filled a little bowl with pickles. “Where is the Mother?” Luna asked, as Giselle poked up the fire in the little hearth and held the bread and cheese on a toasting fork over the coals to melt.
“She went to Fredericksburg,” Giselle said, keeping a careful eye on her food.
“Why?”
Being with the sylphs, Mother said, sometimes with exasperation, was like being with a little child. Once they decided to converse, they often had never-ending questions, and often questions they had asked before, since it was hard to keep their attention on anything for long. Giselle didn’t mind.
“There are things that we need that we do not have and cannot get from the forest or our garden, our chickens, our bees, our little cow, or our goats,” she explained patiently. “Flour and salt and spices and sugar. Books. Cloth. Needles and thread.”
“You could get them from the villages.”
“Mother doesn’t want to do that. She’d really rather the villages around didn’t know we were here. She says it’s dangerous.” Mother had explained some of the dangers; it seemed that the villagers hereabouts were not as accepting of magic as in other places in the Black Forest, perhaps because there were no members of the Bruderschaft der Förster—the Brotherhood of the Foresters—nearby. And truly, given some of the dangerous, even evil things that Giselle had seen in the forest while roaming there under Mother’s protection, she could understand why they would fear magic. “Besides, she wants to make sure my father and mother and siblings are still all right.”
“Why?”
That question made Giselle pull a face, for she didn’t really understand it herself. “She says it’s an obligation. That once a magician interferes in the lives of people, the magician has to make sure her meddling wasn’t for the worse.”
“Is it? The meddling.”
The cheese was just melting and Giselle pulled the bread back, noting that it was nicely toasted on the underside. “I suppose not. She says he’s still living in the old house she bought. He’s got a job as an under-gardener for rich people somewhere in the city, so he gets the vegetable and herb seedlings when the rich garden gets thinned out. So he’s keeping her garden producing and feeding the family.” She made another face. “All those children! I think it would be horrid to be one of nine. Nine! You’d never get any attention! And before Mother took me from him, they hardly ever got food. Now at least they can eat.”
Luna nodded wisely. “Because he is making the garden of the house grow.”
“Not as well as Mother did, of course, but he’s not an Earth Magician. He can’t grow vegetables in midwinter.” Mother did that even here, though she was discreet about using her power and kept the interference with nature to a minimum. Giselle knew why, of course. When you used power, there was always the chance that you would attract things, and those things weren’t always—or even often—friendly. The sylphs were here because she had invited them. There were other things that could, and would, come uninvited. Mother had been freer to use her power in the city, because most of those things avoided cities and their high concentrations of people and poison, iron and steel.
“So you would never go back—”
“Ugh! Never,” she said emphatically. “Mother loves me.” Of that, she was absolutely sure. “That . . . man that was my father, he couldn’t possibly have loved me if he just gave me away like that!”
Luna was silent for a long while as Giselle savored her cheese-and-toast. And then, she said, “Hunger makes desperate choices. You have never gone hungry.”
Where did that come from? Giselle wondered. She didn’t even know if sylphs could hunger.
“That may be so,” she said, feeling stubborn. “And it is true I have never known want. But I do not think that a man who loved his child would give it away for the sake of a wagonload of vegetables, and I don’t really understand why Mother feels obligated to him.”
Luna only smiled. “When will she return?”
Giselle consulted the calendar. “At any hour from today on,” she said, feeling a happy thrill of excitement—for there would certainly be new books, and perhaps some beautiful new fabric to make into new clothing, and the treats that Mother always brought back from the city. Mother’s Earth Mastery could allow her to grow amazing things, but she could not grow exotic spices, and she could not grow chocolate. Giselle’s mouth watered at the thought of