all that in order to see him. Otherwise it was like looking into a mirror.
“All right, out you go,” she said, and off Cody went. There was a window in the storage above the kitchen he could just barely fit through and climb out of that would let him out onto the snow drifted to the second floor. He trudged down the stairs, and in about half an hour, the witch bit off an exclamation.
“The girl!” she spat. “The little bitch is getting away! What a time for Dieter to be cutting wood!”
“I’ll get her, never fear,” the old man rumbled, and got to his feet. A moment later a sort of ripple passed over him, and he seemed to disappear. “She’ll never see me coming. Ha.”
“She had better not. She’s at full power, and you are—” Johann snapped.
The old man interrupted him. “I am your senior in years, wisdom and power, boy!” his voice snarled out of the ripple in the air. “And don’t you forget it. Or cripple or not, I’ll teach you that lesson all over again.”
Then came the hardest part. Waiting. Waiting until they were sure that the old man was too far from their camp to call back. “All right,” Giselle said, finally. “Now, Kellermann.”
He was faster than Cody had been, even with the burden of a dress. It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes later that the witch let out a volley of curses that practically scorched the air, and Johann, who had been watching the mirror beside her, echoed her. “It was a trick! It was all a trick! The first one must have been the Bruderschaft hunter. This one is her!” The old woman looked wildly about, cursed again, and picked up a staff and a sickle. “Curse men to the darkest hells, why are they never with you when you need them?”
And with that, she scuttled off across the snow like a black spider, leaving Johann alone. She didn’t even give Johann a chance to respond.
The mirror she had left beside Johann went dark, no longer controlled by the old woman. Now Johann was limited only to what he could scry . . . and it didn’t appear that he knew how.
“My turn,” Giselle whispered.
18
THEY had been counting on Johann not knowing how to scry, and it seemed that they had been right. Like Rosa, Giselle was wearing several layers of men’s clothing and an oversized coat to fit atop all of it, although she did not have anything like Rosa’s silver-lined leather “armor.” And, like Fox and Rosa, she was swathed in an over-garment made of white sheets. Fox had not known how to create an “invisibility” spell, and there was no time to experiment.
Unlike the men, since she did not want to be seen, she did not try to get out though the first-floor window of the side of the abbey facing Johann’s camp. Instead, she squeezed out the second-floor tower window opposite where Johann still sat; the snow had drifted up to that point and formed a steep slope downward. Making sure her chosen rifle and its little stand were securely fastened to her back, she eased herself belly-down onto the snow and pushed off.
Under other circumstances, the ride would have been exhilarating. It definitely took her breath away, and she and Mother had often made toboggan runs back when she was a child. With her heart racing, she dug in with her toes to slow herself down, and prayed she wouldn’t hit anything as she catapulted down the slope, then managed to force her hurtling body into a curve that took her in the direction of Johann’s camp.
Guiding herself with her hands, she used the momentum of the slide to get quite some distance closer to where her quarry sat. After she slowed and finally stopped, she kept her head down and well covered by the sheet and slowly slid herself along on her stomach, as she had done when sliding as a child. She didn’t want to move too quickly; even at this distance, if Johann looked in this direction, he might notice movement. Every so often she peeked out from under the sheet to see if she could spot Johann, or the vardo. She saw the vardo first, by the splash of yellow against the white of the snow. Finally, she made out Johann; she knew him by the blue blanket he was wrapped in, a single spot of blue against the yellow and red wagon