Free Song of Sorcery by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page A

been mentioned, quite overflowing.
    Maggie let out a long breath and rolled up her sleeves. “I can do something about the flameless part of her problem, at least, if she will promise to help us,” she told Ching. “Tell her that if she will fly us across the river, I can help her by restoring her fire.”
    The cat relayed the message, and Grizel pronounced herself quite amenable to flying them across, all except the horses.
    She would not have been able to provide such ferry service, she told them, if it were not for Maggie’s generous offer. She asked Ching to explain that dragons fly not only by means of their wings, which were insubstantial compared to the rest of a dragon’s bulk. The fire-breathing mechanism created a cavity of hot air within, that served as a buoying agent. Maggie looked down the dragon’s open mouth and concentrated on her hearth-building spell. Soon Grizel was smoking cozily away.
    Colin, meanwhile, unsaddled their horses and gave them a smack on the rump to send them home, so that they might reach safety before Grizel’s next feeding time. Maggie joined him in making packs of their belongings that they strapped to their backs. Ching settled himself on top of the pack Maggie wore, and Grizel knelt, allowing them to mount above her wings upon her neck and shoulders.
    They felt the air rush up at them as they rose faster and faster and higher and higher. Maggie had to catch at her skirts to avoid having them singed by the backlash of the dragon’s flame. Below, the river rushed heedlessly on. They sailed a dizzying height above the trees, and could make out, just beyond them, fields plowed in patchwork patterns.
    Extending her feet, then gradually folding her wings as she damped her flame, the dragon brought them to a safe landing at the edge of a forest clearing.
    “Farewell!” she saluted them. “I cannot go near the town in daylight for fear of my life. You have fed me when I hungered and enflamed me when I languished, and I shall ever be your friend, but I ask you grant me one final request.”
    The people asked the cat to tell the dragon they would be glad to grant the request, and of what did it consist?
    “That if you meet my Grimley before I do, should you survive the experience, you would tell him that his Grizel burns for him still and repents her inflammatory words and—and that I shall return to him anon!”
     
    * * *
     
    Aunt Sybil was slogging about in a puddle of syrup, trying to re-shingle her house with fresh gingerbread cookies. Maggie and Colin had smelled the cookie fragrance as soon as they’d left the highway just past the village and turned off onto the path, which a child had eagerly volunteered to show them. The child also volunteered to guide them to the aunt’s house, but, as it appeared a fairly uncomplicated journey, they declined.
    “Little chap seemed disappointed,” said Colin.
    “His folks wouldn’t like him coming along, I think,” Maggie said. “They surely must remember the previous tenant of Auntie’s house. Great-great-great-Grandma Elspat liked children—but not in the conventional sense. It’s a wonder the rest of the Brown line continued—I believe, you know, that it was no little woodcutter’s daughter that did her in. Gran said it was her own daughter, to save herself. It will be interesting to see the place.”
    “But you—uh—your current aunt—she doesn’t—indulge?”
    “In gobbling children? Oh, no—but she keeps up the original architecture, I understand, so that they’ll come out to see her, and she can treat them. With her specialty, she gets rather lonely.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yes, she sees the present in her crystal ball.”
    Colin scratched his head and for a moment seemed to accept this, then said, “Huh?”
    “She sees the present in her crystal ball,” Maggie repeated.
    “Why does she need a crystal ball for that? Most of us see the present without one.”
    “Well, yes, but Aunt Sybil, you see, doesn’t have