From a High Tower

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I can tell you he was so little regarded that I rather doubt any of his men were bothering about looking in on him last night. More likely he wasn’t discovered until his orderly found the door was locked this morning.” The old woman drank her tea thoughtfully. “But you are right. You will be hunted. Or rather, Gunther will be hunted. No one will be looking for Giselle.” She put down her empty cup with a decisive gesture. “You will stay with me until your hair grows out more. While you are staying here, we will think about what you are to do next.”

  “But . . . I don’t have anything to wear but men’s clothing!” she protested weakly.

  Tante Gretchen rolled her eyes. “That is scarcely a problem.” She got up, and went to a clothes press under the mattress of her cupboard bed. She brought out hunting gear, but this was of much finer make than what Giselle was wearing, and it had clearly been tailored for a woman, with fine, subtle embroidery around each of the four pocket slits in the jacket. And instead of breeches, there was a divided skirt, which some women wore to ride astride. “That was mine as a girl your age, and I’ll never fit into it again, so there is no point in my keeping it,” the old Master said, laying the jacket, vest, and skirt out on the cot and stroking the wool once with a reminiscent hand. “No, you shall have it. And you are welcome to it.”

  Giselle hardly knew what to say. She was still feeling exhausted, and more than a bit befuddled, and she certainly did not like the feeling that she was being hunted—and this, clearly, was a safe haven. She stammered her thanks, but the old woman waved them off, going to the cupboard again and pulling out an old nightdress of the same size, yellowed with age, but still fine. “First, your wrists need proper bandaging. Then you can move the cot and bedding up to the loft so I have my hearth back. I am not risking a fall at my age, not to mention I don’t think I could get the bedding up there myself, much less the cot! Then you can get out of that clothing and into this. And last, you can go back to bed. Then we’ll talk about what you can do to repay me.”

  “What she could do” to repay the old woman at the moment seemed to consist of doing chores and reading books to her. Giselle didn’t mind—it wasn’t as if her savior was lounging about while Giselle worked, it was more as if Tante Gretchen was taking advantage of the situation by getting twice as much work done than she could manage alone. And Tante Gretchen liked to sit by the fire and knit of an evening while Giselle read. They had very similar tastes—and Giselle had discovered to her joy that the Earth Master had Karl May books she had not yet read. No matter what else was going on, or how her feelings of guilt and worry sometimes overwhelmed her, there was always that to look forward to: the warm fire, the old woman’s cheerful companionship, and getting lost in a tale of the Wild West.

  She wouldn’t hear of Giselle moving on for right now. “Let’s see what happens in the next few days,” was all she said, and although Giselle was impatient to get back to earning some money, she also was not at all eager to find herself arrested for murder.

  So Tante Gretchen was kneading dough for bread in the cottage while Giselle was sitting on the doorstep, shelling new peas into a bowl in her lap, when the soldiers came. There were four of them, all mounted on some of the most ordinary-looking horses she had ever seen, and they rode up the path to Tante Gretchen’s cottage as if they knew it well. They weren’t even trying to be quiet, so by the time they dismounted at the gate and tied their horses to the fence, the old woman had left the bread dough she was kneading and had come out to stand beside Giselle, wiping her hands on her apron.

  They opened the gate and trudged halfway up the path through the yard, and stopped. “Good morning, Frau Wildern,” said one who stood further along the path than the others. The sun was shining fully down on them, and Giselle wondered if they were getting warm in their wool uniforms.

  “And what brings you boys here this morning?” she called, shading her eyes with her hand and peering at them. “You’re the only one I know, Hans Pedermann. What are you soldiers doing out here in the forest?”

  All four of them reflexively pulled their caps from their heads and stood there holding their headgear against their chests, for all the world like schoolboys in the presence of the headmaster. Three of the four stared at the fourth one, as if they expected him to do all the talking. After a moment, he did.

  “Don’t mean to disturb you, Frau Wildern, but we’ve come to ask if you’ve seen a stranger about in your forest,” the young man said, his cheeks reddening with the effort of speaking to the formidable old woman. “He’d be a hunter, with a rifle.”

  “There are many hunters with rifles in my woods, and some of them are strangers—but not this season,” she said, one eyebrow raised. “This is not the season for hunting. Nor have I heard any shots fired since last winter. Why do you ask?”

  “There was a fellow calling himself Gunther von Weber who won the Maifest shooting contest. The Hauptmann didn’t like the look of him, so he looked the fellow up in the conscription rolls, and he wasn’t there. So he decided to conscript him on the spot.” The young man twisted his hat in his hands as Tante Gretchen gave him a hard look.

  “Is that legal?” she demanded, as Giselle sat silently, watching and listening. “He could have been an only son. He could have had a club foot. He might have been foreign-born—there are many reasons why he wouldn’t be on the rolls!” She began tapping her foot impatiently, and the young man flushed.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am but—” he made a little, helpless gesture with one hand. “—but it was the Hauptmann, you know? It didn’t matter if it was legal or not, if the Hauptmann wanted something done.”

  There was a long silence, made deeper by the fact that the air was still and not even leaves were rustling. Tante Gretchen stood there, hands on her hips, giving all four of the soldiers the sort of look that would make any young man squirm as if he had been found stealing a pie. Finally the silence was interrupted by a rook calling in the distance and two of Tante Gretchen’s hens who came clucking around the corner of the cottage.

  Tante Gretchen snorted. “So, go on. Did the fellow desert?”

  “In a manner of speaking. The Hauptmann took him into the office and locked the door.” Now the soldier paled a little. “We all knew what that meant, and we all knew what would happen to us if we interrupted, so we just . . . went about our business. In the morning, the orderly found the door still locked, and nobody answered at his knock, so he brought men to break the door down. The hunter was gone, and the Hauptmann was dead without a mark on him.”

  Tante Gretchen rolled her eyes. “Now boy, don’t you dare tell me you all think it was witchcraft and you want me to hunt out the man-witch for you! You know I don’t hold with such superstitious nonsense! I am a good woman! I go to Mass whenever I can! I have a shrine to the Virgin right here in my front garden! And just because I’m an old woman that lives in a cottage in the woods by herself, that doesn’t mean I’m possessed of magic powers and riding a broom to the Horned Mountain on Walpurgisnacht!”

  Giselle had to hide her face by concentrating very hard on her peas. It was clear that her role in this was to observe. She might have observed that all four of the young men were rather good looking—but that encounter with “Johann” when she was fourteen had put her off good-looking young men, and after her sorties into Maifests, strangers were no novelty to her.

  “No, no!” The scolding made the poor boy grow paler. “No, but the chief of police said we at least needed to find this von Weber fellow and bring him in for questioning, because he was the last man to see the Hauptmann alive! So we’ve all gone out as far as we think he might have gotten, and your woods would be a good place for a hunter to hide!”

  “Did he have a horse?” the old woman asked shrewdly. “Because if he didn’t, I doubt very much he got this far.”

  Now the four soldiers exchanged baffled looks, and one shrugged.

  “We don’
t know, I guess,” Hans admitted.

  “Giselle, you went mushroom hunting yesterday,” Tante Gretchen said, turning to Giselle. “Did you see a hunter, a horse, or signs of a camp?”

  “No signs of a camp, and the only horse here is mine, Tante Gretchen,” Giselle replied, truthfully. “And surely, if anyone had been hunting for food, we would have heard the shots.”

  “And surely, if someone had been afoot and on the run, and had come across this cottage, he would have stolen Giselle’s horse,” the old woman concluded. “I think you’ve been chasing a wild goose, at least in this direction.” She surveyed them all. By now, they really were starting to wilt—both from the hot sun they’d been standing in and Tante Gretchen’s forbidding expression. Giselle wondered what she would do next—after all, now she and the Earth Master had all the information they needed . . .

  Tante Gretchen, however, had other things in mind. She sighed dramatically, and threw up her hands. “But I can’t let you boys go all the way back empty. How about some beer and sausages? That should keep you filled up all the way back to Mittelsdorf.”

  All four of them brightened considerably at that. “Yes, please,” said Hans, and so bits of wood were set up in the yard for them to sit on, and Tante Gretchen brought them wooden cups of beer from a cask that held a brew of her own making. Giselle brought them fried sausages, and they flirted clumsily with her. At least, she thought it was flirtation. They called her a “pretty maid,” and thanked her far more than was necessary for being given a couple of sausages and a bread roll, and were careful not to do so when Tante Gretchen was within earshot. She feigned shyness, but it was mostly to hide the fact that she was so relieved that none of them recognized her, or even considered she might have been “Gunther,” that she felt a little giddy. And while they ate, they dropped plenty more information. How the chief of police was determined to blame someone for the Hauptmann’s death, for instance. How they suspected he was under pressure from his superiors to do so. How no one in the small garrison was at all unhappy that the Hauptmann had died, since their new officer was a vast improvement—“I’d give the man a medal, if it were up to me!”—but it wasn’t up to them, and they felt that “Gunther” was going to hang, guilty or not.

  “It’s not right,” Hans said, after enough beer to loosen his tongue. “But the authorities want someone to answer for it, and they won’t take our word for it that the old b—I mean, that the Hauptmann probably died because he got worked up over the idea of another public lashing and broke a vein in his brain. And if it had been me that had been locked in there with him, I’d have run, too.” The other three all nodded solemnly, though Giselle had felt chilled by their revelations.

  When they were done eating, they bade a very respectful farewell to Tante Gretchen, a seemingly regretful one to Giselle, and mounted up and rode back down the way they had come.

  “Peas,” said Tante Gretchen, as Giselle stood in the yard, peering after them, to make sure they were really going, and not, say, sneaking back to spy on them. Because at this point she was rattled enough to suspect almost anyone of anything.

  “Oh! Of course!” she said, starting a little, and went back to her interrupted chore, although she could not see how shelling peas was going to help her situation in the least.

  “Well,” the old woman said, going back to her dough as calmly as if they’d never been interrupted at all. “Now we know quite a bit. We know no one will recognize you now that you’re wearing skirts, we know they don’t even know you had a horse, much less that it looked like Lebkuchen, and we know that they have no idea what direction you traveled in. These are all good things.”

  “Yes, but . . .” Giselle didn’t want to seem at all ungrateful to Tante Gretchen, but this only worsened her situation. “We also know that the chief of police ordered I be found, which means he has probably telegraphed to every town and village that has a telegraph about me. Every single stranger that turns up in hunting gear to join the shooting contests will be stopped and questioned. So what am I to do now? I must earn some money, somehow, if I am to live!” Perhaps that was an exaggeration, but not a great one. Yes, she could hunt, but gunpowder was not free, nor the lead to cast bullets. Mother had been the one that did most of the preserving of vegetables and fruit, and she was not at all certain of her ability to imitate her. Nor could she count on the brownies and the faun to keep serving her; in fact, she had taken the considerable risk that when she returned, the chickens, goats and garden would still be there and in good order, because she expected to have enough money to replace at least the chickens if she had to.

  “Shell the peas,” Tante Gretchen said. “If nothing else, you can go to the Bruderschaft. They might not have dwarf-hordes of gold lying about, but they can probably spare enough supplies for one slender girl to live on until October. Then everyone will have forgotten, you can dye your hair and take a new name, and go in a different direction and earn money for winter supplies.”

  She bit her lip. She didn’t want to go to the Bruderschaft, hat in hand, but what choice did she have? And in good conscience, she was going to have to report to them anyway on the misadventure she had gotten herself into.

  As if reading her mind, Tante Gretchen added “I’ve already sent word to them through the Forest Elementals about your situation; you needn’t worry that you’re in trouble, but you should go tell them in person eventually.”

  Giselle swallowed. “Well then, when do you think I should leave?” she asked.

  Tante Gretchen left the bread dough to rest, and came to the doorway to peer up at the sky. “What do your sylphs tell you about the weather?”

  As usual, there was one hanging about, this time asleep on a branch in one of the trees nearby; there always was at least one, still, although she had greatly feared they might desert her after the night-sylphs had accidentally caused the Hauptmann’s death on her orders. But how could I have done any different? she asked herself, as she always did. What he would have done to me . . .

  She shook off the dark thoughts, and woke up the drowsy sylph with a thought. “Tante Gretchen would like to know what the weather will be for a while, please,” she asked, silently.

  The sylph yawned, and blinked sleepily. “Rain tomorrow and the next day, fine again for at least three.”

  “Thank you,” Giselle said, and the sylph yawned again and went back to sleeping on her sunny branch.

  “Well, you may as well stay until the rain is over,” Tante Gretchen said, logically enough, when Giselle reported what the sylph had said. “I can use the help. And I’d like you to finish our book before you go.”

  “And I will happily give it, and even more happily finish the book,” Giselle replied. Though as she finished shelling the peas, she tried not to think about the situation. She really did not want to be in the debt of the Bruderschaft—she was trying so hard to be independent, like Mother, and it felt like failure to have to come to them, proverbial cap in hand, in the very first year.

  With rain pouring down as hard as Giselle had ever seen it, there was not much they could do but things that could be done indoors. Since the cottage was so small, and Tante Gretchen was meticulous about keeping it clean, it was less than two hours’ work to have everything scoured. Obviously you could not wash clothing when it was raining, nor bake, so that left handwork. Tante Gretchen pulled her favorite chair up to the fire, piled her mending in one basket on her left and had her knitting in a second basket on her right, while Giselle had a lantern over her shoulder and the Karl May book about Winnetou she had promised to finish in her hands.

  She did her best to immerse herself in the story, because to tell the truth, she was having a hard time with her emotions. Anger, one minute, at the Hauptmann for spoiling her carefully made plans. Fear that she might still be caught . . . or that when she finally reached the Bruderschaft Lodge, they would have quite a different view of the situation from Tant
e Gretchen. Something rather like anger at the idea that even if they felt the same as the Earth Master, she would be in debt to them—because obviously Mother had wanted no such thing, or why else would she have made their home in the old abbey? Guilt, of course, because no matter how many times Tante Gretchen told her that it hadn’t been her fault, well, there was still a man dead, and it had been because of something she had done. Then anger again, because she knew very well what he would have done to her if he’d gotten the chance.

  It was much better, all the way around, to try and lose herself in the story. And in speculation: she already knew, for Mother had told her, that Elementals often differed greatly in form from one country to the next, so what form would the Elementals of the Apache take? Karl May gave no hint.

  Well, he was a writer, not an Elemental Magician, so he probably didn’t know, and the Indians he had met that were would not likely have told him anything. Elemental Magicians kept their abilities secret, after all. If you weren’t around others of your kind, and hadn’t been taught, you might even think you were going mad when you saw all the strange creatures populating the world and no one saw them but you. She was very glad that Mother had taken her away from her blood family for that reason alone!

  What would Mother think of the situation she was in now? Would Mother also have told her to throw herself on the mercies of the Bruderschaft?

  But what else could she do?

  “You’re getting hoarse, Liebchen,” the old woman said, putting aside the last bit of mending. “Time for a nice cup of tea and a cake, I think. I’m glad there’s no need to go out in that tempest; listen to that thunder!”

  “I like storms,” Giselle replied, setting the book aside.

  “Well, you would, your magic being Air and all.” Tante Gretchen carefully took the iron kettle off the hook over the fire and went to the little table where the teapot stood ready. “You must be careful of that, you know. Your Mother surely told you.”