She looks like the one who betrayed me.

Reddish-brown hair: the same. Ice-colored eyes: the same. A plain, unlovely girl, no money or manners, fit for a servant and nothing else. That is how the first one came, with a few others when I moved here and began hiring, acquiring the “help” because I had the funds to do so, not that I needed them. They gave me more time, anyway, so I could write undisturbed, knowing that when I remembered to eat, there would be food, and clean sheets when I decided to sleep. I slept little, but not because the bed was so cool and empty and I was always alone—by choice, mind you, why would I want any disruption from my vocation, my avocation?—but because my mind was (is still) always working except in sleep, and sleep was wasted time.

This first girl, this servant, I never saw, didn’t remember hiring, for a long time, until one day she appeared in the library with another visitor for me, a smug fellow who presented me with a puzzle he’d devised that he thought I couldn’t solve. Eh, the fool. I laughed in his face and asked why he bothered to bother me, and he smirked and asked if that meant I couldn’t solve it. I snatched it from him and with a dull pencil answered his pathetic test. His expression was precious, utter misery and dejection, as if I’d ruined his life’s work—and I probably had, and spared the masses who might have read his work instead of mine—and when I threw him out, this servant of mine quit admiring his tall handsomeness and looked at me instead until I dismissed her. And after that, it was always she who brought my dinner and straightened my chamber and caught glimpses of the script in my grimoire when she thought I didn’t know. Let her keep looking, I thought, and we’ll see how much she sees before her fragile little mind breaks.

I gave her chances, left my books open and papers scattered in the library while I ate and she waited on me, stayed up so late she had to keep bringing me candles, even left unlocked and unguarded the treasures I’d acquired: a powerful amulet, rare sword, legendary shield. I feigned sleep, lying in bed with my precious grimoire open across me and candles burning as if I’d given in to exhaustion. I heard her come in, then creep around extinguishing the candles save one, then stand over me, turning pages in the grimoire with hands so trembling, they would have wakened me had I really slept.

She did not go mad, this girl, and one day she brought me something, a few scribbles on a crumpled brown piece of paper in which some foodstuff had been wrapped. For the first time, she spoke to me outside of the dialogue necessary for her duties.

“I have a puzzle for you.”

“From whom?” I kept on with my writing, not noticing her more than necessary although she had become harder and harder not to notice; and why not? with her always there, always looking over my shoulder and disturbing the still air with her breathing and movement. “They didn’t bother to stay this time?”

“I wrote it.” Enough of a shock for me to look at her, but her eyes were cast down, very proper for a servant as if it weren’t so terminally rude of her to look at my books not out of interest in my work and me, but to try to create something I couldn’t solve. I went back to writing before she looked up although it would have been better if she had seen my disgust and scorn and righteous anger.

“I don’t have time right now. I’ll look at it later.”

“Yes, sir.” A little sigh from her, luckily of disappointment and not impatience, or I wouldn’t have looked at her work at all. Lucky not for me but for her, or maybe not lucky for anyone, because when I looked at her puzzle that night, I couldn’t solve it. Two minutes I gave myself—the hardest I’d ever been brought took six—and I thought that was generous, but two passed, four, six, ten, and no answer. Hours and the night sped by and I could not solve it, and when she asked the next day I said I hadn’t looked at it yet. This worked for a few days, days after nights of squinting at the puzzle in the dim light of one candle so she wouldn’t bring more and see my struggle, but then she asked if I’d please try it and I could hear her think what the last visitor said, do you mean you can’t solve it?

I tried again with her there watching, and after a quarter hour she knew she had conquered me. She said she’d leave me alone to work and I did work, searching books in my library and covering bits of paper with markings, the symbols she used, even my own name. And every day she asked if I had finished, and she took to smiling as she asked, until that sweet smile was repulsive and haunted what sleep I got, until all the servants left, she among them, and I worked and worked until death was all around me, and still I had no answer.

And now this second girl, first to push open my castle door in all this time, and maybe trying to find shelter from the storm I hear creeping towards me across the sky. This girl so familiar, maybe my servant’s granddaughter, or something more distant for I have not bothered to mark time. Maybe no relation at all, just like her, but certainly not with the same brain beneath her burgundy kerchief, not here to torture me with her riddles, but for me to torture with mine. Let’s see if she can do what the first did, if she can gain access to my treasures: amulet, sword, shield, grimoire. If she can solve my puzzles and find her way down to me, where my body lies with its ravished brain and I lurk free of its confines with my bed still empty and her puzzle still unsolved.