“You’ll understand when you see it,” was all Rosamund would say.
The journey started off without a single hitch. There was none of the fuss there had been before getting the buffalo into their two carts. Rosamund turned up, and the huge beasts walked right up the ramps and into the carts with no trouble.
So now the caravan was making its way down another road that wound among the great dark trees of the Schwarzwald. This was very thickly forested territory; the trees grew right up to the edge of the road, and canopy overhung it, blotting out the sky. They traveled in a dim, green light, the very hoofbeats muffled by decades, if not centuries, of fallen leaves.
Giselle found it . . . a little unsettling. And a little stifling. It wasn’t hot beneath these branches, the opposite, in fact. It was chill and damp, and there was the scent of wet earth and moss and old leaves. But she had to keep reminding herself that she could breathe, and that the trees were not somehow closing in. Rosamund probably loves this, she thought, wondering how close it was to noon, when they would all stop for lunch and to water and feed the cattle and horses. The buffalo, precious cargo that they were, had buckets of water and mangers of hay in their carts, but both would probably need refilling by that time. Of course Rosamund would love this, she was an Earth Master, and this deep, dense forest was the perfect home for her. Giselle wanted sky, and lots of it.
This forest felt haunted as well. The only time she glimpsed Air Elementals, they were furtive and shy, and darted off the moment she spied them. And she didn’t know why, because they weren’t staying to tell her.
Finally Leading Fox, who had been somewhere behind her, rode his horse up the verge of the path to pace beside her. “This is a very little like the Pawnee’s real home,” he said, wistfully. “This is not unlike land we will buy, when we return with white man’s money.”
“Really?” she said.
He nodded. “The trees are not so tall, but they are old. There are more meadows among them. But my people are lovers of river and forest, and we do not love the dry land we have been sent to.” He had the magpie on his shoulder again, instead of the owl, and it cheered her a little to see at least one Air Elemental that was not fleeing. “We have spoken of this, before I left. We will buy many acres, we will maybe cut our hair and wear white man’s clothing, and build homes like the white men, farm like the white men. If people ask if we are Indian, I think that we will lie. The Pawnee are used to disguising themselves as others. We will be white on the outside, and Pawnee in our hearts. In our homes, in our hearts, we will keep the traditions. Our children will not be taken from us, to be sent away to school to learn to be white all the way through.”
She blinked at him, shocked. “Is that what is happening?”
He nodded. “It is why we decided to do this. We have heard of it happening to many tribes. When the white man comes to take the children of my clan, we will not be there. We will be gone, into the wind, and the white man will not find us.”
“Say you are Italian,” she suggested, after a long pause.
“Eh?” Fox turned, finally, to look at her.
“Say that you’re Italian. You can get the language from Kellermann, he speaks it. Or, for all I know, Rosamund speaks it. I expect no one in the middle of where you are going has ever seen an Italian. If you say that’s what you are, and you speak something they don’t recognize, they’ll probably believe you.” She watched as Fox considered that, and slowly nodded.
“Italians do have black hair,” he agreed. “I will speak to the others. This has great merit.” He rode along in silence for a mile or more; she was used to long silences from him by now.
“Rosamund has said these forests are dangerous,” he said, finally.
“They feel dangerous to me,” she admitted. “Not like back where we were camped. It feels like there are things out there that don’t like being disturbed.”