the feeling she got when someone was gazing at her with rather too much admiration. No, this was as if someone was measuring her, sizing her up, judging her. It was the feeling she would have associated with being weighed by a predator she couldn’t see.
The feeling did not go away. In fact, if anything, it got slightly stronger, right up until the moment when the visitors were chased off so the first show of the day could begin.
And at last, as she and Rosa hurried toward the staging area, she got the chance to say something. “I had the most awful feeling that someone was watching me, and it wasn’t friendly!” she said, as the two of them lined up for the Grand Entrance Parade. “Did you?”
“Not at all,” Rosa replied, and frowned. “I know better than to ask another Master if that was just her imagination, so it must have been concentrated only on you. Do you have any idea why anyone would be spying on you from a distance? I assume it was at a distance.”
“Not at all,” Giselle said, mounting Lebkuchen. “I couldn’t catch anyone nearby at it, and I felt as if I shouldn’t give away the fact that I knew it was happening by looking around. But I don’t like it, not one bit!”
“Try and give me a signal if it happens again,” Rosa replied, bringing her pony up beside Giselle. “I’ll try and slip off and see if it’s being done magically. I might not be able to tell if it’s Air Magic, though,” she added warningly.
Giselle tried not to feel a little sick. “Ugh! It makes me feel unclean, or somehow naked. And if it’s being done magically, there’s no telling what whoever it is might try to see. I suppose if I don’t want to be spied on in my vardo I’m going to have to ward it, but wards aren’t going to do me any good at all when I’m outside. I mean, I can ward myself, but all that would do is make a blank me-shaped spot in the scrying bowl or whatever he’s using, and that’s not much better.”
Rosa nodded, but they didn’t get to say anything more. The entrance curtains opened, and the Grand Parade began.
Twice more that day, Giselle got that feeling of being watched, and each time, the sensation wasn’t as if the distant voyeur was the friendly sort. The opposite, rather. The second time, she managed to signal Rosa, but as her friend had warned, the Earth Master wasn’t able to detect anything. It happened a third time as they left the show enclosure to go to the Alpingarten for supper, but it appeared that once they were moving, the crush of the crowds made it harder for the watcher to find her, and he never managed to catch up with her again. So Giselle was able to relax and enjoy a rather delightful dinner, sitting at a huge table and entertaining an enraptured, and thankfully quiet, group with her manufactured tales of life on the frontier.
It was very dark by the time they finished and returned, and it seemed that the watcher had either given up for the night or wasn’t able to find them. The grounds of the Oktoberfest were astonishing. There were electric lights strung down the main thoroughfare—an innovation Giselle had never actually seen for herself until now—and the effect was quite startling to someone used to the light of candles, lamps and fires all her life. Of course, most of the grounds were still lit by lamps and even torches, but seeing those glass bulbs glowing steadily without so much as a flicker seemed more magical than the use of her own powers.
“Do you want me to help ward your vardo?” Rosa asked, as they entered the now-quiet grounds of the show. It looked as if the visitors had just been cleared out; people were relaxing at their tents, rather than being “on show,” and people were eating various delectables they had gotten out in the grounds and brought back to share. Pastries and pretzels mostly; Giselle spotted a lot of decorated gingerbread and jelly-filled donuts being devoured, as well as both hard and soft pretzels.
“Yes, please,” Giselle said gratefully. “And . . . I think I ought to start refusing presents of food. Or at least we should start testing it somehow. I didn’t like the way that watching felt, if you know what I mean. It .