Elizabeth Ann Scarborough - Song of Sorcery

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Song of Sorcery
byElizabeth Scarborough
V1.1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The “song of sorcery” quoted by Colin (and added to by him) is a compilation of several different
versions of “The Gypsie Laddie,” “Whistling Gypsy O” or “Gypsy Davey,” a popular folk ballad believed
to date from the 1600’s. I am deeply grateful to Dover Books for reprinting The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads collection, edited by Francis James Child, from whom the lyrics I’ve used in Song of
Sorcery have been gleaned, and also to the many wonderful performers of folk music whose artistic
stewardship of these old songs has been a continuing source of inspiration. I owe particular thanks in this
respect to my good friend Alien Damron and to Laurie, Rusty and Autumn of BANISH
MISFORTUNE.
1
If if hadn’t been for Maggie’s magic, the eggs would have tumbled from the basket and shattered when
the panting barmaid careened into her. The automatic gathering spell barely had time, as it was, to snatch
the eggs into the container before they were spilled back out again as the distraught young woman began
tugging at Maggie’s sleeve.
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“Come! Be quick now! Your old Granny’s at it again!”
“Be careful!” Maggie scrambled to keep her eggs from breaking, trying at the same time to snatch her
sleeve from the girl’s grasp. “What do you mean?”
“Some poor young minstrel was singing a song, and just like that she starts ravin’ and rantin’ and
changes him into a wee birdie, and commenced chasin’ him and callin’ on her great cat to come eat him
up! Oooooh, I hears the cat now— do be quick!” This time she had no occasion to do further snatching
at the sleeve, but slipped instead on the forgotten trail of egg mess left in Maggie’s wake as she galloped
across the barnyard and through the tavern’s back door.
Wood clattered on stone and fist on flesh as the patrons of the tavern rudely competed for the front exit,
tripping on overturned chairs and trampling table linens underfoot in their haste to be gone. Only three of
the most dedicated customers remained at their table, placidly sipping their brew, watching the
commotion with far less interest than they watched the level in their flagons.
Granny’s braid was switching faster than the tail of a cow swatting blowflies as she ran back and forth.
She showed surprising agility for one of her age, and for all her leaping about was not too out of breath to
utter a constant stream of hearty and imaginative curses. With the grace of a girl she bounded over an
upturned bench and then to the top of a table, whacking the rafter above it with furious blows of her
broom.
“Come down from there this instant, you squawking hor- ror, and take what’s coming to you!” Granny
demanded, black eyes snapping, and body rocking with the fury of her attack. “Ching!” she hollered
back over her shoulder. “Ching! Here, kitty. Come to breakfast!”
It was fortunate for the mockingbird that Maggie saw him dive under the table to escape the broom
before the cat spotted him. Just as the cat gathered himself for a pounce on the low-flying bird, Maggie
launched herself in a soaring leap and managed to catch the cat in mid-pounce, retaining her grip on him
as they landed with a “whoof” just short of the table.
Struggling for the breath their abrupt landing knocked from her, Maggie clasped the cat tighter as he
squirmed to escape. “Grandma, you stop that right now!” she panted with all the authority she could
muster from her red-faced, spraddle- legged position on the floor.
“I will not!” the old lady snapped, taking another swing at the bird as it landed safely back in the rafter
above the table. “No two-bit traveling tinhorn is going to gargle such filth in MY tavern about MY
in-laws and get away with it.” She jumped down from the table, looking for another vantage point from
which to launch her attack.
“Whoever he is, Gran, change him back,” Maggie insisted, setting the cat free now that the bird was out
of reach on the rafter, quivering in its feathers at the slit-eyed looks it was receiving from both
broom-wielding elderly matron and black- and-white-spotted cat.
The old lady glared at her granddaughter and primly adjusted her attire, tucking her braid back into its
pin. “I most certainly will not.”
“You most certainly will,” Maggie insisted, noting with some consternation the set of her grandmother’s
chin and the anthracite glitter of her eyes. “Grandma, whatever he’s done, it’s for Dad to dispense
justice—it just isn’t the thing these days to go converting people into supper for one’s cat just because
they displease one. What will the neighbors think of us? It isn’t respectable.”
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The old lady made a rude noise. “As if I cared about that. But alright, dear. Only wait until you hear
what he did—wait till your father hears! That birdbrain will wish Ching had made a meal of him before
Sir William’s done with him!”
“But I didn’t write the tune,” protested the man who materialized in place of the mockingbird as Gran
snapped the release ritual from her fingers. His arms and legs clung to the rafter for dear life. “Please,
somebody get me a ladder.”
“It isn’t that high,” snorted Grandma contemptuously. “Ching can jump it from this table.”
“One of you men come help me with this thing,” Maggie said, taking hold of one end of a long bench. A
member of the stalwart society who’d remained at their station during the melee, being between pints,
sauntered over and lifted the opposite end of the bench, and together they stood it on the table so that the
former mockingbird could use it to descend.
“Now then, sir.” Maggie stood with hands on hips as the stranger dusted himself off. “You have upset
my grandmother terribly, and I want to know how and why. What did you say to her?”
“I upset her?” he stammered, red deepening his already ruddy cheeks.
“What did he say to you?” Maggie whirled on the grand- mother, who sat cross-legged on the floor,
trying to calm her cat. The cat was attempting to maintain a seriously threatening hissing crouch while
being dragged flat-eared and whip-tailed into the old lady’s lap.
“Nothing much, dearie,” replied the grandmother, pouring over her descendant a gaze of the purest
molasses. “He can explain to your father. Chingachgook is a trifle upset. I’ll be at my cottage if you need
me.” She dimpled her dried-apple- cheeks at the stranger. “Do sing Sir William that delightful song,
young man. Ta, Granddaughter!” A wave of her arm and a final whip of the cat’s tail from the crook of
her other arm, and she was off.
When Maggie looked back for the stranger, she found him by the hearth, inspecting a fiddle for damage,
setting it to his shoulder and lightly drawing a bow across the strings. He had slung a guitar across his
back.
“You’re a minstrel, then?”
He had to try out several notes before answering. “I’d hardly be making myself so popular with my
music and all if I were a stonemason, now would I?” He spoke flippantly and Maggie thought it was to
conceal the tremble in his hands as, apparently satisfied that his instruments were undamaged, he slipped
fiddle and bow into a soft skin bag. “Who are you?” he asked, “besides the relative of that witch?”
“You might do better with a sweeter lyric, minstrel. The one you’ve used so far today hardly seems to
please, now does it? I am also Sir William’s relative, as a matter of fact. He’s my father.”
The minstrel blinked twice, rapidly, as if expecting the medium-sized dusky-colored girl to be
transformed into his idea of a fair and lithesome noblewoman. She continued to stare at him frankly and
without noticeable approval, giving at best, in her bare feet, coarse brown tunic and skirt, and dirty white
apron an impression of pleasant ordinariness dealing with momentary unpleasantness. Remembering his
manners, the minstrel bowed, briefly. “Colin Songsmith, Journeyman Minstrel, at your service, lady.”
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She had followed his inspection with one of her own as far as her own dirty feet, and now looked up
from them to meet his gaze with shrewd brown eyes. “You’re looking no great treat yourself. Wait a bit.”
Watching her disappear through the back door, Colin sank down onto a bench that had miraculously
remained upright and passed long, tired fingers over his eyes. Being changed from one thing to another,
chased by witches and cats, and being changed back again was not the sort of thing his apprenticeship
had prepared him for. He could make fair to middling instruments, write stirring epic sagas and set them
to equally stirring and complimentary music, play lute, zith- er, harp, dulcimer, pipes, and drums
competently, and fiddle and guitar splendidly, if he did say so. He was quite prepared to entertain at
feasts and be feted, to immortalize adventures and be considered an adventurer by association, to record
history, and to have all the ladies wooing him ever so prettily for songs immortalizing their own particular
charms.
But no, he had decidedly not been prepared to be one moment singing the latest southern ballad to an
appreciative audience, and the next to be regarding his fiddle from a bird’s-eye view while the matronly
sort who had served his cakes and ale batted at him with a broom, shrieking to her cat to come and eat
him.
He had hardly been instructed in maintaining his aplomb while hanging onto rafters, getting splinters in his
fingers and knees, while some brown-haired young woman argued with her grey-and-brown-haired
grandmother about the respect- ability of feeding him to the cat, the animal in question evidencing no
doubt whatsoever as it lashed its wicked tail at him and licked its wicked chops.
His ruminations were interrupted by the return of the unlikely noblewoman, armed with a broom. Colin
knocked over the bench he had been sitting on in his haste to escape.
“Don’t be a goose,” she said. “I’m only going to dust you off a bit. You’re all over feathers and dust,
and if you’re going to see my dad you’ll have to be somewhat more hygienic. He’s been sick, and you
reek of contamination.” He managed to stand still while she broomed him with brutal briskness.
After five months in bed, no amount of twisting and turning and repositioning could make Sir William
quite comfortable. It wasn’t just his legs, injured when an arrow inexplicably found its way into his horse
while he was hunting, causing the poor beast to rear and roll on him. Granny Brown claimed sickbed
fever had prolonged his recovery far past the usual convalescent period, and lack of active use had
caused his legs to weaken and his wounds to mortify, conditions she continued still to fight with her entire
herbal arsenal.
What he wished was that Amberwine could come home— even for a short visit. Although she had no
healing magic whatsoever, and cheerfully admitted incompetence at manag- ing even the simplest aspects
of household or estate affairs, her light-hearted faery gaiety and placid, accepting intelli- gence brought
the dimples out from under Granny Brown’s traditional witch scowls, and even slowed the brusque and
practical Maggie down to something close to gentleness.
Ah well, he sighed to himself, arranging his bedclothes in a position suitable for the company whose
footsteps he heard climbing the long spiral staircase to his tower chamber. He’d made her the best
possible marriage to that southern lord—the fellow might even get to be king, they said, and she seemed
to like him in the bargain. Where he’d find such a match for thorny Maggie was more than a sick man
should contemplate. It was complicated arranging marriages for not-quite-born-in- wedlock children one
acknowledged belatedly. The village witch’s daughter who at the age of two years is declared to be the
daughter of the Lord-High-Mayor-Knight-Protector- of-His-Majesty’s-Northern-Territories (And
Incorporated Vil- lages) tends to remain the village witch’s daughter. No amount of equal education or
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advantage seemed to be able to make of a witchchild as refined a lady as her faery sister. For all of
Amberwine’s extra encouragement and coaching, Maggie remained neither fish nor fowl, her mother’s
line too base for nobles, her father’s too noble for the base-born lads. Too bad she wasn’t a son, so all
he’d have to do would be to leave her the estate, which she managed most capably, and find her a wife.
Worthy wives were bound to be more common commodities than worthy husbands, he felt sure.
To the poundings on his chamber door he called permission to enter, and a disheveled Maggie did so,
followed by an only slightly less disheveled young man.
“Hullo, Dad.” She dropped a kiss on his forehead.
“ ‘Lo, Magpie. Who’s this?” He made an attempt at hearty cheerfulness in the direction of the young
man.
“I caught Granny trying to feed him to Ching,” she replied. “She was in a dreadful huff.”
Sir William narrowed his eyes at the young man. “What did you do to cause my mother-in-law to wish
to make cat food of you, sir?”
“Your pardon, noble sir.” The young man made him a low bow. “Colin Songsmith, Journeyman
Minstrel, at your ser- vice. Noble sir, I don’t know why the lady was so vexed with me. I only sang the
latest southern ditty for her, practicing it, y’know, before presenting it to you.”
“Present it to me then, dammit, and let’s get to the bottom of this. Maggie, dear, do scratch my
shoulder—ah, right there—good girl.”
Since his fiddle rendition of the tune had met with such avian results, Colin unslung his guitar from his
back and tuned it. The tuning gave him time to compose himself. Finally he tapped his fingers on the
soundboard of the guitar and told them, “Not being from this district, or the one where the song
originates, I can’t understand the fuss over it. I learned it from Minstrel Giles. He said he always comes
north this time of year to avoid the first blossom of some of the southern plants. Gives him ill humors of
the nose and throat, he says, and, as you well may imagine that’s an unhandy affliction for a troubadour.”
He paused to allow this professional confidence to sink in. Maggie nodded briskly that she was perfectly
capable of understanding occupational hazards and the old man impatiently waved him to continue.
“Ahem—yes, as I was saying, folk down south at least, find
this an entertaining tune. Giles says it’s all the rage.” He paused again for dramatic emphasis before
striking the strings in a minor key. The guitar sent ripples of sobbing across the room once, twice, and
once again.
The minstrel’s features coarsened and his voice dropped to a lower register. The guitar was a stone
fence he leaned upon as he confided ribald gossip to another peasant. The music galloped along in time
to his voice.
“The gypsy Davey came riding along,
Singing so loud and gaily.
He sang so sweet and so complete,
Down come our faery lady... down come the faery maid.
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“She come trippin’ down the stairs Her maids were all before her As soon’s he saw her pretty face He
cast some glamourie o’er her.”
Sir William opened his eyes. A gypsy man had wreaked a great deal of havoc in the village two festival
seasons ago by absconding simultaneously with two of the estate’s dairy maids, sisters whose soiled state
Sir William had had to launder with generous donations to their dowries so they could be safely wed
before they whelped. If the fella’d charmed a faery he must be quite the charmer indeed—the faeries
were so enchanting themselves, they generally saw through the “glamourie” of others.
The minstrel dropped the peasant role and became the gypsy, insinuating himself into the lady’s romantic
imagina- tion. Casting Maggie as the lady, his passionate glances totally confused the expression of polite
attention she had maintained. Trying to stare down the minstrel’s false gypsy as she would her
grandmother’s cat, she found herself annoyed that she was unable to look away when she wished.
“Will you forsake your husband dear,
And all the wealth he gave ye?
Will you leave your house and lands
To follow Gypsy Davey—to ride with the Gypsy Dave?
Maggie flushed, her dark skin burgundy with befuddlement as the minstrel released her eyes to become
narrator again.
“She dressed herself in her gay green cloak And her boots of finest leather, Then mounted on her pony
fine, And they rode off together.
“Late from huntin’ came Lord Rowan, Asking for his lady. The one did cry and the other reply
‘She’s gone with the Gypsy Davey—rode away with the Gypsy Dave.’“
Intricate minor patterns wove through the main theme, invoking hoofbeats fading away from the lady’s
fine home across the moors. The minstrel didn’t look up from the guitar again until the last keening notes
quivered off his strings to die in the stillness around him. Sir William’s face was a most alarmingly
unhealthy eggplant color, and the resemblance between Maggie and her grandmother was suddenly un-
comfortably apparent.
“Well, Dad,” she smiled around sharp white teeth, “What d’you think? Boil him in oil, or flay him alive?”
What had Colin’s masters taught him at the academy? In deal- ings with aristocrats, when in doubt,
grovel. He knelt so fast he banged his knee on the floor. “Your pardon, m’lady, Sir William. I only did as
you asked. I meant no offense, and can’t think why the tune has given it. I’ll never play it again —ever.”
In your vicinity, at least, he added to himself, search- ing for an exit as Sir William’s skin regained its
former pallor.
“Perhaps you should choose less exotic material in the future, lad,” the old knight advised drily, “or not
mention names in your ditties. The Lord Rowan cuckolded in your song, unless of course there’s another
one, is my son-in-law, married to my younger daughter, the Lady Amberwine.”
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Colin gulped, his eyes darting furtively to the leaded glass window and back to the long flight of stone
steps they’d mounted coming to the tower room.
“Who was this fellow with the stuffy nose who taught you that song?” Maggie asked.
“Minstrel Giles, m’lady?”
“I was wondering if he’d like that nose removed?”
“Maggie!” snapped Sir William, “You’re scaring the lad to death, you little heathen. He said it wasn’t his
song.” He turned more kindly to the minstrel, who by now was perspiring profusely. “Sorry, son.” He
jerked a thumb at his glowering daughter, “She’s a terrific girl, really, just awfully fond of her sister, as we
all are around here.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand this at all. Winnie—Lady Amberwine—is
not at all your average running-off sort of girl. She’s too considerate for that type of thing. To just leave
without explanation! No letter to us! Even if she didn’t like her husband, which I could have sworn she
did, she’d hardly have placed her family in such an awkward spot without giving us fair warning—”
“Fine lady, indeed, noble sir,” the minstrel agreed emphatically, “I’m sure she’s a fine, fine lady.”
“Too right, she is that.” Sir William’s hands tortured the bedclothes for a few moments before he turned
his baffled and miserable face to Maggie.
She leaned down and hugged him. “Aw, Dad, of course she is. She wouldn’t just go gallivanting off with
the first passing gypsy—you know very well she can hardly decide which gown to wear to breakfast in
the morning without consulting every servant in the house, and me and Gran besides. She certainly
wouldn’t be able to bolt altogether on the spur of the moment like that! It’d take her a week to pack!”
She glared again at the cowering Colin. “Must have been one of His Lordship’s enemies paid that Giles
fellow to make up that awful song.”
Colin gulped and waggled a tentative index finger for attention. “Begging your ladyship’s pardon,” he
began, not really wishing to call notice to himself again but equally reluctant for Giles to suffer the
consequences of his own silence. “Giles confessed that he only gave the tune a bit of a polish—it was
actually a popular creation.”
“Common gossip music, then, eh?” Sir William looked even older and sicker than he had looked when
Colin came into the room, and he had appeared twenty hard years older than Maggie’s grandmother
then. “Maggie, what can be going on with the girl?”
Maggie looked down, shoving her fists deep into her apron pockets. “I don’t know, Dad.”
“You remember that nasty gypsy fella running off with Mullaly’s daughters and nearly emptying my wallet
trying to save their foolish reputations?”
“Yes, Dad, I remember. Betsy and Beatrice Mullaly are as bovine as their charges, though. Everybody
knows that. Winnie’s got more sense.”
“I think so. I don’t know. I wish I had my legs under me, so I could go see Rowan and talk to him
myself.” He made an impatient attempt to rise. Maggie gently pushed him back onto the bed.
“That’s no good, and you know it. I’ll go talk to Rowan.”
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The old man looked at her for a long time, then closed his eyes and sank back against his pillow. “Of
course you will, lass. You’re the only one who can, I suppose.” Then opening one eye he looked at her
again, more sharply. “You’re not thinking of going alone, of course?”
She shrugged. “Why not? We can’t have it all over the territories what I’m up to if there’s nothing in it.
I’ll be al- right. I’ve got my magic to protect me, after all.”
He snorted. “Hearthcraft, hmph. All very well for running the castle or tavern, but what are you going to
do if you meet a bear, girl.”
“Very well, then,” she conceded, trying not to allow their disagreement to tire her father any further. “I’ll
take the mockingbird, here, with me.”
The pronouncement came as a complete surprise to Colin.
Sir William peered closely at him. “Oh, then if a bear comes along HE sings the creature sweetly to sleep
with a bloody lullaby, and you turn it into a great bloody hearthrug?” He ran a hand through his thinning
hair, grayer since the accident. “Ah, well, he’s responsible to his guild for his conduct, and if he’s with
you I can at least be quite sure he won’t be spreading that song about. I suppose it wouldn’t be wise to
have any of the local guard go. I doubt any of them would purposely slander your sister, but people don’t
seem to be able to forego telling everything they know, nonetheless.” He sighed once more, deeply, and
capitulated. “He’ll have to do, I guess.”
“Good.” She kissed her father’s cheek again and rose to her feet. “I’ll just go put binding spells on the
cleaning I’ve already done, and enlarge the larder a bit, before I talk to Gran about handling anything that
comes up while I’m gone.”
“That should be exciting,” Sir William mumbled to her back as she swept through the door ahead of
Colin.
2
Maggie was unalarmed to hear the Territorial troops marching in close order drill, accompanied by
professional mourners keening for the dead and wounded, as she entered her grandmother’s cottage.
She recognized the tromping of the marchers as her gran’s heavy-handed double beat on the loom
batten, which always sounded like an advancing army, com- plete with fife and drum corps, and the
keening sound as the old lady chanted a song in the ancient tongue to make the work less tedious.
“Maggie, darlin’!” Her grandmother exclaimed, raising her legs past the edge of the loom bench and
twirling around on her behind to face her granddaughter. “I’m so glad you’re here! Now you can do this
nettlesome chore and I can stir up that batch for Betsy Baker.”
“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
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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 burn- ing 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 min- strel’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 scandalmongering
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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 wel- come 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.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
摘要：

  SongofSorcery byElizabethScarboroughV1.1     ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The“songofsorcery”quotedbyColin(andaddedtobyhim)isacompilationofseveraldifferentversionsof“TheGypsieLaddie,”“WhistlingGypsyO”or“GypsyDavey,”apopularfolkballadbelievedtodatefromthe1600’s.IamdeeplygratefultoDoverBooksforreprintingTheEnglis...

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