Try it on. We have to do our own toilette here. Hugo’s the only servant, and I’d hardly want him to help, would you?” she giggled.
Maggie was staring at her with a mixture of annoyance and perplexity, trying to make some sense of her babbling. Her manner now was more the one Maggie had expected, but her contradictory behavior was weird in the extreme. “Just a moment, Win. You distinctly said that the
reason
I was going to slay you was because you had disgraced us all and that your baby was going to be a gypsy.”
Amberwine had hung the flame-colored gown back behind the screen and extracted a pale gold one. “Not your color, I think. It would look better on me.” She patted her abdomen. “Fortunately, these gowns were tailored by a brownie seamstress, and alter themselves to fit even me.
“Still—now then, I said—what did you say? Oh, yes? Now that’s astounding. I should hardly think I’d say that, Maggie. Really, dear, how could my baby be a gypsy? Unless something happened as I slept, and as I distinctly recall I was already becoming extremely plump around the middle and doing unladylike things in the morning before I left Castle Rowan. I just was on my way to consult Cook about it when I heard Davey singing. Lovely voice for such a slimy sort of boy. Don’t know what put me up to it, I’m sure.”
“You are being inconsistent, you know.” Maggie was beginning to feel disoriented.
“Part of my charm, so I’ve been told. Oh, Magpie, I’m so very glad to see you. Do please stop being dreary about my silly nightmares and try on this topaz gown. I’ll fix your hair, and you fix mine, and there are even jewels to match—darling, I tell you, this is the first time. I’ve felt cheerful in MONTHS, and I’m absolutely giddy!”
“I can tell.”
“Master Brown is quite the gay blade, you know, really. There’s a siren who comes to visit—I’ve seen him talking to her from the battlements when I take my walks. Also, I have been informed by Hugo that we are privileged to be sharing the wardrobe your uncle provides Princess Pegeen when she comes to call. She brings her own entourage, of course, but she has them carrying so many scrolls and inkpots they don’t have room for dresses. Awfully careless of her appearance, I’ve been told, but frightfully clever.”
“I suspect she wouldn’t find it very grand here after the palace,” Maggie said, reluctantly allowing herself to be diverted.
“As long as she has her runes, she’s fine, so they say. She doesn’t live at the palace any more. She has the best-attended hermitage in Argonia, from what I hear. Do you like your hair up like this, or with a little hanging down? Softer that way, do you think?
“I don’t care…” Certain that she was losing her mind, Maggie allowed her sister to help her prepare for dinner.
16
Colin and Boson Neddy Pinchpurse, the former pirate, were spending their off-duty time on deck, where they would not disturb the other crew members who slept. Backs propped against the foc’sle, they were engaged in swapping ditties. Neddy was teaching Colin variations on the chanteys he had learned in school, and Colin was teaching Neddy some new jigs to play on his hornpipe.
The evening was soft and pleasant, and the deck swayed beneath them only a little, in rhythm with the gentle swell of the silvery gulf waters. The cheerful twiddling of their music drifting across the fresh salt air made the men on duty step lightly at their work, each tune setting the pace for a shipboard task.
Colin was enjoying himself immensely on this voyage. The only way it could have possibly been better was if he were not bound to leave behind at Dragon Bay the new friends he had made, and the occupation he was learning to love. For the first time since he’d sung a song in his little-boy soprano, or used his aunt’s clay pots as a drum, he had discovered something that he was good at, something that came naturally to him. He had fully expected to disappoint the sailors he’d met at the waterfront tavern. He thought that when they were all sober, they’d see that he was no good at sailing, had had no experience. He had been sure he’d be unable to do anything properly. Although he had told them he knew nothing of sailing, he was sure they at least expected him to be able to do unskilled manual work on shipboard without falling over into the sea or becoming ill—and to his surprise, he discovered that he was. And not only that, he did what was required quickly and well, and didn’t need to be told twice. If not for his promises to help Zorah and Maggie, nothing would have made him happier than to stay there, learn to be a sailor, and specialize in songs of the sea.
Instead, he was sitting with Neddy now, sharing songs instead of adventures on foreign shores. He was due to leave them on the morrow, when the
Snake’s Bane
docked at Dragon Bay, delivering the last kegs of molasses and ale, the last bolts of linen, and the last of the metal farming implements imported from abroad. For over a week now the
Bane
had been making similar stops at the little towns and settlements that punctuated the arms, legs, nooks, and crannies of the Gulf of Gremlins like suckers on an octopus’s tentacles.
“Land ho!” the lookout cried.
“Ah, let’s see now. Must be the first of the Dragon Isles,” said Neddy, rising to his feet and unfolding the spyglass that hung around his neck. Colin had never seen such a wonderful thing, unless it was Sybil Brown’s crystal. Neddy could see almost as far as the lookout, who carried a similar object. The glasses were made, he had been told, by foreign wizards, and cost nearly as much as the ship’s entire cargo. Neddy had implied he had not had to pay the full exorbitant amount for his.
“May I see?” Colin asked. Pinchpurse held it up to him and, awkwardly, he hunched down to peer into it over the boson’s shoulder. At length he was able to spy the rough rock silhouetted against the sea and twilight.
“What d’ye see, lad?” joked one of the men who had been at the tavern in Queenston. “Was the lookout right or no?”
“Right enough, Liam,” Colin grinned back.
“Then we’re almost done paddling about in the bath, and it’s time to go for the open sea. One more stop and we’re seamen again! Calls for a celebration, if you ask me.”
“Journeyman Minstrel Apprentice Seaman Songsmith here and I might just be able to oblige you, boys!” cried Neddy, blowing a note on his hornpipe.
What they lacked in wine and women they made up in song. Some of those who had been sleeping below decks came up to join them, and the captain emerged from his chartroom to demonstrate his dance style to Neddy’s hornpipe. The lookout’s relief stood his watch a bit early, as the man sighted the first island was also the concertina player. Ching came up from the galley, where he had been serving as ship’s cat, switching his tail at first as though annoyed to be awakened from his catnap. He soon settled, purring, at Colin’s feet as the minstrel and his fiddle led the crewmen in one song after another.
Looking out across the water, Colin watched the waves roll as he sang, and noticed a few fine fingers of mist were beginning to drift across the surface, and also that the island they had sighted with the glass was now quite visible to the naked eye.
As he sang the second chorus, he thought they must be either drifting slowly into a cloud hanging low on the water or else the mist was advancing, a great deal more of it than he’d first thought.
By the twelfth verse of the song, the mist had become a fog, sending soft smoky tendrils dancing up the hull and onto the deck, caressing men and mast alike until, by the end of the song, Colin could scarcely see Neddy, seated right beside him. Also, Neddy wasn’t playing or singing any more. Neither was anyone else. Colin had finished the chorus solo. No one now suggested another, or said anything, or moved, for that matter.
After a few minutes of listening to his own breathing and watching the mist, Colin asked, “Unusual weather we’re having, isn’t it, mates?”
“Quiet, boy,” said Ned. “We’re listening.”
“Listening to what?” He strained his own excellent ear, and perhaps it was from wanting to hear what they did, but he thought he just might be catching something…
“To her, of course.”
“Her who? Where?”
Neddy turned to him viciously. “Are you going to shut your gob, or must I shut it for you?” Colin suddenly remembered that the older man had once been a pirate and gulped, flushing hotly. Whatever they were hearing, he certainly couldn’t make it…
He heard her then, at first softly, and then as her voice grew louder and he recognized it, his pulse began to race with hope. Maggie! The same husky alto, singing so low he had to exert his full attention to make out the words.
And everyone was listening. He really had never thought her voice all that fine, himself, but as the mist swirled and parted and joined and parted again in flying diaphanous banners, he could see the other men, still where they should be working, spellbound gray-blurred ghosts listening so intently that even the steersman had abandoned the steering, leaning over the wheel, ears straining.
“How sweet she sings!” whispered Neddy.
“Ah, there never was one to sing sweeter,” sighed the second officer.
“I’d no idea you all knew her,” Colin said with amazement. “You certainly didn’t mention it when I was telling you about her.”
“Quiet! Can’t you hear Mother singing me favorite nursery rhyme?”
The conversation was violently shushed by the rest of the crew.
Colin’s curiosity finally was able to overpower his desire to hear the song with which Maggie called to him. “Your MOTHER? She’s young enough to be your grandchild!” They were about to pitch him overboard when he finally made out the words Maggie sang. It was a tender love song, personally addressed to him.
“There’s something funny going on here, lads,” he said, and for the first time realized how dangerous their posture was to them all. Snatching up his fiddle, he ducked around them and made for the rigging, climbing high enough that they would be unable to interfere with him right away. Maggie’s voice continued to cajole in a tone more alluring than even her dance for the gypsy had been.
He felt another weight drag at the rigging, and looked down to see Chingachgook, all four paws entangled in the ropes, trying to reach his pant leg.
He had not time to spare for cats, though, or even tuning, as he began to saw at his fiddle and yell out the loudest, rowdiest, bawdiest, funniest songs he could think of, not quite drowning out that insidious voice Maggie was using, even at that. If not for his training at singing rounds and part-harmonies, he could never have sustained the concentration it took to sing what he was singing and ignore that voice. As it was, he was able to keep it up long enough to provide a suitably maddening distraction for his fellow crew members, who began to try to shake him down, anger contorting their faces, covering up the song themselves now with their own hostile threats.
It was Pinchpurse who first came to his senses and shook off the enchantment, and he wasted no time at wresting the wheel from the spellbound steersman. “Siren, you lubbers’ To your stations!” he hollered, every sinew straining as he pulled the wheel hard to the right, away from the rock that suddenly loomed up at them from the sea.
As the
Bane
heaved away from its own bane, it lurched violently. Pinchpurse hung fast to the wheel to keep it from turning back again, and the other two sailors clung to the rails, almost washed overboard. The others held onto whatever seemed stationary. Colin, cat, and fiddle made a somersaulting dive across the decks, over the railing, and into the sea.
17
By now Maggie was unsure of everything, including why she was creeping down the stone staircase in the middle of the night. Earlier, when she’d left her uncle that afternoon, it had all been very clear.
He was a wonderful fellow, cared about her welfare more than Winnie, the bear, her grandmother, Colin, or Aunt Sybil, and possibly more than she cared about herself. She wanted very much to do something nice for him—something grand and special to show how much she appreciated the interest he took in her.
It wasn’t until she began casting around for an idea of what to do that it occurred to her she hadn’t used her own power since they’d left the inn at Dragon Bay. And that was peculiar. Now that she thought about it, he had never even inquired as to what manner of witch she was. All he’d done, really, was to tell her how very beautiful he thought her, far prettier than Winnie really, and tell her how she deserved better than a post as a village witch. And show her all of those wonderful magic gifts all of those powerful friends of his were constantly showering upon him, like the spells for turning people into bears (which was done chemically, not just from raw power, as Gran did it) and the giant black swans and this castle.