dwarf, who is wholly and completely of Earth, going to get his hands on something so full of Air Magic as your hair? You told me yourself: sylphs and pixies play in it, all the Air Elementals love to touch it. It’s as imbued with Air Magic as anything material can be! She’d put the cut hair in that chest, call them when she needed money, and they’d leave payment in here. That’s what that dwarf meant. He’d taken their payment for all the construction they did on the abbey in the hair that had built up in that chest over the years, and left what he considered to be proper overpayment in gold and silver.”
Giselle’s mouth formed a silent “o.” She thought about that, about how careful Mother had been when she cut it, and how the sylphs had been like cats in catnip when she burned the bits in the vardo. “But—what would they use it for?” she asked.
“Probably the strings for stringed instruments,” Rosa replied, after a long moment of thought. “The dwarves are well known for their wonderful instruments, but using your hair for strings would make every instrument into a masterwork. Possibly bowstrings. Wrap it with real beaten gold and make embroidery thread? There are probably hundreds of things I can’t think of because I’m not a dwarf.” She closed the lid on the strongbox, because they were one and all staring at the bounty. Giselle felt as if the closing of the lid woke her from what had almost become a spell of avarice.
Now she could think again, instead of stare.
“Well,” Rosa continued, still kneeling, and laying her hands in her lap. “You’re rich. The treasure was real, after all. What are you going to do with it?”
All manner of ridiculous ideas flew through her head. But one stayed, lodged, and became a conviction. There was one wrong that had not yet been put right, and she actually had the power to do that.
She looked up and met Leading Fox’s eyes, then Captain Cody’s, then Fox’s again.
“Why, it’s simple,” she said, quietly, suddenly flooded with joy. “I’m going to send you all home as rich as you came here to become.”
It was spring before the much-shrunken company left. “We are not going to get out of here before all this snow melts,” Leading Fox had observed, once their initial excitement had died down. “And I am told that winter travel upon the great salt water is exceedingly disagreeable and even dangerous.”
Since both these things were true . . . and since the company was, quite frankly, greatly enjoying their comfort, Elfrida’s cooking, and their leisure, it seemed a sensible plan. Kellermann let it be known, just about Christmas, that a second and more careful accounting had revealed to him that all the money they were saving by staying at the abbey was going to enable every man and woman to go home in the spring with tidy sums in their pockets—as much as they had expected to when they had set out from America. There would be no need for a second tour, after all. They could all go home as prosperous as they had hoped to become.
When one is told that one has not less money than one expects, but very much more, one is not inclined to question the accountant, or the source of the money. Only Kellermann, Cody, the girls and the Pawnee were aware that Cody, Kellermann and the Pawnee were . . . going back considerably richer than their wildest hopes. There would be enough to buy Cody that cattle ranch he had talked about, and enough to buy the Pawnee several thousand acres of land in their ancestral home on the Platte River in Nebraska.
And that still left Giselle with a tidy sum to take care of her expenses, plus a ready source of money for the future.
And now, in the lovely spring sunshine, with the meadow full of flowers and no sign that anything terrible had ever taken place here, she and Rosa were saying goodbye to their friends.
The cavalcade had been reduced to a few luggage and passenger wagons. No show-tent wagons, no equipment, no sideshow. They were keeping the smaller tents and camping on their way to Freiburg and the railway, then taking the rail all the way to Italy and the ship that Kellermann had booked for them. Kellermann had already disposed of all of the show equipment; a circus had come to get