kin load a whole lotta supplies along the way on the Midway wagons.”
Cody and Kellermann looked at each other. “I don’t see us needing the Midway after Freiburg,” said Kellermann. “It will be small towns. One show, two or three days running, for each.”
“If that,” warned Giselle. “Once the snow starts, no one will want to watch a show in a tent.”
“Once the snow starts, I ain’t a-gonna wanta be in a show in a tent!” protested the chief “wrangler.”
“We’ll take every show we get to do as a bonus,” Kellermann promised. “And once the snow starts, we will not stop except to camp until we reach the abbey.”
“Don’t be fooled by light flurries,” Giselle added, frowning a little. “There is no real road to the abbey, and the last part of the journey will be over rough land.”
Kellermann looked over the heads of the others to where the chief carpenter of the show stood. “Can you have runners made for all the wagons in a week?” he asked.
The carpenter spit tobacco into the spittoon in the corner of the tent and nodded. “Skids is simple. Plenty of good wood hereabouts, and four skids for each wagon ain’t gonna add much to the load. If’n this was gonna be for use all winter, I’d want iron skids, but wood ones’ll git us there.”
“Get it done,” Kellermann said. “I’ll leave that in your hands.” He looked around. “Is there anything else?”
“There prolly will be, but we kin handle it when it happens,” the chief wrangler said, laconically.
“All right then. Git t’yer beds. We have ’nother week of hard work ahead.” Cody brought the meeting to a close. Rosa and Giselle left together.
“Any more of your watcher today?” Rosa asked, quietly, as they headed for their vardos. “He doesn’t seem to have let up at all.”
“Yes. It doesn’t seem to be more, or more intense, but if I’m not outside the show grounds, it’s off and on all day.” By this point, Giselle was less fearful than angry. She had tried getting her sylphs to find whoever it was, but they said it was not someone using a sylph or any other Air Elemental to do his watching for him. Fox had tried some other way to find the watcher—some Pawnee magic, he wouldn’t give her any details—and he didn’t have any more luck.
“It has to be by scrying, then, and good luck with tracing it back if you don’t already know who it is,” Rosa decided. “That means the likeliest is a Fire or Water Magician, although . . . it could be Earth. There’s a technique for scrying using a mirror made of obsidian or flint that works for some Earth Mages.”
They had to pause for a moment as a couple of the cowboys walked past them, chewing tobacco and speaking about the horses.
“But don’t you know who the magicians in Freiburg are?” Giselle asked when they were out of hearing range. “Can’t you at least check to see if it is one of them?” She was getting rather desperate at this point, after two whole weeks of feeling those eyes on the back of her head. Every evening, Rosa would ask if the unseen watcher had given up yet, and every evening she would have to say no.
But Rosa shook her head as they reached their vardos, and paused beside Rosa’s. “Most of the magicians in cities are not part of the Bruderschaft,” she said. “It’s different in a village or a small town, where there generally aren’t more than one or two, and quite often there’s none. So being part of the Bruderschaft is an advantage, even if you don’t live at the Lodge, because if there is something going on that you cannot deal with yourself, you can call on the Bruderschaft.”
Giselle nodded, and pulled her woolen shawl closer around herself. Over the course of their stay here it had gotten colder. Very soon she was going to need a coat or a cloak—or both, because if it got cold enough she could wear a cloak over a coat. “Now that I think about it, I believe Mother might have gone to help the Bruderschaft a time or two.”
Rosa nodded, and leaned against the side of her vardo. “Most magicians in the country make a point of knowing at least a few others. But in the cities, well . . . there’s no advantage at all to being in a Lodge if you are the sort that