White, Patricia - A Wizard Scorned by A Wizard Scorned

Author:A Wizard Scorned [Scorned, A Wizard]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-01T18:23:04+00:00

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Chapter

Sixteen

There were no stars out. The wind had died with the setting sun; the bird sounds, few as they were, had dwindled into nothing shortly thereafter. Darkness was cold and heavy all around her, strangely odorless, oddly soundless, awfully close to being, if not quite totally, intimidating. She wanted to get up slowly and creep back into the wizard wagon, but still Jane lingered, hugging the woolen shawl around her narrow shoulders, tucking the long skirts more firmly about her long legs.

Huddling on the back step of the wagon, she felt forlorn, like a lost child, the child she had truly never been. She hoped that weariness was all that was causing the feeling of strange oppression, the sense that something was brewing beyond her limited vision. Something that meant her no good, no good at all.

Fighting off her skin-prickling, but unfocused fear, her melancholy memories of a sparse, joyless childhood and of an aunt, now long dead, who had raised Jane, taught her, but never loved her, Jane clutched her large purse with both hands. She held it, with Cordelia's brass-bound book of locked magic carefully concealed inside, against her chest as if it was a lifeline, the only connection between her and the world she had been torn away from without her leave or permission.

And, as far as that went, the heavy black purse and its jumbled contents were exactly that. Her familiar clothes were gone, so was Maggie, her secretary, and now even the wizard was elsewhere. Jane was alone in the wilderness with a huge black cat, a bright-red wagon, and a gift-book from a deranged lovesick female wizard. A book Will had seemingly forgotten almost as soon as Cordelia had thrown it at Jane's head. And Jane was, to put it mildly, not exactly enjoying any part of the whole unadulterated mess.

The back step of Will's gaudy wizard wagon wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination, a comfortable seat, especially with the maw of the steep-walled canyon just beyond the cumbersome vehicle's present resting site. It was parked near the banks of a small, and what should have been noisy, mountain stream, and within the thicket of young evergreens, that should have been pungent but weren't. All they did, supposedly, was surround and hide the wagon's overwhelming redness from too interested eyes. Or so she sincerely hoped; and just as sincerely doubted.

Still, it was the safest place she could be, or so Will had said, several times, as he rushed around the camping place, talking rapidly, setting the concealing spells and the wards against danger. So Jane would be protected and Will could put her and Sojourner out of his mind and go galloping off to rescue his ladylove and the rest of the fair maids. And others not nearly as fair, all caught in Cordelia's foul clutches.

"Cordelia'll not find you here and neither will the posse," he told Jane as he mounted a crow-hopping, long-horned, black-and-white unicorn, "and we'll be back in less than a week to get you.

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