Song of Sorcery by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page A

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