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Over the next year, I was allowed to continue working in the stables, and my body gradually began to change. I was active all day and working hard—especially after the stags’ rutting season was over. Then I began to work with training the young ones, teaching them to accept a rider, something that didn’t come naturally to them or to me. I also worked alongside the soldiers they were assigned to, helping to teach the stags battle training, which involved hard, physical work and running most of the day alongside the stags, keeping them in line. As a result, I became slimmer and more muscular. My skin tanned in the sun I was out in all day, and my dark hair developed lighter streaks through it. It was also around that time that Lord Juul decided I needed training in how to handle a sword. I wholeheartedly agreed.

On most days, as soon as I got off work, I’d meet Juul in the back courtyard, where he taught me how to fight with a sword and made me practice long hours with both sword and bow. After only a few months, I’d made so much progress that Juul decided I should be taken from the stables to train full-time with the king’s soldiers. I didn’t think Pavel knew about it because he’d been so busy himself, but Juul said not to worry about it, and he’d take care of Pavel. He said Pavel still thought of me as his little brother and was trying to protect me. Juul said that I needed to learn to protect myself, and that one day, I would make a fine warrior. This situation continued for close to six months, until one day, Pavel came looking for Juul in the back courtyard and discovered how and where I really spent my days.

The fight with Juul had been epic. The two of them shouted so loudly at each other that the servants hid, and I went up to my old turret room in the tower to get away from it all. Juul finally stormed out, yelling back at Pavel that he was unreasonable and still thought of me as a little boy instead of the grown man I actually was. Pavel ran out in the corridor after him, yelling that he hadn’t brought me to the Quendi’s to be used as “cannon fodder for the Elves’ insane wars.”

Juul stopped dead in his tracks and charged back toward him, demanding to know what that meant. It involved loud explanations of just what “cannon fodder” was, followed by Juul’s immediate outrage that Pavel thought so little of him that he would think such a thing. That involved more explanations and a few more loud arguments before Pavel drew back his fist to hit Juul and Juul caught it in his hand and twisted Pavel’s fist around to his back, bringing their bodies together. The passionate making up started then, entailing a lot of kissing before Juul kicked open their bedroom door and carried Pavel inside. I heard some of this from my tower room because of all the shouting, and the servants filled me in on the rest. In the end, though, the upshot of it all was that my soldiering days were numbered. I would still train one day a week with the soldiers, so I wouldn’t “lose my edge,” as Juul put it. But Juul agreed to find me other employment.

I was nineteen by then, and I resented Pavel for making these decisions for me. I wanted to be a soldier, and that was how I wanted to spend my days—training and getting more proficient with the sword, battle-axe, and bow. So, I went to the training sessions with the soldiers anyway, just as I’d done before, figuring that what Pavel didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

In fact, I began to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t time for me to leave Quendi land and go back home; I could find a regiment there that would accept me. When I approached Pavel with the idea, he argued against it by saying I’d been with the Elves for close to ten years and had little knowledge of the outside world anymore. He was visibly upset and begged me to reconsider. He told me he had always meant to help me explore my own magic that I had largely put aside, and he wanted me to stay and do just that, if only for a little while. I laughed out loud when he mentioned my magic.

“Magic? You mean the disasters I created as a child?”

He flushed but persevered. “All right, they may have been disasters. In a way. But Sergey, what ten-year-old child could make hair grow all over himself, not to mention on furniture and the floors?”

“It was the elixir that did that.”

“It didn’t do it for me. I tried later that night, just to see what would happen and…nothing.”

I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. You have plenty of magic.”

“I do, but it must be a different kind than yours. I think there must be all kinds of magic. Our grandmother had some too—she was well-known for her healing potions, and she helped the farmers make their crops grow. She could play the pipes, but not like I can. She couldn’t make animals follow her or men dance to her tune. But she did other things that I couldn’t do. Do you understand? For her the pipes only produced music, but she had spells for healing, luck, and protection that really worked. Often there was a bit of a religious element to her magic, and she’d definitely had some secret history with a Fae creature or…something not human. I believe our mother was half-whatever it was, in fact.

“It would account for Mother’s beauty, I suppose.” I looked him up and down. “And for yours.”

“You’re very handsome too, Sergey.”

I made a scoffing sound. “I look too much like our father.”

“Yes, but he was supposed to have been quite good looking as a young man, and he won our mother, who was known in all the villages as a great beauty. It was only after she died that he changed into the man we remember. She remained loyal to him her whole life, too. You have some of her stubbornness in you, Sergey, and you have our mother’s beautiful eyes, with those long, thick eyelashes. You're really quite handsome. I think the magic may sometimes skip a generation though, because I don’t believe our mother had much of it. Or else she was so religious that she renounced it. Mine is real, though, and I think you may even have more than I do.”

I shook my head, but he took hold of my shoulders and turned me to face him. “Don’t be stubborn. You do have magic, Sergey. I know it. Just different from mine.”

“What kind is yours then?”

“Well, Prince Glorfindel and I have discussed it, and we think that mine might be a mixture of a couple of things. It makes use of techniques in the other forms of magic, but not all of them. My use of incantations and potions and charms are Folk Magic, and my pipes and singing, along with the crystals I’ve begun using, is an offshoot of that according to the books I’ve been studying in the tower. And then there is this whole other side to my magic that Glorfindel is trying to figure out. He’s been teaching me some of the incantations and the words to the spells in the old books as well.”

“You’ve been reading the old books in the tower?”

“Oh yes, and they’re really interesting. I had to learn as much as I could since I’m the King’s Wizard.”

“Those books all hate me.”

He smiled and looked puzzled. “What do you mean they hate you? How could that be?”

“They resist me when I try to take them off the shelf, and their pages stick together when I try to read them. The words scramble themselves so they're hard to read, and the damn things puff dust at me.”

His eyes grew wide as he stared at me.

“You don’t believe me? Next time you go to the turret room, call me and I’ll come and show you.”

“No, it’s not that. I believe you if you say so, but… do you see what I mean about having magic? That-that’s extraordinary.”

“What’s extraordinary? That the books hate me?”

“They’re just books, Sergey. They aren’t living things. It’s you and some facet of your own personality you’re projecting onto the books. Yours must have some different kind of magic than what lies in their pages. Natural magic, perhaps?”

“Natural? Do you hear yourself, Pavel? None of this is natural .” I shook my head.

“Neither is war, and yet Juul has convinced you that you’d be good at that.”

“Sergey…I don’t show any talent for anything, really, except the sword. I was good at that.” I placed my hand on the hilt and tried to catch his eye, but he was stubborn.

“You say you don’t have talent, but how about when you conjured up a hundred or more of those rabbits out of thin air?”

“Not out of thin air. There was a magic spell.”

“Written by a child, from the looks of it.”

“Well, yes…but there were magic words to say.”

“Which would probably have done nothing for me if I said them. That’s what I mean . You have magic. The only thing you need to learn is how to control it better.” He got a gleam in his eye and grabbed my hand. “I have a wonderful idea. Let’s ask Prince Glorfindel for his help.”

“You must be joking. What is he going to do?”

“He’s very good, Sergey. I’ve been working with him, and he knows all kinds of things. He’s talented, and he’s already taught me a lot. I tried to read the books in the turret myself, but I didn’t get too far until I started working with Glorfindel.”

I took a moment to answer. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to “explore my magic,” as Pavel put it, though it was no longer where my main focus lay. Still, I’d always thought he’d be the one to train me, if anyone did. I barely knew Glorfindel, but what I did know of him hadn’t left a good impression.

“He doesn’t think much of humans, Pavel. Or mortals as he calls us.”

“Nonsense. He seems to like me well enough, and I’m both those things. I know he’d do it if I asked him to.”

“Suit yourself, but don’t be surprised if he turns you down. Whatever happened to all those warnings you used to give me about Fairies?”

“That was before I actually met one of them. Besides, he’s half-Elven, like Tarrak.”

That didn’t reassure me. I rarely saw the king, even though I knew he and Juul were extremely close, and Pavel was his wizard, or at least he had been. I wondered how this new consort-to-be of his would fit into that equation. I was still mulling that over when Pavel reached into his desk and drew out two books.

Here,” he said, holding them out to me. “Read these. This blue one is about the different types of magic and the other, slimmer one tells a little about the ancient world of gods and creatures and their magic and also their wars with the older gods. It mentions a human realm too—Midgard. And some interesting weapons, so you should like it.”

“What kind of weapons?”

“An ancient sword called the Sword of Light and a battle-axe. Magical weapons that no one could withstand. You can well imagine how much Juul and Tarrak would love to get their hands on something like that. It’s probably just mythical, but still, maybe you’ll enjoy reading about them. The weapons have been lost for centuries, but Glorfindel says he has some ideas about how to find them if they do exist. He just hasn’t been able to do it yet.”

“How did he hear about them?”

“I’m not sure. Books, I guess. They’re weapons that used to belong to one of the ancient Norse worlds, I believe. Glorfindel told us about them, and now Tarrak told Glorfindel he wouldn't at all mind finding some magic weapons. He could use them to defeat his brother’s ogre army for once and for all.”

“He's using Glorfindel to help him? Why doesn’t Tarrak just use you? You’re his wizard.”

He lifted one shoulder. “It’s not my area. I hate war and Tarrak knows it. I don’t seem to have any affinity for weapons or battles.”

“And yet your husband is the king's battle commander, and you accompany Juul every time he rides out.”

He shrugged again but looked irritated. “I’m not going to let him go on his own, if I can help it. Who knows what kinds of bargains he’d make or epic quests he’d take on if left to his own devices? Anyway, take a look at the books and see what you think.” He pushed the volumes across the desk to me, patted my shoulder fondly, and then left the room. Sighing, I sat down at his desk and began to look through the books.

I opened the blue one first and it opened easily for me, even sending up the not unpleasant odor of paper and ink. It seemed strangely welcoming, and I had to wonder why. Pavel said Glorfindel had loaned him the books. Had he spelled the books to be this way? To lure my brother into reading them?

I shook my head and reminded myself not to be so fanciful—it was a quality that Juul had been trying to rid me of, as he said it made me weak. Real men, he said, didn’t allow themselves to believe in the whimsical and absurd. I wondered what my brother would have said to that, as he was all about whimsy, but I didn’t press Juul on the issue.

The book was strictly high Ceremonial Magic, like Glorfindel apparently used. This was a type of magic that depended heavily on rituals. It was flashy, often using fires, explosions, and colored smoke. According to the books, it was also a noisy form of sorcery and included spells that manipulated energy or tapped an unseen source of power in order to produce a desired end. In effect, they created something out of nothing. I was drawn to that idea, like when I produced the rabbits out of Juul’s hat.

I had glanced through some similar books in the turret room, when the cursed things would let me touch them, and I knew high magic was divided into several types. There was the aforementioned Ceremonial. Then the Natural Magic Pavel had mentioned. There was Folk Magic, like my grandmother's, and then Infernal Magic, which included the Necromancy the old wizard who used to live in my tower was supposed to have done. I had only the vaguest ideas of what any of those meant, so I kept reading to find out.

Many of these spells could do a large amount of damage, though, as I’d already seen for myself. Offensive spells such as lightning bolts and fireballs were of the Ceremonial school, as well as the Infernal school. Ceremonial, like Glorfindel used, employed both Latin and Greek terms, like when the Fairy prince had saved me from the stag.

I put that book of Pavel’s aside and opened the other, thinner volume and was fascinated by it right away. The book, entitled The Fantastical History of Lebor Gabála , told the story of the ancient beings who once, very long ago, occupied what the book called the “the northern islands of the world.” Now the “history” part of the title was misleading. The book wasn't a serious history but more a mixture of speculation and mythology from old Germany across Scandinavia to Iceland and even over into old Britain. It had ancient Germanic pagan traditions that included the Lorelei, land spirits, Elves, Fairies, Dwarves, Ogres, Goblins and many other supernatural beings who roamed the wild, out of the way places of the world.

The author of the book postulated that all these beings were around about the same time as the Norse legends of the Frost Giants may have taken hold. Frost Giants weren’t really giants at all, but a race of creatures who started life as icicles. They were basically savage, primitive beings who opposed the rule of the gods, loved war, and generally created havoc and hassle. Sounded an awful lot like the Elves to me.

The author said that this mythology was based on the idea that civilization kept going because of the existence of the wild places and these creatures in the world. It also claimed that all the stories were true and were a vital system of checks and balances. Anyway, according to the book, when the giants still walked the earth, many hundreds of years ago, there was an ancient king named Gratin from Midgard, one of the Nine Worlds, the only one human and the only one visible. The others were mostly hidden, as far as I could tell. But I got a little bored about halfway through, so I might have missed a lot.

This King Gratin was a powerful force of destruction in his world . His magical sword and battle-axe were said to shine with their own inner light, and no one ever escaped from them with their lives once they were drawn against an enemy. Before he died, he hid them in a secret place and there they still waited for someone to come find them.

The book ended without really telling me anything useful, like how to find the weapons. That would be too easy, I guess. It simply said that these magical weapons, the Sword of Light and the Battle-Axe of Lebor, had been hidden, but once they were found, their owner would become a powerful warrior that no one could defeat in battle.

That was often the way with these old books. Hold out treasures of some kind to tempt a person beyond all reason but then only give obscure clues or none at all on how to find the damn things. It occurred to me though, that once a few years before, I had run across another book high on an upper shelf in the tower that mentioned these same magical weapons. I seemed to remember a spell in the book to locate them as well, before the damn thing started sending out clouds of moldy air that were so pungent they made my eyes water, and I had to slam it back up on its shelf, where it fell on its side and ruffled its pages, jeering at me.

I was going to go up and look for it again but was called away from my reading soon after that to help Pavel gather some of his herbs in the garden. I didn’t get a chance to try finding the location spells until the next day. I came in from training and went straight to the tower steps, not even bothering to change.

Of course, if I found the spell to locate the weapons, I’d have to talk to the king about it—not something I looked forward to in the least. But with that sword and battle-axe, no one could defeat me. Pavel would have no choice then but to let me become a soldier. Or I could give the weapons to the king, and I just knew King Tarrak would be so grateful, my brother would be overruled, and he’d have to stop standing in the way of my service to the king.

As usual the books were quiet as I entered, as if they were ignoring me. I went over to the little bookcase I liked best and began pretending to peruse the books there, trying to throw them off guard. It was the middle of the afternoon, and there was a drowsy silence in the little room. Outside the small, narrow windows, the snow was pelting down so thick it was hard to see outside, but the servants kept a good fire built up for me in my little room, and it popped and crackled to me as I entered, as if to welcome me back.

Ever so casually I stretched my arms over my head, like I was yawning. And then I lunged suddenly and grabbed the big magic book off its shelf before it could mount a defense.

“I have you,” I said, not bothering to hide my smug triumph as I put it on the table and pried open the pages. A musty odor emanated from the pages, trying to assault my nose, but I waved it away and began turning the pages to find the spell. It was a Ceremonial conjuring spell, which I wasn’t too sure about. These spells entailed saying some Latin words and calling some sacred or forbidden name and then asking that spirit to come forward. Any form of creature could be called upon to help—spirits, ghosts, or deities—any or all of them could manifest right in front of the conjurer and be made to do his bidding. That was the theory, anyway. Of course, if you called demons, you might be accused of using Infernal magic, so you had to be careful not to rouse any.

I thought conjuring was perilously close to Infernal Magic, or Necromancy, or what I thought Necromancy was anyway, but I guess the difference was that in Necromancy, the spirits you called on to help you were all demons and provided you with personal gain. It was also outlawed and highly illegal to practice it anymore.

There were probably more contrasts, but I was already bored with the subject, so I quickly flipped past it to find the spell. I didn’t find the location spell, but I did find something else. It was a simple spell to call up a spirit, only requiring privacy and that the spell be conducted at midnight in a quiet place, near a flame. There were words to call out, and you had to know the name of who you wanted to see, but that was it. I was struck by the idea that I could call up the original owner of the weapons, the one who hid them in the first place, old King Gratin himself.

Who better than Gratin to tell me where they were? I had to somehow convince him, even though the book said he would just tell me whatever I asked because I had conjured him. I had a hard time figuring out why this kingly ghost, or any demon or deity or for that matter, would simply come when they were called in the first place, and then why they would agree to do whatever the caller wanted, just because that person knew their name. But that was the theory with conjuring up a spirit. If you knew their name you had power over them—and if you did the deed at midnight by a flame— and you could get them to appear. Who was I to question it?

I grabbed a sheet of paper to write down the spell so I wouldn’t have to irritate the book any more than I strictly had to. I copied it down as quickly as I could, slapping at the beetles, silverfish and book lice that kept crawling out of the book and swatting at the moths swarming up out of nowhere and buzzing around my head. I finally had to take off my shirt and cover the lower half of my face with it to avoid the all-out assault on my nose by the odors of decay and mold. When I was through, I slammed the hateful thing back up on its shelf and kicked the bookshelf for good measure.

The books wobbled like they were going to fall out on me, but I pulled the sword I was still conveniently wearing and warned them that if they did, I’d slash them to bits and throw the whole lot of them in the fire. They settled down a bit after that. I opened the window a crack to let out the moths and made my way back downstairs to Pavel’s office, pulling the shirt off my face and slinging it over my shoulder, intending to go to my bedroom for another one not quite so dusty and smelly. I burst through the door a bit quickly as I came down the steps, anxious to get back to reading about my spell, and the door banged into someone who had been walking down the corridor.

“Oh God, I’m sorry!” I called out and peered around the door. To my horror, I saw Lord Juul picking King Tarrak up off the floor. For a moment I was frozen with fear. Then sanity returned and I began to stammer out an apology.

“Oh-oh no, I-I’m so sorry, Your Majesty. I didn’t know anyone would be walking by here,” I said, coming all the way out to help Juul get him up.

He shook his head, waved me away, and sighed as he gazed up at me, a red spot forming on his forehead where the door had slammed into him.

“Tell me, mortal boy, were your parents closely related , by any chance? Maybe they were first cousins. Or even siblings ?”

I frowned at him, my whole face burning, while Juul fought to keep his lips from turning up at the corners. “Are you all right, Tarrak?” Juul asked.

“Yes,” he said, standing up and straightening his clothing. “No thanks to your…brother-in-law.” He looked at me then, and I saw his eyes widen as his gaze traveled over my naked chest. Oh Lord, was it against one of the Elves’ crazy laws to appear in front of the king without a shirt? I covered my chest as best I could with the one I’d taken off and he frowned again, pressing his lips together before looking quickly away.

“I-I’m sorry, Your Majesty. Truly. And I apologize for the way I look. I was up in the turret and the books were…they tried to…anyway, I got dusty and I…” I looked helplessly over at Juul, who shook his head at me slightly, trying no doubt to tell me to shut up.

“Come with me Tarrak,” Juul said, “and I’ll give you a glass of the wine you like to steady your nerves. I think I can promise no more surprise assaults on your person while you’re here.”

“One can only hope. Does that mean the mortal boy is leaving the palace then?” He gave me one last disgruntled look, and the two of them began walking down the hallway in front of me, headed for Juul’s private study. I figured I was lucky he didn’t order my immediate execution and decided to stay out of his sight in my bedroom for a while in case he changed his mind and called the guards to haul me away. At least it would give me a chance to work on my spell.

I literally heard the words “work on my spell” echo in the thin air with an ominous ring. I decided it had to have been my imagination and ignored it, though I soon discovered it had been at my own peril.