From a High Tower Read online

  There were other sorts of Air Elementals than the sylphs, of course. There were great ones, like the Four Winds, dragons of the Air, and Storm Elementals, and according to the books she had studied, there were djinns of the Air and tiny pixies, and all manner of bird spirits. Giselle had more than once, especially in winter, watched the great Storm Elementals playing in the clouds. Sometimes in vaguely human shape, and sometimes as powerful vortices of wind and cloud, she had marveled at them until Mother had made her close the windows and the shutters. “Don’t attract their attention yet, my little rampion,” she would murmur kindly. “They do not know how to play gently.”

  Mother was right, of course. Elementals were not all as trustworthy as brownies or as fragile as sylphs. You had to know your magic, had to be a Master, before you dared have dealings with the Greater Elementals. At fourteen, Giselle was only just beginning her serious studies. It would be years, maybe decades, before she dared to make contact with one of the Greater Powers of Air. If she ever did.

  “Why would you want to dance with the Great Ones?” asked Luna, lazily. Giselle turned away from the window to meet the eyes of her ethereal companion. “They are too serious. They do not know how to have fun.”

  She had to giggle at that. The sylphs didn’t seem to know how to do anything but have fun.

  Luna’s wings waved lazily back and forth as she smiled at Giselle. She had lovely white moth wings that glowed as if they were made of moonlight—the reason that Giselle had named her “Luna” in the first place. “I hope you never forget how to have fun. So many magicians are always dour and serious. So tiresome.”

  “I’ll try not to, Luna,” Giselle replied. With a glance backward at the vista from the window, she left the three Elementals lazing about her room and went down the stairs to the lower levels of the tower. Unlike the sylphs, she couldn’t live on air alone, it was past breakfast time, and she was hungry.

  Mother always had meals precisely on time, but when she was away, Giselle tended to eat irregularly. There was a tiny little kitchen on the bottom floor of the tower, a miniature version of the bigger one that Mother used. Mother said the big one had been the “refectory kitchen”—Giselle guessed that was where the sisters of the abbey had done all their cooking. It was certainly huge, but Mother said she liked lots of room when she cooked. And, indeed, perhaps that was because in the fall and winter, she often cooked large batches of things that could be kept in the freezing cold of the cold-pantry and would not spoil, and in the summer and a little in the spring, she put up huge batches of jams and jellies, preserved fruits and vegetables. She even cured whole hams of boar and venison!

  Even when it would have been convenient, Mother did not seem to use her magic very much, at least not when Giselle was around.

  Luna left her window and followed Giselle all the way down into the kitchen, which was unusual. The sylphs didn’t care for the enclosed room, which was only illuminated by lanterns and high slit windows at the ceiling. But it seemed that Luna’s curiosity was overcoming her distaste for walls this evening. She perched out of the way while Giselle cut herself some bread and cheese and filled a little bowl with pickles. “Where is the Mother?” Luna asked, as Giselle poked up the fire in the little hearth and held the bread and cheese on a toasting fork over the coals to melt.

  “She went to Fredericksburg,” Giselle said, keeping a careful eye on her food.

  “Why?”

  Being with the sylphs, Mother said, sometimes with exasperation, was like being with a little child. Once they decided to converse, they often had never-ending questions, and often questions they had asked before, since it was hard to keep their attention on anything for long. Giselle didn’t mind.

  “There are things that we need that we do not have and cannot get from the forest or our garden, our chickens, our bees, our little cow, or our goats,” she explained patiently. “Flour and salt and spices and sugar. Books. Cloth. Needles and thread.”

  “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.”

  Where did that come from? Giselle wondered. She didn’t even know if sylphs could hunger.

  “That may be so,” she said, feeling stubborn. “And it is true I have never known want. But I do not think that a man who loved his child would give it away for the sake of a wagonload of vegetables, and I don’t really understand why Mother feels obligated to him.”

  Luna only smiled. “When will she return?”

  Giselle consulted the calendar. “At any hour from today on,” she said, feeling a happy thrill of excitement—for there would certainly be new books, and perhaps some beautiful new fabric to make into new clothing, and the treats that Mother always brought back from the city. Mother’s Earth Mastery could allow her to grow amazing things, but she could not grow exotic spices, and she could not grow chocolate. Giselle’s mouth watered at the thought of chocolate.

  They could have done without the fabric, Giselle supposed. Mother was very patient, but she said herself that she was not patient enough to spin her own thread and weave her own cloth. She had taught Giselle how to do both, but . . . Giselle was not very patient at all. To be honest, it was very hard for her to just sit and do handwork; she found it terribly tedious.

  But—books! She hoped there would be
a new Karl May book! The ones set in the Orient were very, very good, but the ones set in America, in the Wild West, were superb! Old Surehand, Old Firehand, and especially Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. She could not get enough of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Especially Winnetou and the other Indians. She wondered what it would be like, to be an Elemental Master on the plains. What the Elementals would look like. They were different in other places, she knew from her studies. And what would it be like to stand in a place where the horizon was flat, where the land was flat for as far as you could see, and not hemmed in by mountains?

  Luna brightened. “Will there be new ribbons?” she asked. Giselle smiled. The sylphs loved to play with ribbons, and would wear them to shredded tatters, twirling them about and using them in games of tag. Mother always made a point of bringing bolts of ribbon back from her trips to the city.

  “Of course there will be new ribbons,” Giselle promised. “Mother would never forget you.” Luna clapped her hands in glee.

  Giselle finished her meal and went back upstairs. She didn’t much care for the kitchen either, it was so dark, and so close. But she had to cook her food somewhere, and when Mother was gone, she was locked into the tower.

  She took the stone stairs that spiraled up the tower wall two at a time; there was nothing like a handrail, but she had been scampering up and down these stairs since she was old enough to toddle, and it never occurred to her to feel fear.

  This tower had four levels. The bottom was the kitchen, and had been her bedroom as well until she was old enough to safely navigate the stairs. The next level was the library and workroom, where she took her lessons and learned her magic. The third level was the storeroom, where everything was kept that wasn’t a book, and the final, top story was her bedroom. Besides her bedroom, none of the rooms had anything but slits for windows.

  She breathed a sigh as she got to her own room and the wide-open windows again. So did Luna. The sun was just setting, and the view from the tower was particularly glorious tonight. The very air seemed full of golden light, and the long shadows cast by the trees across the meadow were a deep, deep amber.

  Damozel woke up, stretched and yawned. Linnet flitted down from the lantern and landed beside the west window. Her fellow sylphs joined her.

  “We will see you at dawn, magician,” Luna said, as the other two took turns balancing on the windowsill before launching themselves out onto the evening breeze. She did not wait for an answer; sylphs lived very much in the moment, and seldom waited on human politeness.

  Sylphs could flit about at night, of course, but the ones that did tended to be shy and secretive and seldom visited Giselle. Giselle leaned out of the window to watch her friends soar up into the clouds. She often wondered if they slept up there, and if the clouds were as comfortable as they looked.

  She remained leaning out of the window, dreamily watching the sunset and twilight stealing over the forest. From here, it looked so peaceful, and near the abbey, it actually was, but all sorts of things could be lurking deeper into the trees—

  “Hello up there!”

  A deep voice called from just beneath her, startling her and making her jump, yelp and nearly hit her head on the top of the window frame. Her heart beating wildly, she looked down to see that there was a man standing just beneath the window. A man . . .

  She knew what a man was, she’d met at least three when members of the Bruderschaft came to consult with Mother. But none of them had been nearly this handsome. Or young.

  Because he certainly was younger than any man she had seen before. She wasn’t very good at estimating ages, but she didn’t think he could be more than a few years older than she. He was blond, his hair pale in the twilight, with a wonderful face, like a warrior in one of her books: clean-shaven, square jawed, with a fine brow and clear eyes. She couldn’t tell what color they were in this light but she thought, given that he was blond, that they were probably blue.

  “I’m very sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you!” the man said, pulling his hunter’s hat off and clutching it at his chest.

  “How did you get down there?” she asked, telling her heart to calm down. It didn’t, but at this point she suspected that had more to do with the man’s handsome features than the fact that he had startled her.

  “I came around the east side of your tower,” he said. “I’m a hunter, I’m very quiet. I didn’t even know there was anyone living here until I saw you at your window. I apologize for frightening you!”

  She smiled down at him as he peered earnestly up at her. “Apology accepted. It’s all right, really, no harm done.” She felt an odd shyness and found herself tongue-tied. What to say to a handsome young stranger? She had no idea.

  He seemed under no such burden. “I thought I would come survey this part of the world before hunting season begins,” he continued, and shrugged. “Too many others in what used to be my forest. Time to move on.”

  “Oh,” she managed, resting her chin on her hands so she could look down at him more easily. “I don’t know anything about that.” After all, the men of the Bruderschaft, although they were hunters, were not primarily hunters of game. It was the evil things of the forest that they hunted . . .

  “But what are you doing, out here in the middle of the wilderness?” he asked, putting his hat back on his head and tipping it at a jaunty angle.

  “I live here, with Mother,” she replied.

  He shook his head. “I cannot imagine living alone in such a remote place. What do you do with your time?”

  She had to laugh at that. “We work, of course! There are all the animals to tend, the garden to care for, food to make, clothing to sew, cleaning to do—what do you think we do? Gaze out of tower windows all day?”

  “And here I thought you were a princess, who only had to do just that!” he replied, with an ingratiating smile. “May I come in to see your tower?”

  “When Mother gets home,” she replied truthfully. “She locks the door when she is gone, and she has the only key.”

  “Doesn’t she trust you?” He frowned.

  “She doesn’t trust the things in the forest,” she corrected him. “I don’t mind.”

  “Hmm. Well, there are gypsies in the forest, and tramps. She’s probably wise.” He nodded sagely. She smiled.

  “You haven’t told me your name,” she pointed out. “I’m Giselle.”

  “And I am Johann Schmidt,” he replied, and swept off his hat in a flourishing bow. “At your service. Shall I tell you all about myself?”

  She felt herself coloring all over again. “Oh,” she replied. “Please!”

  Johann stayed until moonrise, then bowed again and took his leave, promising to come back on the morrow. Giselle could not remember ever having been so excited at the prospect of something, not even when learning new magic. After all, her magic had been a part of her for as long as she could remember, but handsome young men were things she had only read of in books, and a handsome young man standing beneath her window for hours just to talk to her was something entirely new.

  The men of the Bruderschaft that had visited Mother had not had much time for her; she understood that, of course, to come all this way to this remote part of the Black Forest, deep in the mountains, they must have had very urgent business indeed. They certainly had no time to spare for idle chat. To have another person besides Mother interested enough in her to regale her with tales was wonderful.

  To have that person be a very handsome young man was intoxicating.

  After Johann was gone, she spent a long time just dreamily staring up at the night sky, for once not watching for the shyer and more elusive sylphs and other Air Elementals that only came out at night.

  In the morning there was no sign of Johann Schmidt, not from any of the four tower windows, and with a feeling of disappointment, she went about her usual chores. Of her particular sylph friends only Li
nnet turned up, and she seemed listless, and soon left.

  The milk was set out in pans to rise; she skimmed off the cream and put the separated milk and cream in the “special” pantry where things were not allowed to spoil. Giselle made herself something to eat and had her breakfast up in her room with a glass of milk she had set aside. There still was no sign of Johann.

  As listless as Linnet had been, Giselle turned over pages in the history books that Mother had left her to study. Truth to tell, she didn’t think she was a very good scholar at the best of times, and right now, with vague discontent standing between her and the pages, she wasn’t making much headway with them.

  So she set the books aside and turned to another tedious chore, which at least had the virtue of requiring attention without concentration.

  She unwound her braids from her head, unbraided them, and began combing out her hair.

  This was a far different task for her than it was for Mother. Giselle’s hair grew at a rather astonishing pace.

  Right now, it was roughly twice as long as she was tall, unbraided, and when Mother returned it would be time for her to cut it again. There was an entire chest full of locks of hair as long as Giselle was tall. Mother said this had something to do with her magic; certainly the smaller of the Air Elementals, the pixies and other little things she had no name for, had something to do with it. Mother was no help there, except to call them elber, sort of generally. Some of them looked like very tiny sylphs, some like fantastic winged creatures that were part insect, part human, and part plant. They all liked to play in her hair when she unbound it; she let them, because they untangled it as they went.

  The rate at which it grew varied. It could grow as much as a foot in a week, though only rarely. It generally grew about a foot a month, which meant she had to unbraid it, comb it out, and rebraid it at least once a week. Washing it took almost half a day.

  Mother used to joke that she should just let it keep growing and never cut it, saying then you could let yourself down out of the window by your own hair. As a child that had always made her giggle.