"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 to Lord Rowan's hall, and longer still 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 supper-time 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."
"If we come to another place tomorrow, maybe we can buy a horse."
"A horse?"
"Dad didn't give me enough money to buy a lot of horses on this trip, since he supplied us with some. Do you have enough for another?"
His eyes fell under her challenging stare. "No."
"Oh, don't look so put-upon. We can ride double or take turns. I didn't intend to hog it all for myself."
Colin poured a little water from his waterskin over his sore feet, then passed the water to her. "I hope your sister appreciates all this worry and pain on her behalf!"
"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'll 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—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."
The minstrel was not wholly convinced. "I find it hard to imagine such a virtuous person as you are saying she is doing what she did."
"I didn't say she isn't an ass sometimes," Maggie admitted. "If she had to run her own household and do all the chores without the benefit of servants, it would have been impossible for her. She's good with servants though. They all like her, and she knows how to get what she wants from them. She's just not very good at handling any sort of unpleasantness. People are never unkind to her, so I suppose unkindness isn't very real to her." She winced, remembering the vision in the crystal, and continued in a smaller voice. "She'd rather just go to sleep and forget about it than have to face doing something to make someone unhappy. That always has made ME unhappy. I could never see why she's not better at making decisions. She said she didn't have to be because I did it so well." She frowned. "That's why it's difficult for me to credit your song. If she were to go off with someone, it might be for a little while, on the spur of the moment, while she could still see the turrets of her own home across the moors and know it was all very safe and romantic and fun. But to leave altogether? Without asking anyone or packing anything?"
"People do change," Colin said gently.
Ching came bounding out of the woods with a rabbit in his mouth.
"The gnome would throttle you, but thanks," Maggie said, accepting it.
"Excellent," Colin said. "I was getting sick of gingerbread."
They passed 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 preserving the essence of the tale for posterity."
Promenading along in front of them, Ching smirked a great cat smirk and said from over his shoulder. "Another crack like that and he can forget about having his own posterity, eh, witch?"
"Okay then, how about this verse, Maggie?" Colin persisted, attempting to save himself from another tirade. "It ought to work up some popular sympathy for our side:
"A beggar lassie, dressed in rags,
Still in her heart a lady,
She mourns the day she heard his song,
The song of Gypsy Davey, the song of Gypsy Dave."
"It has possibilities," Maggie admitted. "Still, I hope you won't be stuck with such a gloomy ending, even though that's the sort people like Gran prefer."
"Maybe I can come up with something better when we've talked to Lord Rowan," he said.
"You'll have to do most of the talking, you know."
"I will?" He was unsure whether to feel pleased at being assigned an important role or wary of assuming any responsibility 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. 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 was comprised of 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 Colin 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.
"The top of a hill, I think the people at the wedding mentioned."
"Which one? We've topped several. The minstrel needed to wipe the sweat from his forehead to keep it from trickling into his eyes. He had already removed his vest and rolled up his shirtsleeves. His fair skin was burning a hot pink, in spite of the sun to which he'd already been exsposed. It had been several years since he'd worked in the fields of East Headpenney. He was no longer accustomed to hard work under a hot sun and was extremely uncomfortable, more so since he did not feel at liberty to give in and be miserable beside Maggie, who plodded along as steadily as the horse, her coarse wool clothing heavy but not confining, hair braided, kerchief tied around her forehead as a sweatband.
"We may as well stop here for rest and a drink," she said finally, when the path began to widen, and trees grew along the steep cliffs going abruptly up on one side and abruptly down on the other.
They sat for several minutes catching their breath, drinking from their waterskins and refilling them at the little stream of water that cascaded down the side of the cliff that formed a wall on one side of the road. Ching returned from a trot around the next bend, his fur lightly ruffled and his tail switching.
"The castle is on the next hill over," he told her. "But there are people on horses coming this way. A lot of people."
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. He agreed with her about the second item 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 standing as the obviously 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?"
"Sorry," 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 lit, 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 dressed, 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.
"I was talking with the serving maid . . . " the man began.
"You would talk to the serving maid," snapped the lady.
"And she said that the lord had not informed the servants of our impending arrival, nor had he given orders of any sort regarding his household since he ordered his horse and rode off after Lady Rowan."
The lady sniffed. "What would you expect of a northern woman but that? They're all half-wild up there, so I understand."
"Nevertheless, it's a great pity. Poor wretch. I understand Lady Rowan is very beautiful." Maggie sneezed again. "Bless you," the man said absently, taking no note of the origin of the sneeze. The fat woman leaned across him from her saddle to glare at Maggie, who, fortunately, was too occupied readying herself for another sneeze to glare back.
"I don't care what she says," snipped a plain-faced girl three horses back from the apparently noble couple. She was addressing a somewhat prettier maid who rode beside her. Both were clothed too grandly for the road, in silks and satins and laces repaired with other materials and much taken in, evidently cast-off gifts from their lady. "What's that old bag know of true love, anyhow?"
"Not a thing from him, I'll wager," the other girl agreed, chuckling behind her hand. "He's too busy trying to catch us at the bedmaking."
"No wonder, either, poor man," said the first girl, "But Ludy, one of Lady Rowan's personal maids, come from our village, you know, and she was actually there when the gypsy actually came into the actual castle!"
"No!"
"Yes! Handsome as anything, she says, though swarthy, of 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."
"Indeed."
"What happened then?"
"Oh, it was SO romantic! Ludy says first he come and asked 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 song about it all." The girl went on to tell with great relish and considerable colorful embroidery how the Lady Amberwine had been so thrilled with the singing she'd invited him into the hall, and then at his slightest suggestion had ordered her horse saddled, pausing only long enough to pull on her fine leather riding boots and warm woolen cloak over her green silk morning dress before following her new love off across the moors.
"I didn't see any moors hereabouts, meself," said the other girl suspiciously.
"They're on the west side of the castle, silly, where you can't see them for the trees around the hill."
"Well, moors or no moors, she didn't let any grass grow under her, did she?"
"Oh, no, she was gone by that evening."
Maggie's sneezes interrupted their conversation and the plainer girl looked back over her shoulder at them. "Ugh! Scraggy-looking pair."
"He's rather dear, though, don't you think?"
* * *
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.
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 and the possibility 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, hastening the acquisition of his mistress's stepgranddaughter and his own return to his favorite rug under the loom.
"Poor dear can scarcely draw a breath!" the cook said, supporting Maggie in her meaty arms. "To bed with her, and hot herbal towels for her face and chest!" She gently lowered Maggie into a chair and left the kitchen, to return an instant later with a pretty if somewhat vapid-looking girl. "Ludy, put this lady in the North Chamber. She's too sick to be drug all over the castle."
Ludy looked askance at Maggie's disheveled state, and the cook, clearly a person of some authority, said with exaggerated patience. "The lad here claims she's noble enough for our guest chambers, and if she is or if she's not, in the state His Lordship's in he'll never know the difference anyhow."
The girl nodded and guided a streaming, sneezing, gasping Maggie from the kitchen.
Turning back to Colin, the cook said with mild severity, "Your message for His Lordship will have to wait, young man. His Lordship is—er—patrolling the borders at the present time." The minstrel's personal fragrance and grimy clothing, skin, and hair, drew a sniff from her. "Might be best you tidy up a little first anyway."
She showed him the serving men's common quarters and the well. He hauled four buckets of water to the trough for himself, and three more to wash his clothing. He wore the blue twill britches and ochre skirt, smocked for warmth, that he had worn the first day at the inn at Fort Iceworm. He hung the road-worn clothing to dry in the sun. His hands were quite shriveled and soft from all the washing, and it was some time before they dried sufficiently that he could pick up his guitar. Sitting on a servant's straw mattress, the guitar on his lap, he strummed and thought.
What on earth would he say to His Lordship? How could he breach such a tricky subject as a wife's abandonment without causing an offense which might not get him turned into cat food, but could certainly get him hung or something equally uncomfortable and debilitating? He wondered, too, what was wrong with Maggie, and wished she were there to consult. It was very inconsiderate of her to leave him in an awkward social situation that concerned, after all, her relatives, not his.
* * *
Maggie awoke from a nightmare in which she was being pressed to death. Although her breathing had been none too easy when she went to sleep, it was practically nonexistent now, and only panic forced her return to consciousness.
In her dream, a lion's roar subsided into a menacing growl as the heavy paws pressed down on her shoulders and the mane bristled against her face.
Struggling to open her stone-weighted eyelids, she found they stubbornly remained closed. Body and will were made of syrup.
A growl so real that she knew she dreamt no longer rewarded her attempt at movement, and curdled in her ear as the lion's acrid breath came to her nostrils.
Odd, she thought. One would suppose a lion's breath smelled rather like old blood and such, but this one had obviously been drinking wine.
Curiosity accomplished what fear would not. Although her eyes would not open entirely, they did open enough to disclose that what pressed her to the bed was indeed a maned beast, but not one of the feline persuasion.
With hair and beard of bright red, her oppressor looked blearily into her face as she heaved herself upright enough to partially dislodge him. She noted that his eyes matched his hair. Sprawled across her in a drunken stupor, he had snored loudly enough to sound very much indeed like a snarling jungle cat.
Speaking of cats, where was that cat who was supposed to preserve her maidenly honor in such situations, she wondered. From what her granny had told her, drunken red-headed men who sprawled across a girl while she was sleeping constituted a definite threat thereto.
Ever one of the direct approach, she snarled a bit herself, her husky alto voice made even rougher by the trauma caused by her sneezing, which, happily, seemed to have momentarily abated.
"Augh, get up, you!" she said. "You're drunk as a lord!"
He'd fallen back to sleep but now roused a bit, grumbling sleepily, and waved vaguely the bottle still clutched in one floppy fist. "S'alright, me darlin'. I am a lord!"
Finding she was quite decently clad in her own skirt and tunic, the cook's herbal towels crumpled under her elbow, she decided to extricate herself the rest of the way. Wriggling upwards, she sent him rolling to the foot of the bed as she drew her legs out from under him and hugged them to her chest, huddling there for a moment, still not feeling quite herself after her indisposition.
He flopped over on one side and attempted to arrange his slack features into a creditable leer. "Aha!" he mumbled. "Spirited wench. Likes 'em with spirit, I do."
"If you'll pardon my saying so, your lordship, I think you've already had an overabundance of spirit."
"Oh, no, m'dear," he said, playfully swinging one shovel-sized hand in the general direction of her ankles and swigging from the bottle with the other.
She fetched him a kick that caused him to withdraw the hand for a moment. She wished she could drop one of her grandmother's powders into his bottle to convert it to something less intoxicating.
He nursed his hand tenderly. "You've hurt me," he blubbered, his bloodshot blue eyes filling with tears.
"Well, I'm very sorry, I'm sure, but you shouldn't go around lying all over people and grabbing at them like that," she said.
He looked slightly more alert, and also more dangerous, as he said belligerently, "You could have fooled me, woman. I thought that's what you were here for, because you wanted me to grab you." Seeing indignant denial oozing from her every pore, he flopped face down in the bed again. "Then do me the courtesy to get out of me bedchamber."
"This is your bedchamber?" Maggie looked around at the sumptuous room, with draperies masking its curved wall, rich rugs on the floor, and tapestries, and the enormous bed on which they argued. "Sorry," she got up and looked at him curiously, having recognized her brother-in-law and being at a total loss for a decent way to save the interview.
"It's one of them," he said. "Kept THIS here," he swigged from his bottle. "Dammitall, it's empty." Before she quite realized what was going on, he had hooked a brawny arm about her waist and pulled her back down beside him. He breathed a winey whisper into her face. "Cook hides it from me, if I don't hide it first. Bloody servants have the gall to say I've been drinking too much. Don't know their place. Ought to thrash the lot of 'em." He grinned conspiratorially. "I fool 'em though. Hide it in these chambers. Don't want any guests anyway, and the lazy buggers never touch these rooms otherwise."
"How clever of you," she said, drawing back from him as far as she was able. She was just about to open her mouth to scream when he gave her a hard look and shoved her away from him. She tumbled to the floor.
"Go on then, you heartless cold wench!" he sobbed with maudlin abandon into his big hands. "Bloody awful women. Always wantin' this and that from a fellow for nothin' but a how-d'ye do, then along come some other fellow and you don't even want that! Use a poor devil and throw him away!"
Maggie stopped at the door. To leave him in this state of mind would probably alienate him for good and defeat her entire purpose in coming to the castle. She looked at him for a moment, trying to see the stately nobleman at Winnie's wedding, the man they said might succeed Finbar as king, and whom her beloved sister had pronounced handsome beyond her wildest dreams. Picking up his empty jug in one hand and concealing it, just in case, in the fold of her skirt, she walked back to him and put a conciliatory hand on his massive shoulder. He did not even look up.
"Don't cry, your lordship. It's not at all how you think," she said. "You're really much too good for the likes of me, and I'm honored by your attention, really, but I've got these—um—pressing family obligations. I have this grandmother who'd turn us both into frogs, you see."
He passed a hand over his face. "Did you say—? I'm drunker than I thought."
Maggie extracted the jug from her skirts, and poured a drop of the remaining dregs onto her finger. She mumbled a brief spell over it, sprinkled a powder from her pocket over it, and wiped it on the lip of the bottle. Then she cast a general expanding spell and held the bottle out to him. "Have a bit of this, Lord. It'll clear your head."
He swigged a few draughts, gagging on it at first, but eventually both his posture and vision appeared to improve, and he regarded Maggie more soberly, "Can't think how I ever went after such a red-nosed, puffy-eyed, tangle-haired mess of a wench at that." But he grinned, if a little sadly. "Looks like you've been doing some bawling yourself."
"Sneezing, m'Lord."
"Sneezing?"
"Yes, I've had a strange reaction to something hereabouts. I was put to bed here to rest when I became ill."
He said nothing for a moment but looked sheepish. "I—um—didn't exactly advance your recovery, I suppose?"
"Well, I did wake up in a hurry."
"Sorry," he said. "Sneezing seems to be done."
"It does."
"Let's have a truce then, little lass. Come sit by me and I promise not to bite you. I'll finish this brew. Have some? No? I suppose you know, like everyone else knows why it is I'm actin unbefittin' m'station, as cook says."
"I do—I mean—you're not . . . "
"Oh, I am. I am indeed. But how is it that you know? Not one of our girls, are you?" Able to see color again, he was curiously aware now of her darkness in a country of mostly fair-haired women.
She felt her cheeks go hot under his scrutiny where they had not with his more direct advances. "No, m'lord, I'm not from here."
"But—you have heard."
"I've heard."
"How? Has it gone so far abroad then?"
"Oh, no, you might say a little bird told me."
"And did he tell you why she did it?" he asked softly. "Because if he did, I wish you'd tell me. No one has. Amberwine—well, she just said she was going with him, she didn't say why."
Maggie looked away. She didn't know what to say.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Maggie."
"Pleasure to meet you, Maggie. I'm Roari Rowan and this is my place, but since we seem to be so close on such short acquaintance, you can call me Red."
Maggie nodded and he continued as though he hadn't interrupted himself. "She just sat there, Maggie, on that horse I gave her, looking bonny as ever with the wind kinda liftin' her yellow hair, and she says to me, 'I'll leave you now, Roari, and the house as well, and go with Gypsy Davey.' I was so mad I could have cut them both in half, and the horses too! How could she prefer that low-born greasy wretch to me and all I gave her—all I was going to give her? Oh, I know I was gone a lot, searchin' for the border raiders, but for the sake of all that's sacred, Maggie, how could a sane woman leave her man like that with no word at all and just GO?"
In his agitation his voice had risen to a shout, and his fists were clenched menacingly. A shudder ran through him, and for a moment his shoulders shook. Maggie awkwardly patted his back. His fists relaxed and he shrugged. "Ah, well, what good would it have done to kill them? To dirty my honorable sword with that gypsy's filthy gore? To kill the woman I hoped would be the mother of my children? No. I suppose they deserve each other." The tears were flowing freely again, and Maggie could think of nothing to say, but just kept patting him on the back. Red had a passing ignoble moment when he wondered if she might not be ready to offer more substantial comfort, when footsteps came pelting down the hall and the door crashed open.
Colin and the cook tumbled in with Ching at their heels. Rowan leaped to his feet.
"Unhand that woman, sir!" demanded Colin, boldly brandishing the fire iron. "Or you may find yourself scampering to a mousehole to escape yon cat!"
"Keep a civil tongue in your head, young man!" scolded the cook. "Oh, my poor, poor boy. At it again, are you, Red?" she asked, snatching the bottle from him. "Never you mind nasty young men and lewd women, dearie, go to your chamber, and cook will make you a nice pot of tea and fix a bag for your head."
Maggie was going to say something rude about being called a lewd woman, but Rowan was ahead of her.
"Has a man no privacy!" roared Roari Rowan to cover his embarrassment. He had found a roar a very effective measure to hide one thing and another, such as the tears that still glistened on his cheeks and in his beard. "I need no tea nor bag for my head. What I need is a drink!"
* * *
Re-entering a state of inebriation with a minstrel, Red found, was a most economical way to drink. The fellows sang more than they drank.
First drinking songs, then ballads of love lost, love spurned, love unrequited, love unconsummated, and love unconsecrated, both men sang with tears streaming down their faces in poetic abandon, until Colin was afraid his fiddle strings would go limp from the soaking.
Ching sat on Maggie's lap and purred. At first she sang along with them, but she didn't really care for their selection. The sleep that would have rested her from her illness had been interrupted by Rowan's admittedly collapsed lust. She yawned in her chair as Colin and Rowan wailed on. Eventually she leaned over Ching to fold her arms on the table and rest her head on them.
When she woke in the morning, she was in the same lavish bedchamber as the day before, quite alone this time, she noted with relief. She poured cold water from a painted pitcher into a matching bowl, washed and dressed herself, and set out to find the others. Ching hopped down from the bed and followed on her heels.
The stone floors whispered beneath her feet and the place seemed deserted till she once more found the kitchen. Colin was not in sight, but Lord Rowan greeted her as she entered. "Ah, Maggie. The servants obviously must prefer you to our last guests. Squire Bumple and Lady Limely's quarters were not so grand as yours." His eyes were a bright, clear blue this morning and Maggie wondered if perhaps Cook had not after all got to him with her healing poultices and herb teas, though when she might have done it was beyond Maggie. The sky had already been lightening when she had succumbed to sleep.
"You rested well, I hope?" His Lordship inquired.
"Very well, m'Lord," she replied primly before reverting to type and asking boldly. "Were Squire Whatsis and his lady the people we met as we came down to your castle, Lord?"
"Aye, they were." He gestured to a chair at the table, the same where she'd fallen asleep earlier. He sat with his legs straddling his chair, elbows resting on its back. "Of course, Cook didn't fancy them as she did you, lewd woman or not; they were only neighbors and not kinfolk."
"Well I must say I'm glad not to have to formally introduce myself again," she said.
"A more informal re-introduction would have scarcely been possible, eh, little sister-in-law?" He got quite a hearty laugh from the black look she gave him for his impropriety. "Family obligations, indeed, m'dear!" His laughter wheezed to a stop. "Ah, damn, that felt good. I've not laughed in a long time. You and the minstrel are better than all of Cook's tonics."
"Where is Colin?" She touched the mirror in her pocket and remembered with a spurt of impatience her sister's image in the crystal.
"He's about. Choosing a horse for the rest of your journey, I suppose. Gypsies have good mounts. You can't hope to overtake them on foot."
She stared at him.
"Oh, aye, Colin told me of your daft plan." He shrugged. "I did my best already. If you can talk sense to your sister, I hope you'll find her then."
"When we saw her in my aunt's crystal ball, she was leaving the gypsies," Maggie said. "And she was pregnant, my aunt said. Very pregnant."
"Very—?" He looked irresolute for the first time that morning. "Too—?"
Maggie nodded in answer to his garbled question. "Five months at least by Aunt Sybil, who knows quite a lot about such matters. Way before the gypsy came. I don't suppose you'd want to come along? Pregnant women have been known to do odd things before, and it surely must be your child."
Rowan was quiet for a long time. "What do you want me to do, Maggie? How can I take her back, if she'd come? She's shamed me before my own folk. They'd expect me to do something vengeful, and it's not in me to harm Amberwine. I need the respect of my people to lead them, Maggie."
She nodded. She wanted to tell him of her suspicion that Winnie had somehow been tricked, that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, including his own painful confrontation with her, his lady had been forced to leave her home. Remembering his confusion of the night before, she decided regretfully that it would be unfair to add to it, to raise his hopes when she had no real proof that her feelings were based on fact. "But you won't stand in our way? If we find her and she'll come home with us to Iceworm, you'd bear her no malice? You won't mind if she comes home to me and Dad?"
"No, little darlin'." He patted her hand and held the pat a moment too long. "I won't mind that. But I think I mind your going." They each looked in an opposite corner of the room after he said that, searching for a change of subject.
Uncomfortable, Maggie rose to her feet and went to the kitchen door, thinking she'd check on Colin's progress with the horses. As she stepped a foot into the tree-lined courtyard, she sneezed a mighty sneeze and retreated, still sneezing, into the kitchen.
The door slammed as she backed into the table and gropingly found her chair, sinking into it as she once more gasped for breath between sneezes. As she held her head in her hands in the enclosure of the kitchen, the sneezing slowly subsided.
Red looked alarmed. "Poor lass. Perhaps you've simply caught your death of cold. Minstrel Colin made up a song, you know, about your tryin' to save that daft drownin' dragon."
"He—gasp—he did?"
"Aye." He rose and touched her shoulder as he crossed the room in one stride. "You just let me show you how to build a roarin' fire in the hearth here. Cook wasn't expectin' us up and stirrin' so early today, y'know, after our little commiseration last night." He pulled a door in the wall beside the fireplace open and began throwing logs into the hearth's open maw. "She doesn't reckon with me constitution. M' family's descended from the owd frost giants, did you know that? Hell, I can drink like that all night and march forty leagues the next day."
Maggie was paying no attention to Roari's bragging, for as he lit the tinder to the kindling her sneezing once more erupted. "It's ahhhhh—it's—ahhh—it's CHOO! It's the logs!" Although what she said was fairly unintelligible, her frantic gestures and the commencement of her sneezing just as he lit the fire finally made sense to Lord Rowan, who was not a stupid man. He doused the fire with the pot of water in which Cook had been soaking wine cups. The fine pottery tinkled in the hiss of the dying flames. He swore as he both cut and burned his fingers pulling the embers apart, and found the rinse pail, dousing the embers again till they were completely dead. When the fire was out, he threw the sticks of kindling and logs back into the bin from which they'd come, and slammed the door.
Again Maggie's wheezing and sneezing began to abate, and she breathed normally again.
"I never saw t' like of that." His Lordship sat down again and stared at her curiously. "The good rowan logs, is't? From my own trees?" He was still shaking his head when comprehension came crashing down on top of it. "Wait a bit—that trick you did with the wine jug—and your owd granny turning folk into frogs and t' like. I heard Amberwine say she was a witch—you're witchfolk yourself, aren't you, girl?"
Maggie nodded, speech still being difficult.
"It's a wonder then, dearie, that you're sitting there to nod at me."
She looked quizzical.
"Didn't your granny or that aunt of yours tell you anything? Rowan trees are dead poison to witches."
Maggie shrugged and said in a voice half her usual volume, "I suppose they never thought of it. That kind of tree doesn't grow at home, and I've never left there before."
"For one of your kind, it should have been a standard warning," he said, his booming voice still harsh enough to make her shrink from its noise. "Should have told you that along with telling you to wrap your cloak tight and stay indoors on rainy nights. I don't know why the reaction didn't kill you, but if it had my enemies would have said I murdered you from spite over Amberwine."
"That's ridiculous," Maggie replied with some of her old assurance.
"Wouldn't have been unheard of," said Cook, coming in from the courtyard. "'Course YOU wouldn't, m'Lord, but there's them . . . "
His glower persuaded her to continue at a more subdued level.
"Anyhow, just fancy poor Miss Maggie being a witch and your rowan trees making her ill!" She heaved a deep, put-upon sigh. "I suppose that means a cold breakfast and no herb tea for you, with no fire."
The positive aspects of witchcraft were displayed by Maggie who, having recovered her strength, produced ham and ginger omelet, and two loaves of bread, one for Rowan and the other for herself and Colin, who came in while preparations were in progress. Rowan's omelet consisted of a ham and two thirds of the morning's eggs. The other third was more than enough for Maggie and Colin and the servants. Thus they breakfasted comfortably enough to please even Cook, although the older woman did voice the opinion that somehow such fare lacked the taste of food made the conventional way, with elbow grease and a fire of the usual kind. Both minstrel and host assured her that such views constituted nothing but traditionalist propaganda.
With a napkin-ruffling sigh, Lord Rowan pushed himself away from the table, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Now then, minstrel, m'lad, you have the horses?"
"Yes, m'Lord." A sober Rowan, Colin felt, was entitled to formal address, although "Red" was good enough for a drunken one.
"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 camp in similar fashion, I'm thinkin'."
He leaped up and stalked into the dining hall and back before Maggie and Colin had time to do more than exchange bewildered shrugs. When he returned he 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 sword to help you wade your way through her admirers. We Rowans are a warrior clan, really, descended from a rowdy bunch of fellows called frost giants from someplace past the Sea of Glass. Since we've been in Argonia there've been so bloody many heroes on both sides it's difficult to say who's bravest, but it's generally agreed that my sword, Owd Gut-Buster, belongin' formerly to that famous berserker, Rowan the Rampager, is the best. This one," he glowed with pride as he reached across the table to finger the sword as it lay in front of Colin, "is the legendary Obtruncator. Owner was not only a fella of great bravery, but possessed the most marvelous restraint and foresight of all the Rowans before him."
"What was his name?" Colin asked.
"Rowan the Reckless." He placed the sword in the scabbard. "I'm considered somethin' of a sissy by the chroniclers of my family, I would suppose, but most of the heroes, you must understand, served as one-man fronts in some king's war. I'm the first to be considered for nomination to the throne itself. Bumple came here to pledge himself to me before the fact. When you've gone I'm going to have to ride over there and make amends, I guess. Can't just go discarding peoples' allegiances if you're going to be in politics."
"You'll make a splendid king, I'm sure." Maggie said it politely, but was surprised to find she felt considerable conviction behind her statement.
"Damn right, I would," agreed Rowan. "Doesn't look too well, actually, though, Bumple says, what with her potential royal highness not exactly givin' me what you might call her vote of confidence." A few minutes passed in silence, then His Lordship banged the table as he got to his feet. "Well, lad, I'd best show you how to use this second-best family sword, eh?"
"Thank you, m'Lord, I'm sure, but really—"
"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.