then I would apologize for being so rude afterward.”
Now the sylph unbent entirely. “You are much nicer than the one who was here before. He was rude, always ordering us about, and threatening if we did not obey immediately! You are as nice as the Bruderschaft are said to be! Thank you!” She beamed at Giselle, who smiled back. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that Leading Fox was smiling ever so slightly.
“Well, if you don’t mind, would you please remain with Leading Fox and teach him German?” she said, with punctilious politeness. “I would very much appreciate it.”
“I would be happy to!” the sylph crowed, standing on one foot in glee.
“But—” She frowned for a moment. “Couldn’t Leading Fox have asked for himself?”
“He did not wish to offend us, since he is from so far away, and his Elementals are so unlike us,” the sylph replied, and shrugged. “Humans. I do not understand the rules you make for yourselves.”
“Sometimes, neither do I,” Giselle sighed, and through the sylph, offered the Indian a cup of tea, but he declined politely and got up to leave. The owl spirit lofted over to a shelf running along the very top of the left-hand wall and made itself at home; the night-sylph flitted out the door, following Leading Fox. The Indian walked as softly as Winnetou did in the books; she could not hear a single footfall as he vanished into the night.
Giselle considered the little owl, who blinked at her. I should feed it. Or at least offer it something . . .
She could spin little orbs of the magic of the Air, and her sylph friends would devour them with glee, as if they were sugared fruits. Would the owl like them too? Well, it was an Air Elemental, chances were it would like the same thing the sylphs did.
She cupped her left hand, palm up, concentrated on seeing the currents of magic around her, twirled her finger in her palm, as Mother had taught her to gather some of that magic, and started to spin up a little orb. The wisps of magic followed the twirling motion of her finger, sparkling in the semidarkness of the wagon. The faster she twirled, the more the magic took on the shape of an orb about the size of a pebble, and the brighter the orb got. When it began to illuminate her palm, she held it up for the owl to see. The owl’s eyes widened and his beak parted a little; she blew on it and sent it gliding toward him, and he snapped at it and gulped it down eagerly, and looked to her for more.
Well, if he was going to be giving her not one, but two languages, the least she could do was to feed him generously. She continued to spin up orbs and send them wafting to the little owl, who snapped them up with glee. When he seemed to have had enough, he flitted to another shelf just over the head of her bed, fluffed up his feathers, and settled down, eyelids drooping. Giselle took that as a sign she should be sleeping.
She closed the window above the bed and pulled the curtains shut, then jumped down out of the bed and closed the door of the wagon and pulled the curtains on the window of the door. A few moments later she was in a night shift; a moment after that and she had blown out the lantern and was trying to get comfortable in a strange bed. It was not as soft as her featherbed at home, nor were the sounds of the encampment anything she was used to. Somewhere out there, someone was playing a harmonica, or trying to. There were murmurs of voices from the nearer two wagons. Still, it was a great deal more comfortable than sleeping in a haystack, though it wasn’t as nice as the bed in Tante Gretchen’s cottage . . .
Her dreams were strange, colorful, scenes of Indians, including Leading Fox, out in some vast landscape that somehow looked nothing like what Karl May described. The sky was enormous, that was the only way to describe it. The scenes were all very disjointed, and didn’t form any sort of coherent story. Unlike her usual dreams, where she was an active participant, she was a passive observer here. It was as if someone was opening a picture book at random places while she watched. There