in no uncertain terms when she tried to help. For once, she wasn’t inclined to argue; they were using four teams of the heaviest horses and clearly had a defined plan. Cody and the head wrangler had decided that since the wagons could not be got in under cover for the winter, the best thing to do with them would be to protect them as best as possible and use them and some lumber and tree branches to make a corral so the animals could get some time every day out in the sun.
Giselle spent the day getting all of her things out of the vardo, then in the small tower kitchen doing laundry. Finally she was able to get all of her things really clean again. Most of them she planned to pack away until spring, but this was an excellent chance to get everything that had only been dealt with sketchily properly washed. Soon drying laundry was strung back and forth across the kitchen, just as it used to be on laundry days when it had only been her and Mother here.
It was a very relaxed group that assembled for a supper of sausages, kale cooked with bacon, and fried potatoes. Rosa and Giselle went back to the tower afterward as they had last night, but tonight they were joined by Leading Fox, Cody, and Kellermann for some conversation and an impromptu game of cards. Anticipating visits of this sort, Giselle had laid in supplies in the little kitchen.
But after everyone had gone to their beds and it was long past midnight, Giselle was awakened by the wind, howling around the tower. The sounds it was making against the thick glass windows told her from long experience that this was not just wind. This was a blizzard. But there was something about it that was not quite right, something that made her come all the way awake.
She fumbled for the matches and oil lamp next to her bed and lit it. When she had turned the light up, she looked up into the rafters and saw that all of her sylph friends were up there, huddled together, looking down at her with frightened eyes.
In the next moment, she knew why they were there. This was no natural blizzard. It might have begun as one, but it certainly was not natural now. She sensed the magic outside, magnifying everything the storm was doing. Air Magic . . . but other things too, things she couldn’t identify. The defenses that she, Rosa, Mother and the dwarves had put on this place turned it into a fortress against magic as well as against more physical attacks, but this storm was going to completely isolate them from the outside world. And from the feeling she was getting . . . that was exactly what the people steering the storm had in mind.
A light sprang up on the floor below, coming up through the stairwell. “Rosa?” she called.
“You feel it too?” Rosa replied, and her voice had steel in it. She, too, knew what this meant and she was not amused.
“Of course. I think . . . I think that watcher followed us somehow. He’s not alone.” She did her best to keep her voice steady.
“I’m coming up,” Rosa said, and a moment later, she padded up the stairs, wrapped in a huge woolen shawl. She joined Giselle in her bed, and the two of them pulled the eiderdown around themselves. “This is an attack,” she said, flatly.
“I get Air Magic, and something else,” Giselle said. “The Air Magic has a bitter scent if that means anything to you.”
“It means it’s stolen,” Rosa replied, staring at the shuttered window as if she could somehow see through it. “And I told you how magic can be stolen.”
Giselle shivered.
“There’s Fire Magic there too, but it’s been turned to its opposite—cold. That can only be done by making a bargain with an Elemental of Cold, and none of the ones I know of are good. There’s also some other magic, but it’s not from an Elemental Master or even a mage. So it has to be a sorcerer or a witch. By the dark feel of it, it’s all fueled by blood.”
Three different kinds of magic? What had brought all this down on her head? “What do we do?” Giselle asked. “You’re the one who hunts out things and destroys them, not I!”
Rosa patted her hand. “First, I promise you, whoever it is cannot get in