“And I hope you let him know we are suitably grateful,” Rosa said gravely. “Wait . . . he’s going down into the forest.”

The raven was, indeed, flying down into the forest. In a moment he was among the branches, skillfully evading them, changing directions so quickly that Giselle clutched her hands together involuntarily. If watching him fly in the open sky had been disorienting, this was very close to being nauseating. According to Mother’s books an Air Master could choose to see through the eyes of any Air Elemental that would let her, but Giselle had never asked. Seeing directly through the raven’s eyes would probably have me throwing up in short order.

Suddenly, he lofted up a bit and settled on a branch. No longer flying, he worked his way stealthily through the trees, hopping from branch to branch, staying among the evergreens where he was better hidden from sight, rather than going to the bare branches of the oaks and beeches and birches.

“Shh!” said Rosa, just as the sound of voices echoed thinly from the mirror. There were clearly several people speaking. It seemed that they had found what they were looking for!

The raven worked nearer and nearer, until at last he had a view of the speakers, seated in a camp before and below him as he hid just behind a thin screen of fir needles.

There were four people there: three men and one woman. Three were sitting around a fire; the snow was thin enough here they had been able to scrape it down to bare earth in order to get a fire going that the melting snow would not put out. One was seated in a kind of chair-sled, shrouded in blankets. Next to them was a gypsy vardo, one gaudily painted in the Romany manner, rather than plain as Giselle’s and Rosa’s had been. There was a dead horse dragged off to one side; from the look of it, it had been treated badly, and worked until it had dropped of exhaustion. It was so thin that its poor stretched-out neck was nearly flat, and every bone showed under its harsh, patchy coat. Its heavier winter coat had been rubbed off by the harness; they must never have taken it off him.

I suppose they decided that once they were here, they’d steal some of our horses, so there was no need to spare theirs.

“. . . cannot get past their defenses,” the woman said in tones of anger and disgust. “I tried everything! I tried the chimneys, the well, even the drains! Everything has damned forged iron and dwarven defenses on it!”