here. Your Mother wrought even better than you thought she ever did, I put my own protections on the abbey, you already had your own in place, and you can bet that Fox is awake and reinforcing everything with his protections, and I very much doubt whoever is out there will be familiar with anything Fox can do. Add to that what the dwarves built in while they were rebuilding everything. The dwarves are very clever: every single opening into the walls has a warded grate of pure iron. No magic, no matter how strong, can get past magic-forged iron. It would take more than a handful of Masters to get their magic in here, it would take an army, if it could be done at all.”
Giselle couldn’t help it, though, she shivered. The sound of the wind outside—it was as if there were voices in it, voices howling their determination to tear down the walls and rip everything inside to bits.
“As for what we do, we wait until morning, when everyone is awake. We’ll gather in the second-floor room of the tower, and we’ll find a way to see who is out there, how many of them there are, and what they have to bring against us.” Rosa clenched her jaw. “One thing I know for certain, there is no Earth Magic out there. So whoever is out there won’t have wardings against Earth scrying.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t scry?” Giselle ventured.
“I said that I didn’t usually do so,” Rosa corrected. “I don’t have the best tool for it. My obsidian plaque isn’t as . . . finished . . . as I would like. But I would bet any amount of money that your Mother did have the tools we need, and that they will still be in the rooms that Cody is in now. The dwarves and I just locked up the cabinet that her tools and supplies were in and left it there, as it was too big to move.”
“And when we find out, what will we do then?” Giselle persisted. “I—”
“It would be foolish to make plans we are only going to have to change,” Rosa told her. “Now, just remember, they cannot get magic inside these walls. We have enough food to last the winter, if we need to. We have water from a well they cannot cut off. We need to find out how many of them there are, how powerful they are, and what their plans are. The most important thing will be to make sure that our friends in the show are not panicked by all this.” At this Rosa showed her first sign of stress, rubbing her hand across her eyes. “That is the one thing that might be our undoing. I cannot do anything about that now, but as soon as Elfrida is awake—”
“Elfrida is awake now, deary,” came a voice from below. “If you think anyone with magic could sleep through this, you are very much mistaken.”
Now Elfrida came up the stairs, wrapped up in a woolen shawl even more voluminous than Rosa’s, hair entirely covered by a frilly nightcap of monumental proportions. “Move over and give me some bed room, girls, my old bones cannot take this cold.”
Giselle did more than that, she got up and stoked the stove, then came back to bed, glad that her bed was a very old one that could probably have held an entire family.
“We need to keep the others—the ones that are not the Indians, the Captain, or Herr Kellermann—from getting the notion that this is anything other than a normal storm for this part of the world, and panicking,” said Rosa, once Elfrida was under the eiderdown with both of them. The sylphs were paying very close attention to what the three of them were saying; glancing up from time to time, Giselle saw their eyes shining down solemnly in the light from the lamp.
“Bless you, that will be the matter of two spells at most,” the “kitchen-witch” said with conviction. “One on the oven, and the other on the salt. I’ll bless the salt to drive out evil influences, so even if the bastards out there manage to get something past our defenses, anything cooked with holy salt will keep a body safe, and the Good God knows you can’t bake bread without salt. And the other spell, the one I intend to put on the oven, will handle anything that’s baked in it; that’s all the