Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [79]
Sergei sighed. “That’s good on two counts. She’s not fattening you up to eat yet, and she hasn’t bound you to her will.”
“Three counts. She broke our bargain. She may have hired me, but she’s gone back on it by not giving me bread and salt and not feeding me properly.” He chuckled. “Now I can do what I want because she’s the one who broke the bargain.”
“Oh! I hadn’t thought of that!” Sergei exclaimed. “But—”
“You just let me take care of a little something. Tomorrow you and I and Wolf and Goat will be free.” He knew he wouldn’t need to raise his voice for the others to hear him, and he was right.
“We’re still bound by the rope and chain,” the Wolf pointed out. “Those are still enchanted. We can’t leave the stable unless she takes them off with her own hands.”
“Oh she will,” Sasha chuckled. “She will. Now, I’m going out into the woods to see what can be done about Sergei’s spell.”
He had never seen a flute that looked like this one, and he had certainly never heard a flute that played the notes this one did. The scale sounded all wrong to his ears—a series of pensive, breathy notes in a minor key. He didn’t want to play it around the stable or around Sergei for a couple of very good reasons. He didn’t want to be so close to the hut that there might be a chance that the witch would hear him playing. And he didn’t want to be near Sergei on the chance that something he played might have bad consequences when crossed with the spell that was already on the Little Humpback Horse.
That would be bad. Very bad.
So he picked his way across the yard until he came to a path into the woods. He had the feeling that there would be at least one good path, if only to a pond or a stream, or a place where the witch could cut her firewood.
And so it proved. There was indeed a pond, and from the looks of it, a good deep one. As he neared the verge, he heard ducks quacking quietly in their sleep, and smiled. Good. They would give him the alert if anything crept up on him.
He sat down on a tree trunk, put the flute to his lips, and blew, very carefully. There were stories of instruments like this that screamed or shrieked if anyone but the owner tried to play them.
But not this time.
The first note sounded out, breathy, but true, low and tremulous.
He ran the scales, slowly, getting used to the progression of notes, of where his fingers had to go for what. It was a deceptively simple instrument. He found he could get half and even quarter tones out of it if he was clever. But the witch had not been a musician, and she had stuck with the simple tune of the song.
So now he practiced it, although he took care to break it before he got to the ninth repetition, inserting some other little ditty. And when he was certain he could play it in his sleep and backwards—
Then that was what he did. He played it backwards.
He had had an odd feeling about that music when he had heard it. It had seemed to him that this spell was powerful—but simple. Baba Yaga had never been known to be any kind of a musician. He suspected that any spell that she cast by means of music would have to be simple.
So it followed—
It followed that the power was in the magic that Baba Yaga controlled. But the spell itself should be easy to undo. She was familiar with the use of her own power. She was unfamiliar with music. If he played the same music backward…he should be able to unravel the spell.
It was rather like knitting. It took a great deal of time and skill to knit up a garment. But it only took one snip of a scissors and it was easy to unravel, and took little time and effort at all.
And certainly no skill.
When he thought he was ready, it was very nearly dawn. The sky was beginning to go grey in the east, and he didn’t want to take the chance that the witch might decide to wake up early and kick the deaf-mute awake before going back to her bed.
He returned to the stables.
“Now this is what we are going to do,” he told them all. “I am going to try to break the spell on Sergei. If I succeed, he and