to finding myself forced to call a Hunting Party together to clean up what you awoke. I greatly dislike having to clean up other people’s disasters.” The look on her face should have warned Cody that she was not joking.
Evidently it did. “. . . oh,” Cody said, weakly. “Well . . . all right, I guess.”
“So you don’t object?” Rosamund smiled. “Good. Because I wasn’t going to give you any choice. Now . . . what choice of housing do you have?”
They all looked at Kellermann, who put his head in his hands and sighed. “Would you prefer a tent?” he asked. “Or a vardo?”
Rosamund smiled broadly. “A vardo would be perfect, thank you.”
Rosamund turned up in the morning with two horses and cart. The handsome bay horse tied to the tail of the cart was hers; the other and the cart were borrowed. And the cart itself was laden with three heavy trunks.
Kellermann had a vardo cleaned out and waiting for her, parked next to Giselle’s. It was not as nice as the one they had given Giselle, since this one had been stripped of the comforts that had made Giselle’s vardo such a pleasure to move into, but it was clean and it had all the basic requirements of bed and storage built in. Cody had asked Giselle to help the Hunt Master move in.
“I dunno how she’ll take t’this, seein’ as this here is pretty bare,” he said, for the first time in Giselle’s knowledge showing some signs of nervousness. “But it’s about all we got, an’ a tent wouldn’ be much better.”
But the Hunt Master seemed pleased enough with what she found. “As soon as my gear is stowed, I’ll go back into town and get whatever else I need,” she said, and winked at Giselle. “I have a Graf for a patron. I can afford a cushion or two and some sheets.”
Giselle bit back a surge of envy. On the one hand, if she’d had such an exalted and wealthy person to rely on, she’d still be snug at the abbey! A Count. A Count for a patron. I wish I had such a thing . . .
On the other hand, she had the suspicion that, whatever good things Rosamund was getting from this patron, she was earning every bit of it. And perhaps . . . from the little she said last night, I do not believe Fraulein Rosamund has much spare time. And her work sounds . . . rather dangerous. “Well, you get yourself settled,” she replied. “The rest of us have two shows to put on.”
Rosamund waved Kellermann off, accepted her help, and began taking items out of the trunks, examining them, and putting them back to stow them in the under-bed compartment of her new vardo. After a glimpse into the wide variety of weaponry that was in that first trunk, Giselle no longer had any doubt that Rosamund had more than earned her position as a Hunt Master . . . and that this position was probably a lot more dangerous than she could guess.
And she made up her mind that the next time she sat down and talked seriously to Rosamund, she was going to be asking a great many questions.
“Do you . . . really need all of this?” she asked, surveying what looked like a full suit of leather armor, a pair of swords, several daggers, a hand-crossbow, a coach gun, a pair of pistols, an axe, a mace, a morning star, and many boxes of ammunition.
“All at once?” Rosamund asked, picking up, counting, and replacing a box of quarrels for the crossbow. “Not generally. But you never know what you might need, and we are rather too far from a Brotherhood Lodge for me to be comfortable without having everything I might need with me.” She looked a little sideways at Giselle. “Something you should keep in mind is this: when you are fighting against something or someone that is powerful in magic, and they know that you, too, are a magician, more often than not they completely forget to guard themselves against a purely physical attack. That has saved my life, and more than once.”
The second trunk, to Giselle’s relief, contained nothing more lethal than clothing. That all went straight into the under-bed storage, still in the trunk, after just a cursory look.
The third trunk held . . . well, some interesting things. Some of the sort of equipment that Giselle remembered Mother