Song of Sorcery by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    By the time they camped that night, the minstrel had exhausted his repertoire of murder ballads and was considering applying for a teaching position at the Minstrel Academy, where he would present a course on the musical proclivities of the Northern Sorceress Personality, a subject he now felt he possessed more expertise in than he really cared to.
    A technically impossible evening meal of Queenston Quiche, artichokes in almond sauce, and chocolate fudge layer cake, served with a blue wine equally correct with meat or fish, and equally delicious with either, helped to alleviate some of Colin’s artistic aggravation, not to mention his empty stomach and dry throat. As he was hoarse from singing, he limited his musical endeavors that night to a soft lament played on his fiddle while Maggie, arms clapsed about her knees, stared into the fire, rocking a little in time with his playing. Ching sprawled at her feet as comfortably as though on his favorite rug beneath his mistress’s loom at Fort Iceworm.
     
    The morning again just missed being rainy, the sky the color and texture of raw wool, with the sun invisible except as a light patch stifled by bales of clouds. Damp and subdued and tired of being threatened by the weather, neither Colin nor Maggie felt like singing or talking or doing anything but sitting half-slumped in their saddles, absorbing bumps and uneven jarrings as their horses plodded down the mushy trail. It took Colin a few minutes to notice when his horse stopped.
    “Oh, no,” Maggie said, drooping wearily forward on her mount’s neck. Stretching out before them was a vast sea of swirling, frothing water. Debris, natural and manmade, swept along in the churning muddy flood, and trees caught up in it genuflected at its perimeters. How they could have dozed without hearing the roar and rumble of those waters was amazing.
    “It wasn’t like this when I came north,” Colin said. “It doesn’t look the same at all.”
    “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 in THAT stuff.” He shuddered with revulsion. “And then climb a TREE it—well, she deserves to be stuck.”
    “Can’t she fly out?”