to put my horse while I watched the show. You know that humans need money for—”
“Wait!” The sylph dashed off. Blinking with confusion, Giselle moved her mare over to the side of the road, under a lovely green beech tree, and waited as she had been asked. What on earth could the sylph be—
“Here!” The sylph was back, waving two scraps of paper, one in each hand, as she sped toward Giselle. For anyone else, it would just look like two bits of paper, swirling about on the wind. “Here!” The sylph dropped them, and hovered expectantly, as Giselle snatched them out of the air.
To her astonishment, they were tickets. One was for stabling on the show grounds, and the other—admission to all attractions and the show itself!
“But—how—” She gaped up at the sylph.
“Oh, people lose things, drop things, and are very careless.” The sylph danced about in glee. “It was easy! Let’s go!”
She flew off, heading for the entrance, and it was obvious that she expected Giselle to follow. Not that Giselle had any hesitation about doing so! And Lebkuchen seemed eager enough to be with her own kind, too. Once they were within about a hundred feet of the entrance, Giselle dismounted and led her horse into the loosely packed crowd that was slowly making its way toward the entrance. There was a lot of excited chatter. She seemed to be among several family groups that knew each other and were rhapsodizing about how lucky they were for a Wild West Show to be here, at little Schopfheim. “I wouldn’t care if the Maifest was put off until June!” one teenage boy proclaimed. “Think of it! Think of what we’ll see!” He could hardly contain his excitement, and Giselle knew exactly how he felt.
She presented herself and her tickets to the ticket-taker at the front entrance, who, to her disappointment, was not an Indian or cowboy or frontiersman like Old Shatterhand, but was dressed in a perfectly normal suit. Well, normal for a townsman, anyway; so far on her journey, men were far more likely to wear the dress of their villages than a town-suit. He directed her to a tent immediately inside, where she surrendered Lebkuchen to a young boy in exchange for a tin tag with a number on it. Horses were tethered inside to posts with identical numbers; each post had a pile of hay and a bucket of water at it, so it looked as if Lebkuchen was going to be in good hands. She got into her saddlebags and changed out Lebkuchen’s bridle for her halter so she could eat comfortably, then put her in the boy’s confident hands. There were only three horses besides Lebkuchen; it appeared most people had walked here. The boy was a local lad and told her to hurry along to the main tent, as the show was just about to start.
This was . . . well, entirely new territory, so far as the size of the crowd was concerned. Villages, she was used to; she had gone with Mother on occasion to the nearest one, once Mother had deemed her powers safely in check. A town, well, that was just a very big village, and she had steeled herself to deal with them as they came along. But this . . . nothing in her experience prepared her for this.
She let the crowd carry her along the side of the biggest tent to the entrance. To her right was the canvas of the tent, to her left was a row of . . . canvas booths, she thought. They looked a little like the vendor booths she had seen at the Maifest. She smelled food, some aromas familiar, some not. She definitely heard men calling out to the crowd, though she couldn’t see what they were hawking, as she was a great deal shorter than most of the people between her and the booths. But in any event, now was not the time to be distracted by minor diversions when what she really wanted was to get a good seat inside.
The side flaps of the entrance were drawn wide apart and held in place by big canvas straps; a ticket-taker eyed her ticket, but did not take it from her, as he did with some others. It smelled of animals—not strongly, but definitely the scent was there. It smelled of dust, and trampled grass. And some faint whiffs of perfume and tobacco from the crowd. She wondered