a good idea though, and I have more than enough cream to bribe mine.” She smiled.
Giselle laughed. “I remember Mother doing just that! Cream and anything baked. . . .”
“The domestic ones like brownies can bake for themselves, but the wild ones are mad for the taste of anything baked, butter, cream and honey,” Rosamund told Fox, who was looking at both of them as if he suspected they had lost their minds. “You’ll see, when I call them. Cheese too, they are mad for cheese.” She cocked her head at Giselle. “Do you think you can convince something to come out of hiding and stand watch?”
“I can try,” Giselle said. “I don’t like to coerce them.”
“Neither do I. That’s a slippery slope to go down.” Rosamund gazed at her with approval, which made her feel better about not ever forcing one of her sylphs to do anything. “All right then, when we camp for the night, we’ll do a little walking about, see what we are dealing with, then see about getting our Elementals to take a night watch for us. Captain Cody, too. And I might be overreacting. Just because we’re feeling that something is watching us doesn’t mean it might not lose interest and go away before we camp.”
“Oh, I am so glad to hear that I am not the only one feeling that!” Giselle blurted with relief.
“You are not,” Rosamund and Fox said at almost the same time. They looked at each other. Rosamund laughed, and Fox smiled a little.
“Even the trees have the potential to be . . . alive in more than the usual sense, here,” Rosamund said, and turned to Giselle. “That reminds me. The book. Or more accurately, it’s a sort of guidebook to the Schwarzwald that everyone in the Brotherhood gets. I’ll give you my copy, I can get another.” She finished her lunch, hopped up into her vardo, and came back out with a book bound in soft brown leather, like a handmade journal. “Here you are,” she said, handing it to Giselle. “I’d be careful about reading it before you sleep. It can make for nightmares.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Giselle replied, untying the thongs that held it closed, and leafing through it, gingerly. It looked to be handwritten, with many, many illustrations. She closed it when she came to Vampir, with a little shiver. But she didn’t give it back. “I can probably read it while I drive. Or look at it, at least.”
At just that moment, one of the “trail bosses,” riders that had been assigned to get and keep the wagons, riders and herds organized and moving, rode up. “Time to bridle back up and mosey along to the road, ladies, Fox,” he said, with a pull on the front of his hat. “We got us a good campground ’bout four-five hours off. Thet’ll give us a couple hours t’set up and get water afore dark.”
“No rehearsal or practice tonight?” Giselle asked in surprise.
“Not ’nuff room.” Without another word he rode off, to pass the word. Giselle interrupted Lebkuchen and Polly, the Quadrille horse, and coaxed them back into their bridles. They snorted, but they’d been happily cropping the lush grass and clover of the meadow for some time, so they didn’t object too very much.
Once everyone was back in line, and the trek continued, Giselle reached into the capacious pocket of her skirt for the book and began perusing it in earnest.
Rosamund is right. This is the stuff of nightmares.
She didn’t stop reading, however. This wasn’t just going to apply to this trip through the Schwarzwald with the show. This was going to apply to the land around the abbey as well. Mother had managed to protect her from what lay out beyond the safe area around the abbey, but Mother wasn’t here anymore, and she was going to have to learn how to deal with these things herself.
She read very slowly, and carefully—rereading passages often, to make sure she had the information set in her mind. There was no actual organization to the book, it was, more or less, just a catalogue of the creatures of the Schwarzwald, listed randomly, perhaps as they had been discovered by the Brotherhood. There was no particular differentiation between things that were just plain monsters and things that could be Elementals gone to the bad, except notes saying that “some are good, but when they are bad, this is how they behave.” Some, she was already familiar with.