Seeing directly through the raven’s eyes would probably have me throwing up in short order.
Suddenly, he lofted up a bit and settled on a branch. No longer flying, he worked his way stealthily through the trees, hopping from branch to branch, staying among the evergreens where he was better hidden from sight, rather than going to the bare branches of the oaks and beeches and birches.
“Shh!” said Rosa, just as the sound of voices echoed thinly from the mirror. There were clearly several people speaking. It seemed that they had found what they were looking for!
The raven worked nearer and nearer, until at last he had a view of the speakers, seated in a camp before and below him as he hid just behind a thin screen of fir needles.
There were four people there: three men and one woman. Three were sitting around a fire; the snow was thin enough here they had been able to scrape it down to bare earth in order to get a fire going that the melting snow would not put out. One was seated in a kind of chair-sled, shrouded in blankets. Next to them was a gypsy vardo, one gaudily painted in the Romany manner, rather than plain as Giselle’s and Rosa’s had been. There was a dead horse dragged off to one side; from the look of it, it had been treated badly, and worked until it had dropped of exhaustion. It was so thin that its poor stretched-out neck was nearly flat, and every bone showed under its harsh, patchy coat. Its heavier winter coat had been rubbed off by the harness; they must never have taken it off him.
I suppose they decided that once they were here, they’d steal some of our horses, so there was no need to spare theirs.
“. . . cannot get past their defenses,” the woman said in tones of anger and disgust. “I tried everything! I tried the chimneys, the well, even the drains! Everything has damned forged iron and dwarven defenses on it!”
The raven hopped to another branch, hiding behind the trunk of the tree. Now he had a clear view of all of them. All were dressed in heavy, dark wool coats. Two were much older than the others. All were blond; the older man and woman had grey in their hair, yet their faces did not so much show age as ill will. The three at the fire all had a clear family resemblance; all had blue eyes, square chins, and sharp cheekbones. The youngest of those three wore a sullen look, as he glowered out from beneath furrowed brows. If it had not been for a uniform coldness to their eyes, and a cruel cast to their mouths, they would have been handsome.
“Those are never Romany,” Rosa said flatly. “So where did they get that vardo?”
“I very much doubt they bought it,” Giselle replied. She would have said more, but just then the one in the chair turned his head to say something in an undertone to the old woman, and she gasped with recognition.
It was “Johann Schmidt.”
“Well, Mother, my servants cannot get past her defenses either,” he was saying.
“What is it?” Cody asked.
“That—that’s the man that—years ago—” She couldn’t finish her statement, but they knew who she was talking about. “This must be his family! So that is how he escaped after he fell!”
The youngest man in the mirror snickered. “Father told you that you shouldn’t have been so overconfident.”
“A family!” Rosa exclaimed, and shook her head. “Of all the things I would have guessed it was never that our attackers would be a family!”
Between the family resemblance and the fact that the two younger men addressed the older couple as “Mother” and “Father,” it was clear what they were dealing with now. A family of magicians. Probably “Johann” was the watcher and the Air Master that Giselle had sensed. And that explained . . . everything . . . about all those years ago.
“I never would have thought that bastard had a family,” Giselle said, through clenched teeth.
“I hope you have another idea now, brother,” growled the younger man. “All we did was seal them into a nice, cozy cave for the winter. They have all the food and drink in there that they need, aye, and firewood too, and what do we have out here? Nothing, that’s what! We’ve got only enough food for a week, while they feast in there! We’re sleeping in a cold wagon and