Song of Sorcery Read Online Free Page A

ask Ching, dear. I should think that with no one but that maudlin minstrel along, you’d be happy for intelligent company.”
    “Yes, Gran.”
    “Speaking of intelligent company, you’d better stop and see Sybil on your way, or there’ll be another rupture in the family tree.”
    Maggie wriggled with impatience that caused Ching to abandon her shoulder. “Gran, it may be urgent that I reach Winnie!”
    “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.
     
     

 
    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’s gallop created a wind for them.   Her woolen cape tugging at her as it billowed out behind her back 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 mowed down 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 tongue lashing 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.”
    Colin didn’t know what to say. How