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Sergey
I don’t remember exactly what year it was when my older brother, Pavel, returned to the Quendi Ice Forest with his Quendi Lord and took me with him. I was young, though—maybe ten or so—when I left my old village. I believe time might have been measured differently in the Quendi Forest.
The thing about time is that once you’ve lost it, you can’t ever get it back, no matter how hard you try. My father tried to once, not long before Lord Juul returned for Pavel. He came upon me, late one afternoon as I was gathering wood for our fire, begging me to go away with him and leave my brother behind. He looked sad and sorry for himself as he stood there in the growing dusk, twisting his cap in his hands. He told me that Pavel was changed by his time with the Elves, and he only wanted to save me from Pavel, if he could. Father wanted me to give him another chance and stay with him instead of going with my brother.
When I shook my head and refused, telling him it was too late, his face changed, and he struck me to the ground with his fists. I covered my head with my arms to try and protect my face from further damage, the way I’d learned to whenever he hit me, but he took off his belt and beat me with it on my back and my legs, wherever he could reach, cursing and yelling at me.
I suppose Pavel heard all the noise because the next thing I knew, he was beside me, standing between us with his fists clenched and shouting at our father, making dire threats and promises we both knew he’d have no trouble keeping.
He had spent months with the Immortals, and it had changed him. People speak of the past and the future, but the here and now is all there really is. Pavel was the one constant in my life, as the past was fleeting and only a memory, and as for the future—well, I didn’t know yet what mine might bring.
To tell my story, though, I have to go back to the beginning of things. The day my life really began. It was on the day I first arrived at the Elven Ice Palace with Pavel and his beautiful, fierce, and frightening Quendi warrior, Lord Juul. I think I must have been too much in awe, and surely way too frightened, to remember every detail of that day. Most of it was a blur of images: glittering lords and ladies, dripping in bright jewels and arrayed in silks; fearsome fur-draped soldiers, bristling with weapons; and the alabaster palace, looming over it all, icy cold and imperious.
I had heard stories all my life about the beautiful, savage Fae who lived in the Ice Forest, though admittedly, my life hadn’t been all that long at that point. I believe I must have been no more than ten years old when Lord Juul rode out of the Ice Forest to fetch us back to the Quendi forest.
I remember Pavel kept me close to him the entire way, worrying over my bruises and even letting me ride in front of him on his reindeer, Violet, who, despite the name, was a stag with big blue eyes. Pavel told me that most reindeer had eyes that were golden in the summer and blue in the winter, but the eyes of the Quendi stags stayed blue all year round. Violet’s impressive rack of antlers was strung with jewels, little sprigs of holly and silver bells that jingled as we traveled down the broad, snow-crusted trail. From time to time, Violet would glance back around at me as if he were wondering who I might be and how I dared to perch upon his back. I thought at first that he might bite me, but he never made any attempt to do that. He just sniffed me thoroughly, looking me over, clearly unimpressed, before his eyes traveled up to Pavel’s face. He looked content then, just like the fierce Quendi Lord Juul, who gazed over at Pavel in exactly the same way.
Lord Juul was a Midwinter’s dream come to life. He reminded me a bit of the toy tin soldiers I had brought with me, carefully wrapped and stuffed inside the old traveling bag Pavel had packed for me. The soldiers were very old and were much more bent and battered than the beautiful Lord Juul, of course, who was perilously close to perfect, as far as I could tell. But they wore a uniform like he did and had the same stern, military bearing. Their faces had the same look too, cold and determined—except when Juul was gazing at my brother. Then his eyes softened, and I wasn’t quite so much in awe of him as I had been before.
The palace we arrived at after a long day of travel was as elegant and beautiful as I’d imagined it would be from the stories Pavel had spun for me on his return. Solid white, it sat at the top of a snowy hill, with its towers and battlements covered in a thick layer of ice. The towers had pointy tops like witches’ hats that Pavel called “turrets,” and above them flew white flags with golden symbols. They billowed and blustered in the cold, winter wind, and they were almost too bright to look at for long against the bruised clouds that hung behind them.
Our party rode straight up to the massive gates, which parted for us as we came near. Pavel whispered to me that there was nothing to be nervous about, and the guards were supposed to look the way they did—ferocious and forbidding. They all wore white uniforms with tall, rounded, rabbit-fur hats on their heads and a strap underneath their chins. They stood with ramrod straight backs and somber faces as we passed them, unbending only long enough to bow toward Lord Juul as he passed, but ignoring the rest of us. Our stags went through the gates, and the big, heavy doors banged closed behind us, sealing us in. Pavel held tightly to my hand as we walked into the king’s palace. Pavel leaned over to whisper in my ear, “Be brave.”
That’s about all I remember of that day, to tell the truth. Oh, there were vague flashes of memory of fancy people staring at us as we climbed the palace steps and went into the huge hall. I definitely noticed the king with the impossibly handsome face greeting both my brother and Lord Juul with smiles and even a hug for Pavel. Me, however, he spared only a glance and a frown before he turned quickly away, his face looking a bit shocked at the big purple bruise covering one side of my face, courtesy of the encounter with my father.
I don’t think he meant to be unkind. He simply struck me as the sort who thought children should be seen—just not too often—and never, ever heard. I made up my mind then and there that I would try my best to always oblige him. From that point on, I stayed out of his way.
We had our own separate suite of rooms in the huge palace, and I even had my very own bedchamber. It was way too big. It was far larger than the entire little ramshackle house I used to live in with Pavel and our father. My room had dark, shiny wood floors covered with thick white rugs and rich, elegant furniture. The bed had a mattress big enough to hold not only me, but half of the pretty servants, who wore soft colors like pink and yellow and fluttered like butterflies around my room. They also straightened whatever I touched and watched me with downturned lips and curious eyes.
Pavel told me our new rooms were in a part of the palace that once belonged to a long-ago wizard, named Lochimere, or possibly Lattimore. Actually, the wizard lived so long ago that no one could quite remember his name. Some said the kind of magic he practiced—making predictions and prophecy that involved summoning demons and dead people to tell the future—had been declared illegal. I wondered how the dead would know anything about the future anyway.
At any rate, necromancy, as they called it, was dark magic and it had been outlawed during his lifetime. It was my understanding that he had been executed for his magic, and from that day on, they simply called this place the Necromancer’s Hall. Pavel wrinkled his nose at the name and the idea. He said the man had simply been the old king’s wizard and had died in his bed at a ripe old age, having had nothing at all to do with necromancy.
Pavel tried to get the servants to call the hall by Lord Juul’s name, but the other, older name for it stuck, despite Pavel’s efforts.
My favorite thing about our long, broad hallway was the tower at the end of it. It was tall and round with narrow iron steps that clanged as I climbed them, and the steps went straight up impossibly high to a little room at the top. Pavel said it was the turret room, which was a round structure that jutted out over the castle walls. It was like the icing on the tiny, colorful, sweet cakes the servants brought me—not at all needed, but always appreciated. A little secret round room on top of a tower—I loved the idea and right away, I claimed the room for my own.
When I first came to Quendi land, I used to sit in my turret all the time, it seemed. Daydreaming, mostly, and hiding from the servants, who didn’t like to come up to that room, saying it was “haunted.” I don’t think it was, or at least I never saw any ghosts. Just a lot of dust. I loved looking through the books that someone left there long ago. I think the books must have belonged to the old necromancer, and they lined the walls that went all around the room. He must have used the books, Pavel said, for his magical spells, along with the mysterious bottles and vials of strange-colored liquids.
The larger bottles lined the whole of several shelves and contained murky liquids, with strange objects floating inside. Some of them looked like body parts, but I wasn’t sure. I loved to experiment with them until Pavel and Juul finally put a firm stop to it. One had the name “Elixir of Neptune.” It inexplicably caused my bathtub to overflow—even though we had no running water—flooding my bedroom and ruining all my rugs. And then there was the “Marinated Angel Drops” that caused a sparkly halo to float over my head for almost a week and vast amounts of angel dust to collect on my fingertips, so I had to wear gloves and a hat for over a week. Pavel made me drink a lot of potions to get rid of that halo.
Then there was a “Dragonfly Tonic” that made me break out in a green, scaly rash and caused an infestation of the delicate, brightly colored flies inside the palace. I had to take daily baths in some potion Pavel made until the rash finally went away, and the servants nearly went mad trying to get rid of the flies. Juul told me that the king was exceedingly cross about it.
The one that was the worst and most potent of all, though, was the “Curls of Samson Elixir.” I opened that one once too, just to see what it was, but the top was hard to come off and when it did, it spilled out green and viscous and evil smelling across the back of my hand and dripped onto the table. Everywhere it touched, black, wiry hair began to sprout. And spread. Over the table and the floor and even the curtains, the hair grew so fast I had to run down the steps to try to get to Pavel for help before it covered me completely. By the time I found him, the hair had spread up my arms and across my face, then cascaded down to my chest. It even fell around my feet, wrapping around my legs, trying to trip me up and trailing behind me when I walked.
I suppose I did look a bit alarming, but there was really no call for all the shouting. Pavel jumped to his feet and waved his arms around as the curls on the backs of my hands fell down on the tabletops and curled around the table legs before reaching toward him to try to coyly wrap around his ankles. Pavel had to cry out for Juul, who had been having a glass of wine in his office with King Tarrak. They both came running and used their knives to cut the hair away as Pavel mixed up his elixirs to pour over my face and hands and even forced me to drink one of those awful tisanes of his. Then he still had to sing and play his pipes half the night to get the last of the wiry curls to go away. I was forbidden to touch the bottles after that, and not too long afterward, the rest of them went missing. I knew that Pavel and Juul must have taken them away and hidden them because I never saw them again.
Pavel sat me down afterward and explained that he had thought the elixirs and the books would have been harmless to me because he hadn’t been aware I had any magic at all. He said I must have some strong magic deep inside me, though, or else none of the elixirs or the spell books would have worked so well. I told him that if I did have magic, it was very deep inside me indeed—so deep I’d never noticed it, nor had anyone else, including our grandmother.
Our grandmother had been something of a witch herself, but her magic was small and gentle. Some people in the village called her a Wisewoman or a Hearth Witch, but any use of the word “witch” was dangerous, so she discouraged them from calling her that. Her magic wasn’t on the same scale as the fierce and mysterious old necromancer’s would have been. I was sure of that. She made healing potions and did spells to help ease the way of true lovers and the pain of new mothers, and she brought rain for the farmers’ crops. She taught Pavel to play the panpipes and he, in turn, tried to teach me, but I was never able to make the pipes do much of anything except give out weak peeps and tiny shrill whistles, like a baby bird. My mother would never allow me to visit my grandmother much when I was growing up and had even clutched the crucifix she wore around her neck and called my grandmother names, saying her magic was “dark.” I didn’t believe that, but I hated to disagree with my mother.
I do remember an argument once between them. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time. It had been about me. My mother had shouted at my grandmother, saying she wouldn’t allow her to corrupt me like she had done with Pavel. My grandmother looked at me with her sad eyes and shook her head. “Pavel is far from being ‘corrupted.’ But I don’t feel the same glow of magic around Sergey as I do with his brother,” she pronounced, shaking her head. “I think he takes after his grandfather, which is a great pity, and you must take precautions that he doesn’t turn out to be just like him.”
My mother had been outraged and had started throwing things at her then, ordering her from the house and giving her a push down the steps to help her on her way. I was never sure afterward if what she’d said about me had been a prediction or a curse. I had never known my grandfather, so I had no idea what she meant and when I asked my mother, she pressed her lips tightly together and shook her head, refusing to say anything. Later, I thought I must have misunderstood what my grandmother had said—she must have meant to say I took after my father , because when I hit puberty, I began to look a great deal like the old photographs I’d seen of him, standing stiffly beside my mother. Pavel stood by her other side with his hand on her shoulder, and she had a baby in her lap that I assumed was me. I thought I could see a resemblance to my father when I looked in the mirror. I saw Pavel stare at me in fascination sometimes when he thought I wasn’t looking.
Over the next few years, I grew taller and began to develop the same bulky muscles I remembered my father had. I wasn’t exactly fat like he’d been, but I was pudgy. Pavel made sure I ate healthy meals, but my hips and waist remained stubbornly thick, and my face was too full. I towered over Pavel by several inches, even though I was much younger.
I had never forgotten what my grandmother said about me that day to my mother, and I came to hate the person I saw in the looking glass. By the time Pavel came to get me from our old house, my father was staying drunk most of the day, and he would come to the door of my room and stare inside at me when I was bathing or changing clothes. He often hit me too, and I had begun to be afraid of him. I wondered what my grandmother saw in me that would make her think I’d be like him one day. People think children don’t pay attention to the words they say, or that if they do, they’ll soon forget them. I never forgot her words though, nor the shame it made me feel. I never forget the contempt in her voice when she said I’d be just like him.
I remember, too, the way my father used to loom over me, yelling at me when I did something clumsy or stupid, which I guess I did a lot when I was young. Pavel used to get angry when our father cursed me, and he put himself between the two of us sometimes and occasionally took the blows that my father meant for me. Later, Pavel would come to my room to hug me and sing to me and tell me not to listen to the things my father said or the names he called me. But it’s funny how we remember the bad things and forget about the good ones.
Sometimes, after we moved to the Quendi land, if I came up on Pavel too quickly, I think I reminded him of our father, because I caught him flinching once when he looked up and saw me unexpectedly. He said it wasn’t true, but I knew what I had seen. I began to hunch my shoulders when I was near him, trying to make myself smaller and less threatening.
The years passed mostly happily for me, so long as I avoided mirrors that showed me how ugly I was becoming, with my dull brown hair and eyes. Nothing stood out about me, the way it did with Pavel, who was beautiful like our mother and smart like our grandmother. He was talented with the pipes and all manner of musical instruments, and he had a nice singing voice, soothing and sweet, while I could barely scrape out a tune. If I did, I sounded like a rusty gate. I didn’t look anything like the beautiful elves either but had their example constantly before me.
Still, life went on and it was hard to feel too sorry for myself when I lived in such a luxurious palace, with servants to bring me anything I needed. The weather was so fierce and cold that I spent a great deal of time inside the palace, though I tried to get outdoors as often as I could. Sometimes, I would tag along with Pavel when he went to gather his mushrooms and wild berries and other things he gleaned from the forest to make his potions. But I most loved to go to the woods out back of the palace to play soldier and have duels and battles with invisible opponents. Lord Juul came with me sometimes and showed me how to use a bow on the targets out there.
One day when I was playing outside, a strong, icy wind began to blow. That usually meant one of the fierce storms was headed our way out of the north, and we were in for a bad storm, followed by several days inside the palace. Because I knew this and dreaded it, I decided to stay outside and ignore the bad weather for as long as I could, and I wasn’t alone out there. The king himself was having target practice not too far away, along with some of his lords. I could hear them quite well, laughing and probably making jokes about the targets they missed, though I couldn’t understand what they were saying as they were speaking Elven.
I was in the middle of a fierce sword fight with a savage, imaginary ogre when a sudden wind hit me with such force that it knocked me down. I sat up blinking in disbelief as I realized I could no longer see the king and his companions because of how hard the snow was blowing. The storm had struck so rapidly and fiercely that it had caught me unaware, and I knew I needed to get back to the palace.
The problem with that was that I could no longer see the palace. I knew it was behind me, of course, but the sky had turned ominously dark. Pavel had warned me about never being caught out in a storm. Distances and directions could become very confused in the darkness that accompanied a bad storm and a known landscape could lose its familiarity with the blinding snow.
Even with my furs and my cap and gloves, it was alarmingly cold. The snow crunched under my feet when I walked, and the comforting glow of the lights in the windows of the palace that I could usually see now had all but disappeared in the general white-out. I turned to look back to the trees in the woods and they were gone too. There was nothing but the frozen ground and the blowing snow. I heard some shouting—muffled and distant—and I started moving slowly in the direction of the voices, almost feeling my way.
I’d never experienced a storm like this before. In the village, we’d had snowstorms, of course, and even bad ones, but nothing like this. It was unnerving and reminded me forcibly again that I was living in a vastly different world than I had before. I thought I heard my name being shouted and tried to yell back, but the wind snatched my voice away and flung it behind me. I kept struggling and finally saw an unmoving dark shape looming ahead of me. I made for it as quickly as I could, finally reaching it and patting its solid walls. A hut of some kind. Maybe the one where they kept all the targets and bows. I began moving along the wall, feeling my way to find a door, when suddenly someone grabbed my hand and yanked me inside.
“Are you all right?” the murky figure in front of me in the darkness of the hut asked. “Speak to me! I was just going out to try and find you.”
“No, no, I’m all right. I-I stayed too long and then the storm…”
“Came up quickly, I know. I noticed you playing in the woods, so I stayed behind to find you and sent the others back to the palace for more help.”
I shivered and he stepped toward me to pull the door closed. To my shock, I saw it was King Tarrak himself. I wondered why he was being so nice to me and then he turned back to look at me, and his normally ice-cold eyes were blazing.
“How could you be so foolish? Even in your stupid little village, they must have had blizzards. Even the village idiot would know to get inside before the storm starts in earnest.”
I thought about pointing out that he and his men hadn’t gone back inside either but decided now was probably not the time.
“I-I was going to, but the weather turned so quickly.”
He glared at me with his arms folded across his chest. “You could have gotten lost out here and frozen to death.” Still grumbling, he turned to a small potbellied stove against the wall and began loading it with dry kindling from a basket of wood close by. For the next few minutes, he worked on starting a fire with the casual magic that I’d seen the Elves frequently use, but always for small, practical things like starting fires and cleaning up after themselves or for preparing a meal while traveling. It was never anything big or overdone, but still I was jealous at how easily he snapped his fingers and brought the blaze to life. King Tarrak left the fire box open and gestured for me to come closer, so I huddled near it with my hands outstretched toward its warmth.
“We might be stuck here a while,” he said, sounding not quite as angry as before. “Until the worst of it blows over. But there’s plenty of wood, so we won’t freeze at least.”
“T-that’s g-good.”
“You’re shivering. Take off your coat and hat so they can dry.”
I did as he said, though when I took off the coat, I really started shivering, so much my teeth were clacking together. He shook his head and took off his own and handed it to me.
“Here, you can take mine.”
He motioned for me to come closer, pulling me over and making me sit down, wrapping me in his fur coat. Sitting so close to him, I was overwhelmed by the smell of him—a little like almonds, or like some delicious pastry the chef might make.
“But sir, don't you need your coat? Won't you be cold?”
“I have the fire; I'll be fine. There,” he said, closing his coat around me and making sure I was all tucked in under his fur. “You should be good now. Don’t worry. As soon as the storm dies down a bit, our rescuers will be here. I imagine Pavel is already walking the floor and wringing his hands.”
“He’s a good brother,” I mumbled, a little surprised I had the nerve but still wanting to defend Pavel.
He only grunted though and smiled, nodding his head. “Yes, he is. It wasn’t a criticism.” He leaned back against the wall. “We may as well try to get some sleep. It’ll be an hour or so before they can get to us.”
I don’t believe I slept. I was far too excited and keyed up for anything like that. It was very quiet inside the hut, with only the faint pop and crackle of the fire to break the silence. Through the tiny frost- rimmed window high on one wall, all I could see was blowing snow, hurling itself frantically against the windowpane, as the wind howled outside the door and tried to find a way to get in. If I’d been alone in the hut, I thought I would have been frightened, but because King Tarrak was with me, I knew I had nothing to fear. He would keep me safe.
The king was right—it took about an hour or so for a group of soldiers wearing snowshoes to make it through the storm to get us out. By that time, the snow was almost covering the little shed we were in, and if it hadn’t been for the smoke from our fire, they might not have found us so quickly to dig us out. Pavel was worried, but he calmed down when he learned King Tarrak had been with me the whole time, keeping me safe. Still, I got the whole treatment—a hot bath, what seemed like a gallon or so of hot herbal tea, and a hot water bottle in my bed that night. Like I said, Pavel tried to take good care of me.
Later, as I lay in bed, I thought about King Tarrak and how he’d given me his coat. I hadn’t wanted to take a bath that evening and wash away the sweet scent of it, but Pavel had insisted. I had a definite crush, though I knew the king barely noticed me, and then only as a nuisance. It still didn’t change the way I felt.
Time passed, as it always does, and almost before I knew it, I was turning eighteen years old. I already looked like a man fully grown, and my voice had become so deep and booming that I tried to make myself sound small and whispery, so as not to offend anyone. Lord Juul looked at me curiously one morning when I spoke to him over breakfast, asking him to pass the salt, and he tilted his head to the side like he couldn’t quite hear what I was saying.
He frowned at me and put his hand over mine—a rare occurrence, so it got my attention immediately. “Sit up straighter, Sergey, and don’t hunch your shoulders that way. Stop mumbling. You should never shrink yourself to fit into places you feel you don’t belong. Carve out a place for yourself in this world and be proud of who you are, because you’re a grown man now. Speak up and let your voice be heard. Your brother never has a problem letting all of us know what he thinks.”
I smiled at that because he was right. Pavel was fearless. “I’m too big and tall though. The servants say I talk too loud,” I practically whispered, looking around to make sure none of them were listening.
The look of outrage and confusion on his face was almost comical, though I didn’t dare laugh. “ The servants ? You do know who you are, don’t you, Sergey? The beloved brother of King Tarrak’s wizard, and my brother now too, which makes you a very important person, indeed. You’re a man—you should be tall. And why on earth would you care what anyone else thinks anyway? Especially the servants, who work for you.”
Those words, though a little mean and condescending about the servants, did cheer me a bit, and at least I stopped all the whispering and mumbling. My posture improved too, and Juul was kind of absently nice to me after that, whenever he could remember to be. Or whenever he wasn’t distracted by Pavel, which he was quite often.
Like when Pavel came into any room he occupied. Or when Pavel smiled. Or spoke. Or did anything at all, really. Then Juul’s eyes would glow softly as they followed my brother around the room, watching him intently, possessively, as if it were his job to do so. Often, Pavel would notice his regard and his cheeks would flush pink and he’d flutter his eyelashes and start breathing funny. Soon one of them would make some flimsy excuse to go out of the room and the other would follow, and they’d lock the door behind them. That was my cue to go up to my secret place at the top of the tower because I knew it would be a while before they reappeared.
While I was there, I sometimes tried to read the books in the many bookshelves that lined the walls. Usually, I brought my own, but on those occasions when I ran out of the room so I wouldn’t hear the small whimpers and cries my brother made behind the closed door with his Quendi Lord, I was in a hurry and sometimes forgot to bring along one of my books. I liked to read—my mother had taught me how when I was a small child, and later Pavel encouraged me to continue reading, even finding me books that our grandmother had given him when he was a boy and showing me how to pronounce the big words.
The books were about history and murders and violence and intrigue and great families and foreign wars, and I liked to read them, though I didn’t understand a lot of it, really. If I came across a part that was hard to understand, I’d just skip over it until I got to a better place. Stories by Dostoevsky and even Tolstoy, though the War and Peace one that Pavel gave me was pretty hard work, and I could only read it for a short time before I began to get a headache and all the names mixed up. One day, when I was bookless and got tired of gazing out the window at the long ice road or the white mountains and the falling snow, I looked through the books crammed onto the shelves up in the turret room. Or I should say, I tried to.
They stood innocently in their neat rows when I came to stand beside them. They appeared to be innocuous, covered lightly with dust and a stray cobweb or two. But they resisted when I tried to pull them from their places on the shelves, as if they had been peacefully sleeping and resented me for waking them up. Their bindings were stiff and defiant when I opened them, and they gave off a strong, musty smell to discourage me and make me put them back. The words on the page were small and cramped too, and as I bent over to read them, they made me sneeze. I tried to call out a few of the moldy old spells in the book; they became impossible to pronounce, with the words feeling like rocks in my mouth. They got in the way of my tongue when I tried to say them and even the pages stuck together and gave me a hard time as I struggled to turn them. Finally, I’d given up and shoved them back in their places on the shelves, where they sent little puffs of dust in retaliation to make me sneeze.
On one of the bookshelves, though, far from the light of the window and half-hidden by some chairs, stood an old, much shabbier bookcase, filled with books whose bindings had come off, so their titles were lost to time, along with notebooks stuffed with handwritten papers. I pulled out one of these notebooks and settled down at the little table in the room to look through it. When I opened it up, I heard a little hum of satisfaction in the air, so loud I looked behind me to see if someone had come in, but there was no one there. I took out a piece of paper, old enough that it crackled, and a piece of it was so brittle with age it tore, despite my efforts to ease it out of the book. I pieced it back together and laid it out on the table to read.
Right away it drew my interest because it seemed to be a page from a primer on how to do magic. The spells had been written in a child’s hand, the letters big and some of the words misspelled. Even a few of the “R’s” were written backward. The most wonderful thing, though, was that I could understand it because it had none of the arcane language and big-sounding words of the other, meaner magic books.
The first spell in the book was How to pull a Яabbit out of a Hat. It even had a drawing of a round fur hat like the guards wore, with a large white rabbit peeking out of the top. The instructions were listed below the title.
Find a nice Hat that the Яabbit will like.
Call on the name Samael to help you. Wave yur hands over the top, while saying the Magic Words, Tili tili boom. Ribi, ribi, la. Ribi, ribi tili tili boom. Sing as seems good to a tune you like. Keep singing while you pictur a Яabbit in yur head.
Catch Яabbit as it jumps from the hat .
I was charmed by the spell immediately, and I couldn’t wait to try it. I did wonder who Samael was, and I wasn’t exactly sure how to say his name, but I did the best I could when I practiced saying the spell in my head. Before I could do it for real, of course, I had to find a proper hat. I knew just the one.
I went downstairs right away and into Pavel’s bedroom, where he and Juul slept and kept their clothes. I don’t know how I dared to do it, and if Juul caught me, I would have probably passed out, but I looked in their clothes cabinets for one of Juul’s hats. Far at the back, in a fancy round box with a lid on top, I found it. A beautiful fur hat, round like the guards and soldiers wore, with the wide, leather chin strap. I’d never seen him wear it, so I thought he wouldn’t notice, and I intended to put it back as soon as I was through. I took it down reverently, careful that my hands were clean so I wouldn’t soil the fur hat’s pristine whiteness. I checked that no servants were lurking in the main room before I opened the door, and then I hurried out to the hallway and back up the iron stairs to my turret room, carrying my prize.
Once back in the room, I sat down at the table, inadvertently knocking over a glass of water I must have left there earlier that week. It crashed to the floor, so I had to spend a few minutes picking up the broken shards. I cut my fingers, but I put the shards on the table, thinking I could take them back downstairs with me when I left and clean up the blood later.
Then I got to work. The hat was in the middle of the table, and I closed my eyes and tried to picture one of the big white rabbits in my head. I called out to the unknown Samael for help. And then when I thought I finally had it, I waved my hands over the hat, calling out the words that seemed so magical.
“ Tili tili boom. Ribi, ribi, la. Ribi, ribi tili tili boom.”
Nothing happened, except a tiny puff of smoke appeared over the hat and hung in the air for a moment before it drifted away on a breeze. Disappointed, I said the words again, louder this time, but still nothing. I read the directions again and realized I had to sing, “as seems good to a tune you like.” I didn’t know any songs except for a lullaby my mother used to sing me, so I tried that one. Waving my arms extravagantly over the top of the hat, I sang, “Tili tili boom. Ribi, ribi, la. Ribi, ribi tili tili boom.” My voice was creaky and rusty as always, but what I lacked in technique, I more than made up for in volume.
In frustration, I slammed my fist down onto the table and cut my palm with the piece of the broken glass. It was only a few drops that I flicked away before trying the spell again. This time I belted out the words even louder, drawing out the syllables to make the tune work. I even shouted the words more forcefully. “Tili ti-li boom. Ribi, ri-ibi, la. Ribi, rib-iii tili til” —I finished with a flourish— ” boom!”
Outside the narrow turret windows there was a sudden clap of thunder…and a rabbit stuck his head from the hat, then hopped over the side onto the table. He was beautiful—big and white, with long, soft bunny ears, pink eyes, and a twitchy pink nose. I picked him up and cradled him in my arms, rubbing my face against his soft fur. It was perfect, sublime! I had done it! I had done actual magic and made a rabbit appear out of thin air. I was ecstatic…right up until the moment that another rabbit poked its head out of the hat. And then another. And another. And another. One by one they piled out onto the table until the top of it was full of white bunnies. One of them started humping another one to my horror, and then they all hopped off to the floor and began to chase each other around the room. Before I knew it there were more than twenty bunny rabbits in the room and there was no sign of them stopping anytime soon.
I panicked. And even though I considered myself to be a grown man—eighteen years old—I ran out, clumping down the iron stairs and calling at the top of my lungs for Pavel. But I forgot to close the door behind me, so the rabbits came hopping along after me. If I live to be a very old man, I’ll never forget the look on Pavel’s face when he came out into the hallway to see what the commotion was about and saw the herd of white bunnies scampering along behind me. There must have been over fifty of them or more by then with more of them piling down the steps behind me.
He looked at me wildly, crying out, “ How? Why? ”
I pointed behind me to the turret room, waving my arms in the air, and all I could manage to get out was, “R-rabbits! And-and hats and-and… Boom! ”
He shot me a look of complete incomprehension and horror and took off toward the steps to the tower, fighting his way through the rabbity crowd, with me pushing along right behind him. He sent me one more incredulous look when he spotted Juul’s poor, ruined hat lying trampled on the floor, with rabbit droppings smeared on the brim and rabbits still piling out of it. Then he waved his hands over the hat and said, “ Resisto! Prohibere! ”
I later learned that was Latin, and it stopped things, like the flow of rabbits from the hat. I didn’t even know that Pavel knew such words, but I supposed he’d been studying too since he had been named the King’s Wizard. I sagged in relief.
He shot me another look of dismay, however, and my relief was short-lived as we both gazed around at the mounds of rabbits milling around all over the floor. He quickly pulled out his pipes and began to play. He waded through the herd and out into the hallway, making his slow, careful way down the steps, and the rabbits all began to follow him. I ran along behind them, shooing them along and making sure there weren’t any stragglers. Pavel led the bunnies out of the palace, down one long hallway after another. The servants were outraged and horrified, shouting in dismay and running along behind us with brooms and mops to clear up all the rabbit droppings. Noblemen and women with horrified, outraged faces scattered in front of us, shrieking in alarm.
I even caught sight of King Tarrak, his handsome face looking astonished as he peered around a door, his mouth open and eyebrows raised, as he stared at the spectacle we were making in the halls of his beautiful palace. Pavel merely nodded at him, his face flaming, and kept going, playing his lilting tune and leading the rabbits outside. I was going to follow them, but just as I got to the wide front doors, a strong hand fell on my shoulder and whirled me around. Lord Juul was looking down at me with a furious, glittering gaze that felt like needles hitting my skin. He grabbed my collar and hauled me back to my quarters. I never imagined he could be so strong, but I didn’t even try to resist.