“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.”