“Not at all,” Rosa replied, and frowned. “I know better than to ask another Master if that was just her imagination, so it must have been concentrated only on you. Do you have any idea why anyone would be spying on you from a distance? I assume it was at a distance.”

“Not at all,” Giselle said, mounting Lebkuchen. “I couldn’t catch anyone nearby at it, and I felt as if I shouldn’t give away the fact that I knew it was happening by looking around. But I don’t like it, not one bit!”

“Try and give me a signal if it happens again,” Rosa replied, bringing her pony up beside Giselle. “I’ll try and slip off and see if it’s being done magically. I might not be able to tell if it’s Air Magic, though,” she added warningly.

Giselle tried not to feel a little sick. “Ugh! It makes me feel unclean, or somehow naked. And if it’s being done magically, there’s no telling what whoever it is might try to see. I suppose if I don’t want to be spied on in my vardo I’m going to have to ward it, but wards aren’t going to do me any good at all when I’m outside. I mean, I can ward myself, but all that would do is make a blank me-shaped spot in the scrying bowl or whatever he’s using, and that’s not much better.”

Rosa nodded, but they didn’t get to say anything more. The entrance curtains opened, and the Grand Parade began.

Twice more that day, Giselle got that feeling of being watched, and each time, the sensation wasn’t as if the distant voyeur was the friendly sort. The opposite, rather. The second time, she managed to signal Rosa, but as her friend had warned, the Earth Master wasn’t able to detect anything. It happened a third time as they left the show enclosure to go to the Alpingarten for supper, but it appeared that once they were moving, the crush of the crowds made it harder for the watcher to find her, and he never managed to catch up with her again. So Giselle was able to relax and enjoy a rather delightful dinner, sitting at a huge table and entertaining an enraptured, and thankfully quiet, group with her manufactured tales of life on the frontier.