From a High Tower Read online

  TITLES BY MERCEDES LACKEY

  available from DAW Books:

  THE NOVELS OF VALDEMAR:

  THE HERALDS OF VALDEMAR

  ARROWS OF THE QUEEN

  ARROW’S FLIGHT

  ARROW’S FALL

  THE LAST HERALD-MAGE

  MAGIC’S PAWN

  MAGIC’S PROMISE

  MAGIC’S PRICE

  THE MAGE WINDS

  WINDS OF FATE

  WINDS OF CHANGE

  WINDS OF FURY

  THE MAGE STORMS

  STORM WARNING

  STORM RISING

  STORM BREAKING

  VOWS AND HONOR

  THE OATHBOUND

  OATHBREAKERS

  OATHBLOOD

  THE COLLEGIUM CHRONICLES

  FOUNDATION

  INTRIGUES

  CHANGES

  REDOUBT

  BASTION

  THE HERALD SPY

  CLOSER TO HOME

  CLOSER TO THE HEART*

  BY THE SWORD

  BRIGHTLY BURNING

  TAKE A THIEF

  EXILE’S HONOR

  EXILE’S VALOR

  VALDEMAR ANTHOLOGIES:

  SWORD OF ICE

  SUN IN GLORY

  CROSSROADS

  MOVING TARGETS

  CHANGING THE WORLD

  FINDING THE WAY

  UNDER THE VALE

  NO TRUE WAY

  CRUCIBLE*

  Written with LARRY DIXON:

  THE MAGE WARS

  THE BLACK GRYPHON

  THE WHITE GRYPHON

  THE SILVER GRYPHON

  DARIAN’S TALE

  OWLFLIGHT

  OWLSIGHT

  OWLKNIGHT

  OTHER NOVELS:

  GWENHWYFAR

  THE BLACK SWAN

  THE DRAGON JOUSTERS

  JOUST

  ALTA

  SANCTUARY

  AERIE

  THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS

  THE SERPENT’S SHADOW

  THE GATES OF SLEEP

  PHOENIX AND ASHES

  THE WIZARD OF LONDON

  RESERVED FOR THE CAT

  UNNATURAL ISSUE

  HOME FROM THE SEA

  STEADFAST

  BLOOD RED

  FROM A HIGH TOWER

  Anthologies:

  ELEMENTAL MAGIC

  ELEMENTARY

  *Coming soon from DAW Books

  And don’t miss THE VALDEMAR COMPANION edited by John Helfers and Denise Little

  Copyright © 2015 by Mercedes Lackey

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket art by Jody A. Lee.

  Jacket designed by G-Force Design.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1693.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES—MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.

  ISBN 978-0-698-13979-4

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Mercedes Lackey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  DEDICATION:

  To Oklahoma and especially the people of Claremore, home to poetry, comedy, bold change, and kindness. Oklahoma was part of the Wild West, and it brings us all adventures even now. Thank you for being good to me and to our household. We may be weirdos, but we’re your weirdos.

  Foreword

  I don’t normally write a foreword for the books in this series, but this time I thought I’d give you all a little warning. In this book, I’m going to be heavily referencing an author utterly unheard of in the US: Karl May. This 19th-century German writer of American Westerns is the bestselling writer of all time in Germany. His books, particularly Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, Old Surehand, and Old Firehand, are still widely in print. Many movies have been made from them (mostly using the Czech Republic as a stand-in for the American Southwest, and Italian actors as Native Americans). There are Karl May Festivals all over Germany every year, where avid fans watch reenactments and plays based on the books and dress as their favorite characters, not unlike Western-themed, outdoor versions of American SF conventions. Karl May mania has created over a century’s worth of fans just as rabid as any would-be Jedi or Trekker.

  Karl May’s closest contemporary counterpart is probably J. K. Rowling, but it remains to be seen whether the popularity of Harry Potter will persist for 150 years, as the popularity of Winnetou has in Germany.

  I have no explanation for this. We’re not exactly talking Shakespeare, here. Karl May literally writes himself as the hero of the Old Shatterhand series. The books themselves are incredibly self-indulgent; May’s heroes never, ever put a foot wrong. Old Shatterhand is such a powerful puncher that he levels his opponents with a single blow; never having faced a grizzly before, he kills one with a knife; never having seen a buffalo, he takes down an enormous bull with a single shot to the heart! Winnetou is the noblest of “noble savages,” and is so accurate in predicting the movements of his enemies that you’d suspect psychic powers. May strongly encouraged his readers to believe that he, personally, was the hero of his works, despite never once having set foot on US soil, much less gone as far as the West, a fact that is painfully obvious to anyone who reads the original German or the one good translation I was able to find. He wrote in the first person, named his hero “Charlie” (the English version of Karl), then dressed as Charlie and encouraged all his fans to assume Charlie’s adventures were his own. And yet hundreds of thousands of Germans read and reread the books obsessively, and no less a personage than Albert Einstein said that the adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand brightened his childhood.

  Perhaps the explanation is the simplest possible: despite the defects (and they are many), and despite an egotistical self-aggrandizement that led him to dress like Old Shatterhand, and even commission a rifle that replicated the “magical” 25-shot carbine the hero carried (although I have no clue whether or not the thing ever actually worked), Karl May wrote a rattling good story. If he was a “hack,” remember that the definition of a “hack” is this: a strong, dependable horse that can always be relied on to get you where you want to go.

  There are worse things to be.

  Prologue

  BLESSED Mary, it is bitter. Friedrich Schnittel did not take his coat o
ff after closing the door to the single room he and his family inhabited in a ramshackle building on the inaptly named Gartenstrasse in Freiburg. There was no point in taking it off. It was only a little warmer inside than it was outside. The single room, with its peeling wallpaper and single window with rags stuffed in every crevice, was mostly heated by the bodies of his family, when all was said and done.

  His eight children crowded around him, waiting to see what he would produce out of his coat, but they knew better than to clamor at him. And they knew better than to grab for the loaf of day-old bread, the head of cabbage, and the little pot of rendered fat that was all he had to show for an entire day of work stacking crates of wine. He passed these treasures over their heads into the hands of his heavily pregnant wife, Maria. Eight pairs of eyes followed the food with longing and hunger. Maria sat down beside the hearth on a tin bucket, and propped a piece of chipped tile on her lap to use as a cutting board. The cabbage wasn’t very good, or very large, but Maria chopped it fine and added every bit, including the stem, to the pot over the tiny hearth. Meanwhile, Friedrich sat down on the bit of ruined masonry that he used for a stool on the side of the hearth opposite her. They didn’t have any furniture to speak of; if they’d had anything, it would have been broken up and added to the fire long ago. The only reason they had anything at all to burn was because three of the four oldest children spent all day scavenging every bit of wood or crumb of coal they could find within walking distance of their home. They were good at it, finding even the smallest scraps and the thinnest twigs, but they were competing with many others in similarly impoverished circumstances.

  The eldest boy had a different task: he took whatever jobs people would give a nine-year-old boy, which in the winter, wasn’t much.

  Friedrich stuck his feet, shod in his cracked, rag-wrapped, and ill-fitting shoes, so close to the tiny fire that if the flames had been enthusiastic he might have been in danger of scorching them and surveyed his family with the eye of despair. Eight children, six boys and two girls, all of them clad in every scrap of clothing they possessed, all of them staring at his wife with desperate longing as she cut the loaf into ten absolutely equal pieces and scraped a bit of the lard over the surface of each piece. All of them with the pinched, slightly grayish faces of those to whom hunger was ever present, and soap unheard-of. Dear God, Friedrich thought, sadly. Oh, dear God, why did You make Maria so . . . fertile? I know that You have told us to be fruitful and multiply, but surely You meant that for wealthier men than me. . . . The Priest at Saint Martin’s Church said that it was a blessing that they had so many children, and that none of them had died, but Friedrich could not see how it could possibly be a blessing to have so many children when not one of them could get a full belly no matter how hard he worked.

  Especially not in the winter, when they needed full bellies the most.

  Maria looked up at him sharply, as if she had gotten wind of his thoughts. But then she looked back down at her task, which was no easy one, slicing so carefully through the bread so as not to waste a crumb and carefully apportioning the lard so that everyone got the same tiny amount. When she had finished, she carefully—almost reverently—handed it over, slice by precious slice, into the outstretched hands. Then she protected her hand with her threadbare skirt and lifted the pot off the hook, took her own battered cup, and apportioned one cup of the cabbage soup to each of nine bits of abused tin or chipped pottery that the children passed her. When she had given Friedrich his, she lifted the kettle and poured out the rest—exactly a cupful—into her own vessel.

  They all ate slowly, carefully, dipping the bread into the broth and taking tiny bites and then, when the bread was gone, drinking what remained, and chasing the little bits of cabbage remaining with fingers and tongues until the vessels could not have been cleaner had they been scoured. Maria sent Pieter, the oldest, for the bucket of water in the corner, refilled the pot, and hung it back over the fire. They would all drink hot water if they got too cold, and to ease the complaints of still-empty stomachs.

  While they were relatively warm, and had something in their bellies, the children all piled together on the heap of rags that they called a bed, made of rags too small to be patched into clothing or too coarse to wear. In moments they were asleep. Maria sighed, and rubbed her belly. “I wish it was summer,” she said, sadly. “I long for green things and vegetables to eat. I feel I will die without them. Ramps! Oh, if only I could have ramps!”

  Friedrich winced. Of course she would crave what she couldn’t have. Vegetables in winter? Other than cabbage and potatoes, they were dearer than meat. When she had been pregnant in the summer, she had wanted meat, which they couldn’t afford at any time, and pickles. Now in the winter, she craved green things. But . . . this time was a little different. This time it seemed to him that her face was thinner than before, and more strained, and that there was a feverish, haunted look about her eyes. Was she voicing more than her usual complaints and cravings? Could it be that this time bearing the child would kill her?

  And then what would he do? He couldn’t work and watch over the children at the same time! Panic rose in his throat, though he kept his face stoic.

  “Rampion,” she said wistfully. “Oh, for a heap of rampion.”

  Unable to bear any more of this, or the frightened feeling in his belly, he stood up, abruptly. “I’m going back out,” he said gruffly. “By now everyone has cleared out from the winter market. I might find some cabbage leaves or onion tops, or maybe some spilled oats or barley.” He turned without another word and went out the door. As he closed it, he glanced behind, through the closing door. She was sitting there, still rubbing her swollen belly. He tried not to feel angry with her, but it was hard. What was he supposed to do? Conjure up food out of nothing? It took almost everything he could earn just to keep a roof over their heads!

  It was dark now, but that was all the better so far as he was concerned. No one would see him rummaging in the fouled straw left after the farmers at the winter market packed up their remaining wares and beasts and left. He was no longer too proud to hunt for the old discarded cabbage leaves, or even, if the light was good enough, pick through the straw for grain the hens might have left. Thanks be to God, there was a full moon and the snow was thin. That made foraging easier.

  But before he reached the market square his attention was diverted.

  He thought he saw a flash of light where no light should be, on the other side of a wall that surrounded what had once been a fine old house that was now as rundown as any other place in this slum. No one lived there, to his knowledge, and it had been boarded and locked up for as long as he and Maria had lived in this neighborhood. But behind that wall, it occurred to him, was what was left of a garden. And even a garden long-deserted might have things still growing in it that were worth salvaging. Roses bore hips that made good tea, and might give Maria some strength. There might be herbs. Maybe at one time there had even been vegetables, and some might still be there, half-wild. Perhaps there were withered apples.

  The thought was father to the deed. He found a place where he could scale the garden wall, and in a moment, he was over.

  He realized as he dropped down the other side that the “light” he had seen must have been the full moon reflecting off a glass witch-globe in the center of the garden. But that was not what caught his attention.

  No . . . what caught his attention was that somehow, some way, this garden was not a useless garden full of half-choked flowers and weeds, but—a vegetable garden. And more than that, it was a vegetable garden that was cultivated, and as full of produce as if it was harvest season. By some miracle, there was not so much as a flake of snow on the ground, nor were the plants frost-killed and rotting.

  There were squash, kohlrabi, and beans, onions, kale and cabbage, carrots, Brussels sprouts, and beets and turnips. There were peas, potatoes, radishes, leeks, parsnips, and the rampion that Maria craved
! He felt nearly faint at the sight of so much food.

  There was no sign of life in the house . . . and he did not hesitate for a moment at the theft he was about to perform. My children are starving. And no one has touched this garden. It would be a sin for it to go to waste and freeze and rot.

  An hour later, he was over the wall again, wearing his coat and jumper only, with his shirt over his back stuffed full of vegetables and serving as a sack.

  Maria wept when he spilled out his bounty on the hearth; wept, and gathered it all in, marveling and looking up as if to say something. But he didn’t stop to answer her questions, for this was an opportunity that might never come again, and while he had moonlight, he was going to steal as much as he could. After all, he had already stolen; the sin was committed, the deed was done, and he thought that how much he took really didn’t matter at this point. How was it the old saying went? Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. By the time the moon went down, the children were awake again, and there were vegetables stacked everywhere in the room, and herbs hanging upside down in bunches from a string knotted between two nails on the wall. The kettle of hot water now held more vegetables stewing away merrily, and potatoes baking in their jackets in the ashes, and they all went to bed again, exhausted, but knowing that, for the first time in more than a year, they would wake up to something to eat.

  In his dreams he continued to fill his shirt and bring out more food. But in his dreams, it wasn’t only vegetables he was looting; when he pulled up beet and turnip tops, there were loaves of bread and even a sausage or two attached to the greens.

  But then, he almost always dreamed of food. The children probably did, too. At least when he woke to the first light this morning there was something to fill his stomach.

  He would have very much liked to have lingered over his breakfast of roasted potato the way the children did, but he was well aware last night might have been a fluke. Surely, whoever had planted that garden was going to notice and take measures to protect it. So when he went out in the thin morning light to see if there was work again at the vintner, he detoured by the old house, fully expecting to find that he had been mistaken—that it was inhabited, and the occupants were now incensed over his raid on their garden.