Rosamund frowned at him. “Just from my point of view, I don’t think that is a good idea. I have only your word for it that what you do will have no effect on what’s already here.” She gave Cody a stern look, and to Giselle’s feeling of satisfaction, she saw Cody cringe just a little. “Moreover, you have no way of predicting what might decide to come at you, regardless of how careful you are. So I have a plan. I am coming with you.”

Giselle blinked. Well, that’s certainly . . . unexpected. The Captain stared. Kellermann shook his head, and Fox chuckled under his breath.

She wasn’t at all displeased by this demand. She already liked Rosamund, and she missed the company of another female who was also her countryman and a magician. And Rosamund might be able to teach her more about her own powers than Mother had been able to.

“This is a joke, right?” Cody said, after a moment.

“I have never been more serious,” the Hunt Master replied. “You might encounter nothing. But given how luck plays out . . . it is not that I am averse to having your rotting bodies discovered some time next spring. It is that I am averse 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.”