The Eye of Wysaerie

Chapter Ten: The Lives Left Behind

Elessa was not surprised when Gaspar was sent off with a saddlebag of coin, Though Ilmar called it a reward, she thought it a bribe to smooth Gaspar's ruffled feathers. Though Elessa felt that her sympathies should lie with Mr. Third, she knew no pity but self-pity, and her reservoir of sorrow was dammed by thoughts of her father. Not that Gaspar lost sleep over Ilmar and Adelae shacking up in the wizard's ascensor apartment. Ilmar, also, had become cordial to Gaspar, and reserved his cruelest jests for his new paramour. When this triangle of false friendship emerged, Elessa knew herself to be a point unknown to that trinity, an outsider in a castle in the sky.

Every day Elessa resented the castle more and more, for it was no architecture, but a piece of Ilmar himself. Which is not to say that she disliked the inspiring style, as the enchantment had smoothed the vast rock impossibly sheer in parts, with crystalline windows, lacy moldings, and staircases that twisted not only upwards, but diagonally, taking you to a different part of the floor above. An earthly architect would have had a hard time describing it, for it had no prosaic gatehouse, but a cave hollowed into an enormous geode, and it had no walls made of locked stone, but a stone box, all of one piece, that was squeezed upwards from the mountain. The spell-carved castle was not a masterpiece of planning, not a life's work of human hands, but the concretion of Ilmar's ego from a single thought and naked will. As the days drew on, Elessa felt that even her lonely moments were mirrored in this stone reflection of the wizard.

Long at ease with herself, Elessa was unaccustomed to the misery and loneliness of being removed from the society of others, and so she found herself applying to a new society, the society of books. Ever an imaginative girl who consumed the books and scrolls available to her, in the wizard's care Elessa became bookish, cutting corners in her duties to find more time for study. No longer perusing a single subject, Elessa read by candlelight until her eyes were red. The constant grinding was not unlike farming, except the gruelling mental labor enervated her instead of making her stronger.

Though the corral became untidy, and the griffins in her care became rumpled, Ilmar was distracted by his insufferable coquette, who had become a burden not only on the wizard, but his estate. While at first the wizard happily made many steep descents to fill her gourmet orders, as the days drew on, he went from affectionately handing her the delicacies to levitating them toward her, to carelessly tossing them next to her on the divan. While Ilmar was initially delighted to serve her dishes cooked by his own hand, in time he delegated this to one of his servants, even giving the task to Shaul, who in his ensorcelment didn't know salt from sugar. By the end of Ilmar and Adelae's black honeymoon, hundreds of griffins, frustrated by an inconsolable craving for their absent master's attentions, looked with rage on Adelae. When the beasts took to perching on the battlements, Ilmar magically shaped stone bars from the castle walls to flow over the windows.

To Elessa, Adelae was particularly onerous, remembering and resenting her as a free spirit half her age. Finding the confident young woman in her power, Adelae punished her by making Elessa attend her in the smallest matters, the pettier the better. In addition to her many duties and her constant reading, Elessa was forced into a new calling, that of a jane of all trades--not only a maid and valet, but a seamstress, shoe-shiner, plumber, cook, secretary, and scribe. Though Ilmar was once the pinnacle of Elessa's loathing, that hate ebbed when the odious Lady eclipsed him, and because Ilmar dismissed Elessa when entertaining Adelae. Though she harbored a vengeful resentment toward the wizard, she could not deny that in being relieved from the horrid woman's presence she felt immense gratitude. Though exhausted from her double duty to the cruel wizard and the crueler adulteress, she would walk briskly not to her room, but the library.

After Elessa read every book on the safe shelf, she re-read them, and learned, through observing Ilmar out of the corners of her eyes, the trick of handling a few tomes on the entrapped shelf of dangerous books. Abstruse volumes she familiarized herself with as soon as possible, so that she might use them later as a reference when the rare opportunity arose, while the rest she absorbed, reading and rereading them for knowledge, entertainment, diversion, or fascination.