Song of Sorcery Read Online Free

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.”
    “News certainly travels fast.”
    “I suppose you’re going south to visit your lovely sister?”
    “Toads! Does the whole village know already?” Maggie was annoyed. Not only had she hoped to keep her mission a secret, but she particularly did not want a gossipy old goat like Hugo the Peddler to know her business.
    “No, no, no. Never fear, dear lady. I won’t tell a soul. You know I’m quiet as Medusa’s boyfriend when it comes to a lady’s private secrets, eh? But I was taking a new hammer over to the smith, and he told me you were journeying tomorrow, so naturally I just assumed…”
    “Here you are, Hugo.” Granny poured a little of the powder from the earthenware jug into a paper, folded the paper with great ceremony, and presented it to the peddler. “Six coppers, please.”
    “ Six! ” Hugo protested while unclasping a neat brocade coin purse he carried at his belt. “It’s gone up, has it? I remember when it was two.”
    “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 something 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.
    “Make yourself more clearly understood, of course,” purred Ching, bumping her cheek with his head.
    Maggie started, but, seeing her grandmother’s smirk of satisfaction, resigned herself. “I suppose having Ching along will help me talk with the larger non-human types. But I hope I won’t have to hear the horse complain about his sore feet and the bad grass?”
    “Not unless you