Song of Sorcery by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page B

the center of the ball, to gradually grow into a bright glow that began suddenly to fragment, sending motes of colored light dancing about the room.
    “Ah, yes,” said Aunt Sybil with satisfaction. “I believe that must be it.”
    All they could see was the image of a dagger, glittering nastily through the rainbow lights. Slowly, that moved away, and a throat came into view, slender and pale, and above that and around it a swath of cornsilk hair. Long, tapering fingers with broken nails dragged the hair back, and a pair of sleep-dazed, startled green eyes peered out through the parted curtain of hair.
    “Out, you hussy!” hissed a voice behind the dagger. “Leave this camp at once if you want to stay alive and pretty!”
    Amberwine gulped. She was not used to threats. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
    “Oh, I’m sure you do that, my fine fancy lady. But begging is for honest gypsies, not faithless false trollops such as yourself! Out with you!” The voice turned into a black-haired woman, who leaned into the range of the glass, the better to menace the shrinking Amberwine. Except for the color of her hair and the green of the dress she wore, the second woman’s image was indistinct.
    Aunt Sybil frowned and put fingertips to her forehead. “Let me just see now if I can fine-tune this.”
    “Ooooh, Auntie!” Maggie’s nose nearly touched the glass in her anxiety to see more. “You’ve got her! Poor Winnie, what an ugly customer that old bat is!”
    Colin and Sybil each touched Maggie’s shoulder and she scooted back so they could see.
    Sybil’s breath hissed out in surprise. “Well, I’ll be burned. If it isn’t that charlatan, Xenobia. I might have known she’d be behind this sort of thing.”
    “Xenobia?” Maggie asked. “Who’s she?”
    “She’s beautiful ,” sighed Colin, evidently not referring to Xenobia, who was flashing her knife in glittering arcs at Amberwine, who finally had wakened to her danger and was reaching to pull on her boots before making an exit.
    “Not so fast, my lady ,” said Xenobia. “You can just leave those behind to pay for your keep.”
    Amberwine complied, but said, “Quite a costly straw pile you have here, your highness. Four gold rings, a silk dress, a fine woolen cloak my sister wove for me, my moonstone necklace, and a good gray mare. Now my fine leather boots.” She stood up barefoot in her shift and Sybil gasped.
    “Consider it your dowry for coming away with my son, girlie!” laughed the other woman. “Pity you couldn’t hold him, weren’t it?”
    “Pity my husband didn’t kill him when he found us together on the moor,” Amberwine replied over her shoulder as she hurried out into the dimness beyond the glass. “And me along with him.”
    The dagger flashed as Xenobia threw it and the glass went dark.
    “Get it back , Aunt Sybil!” cried Maggie.
    “I’m trying, child, but violence disrupts my concentration—ah, here,” the rainbow colors danced briefly to show Amberwine hurrying down a path. Still vibrating in a tree she had just passed was the gypsy dagger.
    “Perhaps we should start tonight,” Maggie said. “She seems to be in terrible danger.”
    “Yes,” Colin said. “Perhaps we should. For that lovely lady to be so mistreated by that AWFUL witch—oh, excuse me, I do beg your pardon!”
    Aunt Sybil grinned at him. “The false part of your statement, lad, is that Xenobia is not a witch at all. Doesn’t even have the second sight a lot of her people have. She’s just a charlatan who calls herself Queen of the Gypsies.” She turned to Maggie. “How long has your sister been missing, now?”
    Maggie shook her head and looked at Colin, who replied, “From the last full moon to this, from what Giles said, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps half again that time since I met him and Maggie and I started this journey.”
    Sybil nodded. “Good. Then it could hardly be the gypsy’s child.”
    “Child?” Maggie asked.
    “Haven’t you