From a High Tower (3 page)

The strange woman never returned to her house.

And Maria never forgave him.

G
ISELLE
leaned out of the window of her room at the top of the tower and drank in all the spring fragrances being carried up to her on the breeze. Her room had the best view of any in the former abbey, and she often wondered who had been the tenant back when the complex had been inhabited by the Sisters of Saint Benedict. The abbess herself? Or perhaps it had been a room devoted to communal prayer?

Probably the abbess,
she decided. It would have been a good place from which to keep an eye on the entire abbey. Mother said she had no idea why the abbey had been abandoned for so long, to the point where only the tower had been inhabitable when she had first taken it over, and only because the entire tower was built of stout stone. That had been long before Giselle had been born. By the time Mother brought her here as an infant, the tower had been completely renovated, all the other buildings had been reroofed with proper, strong tile, and the building attached to the tower itself, which had probably housed the nuns in their little cells, had been converted into spacious living quarters for Mother. Only the chapel remained in ruins. Mother never explained why she had not rebuilt the chapel, but then, why should she have? It wasn't as if she and Giselle needed a church.

There were four windows in Giselle's tower room, facing precisely in the four directions of the compass. Giselle preferred the view from the east window, which looked out over the valley meadow to the forest beyond, and to the mountains beyond that. Probably, back when the abbess had lived here, there had been nothing to keep out the winter winds but simple wooden shutters, and only a charcoal brazier to huddle over to keep out the cold. Mother had changed all that. There were proper glass windows
and
shutters in all the windows now, and a good fireplace on each floor of the tower.

Giselle wondered if dwarves had done the work. She'd never seen any here, but then, the work had been completed before she ever got here. Since it had all been stonework, it would have been logical for Mother to have made a bargain with dwarves to accomplish it. Mother was an Earth Master, after all, and dwarves were Earth Elementals.

I certainly can't imagine her allowing ordinary stonemasons here.

The nearest village—and it was a very small one—was over two days' ride away, in the next valley over from the abbey. You couldn't even see it from the top room of the tower. Giselle had never been there herself, only Mother, driving the cart out to get the things they could not produce for themselves and coming back again days later. Still, it wasn't as if she could be lonely. Not when she was surrounded by all the Elementals of her own Element, Air.

There were three of them here in the tower room with her, since she had flung open all four windows to the winds. Sylphs, who generally looked—at least to Giselle—like lovely, mostly naked women with wings. These three were all longtime friends of hers. One had the wings of a moth, one of a dragonfly, and one of a bird. They wouldn't give her their “true” names, of course, even though they trusted her, so she called them Luna, Damozel, and Linnet. Linnet was perched on the lantern hung from the peak of the roof, Luna was in the west window, and Damozel dozed on the mantelpiece. Generally when Mother was gone, she had one or more of the sylphs with her at all times, which was a great comfort. When she had been
very
little, there had been one of the Earth Elementals, a brownie, who had acted as a kind of nursemaid when Mother had to leave, but she had not seen old Griselda for many years now. It wouldn't have been wise to entrust the safety of a baby or a young child to the sylphs; they were well intentioned, but easily distracted. Even now, there was some sort of Earth Elemental who tended the chickens, the cow and the goats when Mother was gone, but Giselle had never seen it. It might have been a gnome; they were very shy. Eggs and milk simply appeared in Giselle's kitchen while Mother was away.

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.