Elizabeth Ann Scarborough - Songs From The Seashell Archives

The "song of sorcery" quoted by Colin (and added to (tm) him) is a compilation <t?r*.?!!Si "The Gypsie Laddie," "Whistling Gypsy O or Gypsy Davey "a popular folk ballad believed to date from *e 1600's I am deeply grateful to Dover Books for String The English \nd Scottish Popular Ballads flection, edited by Francis James Chfrom whom the lyrics I've used in Song of Sorcery have been gleaned, and also to the many wonderful performers of folk mu sic whose artistic stewardship of these old songs to teen a continuing source of mspu-ation I owe particular thanks in this respect to my good fnend Alien Damron and to Laurie, Rusty and Autumn of BANISH MISFORTUNE.

SONG OF SORCERY

CHAPTER 1

If it 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.

"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?"

"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."

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.

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."

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, zither, 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 respectability 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 managing even the simplest aspects of household or estate affairs, her lighthearted faery gaiety and placid, accepting intelligence 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 Villages) tends to remain the village witch's daughter. No amount of equal education or 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-bom 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 wormy husbands, he felt sure.

"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 avion 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.

"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 imagination. 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.

"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.' " r

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 uncomfortably 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 dealings 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, searching 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."

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.

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."

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 alright. I've got my magic to protect me, after all."

CHAPTER 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, complete 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 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 burning 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 minstrel'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."

"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 welcome 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."

"Inflation," Granny said cheerfully, tucking the money in the pocket of her skirt. "The cost of practicing witchcraft these days! I couldn't begin to tell you how that drought last summer cut into my profit margin. Some of my most valuable plants were scorched, and probably won't even come up this year at all . . ."

Hugo was backing out the door, tipping an imaginary cap as he left. "Yes, well, goodbye, ladies."

Maggie let out a whoop of laughter. "Oh, Gran, how COULD you? Six coppers for that rubbish!"

"It's all part of the charm, dear. Good magic always is better if it costs semething more than the client can comfortably afford."

"What's it for?"

"Impotence. You can come in now, darling." She cooed the last in a tender voice never heard by anyone in the village, including Maggie. Chingachgook, her black and white cat, leaped into the room from the windowsill, and onto her lap.

"Well, I may have need for some of those powders myself."

"I thought you might, so in my antique wisdom I have prepared a couple of things for you."

"Such as?" Maggie sat down abruptly on the weaving bench as Ching launched himself from Gran's lap to her shoulder. Gran pulled her own braid forward and carefully extracted seven long hairs from it. "Here, you're the weaver, plait these into a chain, and wear it round your neck."

In order to do what?" Maggie's fingers flew through the loops of hair, and she plaited the chain closed in an intricate invisible knot behind the curtain of her otter-brown hair.

"All the more reason that you see Sybil." She thrust a thonged leather bag at her. "Here's your medicine pouch. Now run along. I'm sure the estate will take care of itself."

"It'll have to," Ching muttered, settling his chin on his front paws and wrapping his tail around his nose.

CHAPTER 3

Maggie was so anxious to get away from the village that she left Colin and the pack horse far behind in the first half hour on the road. After a long frozen winter at Fort Iceworm, it was a joy to splatter over the muddy tracks and splash through the pools left by melted snow from the last storm a month earlier. She scarcely noticed the nip at her ears as her mare created a wind for them, and the flopping tug of her woolen cape as it billowed out behind her made her want to sing from exhilaration. The smell of the new, tender grasses, the smell of anything at all after a sub-zero winter of buried vegetation and frozen noses, was sweeter by far than any of the perfume worn by the ladies at Winnie's wedding. Even under a dull gray sky, the colors of spring were dazzling after the stark blacks and endless expanses of everlasting white. Mostly there was green, of course, but there were also redbirds and bluebirds and an occasional brave blossom of yellow or purple.

Her neighbors, whom she did spare a glance as they leaped into drainage ditches to escape being galloped ddwn as she sped past, were also colorful. After nine months of black and deep indigo and brown that they wore against the cold, it was good to see the dark coats finally exchanged for the women's costumes of red and gold skirts, blue or yellow blouses, and white embroidered aprons and kerchiefs. Most of the men dressed more soberly even now, a plow being less kind to white aprons than a butter churn, but Maggie knew that soon on market days they would be slipping over their smocked homespun shirts felted vests embroidered in the most outlandish scenes and hues their womenfolk could devise. The more fantastic the embroidery, the more fantastic the man, folk said, for what woman would ruin her eyes doing such work for a nincompoop?

It wasn't until she had to wait for a flock of sheep to dawdle across the road that the minstrel, panting and red-faced, galloped up on his mud-flecked buckskin horse. Ching, being jounced unmercifully in the basket he occupied atop the pack horse, yowled filthy feline curses.

Colin struggled to contain his ire as he reached the witch and her sweating chestnut mare. "Your pardon, milady, but if you try to maintain this pace, you'll kill your beast before we reach the next village."

As the thorough tonguelashing she was receiving from her grandmother's cat began to sink in, Maggie bit back the angry retort she'd meant for the minstrel, and instead nodded meekly and gently urged her horse forward as the last sheep passed.

Encouraged by this apparent acceptance of his authority, Colin added generously, in the grand language he'd been schooled to use with the aristocracy, "We troubadours are well versed in the ways of the road. Pray let me be your guide, milady."

"Oh, pray go soak your head," Maggie replied, unable to control her temper this time. "There's only this one bloody road south from here to the Troutroute River, according to Dad's map. What's there to know, anyway? Look," she pointed to a red bag tied in the fork of a tree. "The path is even protected with medicine bundles. Probably as exciting as a walk around the barnyard."

After a brief exchange and one or two mutual nuzzlings, the unicorn melted back into the willows and Maggie returned to her companions. "Moonshine says he'll check a favorite watering-hole of his. If the horses aren't actually stolen, but have only wandered off, or been driven away, he says there's a good chance they'll be there. Of course, I could always go on alone on Moonshine." From her tone, Colin knew that the last was not an afterthought, but a fond wish which the theft of their horses had given her an excuse to voice. Colin had only to bow out of the quest, to return to his own concerns, and fashion new instruments, and she would be free to go with her new friend through the magic trails in the forest as far as they extended, however far that was.

Pop the Gnome was apparently dubious about the last, for he looked disapproving.

"What's the matter?" asked Maggie, for even her charmed distraction was not impervious to a gnome's disapproval.

"How many mortals do you suppose would see you when you had been forced to take Moonshine onto the open road before they decided to slay you, unicorn, cat, maiden, and all, for the sake of the magic horn?" He was struggling, it was evident, to ask the question civilly but his voice emerged harsh and stern. Maggie opened her mouth to protest, looked at him, at Colin, and Rabbit, and cat, then closed her mouth and nodded. Her eyes, when she lowered them, were oddly bright.

"Come now, witch," said Ching, rubbing at her ankles, "Don't go clouding up. You've lived here near this wood nineteen years, and never knew till today there was a unicorn in two hundred miles of the place. Or a gnome, for that matter."

Maggie made a face, but said nothing, for the horses trotted up to them then, supplies and instruments still strapped to their saddles.

Moonshine made no secret that he was as reluctant to part with Maggie as she was with him, and even allowed himself to come in full view of Colin as he followed them at the edge of the wood where it bordered the highway. He exerted no other spell to keep her near, however, and as the wood and road parted to make way for a stream, parted from them with a last flourish of his tail, releasing her after an orchid-eyed good-bye to vanish into the forest.

That night, as they camped far from that section of the North-em Woods, Colin had to occupy himself with his music and Ching with his toilet, and they all had a cold supper, for there were no comments, nor questions, nor answers from the witch who had belatedly found reason for homesickness.

As she finally rolled herself in her goosedown blanket, Ching came and lay in the crook of the arm that cradled her cheek, purring, "Poor Maggie. Why can't you content yourself with a broom, like your foremothers?"

CHAPTER 4

She poured a little white powder into his tea and it turned a soft toffee brown. He tasted it. "That's amazing."

"Glad you like it."

They passed that day and the next pleasantly enough, once more reaching a village and scattered outlying houses by the middle of the third day. Colin remembered as much as he could of unicorn lore, and entertained Maggie with all the stories and songs he could think of concerning the mystical beasts. He even made up a unicorn song, on the spot, which delighted her so much that she managed from somewhere to produce an excellent meat pie for lunch and fresh peaches for dessert. Colin hadn't eaten so well since he left East Headpenney, and fitted the long discourse he was delivering, on the difficulties of keeping the proper dramatic tension present in one's lyric while doing an appropriate number of aesthetically correct doo-dahs in the music, in between appreciative slurps and gobbles of peach flesh and juice. He quite forgot to wonder where she found peaches six months before they would blossom and nine months after they should have rotted, or how she had dried them to include pits and all.

"About that song you don't like, for instance, Maggie," he said as an example. "There is something about it that bothers me."

Maggie, who could only stand so much jargon about someone else's specialty, shot her peach pit into a puddle of water. "There's a great deal about that song that bothers ME, minstrel," she said.

Ching was giving his full attention to his lunch of reconstituted trout heads and had not so much as a glance to spare them. Cat music tended to consist of one pleasant long hum of lyric and he saw no need at all for any other kind.

"Well, I know, that, of course, but what I mean is, there's no proper ending at all. It's anticlimactic, don't you think?"

"I certainly hope so," she replied. She would hate to think it would all end like that-with Winnie riding off for no good reason with some grubby gypsy while her bewildered husband rode home scratching his head. She began to see what Colin was talking about.

"Just so. Well, I'm actually very glad, indeed, you had me come along to protect you on this journey. Perhaps our investigations will suggest a more poetic conclusion."

"And then you did catch your cat and stop him from-you know--"

"Oh, that. Well, I suppose Gran must be right. She says our bloodline has become increasingly impure in the last few generations. She likes Dad well enough, you understand, thinks he's wonderful and all that." She swung up into the saddle after settling Ching in his basket on the pack horse. "Probably because he was such a raffish sort in what the two of them refer to as his misspent youth." She smiled. "I suppose it just wasn't misspent enough, and I got tainted by his decent side."

"What sort of witch are you then, exactly, if you don't consider it impertinent to ask?"

"You hadn't noticed?" She gave him a queer sidelong look, and clucked to her horse, kicking its sides with her soft-soled boots as they clopped back out into the muddy road again.

"No." Colin followed behind her, leading the pack horse.

"I'm a hearthcrafter. Where do you suppose the warm fires and fresh fruit have been coming from?''

"I wondered," he admitted, digesting this new information as they rode off downhill again, the muddy road little more than a track through spreading marshy meadows and newly lush hillocks that gradually gave way to a few sparse slim trees flush with new green leaves. "It seems very useful then, if you can do all of that."

"Oh, aye, it's that," Maggie said, making a face. "That's

what Gran says too-but I'm afraid useful doesn't really do me all that much credit in our line of work. It takes passion and power, Gran says, to be a really first-class witch, though I think at times she only says that to justify her beastly temper. No one has ever accused me of lacking that sort of passion either-but Aunt Sybil's got a lot stronger magic than I do, and she's a far more placid person than Gran or I either one-I suppose it comes of knowing what to expect. You'll probably really like her." She looked at the tortuous track ahead of them. "It's still quite a ways though, I reckon. I don't suppose you'd know that song about the silly nobleman who died of indigestion from eating eels, would you?"

Colin did know the song about the nobleman, a fellow named Lord Randall, and the song about the fiddle and the wind, which was one of his own personal favorites, and the one about the laddie-cut-down-in-his-prime. Maggie sang along in a voice low and rough for a woman, but with a lot of power and vitality, and she was even very often on key. She expressed a strong preference for murder ballads and the popular songs women sang over the loom or field hands sang while doing whatever there was to do in the field. When Colin tried to introduce an occasional romantic air, she interrupted him with a request for a work song sung by bandits as they plundered helpless villages. If he tried to ignore her long enough to finish a chorus of one of the charming love ballads he preferred, the black and white cat made it a point to rouse himself long enough to produce a terrible yowling. It seemed that any tender emotions the lady had were addressed exclusively to unicorns, and other expressions thereof were not to be tolerated.

"This IS the Troutroute River, then?" Maggie asked.

Colin nodded. "According to the maps-and I remember the path this far too, but the bridge that was here is gone."

"How are we going to get across, then?"

Ching growled low in his throat and hopped down from his perch, stalking forward to crouch low on the path ahead of them. Except for his growl, his total green-eyed concentration was fixed on the flood. With a whip of his tail he stood up and turned to Maggie. "Well. If that doesn't beat all. This is the first time I EVER saw a dragon climb a tree."

"What?" she asked, a little snappish at being interrupted while she was trying to plot how they were going to cross. She personally was not overly fond of large bodies of water, and Ching was even less enamored of it than she. There were far too many trees on and just beneath the surface, and the water was far too fast to make swimming even a fleeting consideration.

"Maggie, look out there!" Colin pointed. "There's a dragon in that tree."

"Silly creature," sniffed Ching, cocking his ears again for a moment. "She's crying for help. Of course she's stuck. Any dragon dumb enough to go out irt THAT stuff." He shuddered with revulsion. "And then climb a TREE it-well, she deserves to be stuck."

"Can't she fly out?" Maggie shielded her eyes with her hand to try to block out the sparkles of light bouncing off the water to obscure her vision.

Ching was still for a moment, listening, for he seemed to need to cock his black ears even to hear with his mind. "She's moaning something about her wings being tangled."

"Still don't see why she doesn't fly out, great beast like that . . ." Maggie said, riding a few paces up, then back, to get a better view of the dragon.

"Don't be silly," the cat scoffed. "What would I do with a rope anyway? Walk tippy-toe across it, or hang by my tail?"

"I don't know," Maggie snapped, nettled by the cat's sarcasm, her inability to produce a solution, and the party's generally negative attitude. "But I'm sure not going to carry you." She curled her lip at the water. "I'm not all that fond of that stuff myself, you know. If my magic didn't require extensive contact with scrubwater, I'd probably be as likely to melt of it as Great-Grandma Oonaugh." She twined a second weed around the first and forced them into a rough coil in her hand.

The cat swatted at the end of the reed that protruded from her hand. "Going to make a bathing dress of these, witch?"

"Take a swim, Ching. Maybe I will," she stared at the reeds, replying to the concept of constructing reed bathing dresses, not to the swim. "Minstrel?" she said.

Colin hoped she had decided after all that they would turn back, now that he had patiently given her time to reflect on the impossibility of their situation. He expected she, as would any reasonable person, would reach the obyious conclusion. "Yes?"

"Help me pick some more of these rushes, please."

"Uh-why?" A qualm made him pause before he picked the first of the reeds.

"Umm-just a little idea of mine," she replied, as she energetically began to snatch up every reed in sight.

His qualm became an uneasy twinge as he dropped an armload of reeds on top of those she'd already gathered. She stopped gathering finally, but signalled him to continue, and sat down and began to weave the rushes into a large, flat coil.

"Funny time to make a rug," Colin remarked, smiling at his own humor as he dumped more rushes on the pile.

"While you rescue that poor stranded beastie, of course."

"That DRAGON!?" The stillness exploded into an orgy of

pacing and wild gesticulation and he changed octaves several times as he spoke. "Look here, Maggie. I'm every bit as much an animal lover as you are, but why in the name of all that's sane would I want to rescue that dragon? I like it exactly where it is!"

"We have to rescue her because she flies, of course, is why " She used the sort of voice she might use to explain to a small child why the sky is blue. She didn't stay within earshot of his indignant sputterings, either, but went to the pack horse and began unstrapping their belongings.

"Well, see here, Maggie. Now just stop. Just because I don't agree with you doesn't mean I'm about to leave you here alone! Put those things back, won't you?" By the fury with which she was unwinding the bindings of their packs, throwing the bundles indiscriminately on the ground to fall where they may, he reckoned she was ready to remain behind if he insisted on sensibly returning to civilization. He perceived her bizarre unpacking methods to be a demonstration both of the sorcerous passion, if not power, she'd discussed earlier, and also any possible determination to remain at the river as a means to make him guilty enough that he'd stay and do as she demanded.

She ignored him, however, as he flapped around putting things back on the horse which fell right back off, of course, without the benefit of the length of braided leather rope that had bound them on. This rope Maggie was busying herself winding around her hand and elbow. After trying to replace the cat basket one more time to have it fall to his feet, spilling out the snug old piece of blanket intended to insure Ching's comfort, Colin decided against trying to strap his fiddle back on and instead replaced it gently on the ground, out of reach of the chestnut's hooves should it decide to take a stomp or two.

Maggie was looking pleased as she wound the rope. Fortunately, they'd brought far more gear than they really needed and the rope was quite long. Rummaging in the pile of belongings, she removed the extra clothing she had brought from its sack, and stuffed it in with the foods. The sack she began to fill with mud from the banks of the swollen Troutroute, digging the stuff up in great gooey gobs, and depositing it in the sack with a sucking "plop."

Colin had continued to pursue her progress with alarm and not a little personal interest. Perhaps she had not been entirely frank about the scope of her magical powers, and was capable of a great deal more than she'd admitted. Perhaps she was now concocting a gigantic, magical, enormously powerful, arcane-

poultice-though whether its purpose might be for rescuing tangled dragons or chastising recalcitrant troubadours he was uncertain.

She lashed the muddy sack securely to the end of the rope and hefted it. Turning to him, she inquired sweetly. "I don't suppose you're a fantastic shot with a sling or anything like that?"

"Whereas if I should venture in this case, I might stand to gain a charring?"

"As I was saying before you gave me the benefit of your immense wisdom, I do intend to get across this river and to the other shore, and I don't intend to go the whole width by means

. of rope and basket. So if dragons frighten you, my faint-hearted friend, I suggest you stand back."

"I still don't see how you propose that that dragon will be of any benefit to us once you acquire it."

"Once you have helped me rescue her, she will fly us across the river, naturally."

"Oh, she's agreed to that, has she?" He raised a questioning brow to the cat, who had sauntered over from behind his tree and was sniffing without interest at the spilled contents of the packs. Looking up, he met the minstrel's eye, flipped his tail, and . stalked off. He had better things to do than talk to tree-climbing aquatic dragons or, for that matter, to so-called musicians who talked to cats.

"Maggie, I know you want to see your sister, but this is rather extreme, isn't it? I mean, the river is dangerously flooded, and die dragon and all-" He could hardly believe she meant to go on with it, and kept waiting for her to say that of course he was right and she would naturally go back to her father's hall and wait like a good witch for conditions to improve. "Have you another suggestion?" she asked with iciness that warned him he was likely to wait a long time for her to say what he wished. He coached her a little.

""e ought to wait a few days, perhaps, for the flood to subside, and then cross it the usual way."

"Why not? Oh, Maggie, what difference could a few days possibly make?"

"If all of that's true, she'll probably be far beyond your help by the time we get there, anyway."

Maggie's eyes ate caustic holes in him. "She certainly will be, if we sit tamely by and wait for the river to go down-or I waste all my time debating the matter with craven minstrels."

He shook his head stubbornly. "Stop debating then. I'm done trying to keep you from risking your life. But I'm certainly not going to risk mine." He leaned with greater determination against the tree, looking if possible fiercely dedicated to languishing there for the duration. "I'm sorry, old girl. A lot of people have control over my life. My craftmaster has power over my music, your father and other aristocrats have power over my comings and goings, and your grandmother has power over my shape. You, however, don't have any power over me at all, and I refuse to allow you to push me into something stupid and dangerous."

"At your service."

With one last glare, she arranged herself in the boat, holding on to the rope for balance. Then she had to stand again, one foot on the basket and one on shore, to push the basket boat out into the water.

Her arms were almost yanked from their sockets as the tide jerked her and the boat downstream of the rope she clung to. She regained her seat and began hauling herself hand over hand down the rope, thinking stubbornly that she was certainly showing the minstrel that she was not a girl to stand around and wait for the men to do everything, as he obyiously thought. Her ruminations were extremely brief, however, for me rope was slick and wet and her shoulders ached horribly with the strain of clinging to it against the current. In no way did the pain lessen as she strove to get enough purchase to pull herself and the boat against the tide, closer to the rope. Her body stretched so far between her lifeline and the boat that it arched, her belly almost grazing the water, her knees barely in the basket, head buried between wrenching shoulders and straining arms as she struggled for a better grip on the rope. A passing log swept the little rush boat out from under the precarious purchase her knees had maintained, and she dropped with a shocking icy splash into the river, the water soaking her to the waist. Inexperienced as she was at rivercraft, she did realize mat her most desperate and immediate priority was to retain her grip on the rope at all costs.

She was actually only a few feet out from the shore, but even her work-hardened hands were not used to supporting her entire weight from slick, cold leather thongs against the force exerted by the river. The icy water chilled her to the top of her head, and she couldn't feel her fingers after a short time.

Abruptly she sank to her armpits in the biting cold river. A weight jerked on the rope and it slipped agonizingly in her hands. She could not be sure when one hand slipped from the rope, but suddenly her body was floating on the surface, tossing and turning with the torrent, the arm that kept her from drowning an arrow of pain that felt as though it were breaking her back.

She was hauled partially out of the water as Colin's arm caught her clothing, then her waist. "Got you!" he yelled above fte river, nearly breaking his own hold on the rope with the shock of her added weight to his own. "Grab on, now!" He had did along the rope far enough to catch hold of her. Flinging her free arm wildly in his direction as she tried to obey his order, she nearly throttled him, hooking her elbow around his neck. - He gargled at her.

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 her, 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."

"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 not spring nor flood-I almost wish your violent agitation of mat 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 flood waters 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-armoured, 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 passiofls 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

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 metal-work 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.

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 mis 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."

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 fool. 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.

"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.

CHAPTER 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 yet to Lord Rowan's hall, and longer yet 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 suppertime 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.''

"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'H 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 and similar-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."

They did pass 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 posterity."

"I will?" He was unsure whether to feel pleased at being assigned an important role or wary of assuming any responsi-

bility 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, and 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 were 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.

Through the rocky foothills, then. Maggie and Coiin and the tired old horse trudged, the road getting ever more steep and ever more winding as they traveled.

"I hope he doesn't live in the middle of those mountains," said Colin.

Maggie passed the information on to Colin, who sighed gratefully at the first part, although he hardly saw, really, how he could brave another hill, even one more, and agreed with her about the second that the best course would be to climb to the top of the hill and wait until the party passed them. "Who knows?" Colin remarked. "Maybe they'll be going back right away and won't mind giving us a lift."

Maggie said nothing, but was clearly dubious.

Ching scampered ahead and back several times. At the next bend the path reached its zenith. The descent was not by means of a rocky path such as the one up which they had come. The path sloped gently down, dividing a broad field from a wood that covered the land as far as they could see, including the rounded dome rising from the floor of the valley beyond them. The wood only covered the dome to a certain point, however, for the rest was taken up in the structure of a castle, smallish as castles went, Colin thought, a circular wall enclosing a circular moat dug into the top of the mound. The circular moat surrounded a circular structure flanked by six semi-circular towers. That was it, a simple but effective, and incidentally rather beautiful, design.

"Achoo!" Maggie sneezed and scratched her nose, rubbed her eyes, then pointed. "Here comes that party Ching referred to. Best get over to the side." It took them a few moments to

convince the horse, by which time the procession was upon them.

Although Maggie's actual rank as her father's acknowledged heiress and acting steward was rather ambiguous, Colin's presence and their by-now shabby mode of dress dictated that they follow the custom of standiorf as the obyiously noble caravan paraded before them.

Accordingly, Colin took his cap in his hand and wore his best humble look as the first horse, which contained a man in a military uniform, passed.

Maggie sneezed again and watched the upcoming equestrians with bold and open curiosity. Colin's elbow jabbed her ribs. "Come on, Maggie, you'll get us whipped. Do TRY to look the modest maiden, won't you?"

"Sony," she said, and trained her eyes on her great toe which was now protruding from her boot. Only occasionally did she sneak a peep at the procession. She could hardly help the sneezes, however, which occurred with increasing frequency.

"Imagine, receiving us with no chamber prepared, nor lamp tit, nor tea laid!" a well-fed figure who looked as though missing her tea would do her no harm at all complained to a thin and delicately handsome man. Both were well mounted and well (hessed, the woman perspiring through the limp lace collar of her lavender brocade riding costume, which threatened to collapse at the seams at any moment, with the stress placed upon it by her numerous bulges and protuberances. She was red-faced, either with indignation or the effort of riding, it was difficult to tell which.

"Yes! Handsome as anything, she says, though swarthy, o course, but I find dark foreign types attractive, don't you?"

"Oh, my, yes. That brooding, unknown quality!"

"Prouder than any noble, he was, she says, though not too proud to give a girl a pinch." She giggled. "Ludy showed me her bruise to prove it."

"Well, they are all alike."

"What happened then?"

"Oh, it was SO romantic! Ludy says first he come and asket for a meal, you know, and the lady, she was just passin' by. He offered to sing to pay for his lunch."

"Ooooh, he sang too?"

"My, yes, that's part of it. you know. There's a lovely sons about it all." The girl went on to tell with great relish anc considerable colorful embroidery how the Lady Amberwine hac been so thrilled with the singing she'd invited him into the hall and then at his slightest suggestion had ordered her horse sad died, pausing only long enough to pull on her fine leather riding boots and warm woolen cloak over her green silk morning drcv before following her new love off across the moors.

By the time they had climbed down the hill, crossed the valley, climbed up the dome, crossed the drawbridge, and gained entrance to the inner courtyard, Maggie was not only crying openly, she was gasping for breath.

The closer to the castle they came, the more blurred her vision became from the itching and tearing of her eyes. Her constant sneezing kept her from drawing a decent breath. She stayed bent over with convulsions of katchooing, and Ching no longer rode on her shoulder but regarded her with wide-eyed alarm.

Colin gently guided her across the courtyard to the hall and pounded on the door. A servant on his way in by a side door noticed them at first with disapproval, then saw the state Maggie was in and sympathetically motioned to Colin to come round to that entrance which led to the kitchen.

"Your woman looks sick," observed the sturdy female who, by the ladle she brandished, Colin took to be the cook.

"Yes, ma'am, it came upon her suddenly. Though we may not appear so, my traveling companion is of noble blood, and I accompany her with a message for the Lord Rowan. Do you suppose she could be made comfortable till this illness passes?"

Ching lingered in the doorway for a moment, then, confident that the two-legged members of his party were looking out for

One another, went to see if there was a barn available with the

'jiossibilities of a good brawl with some of his own kind, and

:Other feline diversion. Perhaps he would get friendly enough

'With the locals to acquire some gossip useful to their mission, fastening the acquisition of his mistress's step-granddaughter and

"And the provisions?"

"As much as we'll need. We can travel light on that account, m'Lord, due to Mistress Brown's-er-skills."

"Very good. Weapons?"

"Weapons, m'Lord?"

"Weapons." Rowan nodded encouragingly. Colin cast a quizzical glance at Maggie, who shrugged.

"No weapons, m'Lord. Our mission being-uh-in the nature of a family disturbance, you might say--"

"Laddy, there is NOTHING," Lord Rowan jabbed a sausagelike finger emphatically into the table top, "Nothing more dangerous than a family disturbance! Were I not so sweet-tempered in my cups, had you not known so many good drinking songs, and had my in-law here not been sae bonny, you might well have found out from me how dangerous. You won't be so lucky as to charm the gypsy gamp in similar fashion, I'm thinkin'."

He leaped up and stalked into the dining hail and back before Maggie and Colin had time to do more than exchange bewildered shrugs. When he returned there was clasped in his great paw a broadsword whose enormity was minimized only by his own. He whacked and whooshed experimentally at the air around him, then ceremoniously presented the sword to Colin, who found it awkward to keep aloft.

"I don't see how he can carry that," Maggie said.

"Right!" barked Rowan, springing off again to return with the scabbard, which he plopped on the table. He sat again, drawing his chair up to the table once more, beaming like an excited child. "It's my second best family sword, y'know. Figure if you're off to find my wife you may as well have my

"Oh, yes, and Maggie darlin', you'd best have this along." He tossed her a sheathed dagger. "All the gypsies carry at least one, and you oughtn't to be unprotected." The hilt was notably unencrusted with gems, but was made of a beautiful purple-colored wood, and appeared quite sharp enough to slice anything requiring slicing. Maggie devoutly hoped she could confine its use to game meat and fresh fruit.

CHAPTER 7

Colin groaned with pain as he half slid and half fell off his horse and onto the ground, where he lay like a freshly landed trout. A long night filled with too much wine and not enough sleep, followed by the unsoothing clang and banging of Gut-Buster and Obtruncator as Rowan attempted to teach him the rudiments and a few of the finer points of swordplay (as far as he could tell it was all rudimentary, and though he felt the point often, he didn't find it particularly fine) had gotten his day off to an inauspicious start. Maggie's insistence that they feave immediately after she had been unable to use her aunt's gift to locate Ambcrwine from within the castle had not been a welcome development. It had become even less agreeable when the decision was made by Maggie and Rowan that in order to keep to a minimum the effect of the rowan trees upon her, Maggie was to ride Rowan's swiftest steed at maximum speed out the west gate of the castle and across the moors. Colin was to trot behind with a packhorse and a fresh mount to replace the lathered one that would carry the heavily-veiled Maggie away from her nemesis. That was all very well for Maggie, but Colin hardly felt up to walking on tiptoe very quietly, much less trotting.

Neither had his sacrifice of his own best interests in order to preserve hers met with deep appreciation and profound gratitude. Maggie was turning the mirror over in her hands, staring at it moodily when he rode up, and she continued to be quiet and uncommunicative, nodding or shaking her head or answering in the shortest possible fashion when he addressed her, if she answered at all.

Now that he was finally allowed to rest his throbbing head and aching limbs, he was prodded out of his misery by Maggie saying "If you don't want any of this, I'll give theresttoChing." He looked up. Maggie was seated on her bedroll, toasting her toes before one of her fueliess campfires. eating a wing of the

roast pheasant that turned on the spit above the fire, dripping juices into the flames with a sizzling pop that even sounded delicious.

After feasting on the rest of the bird, two potatoes with fresh herbed butter, and half a loaf of hot bread, Colin thought he might survive after all.

With surprise, he saw that Maggie had spread his cloak across her knees and was reweaving one of the collection of rips and tears and holes that were its only adornments.

"Thank you," he said. "But you don't have to do that."

"I like sewing," she replied without lifting her eyes. "It calms me."

"How could you leave your house and land And all the wealth I gave ye? How could you leave your own true love To ride with Gypsy Davey?

"Oh, what care I for house and land Or all the wealth you gave me. I'm goin' now, my own true love, To ride with Gypsy Davey."

"Then I'll put those other two verses I sang earlier towards the end. What d'ya think?" Colin asked, looking up expectantly. Maggie was staring off into space again, ignoring her needlework. When she saw him watching her, she quickly brushed her face with the back of her hand and leaned down to bite in two the thread with which she had been sewing.

."Well?" Colin asked again.

"He'd make a handsome king, don't you think?"

By returning his guitar to its sack Colin was able to conceal his frown. Rowan had been decent enough to him, but Maggie was acting, now that he thought about it, a lot the way she had after meeting the unicorn. While Rowan's horns were of another variety, they apparently troubled him enough to cause him to pay a lot of unsettling attention to ordinary brown-haired girls -like his susceptible sister-in-law. It would have pleased Colin a lot better if the bereaved, deserted husband had just gone on bereaving and left his own traveling companion out of it.

"Why don't we try the magic mirror again, Maggie? We ought to find out if we're headed in the right general direction before we go much further."

"I suppose you're right. I wonder why it wouldn't work this morning. Toads! I thought if Rowan could just SEE Winnie he might--oh, I don't know what I thought."

"He did try that once to gel her back," Colin reminded her, disliking Rowan even more because fairness forced him to defend the fellow.

"I know. Where shall we start?"

"Where your aunt left off."

Maggie had pulled the mirror out of her pocket and polished it. She held in her mind the image of Amberwine and of gypsies, the latter image provided by the village fairs and her imagination

freshly fueled by Colin's song. As the rainbow lights flashed away in the darkness, two indistinct pictures, one superimposed on the other, appeared in the mirror.

"Hmtnm, let me try to clarify that," she said, and thought hardest about her sister as she had last seen her, tousled and troubled and burdened by pregnancy. The gypsy wagons that had hung ghostlike over the mirror faded and Maggie and Colin almost wished them back to hide the ugliness of the remaining image.

At first it appeared as though Winnie might try to round the corner of the building and escape the peddler's notice, but then she seemed to change her mind and drew herself to her full height, managing to look regal and somehow, Colin thought, ethereal and heart-breakingly beautiful, for ail her dirt and mats and sores.

She stopped herself from talking by fairly dancing onto the cart. "Is Maggie along? Will I see her?"

"Old Hugo has all kinds of surprises for you, my Lady, if only you'll just settle yourself so we can get on now," he said it as though coaxing a child.

"Oh, certainly, to be sure, oh, my, yes," she wriggled around and signalled to him that she was ready for departure.

"That slimy bastard!" Maggie yelled, as the mirror went dark. She thrust it rudely back into her pocket. "How fast can we get to Queenston from here?"

"It's about a week's hard ride, at least. Maggie, what did he mean about your father being there?"

"I don't know. It's a lie, of course. What can that vile worm be up to, anyway?"

"Can he nave passed us while we were at the castle?"

"Perhaps-or else--"

"Or else what?" he asked, hoping she wouldn't insist they ride all that night to get to Queenston the earlier.

"Or else that explains the iron trap, and why our horses were stolen. But why would Hugo be the villain Rabbit saw shoot Dad's horse? And how could he move so quickly? You yourself said a week. The* man must not sleep." She sighed and bit her thumb nail before spreading her blankets. "We have to though. And the horses need a rest."

His own questions about the vision were drowned out by relief as Colin spread his own bedroll.

Colin, whose ear could pick a birdsong out of a thunderstorm during an earthquake (if a bird should be so unwise as to be present and singing under such circumstances), heard the music hours before they reached the gypsy camp.

Ching sat up on his pallet and viewed the camp with precisely the same attitude he displayed towards birds. Maggie smiled suddenly, a lazy, preoccupied smile, and nodded, leaning over to scratch the cat's ears.

Hoping that the smile meant her mood was improving, Colin said, "Maggie," in his best tone of gentle but firm reasonableness. "That is not place for you. You are far too emotional about

this situation, and will undoubtedly cause those people to do us some injury if you let your temper get the better of you. You can't do your sister any good then, can you?" He ended on a note slightly more confident than the one he'd started on, and stole a glance from his alert, eyes-forward posture, to see how she was receiving his speech.

To his utter astonishment, the predatory stance and the probably even more troublemaking smile had both disappeared, and it was a mild Maggie who sat on the horse beside him, her head lowered, eyes downcast, hands meekly folded atop the pommel of her saddle. Ching had rolled over on his back and was watching them, upside down, purring sincerely.

"I-uh-I feel," he finished lamely, somewhat deflated by the lack of anticipated opposition, "that an objective party such as myself is the proper one to do the reconnaissance. Besides, gypsies are pretty musical. They're not so apt to mind a minstrel."

"Of course not, Colin," she readily agreed. "A minstrel's pocket's as easy to pick as anyone's." The momentary sharp look that accompanied that statement was quickly veiled by lowered lashes. Colin wasn't really fooled by her pose of maidenly acquiescence, but was grateful she wasn't making a scene. "I really think you're probably quite right. As you say, I do get upset. So perhaps Ching and I will stay here in this part of the meadow."

"What will you do?" he asked suspiciously.

"Oh, pick a few wildflowers, gather a few herbs Gran was wanting at home. So you just run along and find that awful gypsy-but watch out for his nasty mother."

"Right," he said, still puzzled, but getting ready to take advantage of her uncharacteristic fit of good nature to click to his horse and be off.

"Good-bye!" she waved gaily to him, though he still sat beside her. In order not to feel ridiculous, he rode into the camp.

Children clung to his britches and shirt tail as he walked from wagon to wagon, seeking the musicians, who were not occupying the bare meadow grass within the ring of wagons, as Colin had half expected. There were women poking in a cooking pot over a central campfire, and some others tending a spitted animal roasting over a pit, but they were old and unattractive, and in no way musical-looking, though he admitted he could have been fooled. Actually, the children weren't the only ones enjoying the novelty of being with peculiar-looking strangers. Colin had sung a lot of songs about and by gypsies, but like many of the other things he had sung of at the academy, gypsies were not something of which he had any first-hand knowledge. He'd sung of rowan trees too, but how good had he been at recognizing them? They'd practically had to kill a friend of his before he even knew what they were. The same ignorance held true of court life (except for a brief field trip to the minstrel hall at the capitol), the seas beyond the Gulf of Gremlins, war, bandits. True Love, ogres, flying carpets, and princesses. And of course, any number of other things, though he had been able, in the course of this journey, to withdraw dragons, unicorns, gnomes, and knights from the list. Even in East Headpenney they had had a witch, though she was of little real use that Colin could see, her main talent being the ability to communicate with dead people. Because of that talent of hers, he had met a lot of ghosts, but on the whole, he thought with satisfaction, gypsies were far more colorful and exciting. He sort of hoped this might be the wrong gypsy camp, or that if Gypsy Davey were here, Amberwine would, in spite of the evidence of the magic mirror, be with him. While Amberwine and Maggie were being reunited, Colin could befriend the people of the caravan, who would recognize him as a good and honest man and a great artist, and trot out all their best folk stories and songs to tell him, which he would take back to the academy and for which he would be given all sorts of praise and respect and a professorship with tenure (which he would humbly decline, of course, preferring the true troubadour's life on the open road).

Just as he was accepting the Minstrel's Medal of Merit from Master Minstrel Peter, he tripped and fell sprawling, face first, catching himself hard on his left side to avoid damage to his fiddle.

"Sorry," mumbled the person over whom he had tripped, languidly drawing her feet closer to her and covering them with a full blue skirt. Her mood appeared to match her attire. Ignoring him as completely as though he were a ghost, she sat with her head resting against the splintery rough wood of the wagon, the pretty head drooping as though her neck were inadequate to support it. Though the neck was long and graceful, it appeared to Colin to be in no way insubstantial, however. It was draped with beads and coins that jangled distractingly as the girl heaved a desolate sigh. Her chin pointed up but her mouth pointed most emphatically down, and he watched a tear balance, glistening, on the end of her nose before skipping over her lips to slide down her chin and trail off behind her ear.

"It was my fault. I ought to look where I'm going," he said, feeling embarrassed to be relatively tragedy-free in the face of such evident misery. "Beg your pardon, but could you tell me where the musicians are? I play the fiddle." he held it up, his credentials, "I thought, you know, they might let another fiddler sit in."

She jerked her head to the left. The children who had been following him had joined a group of people, liberally sprinkled with dogs, who leaned, sat, or lay in a loose cluster around five men, and around one man in particular.

Having had more than what he felt was his just portion of moody women lately, Colin stifled his sympathy, and in three strides joined an ale keg of a man who was seated on the ground. The man in the middle was telling a story, and telling it very well. His tone was ringing and true and carried so well Colin wondered that he had not heard him earlier. The fellow's whole

. attitude was a parody of the love, grief, hate, sorrow, and anger that motivated his audience. His was the voice of life taken lightly, and it was a soft voice, sibilant, caressing the ears of his listeners. He had a gift for timing, drama, and imitation that made him the best natural storyteller Colin had ever heard, aside from Master Minstrel Peter.

Though certainly dark, the gypsy was neither tall nor particularly handsome, having a beakish nose not uncommon on other faces in the crowd. But his black eyes sparkled with wit, his mouth was always ready to laugh, and his hands were in constant motion, making a play of his words.

They were large, thin-fingered hands and they drew, as Colin watched diagrams of battles, became firing cannon, or horses so fast as to elude all pursuit. They described with gestures to match his voice his conquests of the most beautiful women in more countries than he cared to count. Colin believed every word.

Watching the gypsy, Colin wished that he had as large a nose so that he could flare it dramatically, as though at the scent of blood or perfume-it was, on the gypsy, an excellent tool of expression. Colin also thought that his nature slighted him when it came to flashing a dashing smile. Even with brown edges, white teeth flashed so much more effectively in a dark face. The gypsy drew answering grins from the men and sighs from the prepubescent girls and the few crones.

"Outsiders get entertained tonight, when they pay," said the skinny man. "Isn't that right, Davey? Only gypsies now."

Colin huffed himself up indignantly. "Not a gypsy? I? Not a gypsy? What sort of people are you not to have heard of the fair gypsies of Kallanderry?" He warmed to his part. "You wound me. My violin weeps with pain-to be so ignominiously cast out by my own people--" seeing a glint of amusement in Davey's eye and fearing he was laying it on a bit too thick, he left off talking and began playing again, which suited him much better. The fiddle did indeed cry a violin's lament, a morbid throbbing tune, if to say tune was not to make it sound too lively. Before long the majority of the observers and participants looked a lot like the gypsy girl he had tripped over. It was too mournful for Colin to sustain without becoming seriously depressed, so he blended it into a sprightlier tune, one full of enough spirit and fire to convince them he had to be a gypsy.

Nonetheless, up till the moment when Davey began to first clap time and then to improvise on his own guitar, Colin had expected to have his fiddle shoved down his throat at any second. Taking Davey's lead, the others also chimed in and the hostility was forgotten. Behind his concentration on his music, Colin was finally able to exhale.

As one good drink begat another, so did one lively tune lead to the whole group joining in on a second song. Soon everyone was laughing, crying, singing, shouting, and generally carousing

in an altogether friendly fashion. All except Davey, Colin was surprised to notice. Among the unabashed tears and laughter, the storyteller had stopped participating now that he was no longer the center of attention. He looked bored. A jug had been making the rounds of the group, and when Colin next passed it to Davey, the gypsy rose to his feet. "Come on, Cousin. I'll show you around." He picked up his bolero, on which he'd been seated, and flung it casually over one shoulder. His guitar dangled from the other hand. As they left the group, he said, "My people are preparing to entertain the townsmen with a little show tonight, while the children go into the town for supplies. Now. of course, that we know you're one of us," and a twitch of his eyebrow gave Colin to understand that he knew no such thing, "we hope to enlist you in our performance. We'd be honored, you understand."

"I understand, and I'll be happy to do that, Cousin," Colin replied. "Nothing I like better than a good show. Nothing like it for-er-gathering provisions either. Are you sure the town will be empty enough to make the shopping profitable?"

"Oh, yes." His smile was wolfish. "A group of our little black-eyed beauties, chaperoned by my mother, have gone to the town to do what you might call the advance publicity. A few of them," he indicated the nongypsies still engaged in trying to trade horses, "came out this afternoon when a friend of ours who's a peddler passed the word we were here. They hope to trade horses and buy and sell orphans." He grinned broadly, apparently considering this last very humorous. Colin, orphaned since babyhood, was less amused, but nevertheless smiled his best shrewd ersatz-gypsy smile.

"I saw one pretty girl who apparently didn't go. I tripped over her when I joined your group-very nice-looking, but she seemed unhappy."

"You can only mean Zoran," Davey snorted. "She thinks she owns me. She's always hanging around me, crying. I think she believes if she cries hard enough I'll drown in her tears. If you like her, take her with you, please. She's nothing but trouble. One time when I was young and stupid I gave her a little thrill, and ever since she dogs my footsteps. Her father used to be a powerful man here, could train anything, trained our first bear, in fact, but then he was killed. If Zorah weren't such a good trick rider my mother would get rid of her."

Colin felt ill at ease. This was not what he wanted to know about female admiration, its care and feeding. Infatuated girls

"Oh, and you say she's traveling with you?"

Colin waggled his head deprecatingly. "She's a really shy girl. She wanted to camp up farther in the meadow-doesn't like crowds."

"What? And miss our legendary hospitality?" Davey clapped him on the back and speared a chunk of meat from the roasting Iamb as they passed. "No, my friend, cousin, we must insist you bring her down to our camp. Never must it be said that some of our own camped alone while we had a fire and music and plenty of food to share! It would be a deadly insult!"

"It would?" Colin certainly didn't want to offend local custom. He suspected Davey knew that and was counting on it. "That's very gypsy of you, I must say." Colin replied finally, feeling trapped.

Davey waved expansively. "Of course it is."

Colin was shoved suddenly forward as a small black-haired missile slammed into his back. "Davey! Queen Xenobia wants to see you now.'' A buxom gypsy lass disentangled herself from Colin and tugged at the hand of Davey. who was already following her back toward the campfire.

"Your pardon, Cousin. My mother has returned."

"Perfectly alright, old man. I'll just go along and-uh-

command Maggie to pull up stakes and come back here with me to your camp and-er-no nonsense."

"Good!" hollered the gypsy, flashing one more dazzling grin as he was dragged off. Colin sighed to notice that the gypsy didn't allow himself to be dragged for long, but neatly turned the situation by catching up with the girl in two strides and encircling her waist with his arm. Colin shook his head slowly, and walked back toward where he had left his horse,

"But you like him. Fine fellow, yes?"

"Sure, you do. Everybody likes him. Me, especially," a rueful shrug punctuated that remark, "but it's you who's got to help him."

"Me? Help him? He looks as though he's doing just fine without my help, actually."

"You don't understand."

"Can't say as I do, in fact. Say, tell me. what's a nice girl like you doing lurking about behind wagon wheels anyway?"

"Come down here and sit by me, and I'll explain it all to you, little fiddler."

"Thank you, but you see, I'd actually promised Davey that I'd

He went.

Back to the woods she went with this thread, and from the boughs of two trees that grew close together she made a loom. Powered by her magic, the crude loom warped itself and wove the ex-lingerie into a gossamer white cloth. k

Maggie draped the cloth over her arms and carried it back to the dyepot. Cutting some of it off, she dipped the shorter piece in. It came out a saffron and she held it up to herself. "What do you think, cat?" she asked Ching, who had had time for a short nap during all this activity. "Do I look nice in yellow or maybe a little sallow?"

Ching growled at the herby smell of boiled lichen on the cloth, but it was a token growl only. He had smelled far more obnoxious smells than stewed vegetation in his life as Granny Brown's familiar. "What in the name of the Mother are you doing with THAT?" he asked.

Snipping at his tail with her fingers, Maggie laughed mysteriously and cut off another piece of cloth, added something from her medicine pouch to the dyepot, and withdrew a bright emerald piece of cloth. "Making a party dress, kitty dear. The gypsies are obyiously planning a do of some sort, and I won't want to look shabby, will I?"

"Kitty dear?" Ching flipped his tail with a gesture of profound disgust and trotted off towards the woods. "On that note I think I'll go have a bit of a scratch in the dirt."

When the cat returned, Maggie had put the last stitch into the dress and had emptied the dyepots. With only a little water and a bit of soap root her grandmother had smuggled into the country at considerable cost to Sir William's purse, she managed to bathe her skin and hair.

"Ugh. Putting THAT stuff on your pelt can lead to a fever, witch. Don't you know anything? Why didn't you use your dry-cleaning charm?" Ching sounded casual, but if he hadn't been fairly used to the vagaries of his own mistress he would have been seriously concerned for her granddaughter's mental health.

"Believe it or not, cat, once in a while it actually feels nice to be wet all over. Particularly on a warm day." She shrugged. "And I haven't melted yet. I'm going to the woods again. Stay here and watch the horse, will you, and be prepared for a surprise!"

"Nothing you do any more surprises me," grumbled the cat, settling down to clean his immaculate white belly.

Without the thin hair necklace mostly concealed by the billows of her hair, the cat would never have recognized Maggie. Even at Amberwine's wedding she had been too busy flitting hither and yon supervising preparations and yelling at people to bother much with her own appearance. Freed of the dirt and set off by

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."

"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."

"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, if 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."

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.

"As for- you, my merry minstrel," Xenobia said sweetly, "You could prove less easy to handle than the girl."

"A lot you know," he mumbled under his breath, but replied more clearly. "Why are you treating us this way? Your son was bragging about your famous hospitality. Is this how you treat your distant kin?"

"MY kin?" She really did hiss now. "You're MY kin? Say something to me. then, in our own secret tongue, relative." She chucked him under the chin with her fingers so hard it made his eyes water. "Sing me a sweet gypsy lament in the old tongue. No? I thought not." She turned to the shadows behind her. "Mateo, my boy, show this false gypsy what you found on his horse."

Triumphantly, the boy dragged forth the second best family sword. House of Rowan crest and all.

"This sword, I am told, is the property of the enemy of a great sorcerer who is friend to my people. If you're such a fine gypsy, how come you have it, eh?"

"I stole it."

She shook her head. "No. And there are no gypsies in the world who look like you, as my son well knows. He only liked your singing and playing and thought, 'ah well, he's harmless enough.' Then we found this. Too many of your kind mixing with my people is whatI say." She spat the last and turned from him to give a command to her guard. When her back was turned, Colin amazed himself with his own ruthless cunning as he snaked an arm around her throat, catching her neck in the crook of his elbow. "Nobody move," he ordered. "Or I strangle the old witch." He was snarling in the voice he used when singing the villain's part in a murder ballad, and was gratified to see how effective it was. Xenobia clawed at his arm and he tightened his grip-

"Mateo, if you are fond of your present form of government, it would behoove you to replace that sword in its scabbard and put it back where you found it. Then you will bring my horse right here."

How was he going to elude them long enough to free Maggie from the gypsy's lustful clutches and ride away through the thick wood beyond danger of capture was quite beyond him. It was better than listening to Xenobia's melodramatic threats, though.

"Too bad it's all closed up, like. I'd enjoy watching," he heard someone say as he landed.

"We'll hear, right enough," said someone else.

A deafening roar was the first indication of their veracity.

CHAPTER 10

The gypsy had his love nest all arranged. Since he shared his mother's wagon, he found it convenient to prepare such trysting places wherever their band went. It made an interesting game, to find a suitable spot to woo, and, naturally, to win, his loves. The locations were varied enough to titillate his sense of adventure: a hay mow, an outbuilding, an open field, a deserted woodcutter's hut, or, as it was tonight, a comfortable bed of fragrant spruce boughs and soft moss, all ready for him to lay the lady down beneath the rustling willows.

"Me-me and my soft skin. What did you expect, anyway?" she was so amused by her own joke she collapsed once more before she could continue. "I mean to say, did you imagine I would have scales, or what?"

For such a ravishing girl she clearly didn't understand the first thing about being ravished. She was drearily unaware of the protocol of such matters. That was a classic compliment! Offended, Davey decided that perhaps she preferred a more basic approach, which also happened to suit him at the moment.

He grabbed the front of her bodice and pulled. It ripped apart long enough for him to catch a moonglow swell of copper skin, then it wove itself primly back together again.

"Ching was right," the girl muttered to herself, "a stitch in time would have indeed saved nine this time."

Though her perfume was driving him mad, he thought it prudent to employ more circumspect tactics with young women who caused their clothing to automatically mend. "However you did that," he grumbled, "you're certainly a lot more modest than you were a while ago." He had relinquished his embrace, but retained her wrists.

She glared at him.

"Of course," he added quickly. "On you, my lovely, modesty or immodesty are equally becoming."

Seeing that he was making no headway, he reverted to persuasion. "Come, now, my sweetheart. I won't force you to do anything you don't want to do. Not until you're ready. I'm sorry I tore your dress-I am too impatient to taste your charms. I can't help myself, you know. Passionate gypsy blood, and all that." He pulled her back into his arms, where she lay for a moment against him while he kissed her neck and munched her earlobes. He had found ninety-nine percent of the subjects tested responded favorably to such embraces.

She sighed deeply and almost snuggled against him for a moment. "You don't intend to harm us, then?"

He looked down at her with annoyance. The little wench was trying to take advantage of the situation! "Well, I didn't say THAT. You are spies, after all. But I wouldn't want to have to force you, dear girl. Think how bad that would sound!" He considered that for a moment, while defining the contours of her bosom and experimenting with a couple of squeezes.

A lupine grin replaced his unaccustomed meditative air. "On the other hand, who would you tell? Not many more get-togethers with the girls for you. sweet."

"You haven't got much sensitivity, have you, wench?" he asked critically.

"More than you have. I say, is it true you haven't a heart?" "You really are an insensitive little witch." "Precisely."

"As a matter of fact, I don't. Part of my puberty rite as a gypsy prince required its removal."

"What a quaint folk custom! Oh, Mother!" she swore, catching sight of the rope in his hand. "You aren't going to use that thing, are you?" She tried to scramble away, but he caught her by the foot and slammed her against the trunk of a tree before she was able to contemplate cows.

"I don't see why not." He yanked the knot tight. "You are a spy.

"I am not a spy, and you are awtul." "Not entirely. If you'd only have given me a chance I can be quite amusing, really." His protestations were limp, however, and he had lost a good deal of his inspiration for the moment. "Oh, to be sure. I think you're funnier than a hanging,

myself," she said acidly. "Really, how do you keep walking around without a heart?"

"It was magically removed, silly girl. Not surgically." "I see. You have a blood-pumping apparatus, just no feelings." "You might put it that way. Scientific turn of mind you've got, for a spy."

"I told you I'm not a spy. I only wanted to find out how you managed to make off with my sister, and why you allowed your mother to drive her away later. As a matter of fact, now that we're better acquainted. I'm amazed Winnie didn't leave without being asked."

"You don't like me, do you?"

"No. You do have a certain superficial charm--" He cocked an eyebrow. "Alright then, a deep superficial charm. But though Winnie might occasionally do something batty, she's very discerning about people generally, and men in particular.'"

"Be a good fellow, prince. You really don't fancy my berry-brown body any more, do you?"

"She didn't. She couldn't-wouldn't."

"She did."

"How? You can't be hurt without a heart, can you?"

"I have my pride," he said stiffly, then snarled so nastily at her that in her helpless condition she was quite alarmed. "There is something very wrong with the women of your family. I should have known you two were related by the way you act."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean your father will have no grandchildren, the way you and that lily-white sister of yours behave."

"Nonsense. Winnie is pregnant already."

"So I noticed, once mother confiscated her gown. It has to be a changeling."

"Be reasonable. The baby has to be born for faeries to substitute a changeling, and Winnie's part faerie herself. Nothing like that could possibly happen." It occurred to her then to stop arguing long enough to understand what he had been telling her. "You don't mean you-um-she-you mean there's no disgrace to Rowan then?" That was as delicately as she could put it.

"But why did you want her in the first place? Aside from your low-born lust, I mean. I'd think that all that would be a great deal of trouble for just that."

"I beg your pardon. As a matter of fact, it was a practical arrangement. A friend of our people-the sorcerer I mentioned-

has political ambitions. He wished to discredit Lord Rowan in some subtle way, as he cannot do him direct damage. The rowan trees that surround Rowan's castle protect him from sorcerers. They are murderous to witches."

"Yes, I know."

"I was naturally happy to be of help in my modest way," he shrugged his most charming humble shrug. "We are loyal friends, we gypsies."

"Provided there's enough gold and silver to sweeten the deal," Maggie amended.

"You insult!" He made a jack-knife leap to his feet. "I try to act nicely to you, to make love to you, and you insult me. I shall leave you here, tied to this tree, to die." He started to stalk off.

"Oh, Davey, don't go being offended!" Maggie talked so fast she almost stumbled over her words. It would cost her a lot of valuable time to figure out which household spell to apply to loosen a leather rope. She could have simply unspun a hemp one, but the leather was difficult. "I didn't mean to insult you, truly. I didn't think I could, you being heartless and all."

"I may not have a heart, but I'm a very sensitive man." He fairly spat at her.

"I can see that now, and I was wrong, and I'm very sorry. You're absolutely right, of course. You really are irresistible. It's just that odd things are expected of us younger witches by our elders and there's this unicorn at home and-well, you see, I can't afford to get involved with any man right now."

"Well." he said, looking back through the trees to the camp where the embers of the evening's fire still glowed in the darkness. "It is early yet. I think it would not look g-I think, so, I would not like to go back so early." He sank to the ground near her. "Now, woman, tell me what it is that you have to help me.

"That girl you were with tonight--"

"Lahara? What about her?"

"Yes, of course."

"Well, what if you get tired of her?"

"Then I find another one."

"What about her? Doesn't she make trouble?"

"That one? No!" He laughed. "She wouldn't dare. What trouble could she make?"

"Mostly. But as you say, you folks have all this passionate gypsy blood, and once in a while a little of it is bound to be spilled. What if some night you're all snuggled down in the shrubbery with a new friend, and Runya decides to take up whittling?"

He shuddered.

"It can't be much fun for you, either," she pointed out. "It must be depressing having all those women crying over you all the time."

"No. One can only do so much for them. It's the price of manhood, I suppose."

"Runya could take care of that too."

He gulped. "What did you have to say, witch?"

"Just this. What if I were to give you a potion that just sort of de-ignites the passion of the ladies no longer in favor? A kind of anti-love serum?"

"You could give me such a thing?" He sounded tempted, then a troubled look crossed his handsome face. "But they would forget me then. What if I wanted to try again with one I had given this potion to?"

"Oh, Davey," she smiled from beneath coyly lowered lashes. "Do you really think you'd have any trouble if you chose to overpower a little potion?"

He began to untie her.

CHAPTER 11

Colin's horrible screams and the bear's ferocious growls made it difficult for even the most hard-hearted of the gypsies to get to sleep. Xenobia had thought the minstrel's execution would be noisy, but was beginning to wish the bear would eat more daintily. Zorah cowered beneath her blanket and whimpered herself to sleep, all of her own hopes dying in agony with Colin. And in the woods, Maggie cut short Davey's explanation of how to reach the sorcerer's castle. Her heart sank as she shoved the potion at him and began to run through the edge of the wood to the point of the encampment closest to the commotion.

In the bear cage, Colin shook with genuine fright, and followed his first, authentic scream with a repertoire both bloodcurdling and heart-rending. Ching, the cat, sat switching his tail. clearly promising to give him another taste of his claws if his performance was substandard. The bear, likewise under the influence of the cat, snuffed and whuffled, bellowed and bawled, growled and grumbled his most challenging, while finishing the remains of the meal his keeper had left in the cage before the bear-baiting began.

With a particularly satisfying chilling gurgle. Colin reached his finale. The bear ate more quietly as the cat sank down onto the floor of the cage to lick his front paws and wash his ears.

Colin wiped the perspiration from his brow with the side of his arm. "That was close," he whispered to the cat, "I don't know how you talked him out of eating me, but thanks a lot, cat. I swear to you that none of your kind shall be mistreated or hungry as long as I'm about."

Ching's eyes gazed greenly up at him in the darkness, his purr almost as loud as the bear's growls. Colin scratched the cat's ears and considered. "Still, I don't imagine you're magical enough to open this cage, are you? No, of course not. At least you've given me time to think." Ching presented the side of his face for a whisker scratch. Colin regarded him thoughtfully.

"Yet you can understand me, can't you? I mean, I know I can't tell if you're saying 'meow' or reciting poetry when you and Maggie chat, but you're a clever fellow. You can understand everybody, right?" Ching said "mrrp" in a pleased sort of way. and continued to encourage caresses by rolling onto his back for his black-and-white belly to be rubbed.

"There's one girl here who might help me. I don't know if she's actually a friend or not but she does dislike Xenobia. Maybe if you could get Zorah to come and get me out?" He was starting to think and talk faster, hoping there might be some way to escape in time to save Maggie.

Being careful not to wake the others, who might not be so sympathetic to Colin's and Maggie's respective plights as the young woman he was sent to fetch, he hopped softly onto the girl's chest and sang into her ear. She stirred. He sang a bit louder, but she mumbled, and her arms made brushing motions to rid herself of him.

He patted her half-open lips with a paw, his nose almost brushing her teeth. Her breath smelled pleasantly of home-brewed ale and spice-root. He patted again, then leaped sideways as she sat up, her elbow nearly striking him as she raised her hand to rub her eyes.

"What?" she asked.

Ching purred reassuringly, fixing her with a calm composed gaze. He hoped she wasn't one of those silly hysterical people who couldn't abide the presence of a cat.

Zorah liked cats, however, and found stroking Ching a soothing balm for her sadness, even though she was barely awake and afraid of waking her family. She had no idea how he'd come to her wagon, but welcomed his company anyway. When Ching was sure he had her attention, he backed off, chirruping for her to follow, advanced again to rub against her, then once more retreated when she tried to pet him. Soon she got the idea that she was being instructed to follow him when he hopped down from her wagon.

He led her to the bear's cage, but when she saw the direction he was taking she turned again to go, protesting tearfully, "Oh, puss, I can't go there. That poor man!" Ching sat thumping his tail on the ground, staring up at her until she began to realize he was not behaving in a naturally feline fashion. Most cats, if there was a great deal of blood around, would have been savagely excited. Such a description in no way fit Ching. Zorah's curiosity led her on.

More to bolster her own courage than because she actually thought she would be understood, she said, taking a deep breath and pulling her frayed and muddied cloak close about her,

"Very well. I will look, then. I am a gypsy woman, and not squeamish."

A disembodied voice followed this outspoken proclamation of bravery, almost making lie of i( by sending her screaming back to her wagon.

CHAPTER 12

Colin's terrible screams had come to a shuddering climax long before Maggie reached the portion of the woods that would enable her to reach the bear's wagon undetected. For a long time after that she stood staring dry-eyed at the circle of wagons, unable to believe the evidence of her own ears. She wandered further into the wood, to the upstream end of the camp, her stomach heaving and body trembling with shock and fury.

She had to control an almost unbearable urge to fly "into the gypsy camp and dismantle it and everybody in it with her bare hands. She didn't have even her dagger now. though, and if she met the same end as Colin, who would there be to help Amberwine? She was comforting herself with visions of plagues both magical and mundane which she would cause to infest the gypsies if it took the rest of her life, when her attention was redirected to the camp by the clanging of swords, the screams of combatants, and the neighings of horses.

By the time she could no longer hear voices, neither could she find a path underfoot. The sun had risen, and as she searched it came from oblivion to reach mid-point in the warm spring sky. The leaves overhead glimmered feverishly, their tops glazed with a citrusy hue, and all around her were mosses, tall grass, fallen leaves, and the trunks of dead trees underfoot. The path had completely disappeared. She had blended into the forest a little too successfully, and realized that she was lost.

Wandering, she came at last to the bank of another stream. Although willows and other taller bushes grew close by the bank in many places, at one point they did recede into a clearing, and in this spot the stream was lined with a field of berries.

She picked great handfuls, and ate them that way, having nothing to make a more fanciful concoction, and not possessing the strength or inclination for cooking, magical or otherwise, just then, anyway. They were very good just as they were, if a bit tart at times. She continued gathering after she'd eaten her fill, and tied them into her kerchief, leaving her hair to string down, hot and sticky, against her neck.

Her exhilaration over Colin's escape and her own began to fade, and she sat down on a log to think. She was tired, having been up the whole night, and now that she knew he was. safe she was annoyed that Colin was not there to keep her company and help her continue their journey. Presumably Ching was with him now, and she missed the cat too.

She would have liked to discuss with Colin what Davey had told her, and plan how to get her sister away from Hugo, who she now felt sure was taking her sister to the sorcerer, if he hadn't already killed her. Although she badly wished to see Colin again, she just as fervently hoped he would continue on his way when he found she was not in the section of the wood for which he had been headed.

Still, Ching might have cheered her with his sarcasm, and not incidentally with the game he could catch and share with her. It would be nice to stroke his fur while she thought, too, instead of watching her hands turn blue from the berries. A tear of self-pity slid down one of her brown cheeks.

She was about to brush it aside when she heard the rustling in the bushes and heard a peculiar snuffling, whuffing sound and saw the leaves of the willows shake. A brown, furry nose poked out of the shrubbery.

She froze. A bear, perhaps the one from the gypsy camp. Now she really did miss Ching, and even the minstrel, who might have at least tried to do as her father had suggested and sing the bear a lullaby. She could always TRY to turn the creature into a rug. It was better than being eaten.

The bear emerged fully from the bushes and stood on his hind legs, blinking his small eyes and looking around. Maggie sat back so abruptly when he stood up that she almost fell into the stream. Before it had occurred to her that that would have been a safer course of action than to attract the bear's attention, she had caused considerable commotion flailing around trying to save herself a soaking.

The bear growled.

"No, I'm sorry. Perhaps I can go find some--" Seeing a chance to escape, she tensed herself for flight, then hesitated. He seemed completely uninterested in eating her, at least so long as berries were available. "Excuse me, bear. How is it you-or rather, I-I mean, how can we understand each other?"

"You young folks broke part of the spell. Didn't you know?"

"Yes, indeed. Xenobia's spell specifically stated that if I were

: released by-say-a magic cat-and my son's own true love,

. that I should once more be able to talk and act as a man. Of course, I can't look like myself again unless I'm able to recover young David'sticker." His little bear eyes looked at her shrewdly.

"Excuse me, though. Prince Worthyman. How did you come

*. to be enchanted, if that's not too personal a question? My aunt says Xenobia's a charlatan, not a proper witch at ail . . ."

"Hmph," said Maggie. "He seemed to be doing alright for himself, if you ask me."

"Well, of course you've no idea, not having been around long. But I can tell you, gurrl, that my son is not the warm, gay child he was. He is not even a nice person now. Many fear him, and many envy him, but no one except his mother and that girl who opened my cage truly love him-and even Xenobia and the girl only love what he used to be."

"I see."

"Back to my story-I say, I hope I'm not boring you?"

"Oh, no."

"Well, then. Davey was a beautiful child, and we loved each other at once. For a week I bided with the gypsies and taught him the things I knew-a bit about hunting, a bit about affairs of state, a few songs I'd learned off the circuit minstrels. But when time came for me to go. Xenobia cornered me, wantin' to know couldn't I stay with her and the lad. I explained about learning to run kingdoms, and Jane, and all, and I s'pect she must have figured I'd gone snooty on her. With Jane and all that. I couldn't take her back to court even if they could have adjusted to the life. It wouldn't have done at all.

"I thought she understood that in spite of the fearsome frown on her face as I left them. Five years later I received another message, this one askin' me to come to young Davey's manhood ceremony. I see now that that frown, when I first told her there was no room in my life for her and our son, was when she decided to change, and all three of us became monsters.

"She met me on the road before I reached their camp, and was all smiles and giggles. Even eight years ago, Xenobia was still quite a good-looking woman, and I flattered myself that my

"I didn't know, of course, what she meant by that, but I was soon to find out, for she left the cage facing the gypsy's campfire.

"This ceremony they were having was all lit by torches carried by the friends of all the boys getting passed to manhood, and I could see well enough. Young Davey, he was all eager and excited, and they smeared paint on him and on the others and

waved symbols in the air supposed to be magical, had some dances, give him a speech about how he's a prince now. Ha! If only he knew, he could be a real prince with none of that hokum about it.

"But on with what I was saying. Anyway, pretty soon it's all over for the other boys and they go back to their parents. But Xenobia tells the boy that since he's a prince and so on, he has one more bit of special rigamarole to go through.

"She takes this crystal thing from the sorcerer-what d'ya call them, gurrl? A prism. And she holds it in front of the child and tells him to watch it, to watch the fire inside it, to watch the colors of it, and pretty soon he gets real stupid looking. A trance, I s'pose it was.

"The sorcerer comes forward then and takes this prism from Xenobia, places it against the boy's breast. He chants and singsongs and makes more magical patterns in the air. Wasn't much of that went on before the prism gets brighter and brighter, and then very bright, indeed. Xenobia held out her hand for it then, but the sorcerer didn't give it to her. She put up no fuss, either, afraid of undoing the magic, I suppose.

"Davey woke up then, and a great feastin' party was held. I felt hungry myself, you see, for I was this way by then, and the meal I'd had as a man was hardly enough for a bear. I was also beginning to feel stupid and dull and ornery, and I tried to lift my arms to rattle the side of the cage, i saw my paws and forelegs then, and I knew she was telling the truth, that I was turning into a bear. I tried hard to understand what they were saying as they came to the cage, hoping they'd give me a clue as to how to free myself.

"Xenobia had figured by then that the sorcerer had tricked her and was hollering at him. 'You promised me I'd have the heart.' I heard her say.

"The sorcerer was sweet as honey. 'I only promised to relieve him of it, dear lady, Come now.' he says, 'why should a traveler like yourself be needing extra possessions to cart around? I'll just keep it safe for you as a memento of this lovely party and this charmin' native ritual of yours. Someday, maybe, when I*m sure of your friendship and all, I may let you have it back.'

"Xenobia didn't say anything to that, and he raps on my cage, and I knew I was more bear than man already, for he smelled delicious. 'By the way, Highness, the lady was not exactly playing fair with you. She neglected to tell you the rest of the antidote, as I'm bound by the spell to do. If, having been freed

by those other conditions she mentioned, you manage to recover this little trinket.' he flashed the prism again, dazzling my eyes and taunting Xenobia, 'so your son can be as dreary as most young men. you will regain your human shape. If you don't die of old age in that bear body first!' -

"Then I'll be if he didn't mount on a great black swan and fly away before Xenobia could be at him again."

"I must say," Maggie admitted through her yawn, "that was an amazing story." Her eyelids had been getting ever heavier as the bear's deep voice growled on. The bear prince raised his great shaggy head from her lap. and if a bear's tiny eyes could look solicitous, his did.

"Ah. gurrrl. and you listening to all that after being up all night andnone of the sleep you natural folk need. You're in sore need of hibernation." He rose to his hind paws again and looked around, then dropped once more to all fours. "You nap a bit and I'll keep watch. I doubt any of Xenobia's tribe have lingered in the area, but we'll wait for nightfall to move along all the same,"

"You're the prince," Maggie agreed, snuggling down into a nice grassy place and immediately sleeping.