grazing on it, which might give pause to the timid city dweller. They could expect to be left alone. There were much higher mountains around the lake and valley, some of which were barren rock, or nearly, but this was certainly tall enough for their purposes.
Although she gazed just behind her at those scoured rocks of a much higher peak a little wistfully. She had not realized until they had come out of the forest just how much she had craved height and free air. This mountain was good, but that one was so much better. The view from there would have been wonderful . . . even if the climb would have required ropes and rock picks.
Maybe someday. Rosa had told her of a wicked Air Master who had contrived a way to be carried where he willed by dual use of a hot-air balloon and his Elementals to push him where he wanted to go. She had thought about that quite a lot, after Rosa had told her the story. Of course in the story Rosa had told, the Master in question had been coercing his Elementals, and if she were to try that . . . well, first of all, she’d have to find a way to persuade the Elementals in question to help her without coercion, and secondly she’d have to have the help of much more powerful Elementals than mere sylphs. Until now, she hadn’t dared even try to contact the sort that managed winds and whirlwinds.
Today, that would change.
“All right, remember what I told you,” Rosa said calmly, from where she was seated on a round boulder nearby. “Make sure you are calm. Call in the magic of the Air to you. Bring in as much as you can—as much as you can hold, if there is enough here. Then tell me what you see.”
She was calm, although she was also excited; it was a peculiar sort of excitement, not one that made her nervous, but one that gave her energy. Air Magic was all around her, and there was more than enough up here, in the heights, that she could fill herself with it to overflowing. It sparkled in the air, all the colors of blue that there were, swirling and dancing in the sunlight. Air Magic had been abundant back at the abbey, but here . . . here it was as thick as the scent hanging over a field of flowers.
She gathered it to her, breathing it in, watching it swirl slowly around her, absorbing it until she, at least, could literally see the glow of it just under her skin. She filled herself, far beyond the point where she had ever dared to before, until she fairly hummed with it and she was sure she could not take in one bit more.
And that was when she raised her eyes to the sky, and saw them, as she had seen them only a few times before.
The Winds. . . .
Not the traditional “Four Winds” of folklore, but the greater Elementals that moved the winds, and moved with the winds.
“What do you see?” Rosa asked calmly.
“The Elementals of the wind,” she whispered, her eyes still on them. “I have seen them as a child, but far off up in the clouds. These are so close!”
“We’re nearer to them,” Fox pointed out.
Unlike the sylphs, these creatures had no one form. They shifted from a kind of stylized human, to a flowing birdlike shape, to just wavy shapes in the air, to something vaguely serpentine . . . well, they didn’t stay the same from one moment to the next. Yet somehow she was able to tell individuals apart: tell that one might be shyer than the others, one friendlier, one cold, one very emotional. Personalities. She could tell what personalities they had, although she could not have said how. It was more something she knew, on the level of instinct.
“Do they see you now?” Rosa asked.
They were indeed looking at her, not steadily, but regularly glancing down at her as if they were curious about what she intended to do next. Giselle nodded.
“All right then. The Greater Elementals, you don’t call. You invite.” Rosamund’s voice brooked no argument, not that Giselle disagreed with her! She was the Master here, after all.
“Exactly so,” Leading Fox agreed, who was standing behind her. “Reach up to them, make yourself known to them and ask them if they would care to come meet you.”