From a High Tower

by Mercedes Lackey

  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!”

  The raven hopped to another branch, hiding behind the trunk of the tree. Now he had a clear view of all of them. All were dressed in heavy, dark wool coats. Two were much older than the others. All were blond; the older man and woman had grey in their hair, yet their faces did not so much show age as ill will. The three at the fire all had a clear family resemblance; all had blue eyes, square chins, and sharp cheekbones. The youngest of those three wore a sullen look, as he glowered out from beneath furrowed brows. If it had not been for a uniform coldness to their eyes, and a cruel cast to their mouths, they would have been handsome.

  “Those are never Romany,” Rosa said flatly. “So where did they get that vardo?”

  “I very much doubt they bought it,” Giselle replied. She would have said more, but just then the one in the chair turned his head to say something in an undertone to the old woman, and she gasped with recognition.

  It was “Johann Schmidt.”

  “Well, Mother, my servants cannot get past her defenses either,” he was saying.

  “What is it?” Cody asked.

  “That—that’s the man that—years ago—” She couldn’t finish her statement, but they knew who she was talking about. “This must be his family! So that is how he escaped after he fell!”

  The youngest man in the mirror snickered. “Father told you that you shouldn’t have been so overconfident.”

  “A family!” Rosa exclaimed, and shook her head. “Of all the things I would have guessed it was never that our attackers would be a family!”

  Between the family resemblance and the fact that the two younger men addressed the older couple as “Mother” and “Father,” it was clear what they were dealing with now. A family of magicians. Probably “Johann” was the watcher and the Air Master that Giselle had sensed. And that explained . . . everything . . . about all those years ago.

  “I never would have thought that bastard had a family,” Giselle said, through clenched teeth.

  “I hope you have another idea now, brother,” growled the younger man. “All we did was seal them into a nice, cozy cave for the winter. They have all the food and drink in there that they need, aye, and firewood too, and what do we have out here? Nothing, that’s what! We’ve got only enough food for a week, while they feast in there! We’re sleeping in a cold wagon and they have warm fires and blankets and featherbeds! We haven’t even got a horse to pull us out of here, because you said we could take theirs instead, and told us to beat it to exhaustion to get here! You swore that we’d have them out of a ruin in no time. And what do we find? A fortress! And if that isn’t bad enough, you swore the bitch was without allies now that her protector was dead, and we find out there’s plenty of mages in that stone vault!” His features were contorted with anger. “Just as you were oh so confident you could steal the old one’s treasure all those years ago, and talked me into coming along. And then instead of sticking to that plan, you saw the girl and had to have her power too! And look where all that got you!”

  “And this is why you are an idiot berserker, and not a mage, and never will be, kleine Dieter,” the man that Giselle had known as “Johann” sneered. “You get one idea in your head, and that’s all there is room for.”

  “Well, it’s a damn good thing for you that the idea I got in my head years ago was to haul your broken carcass away from that bitch and her bitch mother, and take you to our mother!” Dieter shouted, standing up and clenching his fists, spittle flying from his lips. “And it’s a damn good thing for you that I still serve as your legs, you crippled eunuch!”

  “Sit down, Dieter!” the old man thundered. “Or by all the dark gods I will make you his double!” With a curse, Dieter spat in his brother’s direction and sat back down, wearing a snarl.

  “Obviously they were better prepared than we thought,” said “Johann,” as if Dieter’s outburst had never happened. “That’s no matter. I always have more than one plan. We have the power we got from sacrificing those filthy gypsies. That’s enough to build a frost giant. Or between us, Father and I can summon the Breath of the Ice Wurm. Or both.”

  “Both,” said the old woman, her eyes bright with emotions that Giselle could not read. Hate? Greed? Both? “Better be safe. But we need to have that girl and whatever allies she’s got in there out alive, or we’ll never get their power.”

  “Oh, too bad you can’t get her power the proper way, brother,” sneered Dieter. “But you can’t do that anymore, now, can you? You ought to let a real man have her—”

  “Oh yes, a real man who’d kill her in his rage and let the power drain away altogether? Just like you did the first girl we let you have? You get no second chance, dolt.” “Johann” spat into the snow. “The village must be missing its idiot with you gone.”

  “That’s enough Johann!” the old man growled. “You’re on probation yourself, here. We’re only giving you a second chance at this bitch because you promised a rare fount of power from her and any of the treasure her protector left behind. So your plan had better work, or you’ll be the one stretching his neck on the altar.”

  “You and what army will put me there, Father?” Johann grated back. “Even crippled, I can take you!”

  This might have turned into something even more interesting than it already was, had the old woman not hissed at them. “Be quiet!” she spat. “I think I heard something!”

  And with that, the vision faded away.

  “What happened?” Giselle asked, stabbed with fear.

  “The raven faded into the spirit world,” Fox said, in reassuring tones. “A wise move, to avoid detection. They will find no trace of him. He will return to his post when he believes it is safe—or if that does not happen, at night I can send an owl. And now . . . now we know what it is we are dealing with.”

  “The Breath of the Ice Wurm. . . .”

  They turned to Rosa, who was as white as the snow outside. “What?” Cody snapped. “What is it?”

  “It’s . . . cold. The very essence of cold,” Rosa replied, her words laden with a fear that Giselle had never heard in her before. “It’s cold so intense that it is said that even fire freezes. If they can direct that at us, nothing, no spell, no protection, will keep it out. A
nd there is nothing we can do to keep ourselves warm enough in here. We’ll freeze to death. That’s if we’re lucky.”

  “And if we’re not?” Giselle asked, her hands trembling and fear running down her spine. She had never seen Rosa at a loss before, and never, ever seen her show more than a moment of fear. To see Rosa so terrified made her insides clench with fear herself.

  “And if we’re not . . . they’ll manage to build that Frost Giant they spoke of. It won’t care about dwarven protections. It won’t care about stone walls. It will just walk up to the walls and bash them down, and we’ll be exposed like chickens when a bear cracks open their coop.” Suddenly she put her face in her hands and began to cry. “I can’t do anything about either! I don’t have that kind of power! And no one I knows does!”

  Giselle found herself plunged into dark despair. If Rosa didn’t know how to handle this situation . . . what hope did they have? They didn’t have a chance! And . . . not only were all her friends going to die, but the people she was closest to were going to die horribly, and so was she!

  And in that moment, as her mind froze with terror . . . she remembered something. Something that Rosa herself had said.

  When you are fighting against something or someone that is powerful in magic, and they know that you, too, are a magician, more often than not they completely forget to guard themselves against a purely physical attack. That has saved my life, and more than once.

  And she heard herself speaking, calmly, before she had even consciously formed the words, before she had even thought past that fear. It was as if something was speaking through her, and as if Mother was once again putting a comforting arm around her shoulders.

  “Well,” she said, putting her hand on Rosa’s shoulder, as Mother used to do for her. “Then we’ll just have to kill them all before they get a chance to put their plan into motion. As you told me, they will be expecting magic to oppose them, not physical force. Simple, really.”

  Later she was a little appalled that she had said that out loud . . . but no one else seemed in the least shocked. Cody and Fox had even nodded in approval.

  And really, what other choice did they have? It was quite clear that this was a situation of kill or be killed.

  The raven evidently did not feel it was safe to come back, so after nightfall, Fox sent out an owl. It had been a long wait, but one in which they had discussed . . . a lot of plans.

  “Look. ’Member when we reckoned that the strongest thing we had was us?” Cody finally said. “That we gotta make sure they couldn’t put somethin’ to drive us apart? Well, don’t y’all think the other way ’round goes fer them?”

  Giselle’s eyes widened. “They’re practically at each other’s throats, all the time. And if we can get them separated . . .”

  “They’ll be so busy thinking of themselves, they won’t come to the aid of one of the others,” Rosa agreed. “What we have to do—”

  “Is pick our ground. An’ choose our opponents,” Cody finished, and grinned at her.

  “The most dangerous of them seems to be this Johann,” Fox observed. “He may be a cripple and unable to move, but that has made him all the stronger in magic. No one will be able to approach him.”

  “Yes . . .” Giselle said, slowly. “But I don’t have to.”

  It was already colder by the time Fox sent his owl out. And through the owl’s eyes they saw there was a mound of snow in the meadow near the abbey that had not been there before. “That’s the frost giant,” Rosa said. “Or it will be. It will take them days to grow the thing, but they have already started the Breath of the Ice Wurm, you can tell by how much colder it is.” She thought for a moment. “Actually, that can work in our favor. There will be a crust of ice on top of the snow by morning that will be thick enough to hold us.”

  “Yes, but how’ll we move an’ fight on ice?” Cody asked “I could make snowshoes iffen the snow was still soft—”

  “I have just the thing,” Giselle said, instantly, and ran for the rooms that had once been Mother’s, where her things were still stored. She came back with two sets of ice spikes that you could strap onto your boots or shoes. “Here,” she said, giving one set to Cody and one to Rosa. “You’re the two that will need them.”

  Cody examined them with interest. “That’ll do’er,” he agreed. “But it’d be best iffen I kin get this bastard under the trees, where th’snow ain’t so deep.”

  They had already picked their opponents; Cody wanted the old man, pointing out that the one advantage he had was that he had the same power, but opposite—fire against cold. “An’ he’ll have ’bout used his up, doin’ that there frosty giant an’ the ice breath. So I reckon when it comes t’fightin’, ’lessen he drops them spells, he ain’t gonna hev no more’n me.”

  And that was another point of getting their enemies separated. If none of them knew that the others were fighting, they’d have no reason to drop an ongoing work of Great Magic. Such a thing needed too much concentration to put into motion, and there were consequences to breaking a work of Great Magic before it had completed. The power could snap back on you. You could lose control of your Elementals.

  “So, I druther hev that there Dieter, but . . .” He looked askance at Rosa. “I ain’t gonna fight you fer ’im. You’ll likely black my eye.”

  “Yes I would,” Rosa said firmly. “If he’s a true berserker, then he does more than just go battle-mad. He’s a shape-shifter. And I have things to deal with a shape-shifter. You won’t fit my special armor, and you don’t know how to use my axe or my crossbow.”

  “Crossbow, mebbe. Special armor, no. An’ I ain’t never seen no shape-shifter.” Cody cleared his throat awkwardly. “So I reckon I’ll take on th’ old man.”

  “The witch is mine.” Fox’s eyes glittered in a fashion that suggested he was very pleased with this. “She holds the stolen power, and perhaps the stolen souls, of too many. I shall be pleased to free it, and them.”

  They planned.

  And then they got Elfrida to feed them a very special meal, made in her oven, and despite everything, they slept.

  Fox slipped out first, swathed head to toe in a kind of oversuit that Elfrida had whipped up for him overnight out of sheets. He left in the early dawn, and if Giselle had not been watching for him, she never would have seen him against the snow. He left the mirror behind, tied to the raven, who had decided it was safe to observe again, from a distance. The witch had begun a scrying spell using a mirror of her own, presumably to keep an eye on the outside of the abbey, so that they could ambush anyone who ventured out. This was exactly what they wanted. In fact, their plan counted on it.

  The fire had predictably died down overnight, and just as predictably, there was insufficient wood for it. Dieter, who seemed to have gotten the job of woodcutter as well as every other chore that neither his mother nor his father cared to do, was sent out, with much scolding, to fetch more. That was Rosa’s signal; like Fox, she too was swathed in a garment made of a white sheet, and out she went.

  When there was no sign that anyone in the camp had noticed her leaving, and the raven had determined Dieter was well out of earshot of the camp, no matter how much noise he made, it was Cody’s turn.

  And he was . . . something of a sight. He was bundled up in Mother’s old woolen cape with the hood up. Over his trousers he wore a skirt. His head was so wrapped in a long scarf that nothing was visible but his eyes . . .

  ...and the two blond braids that hung down over the breast of his cape.

  They were two of Giselle’s braids, the hair that she had gratefully cut short when they first arrived. These, and Rosa’s spell of illusion, should make him pass at a distance for her.

  “I look like a durn fool,” he said, voice muffled by the scarf.

  “There’s no one to see you but me and Kellermann,” Giselle pointed out. “And Kellermann looks even sillier.”
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br />   That was because Kellermann was also disguised as Giselle, with another two braids dangling over the cloak he wore. Which was Giselle’s. As were the dirndl and smock, and perfume. Rosa had worked the much more difficult spell of seeming on him, and even to Rosa’s eyes, she had to concentrate on the man she knew was under all that in order to see him. Otherwise it was like looking into a mirror.

  “All right, out you go,” she said, and off Cody went. There was a window in the storage above the kitchen he could just barely fit through and climb out of that would let him out onto the snow drifted to the second floor. He trudged down the stairs, and in about half an hour, the witch bit off an exclamation.

  “The girl!” she spat. “The little bitch is getting away! What a time for Dieter to be cutting wood!”

  “I’ll get her, never fear,” the old man rumbled, and got to his feet. A moment later a sort of ripple passed over him, and he seemed to disappear. “She’ll never see me coming. Ha.”

  “She had better not. She’s at full power, and you are—” Johann snapped.

  The old man interrupted him. “I am your senior in years, wisdom and power, boy!” his voice snarled out of the ripple in the air. “And don’t you forget it. Or cripple or not, I’ll teach you that lesson all over again.”

  Then came the hardest part. Waiting. Waiting until they were sure that the old man was too far from their camp to call back. “All right,” Giselle said, finally. “Now, Kellermann.”

  He was faster than Cody had been, even with the burden of a dress. It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes later that the witch let out a volley of curses that practically scorched the air, and Johann, who had been watching the mirror beside her, echoed her. “It was a trick! It was all a trick! The first one must have been the Bruderschaft hunter. This one is her!” The old woman looked wildly about, cursed again, and picked up a staff and a sickle. “Curse men to the darkest hells, why are they never with you when you need them?”