Sample Chapter: The Cinder Boy

Of the wizard tower’s fourteen floors, Owen’s favourite was the library. He couldn’t read the grand tomes stacked in their towering shelves, couldn’t make out a single word of the letters that the wizard spent long hours reading and writing at his heavy desk, but that didn’t matter. It was far from the richest-looking room in the tower, unless you counted the immense value of the books themselves; the worn carpets and faded curtains were nothing compared to the luxurious fabrics and beautiful jewels and expertly crafted trinkets in the treasure rooms below. But that didn’t matter either.

There was just something about the library all the way at the top of the tower, all the way at the top of the mountain, topped in a dome of wizard glass so clear that it looked like you were standing under an open sky, made him feel like a great man looking down on the whole world. Which wasn’t true; he was fifteen, and a servant, and not even a very good one, according to the wizard. And while the library was indeed very high up, there was nothing to see below but rocks and snow; most of the ‘whole world’ was at the other end of that narrow mountain pass that petitioners trawled up every summer and autumn, begging for the magic to rewrite their destinies. From the library at the top of the tower, Owen could see the same sights he saw every day – stone and the stables and the places he set animal traps and, a little ways off the trail, the small copse of trees that provided precious firewood.

Perhaps it was the books themselves that felt so special, all that immensely valuable potential of deep knowledge, ready to explore if only he knew how to decode them. The wizard had once told him, in one of his rare good moods, that the books were technically worth more than the treasure vaults, that the cost of a scholar’s hand on so many pages dwarfed the costs of mere gold and gems pulled from the bowels of the earth and even the cost of the weavers and jewellers who coaxed beauty from such materials. Owen didn’t entirely understand how that worked – he’d never been paid when he’d had to make or repair something, after all – but the petitioners brought treasures to the wizard in exchange for his help, so he supposed that this was true of the skilled crafters of such treasures, also, including the books. Whatever the reason, cleaning the very top room of the tower always gave him a sent of comfort and pride.

Or at least, it used to.

Something was wrong in the library. Owen paused in his sweeping to glance about. The shelves of books stood as they always did, bathed orange in the light of the distantly setting sun. There were no sounds of any intruder (not that he’d ever found an intruder in the library before – anybody foolish enough to violate the wizard’s hospitality and leave the guest levels of the tower usually went no higher than the treasure rooms, more interested in pilfering gold than books). One of the kitchen drafts played about his ankles, urging him to hurry so he could go back downstairs and play. The carpets, more frayed and faded every season, were –

Wait a moment. A draft?

The kitchen drafts rarely left the kitchen itself, afraid as they were of the wizard. They certainly never strayed this high up the tower. Owen hunted about until he found the source – one of the panels of mage glass that made up the dome over the room was broken, a mess of shards sprinkled across the carpet. Through it, a chill late autumn wind blew, bringing with it moisture to ruin the books.

Owen stared at the glass on the floor. This wasn’t right. Things broke in the tower, of course, more and more often every year, but mage glass was… well, magical. It wasn’t supposed to break.

The wizard had to know about this.

Using a dusting cloth to protect himself, Owen carefully picked up the largest shard, about the size of his hand, and tucked it into one of the large pockets of his apron.

Then he finished sweeping the floors. The wizard would be furious to come up here and have to walk on dusty floors. He secured cloth from the treasure room over the hole like he’d stuff rags into the cracks of his workrooms to protect himself from the chill, and went on his way.

It was almost winter, and certainly too late in the season for petitioners. Anybody coming up the mountain now risked being trapped in an early snowstorm and killed on their way back down. So when Owen approached the wizard’s chambers, the last thing he expected to hear was talking.

“To ask me to do anything further would be very unwise, Your Majesty,” the wizard was saying. Owen hesitated. He didn’t know anyone named ‘Majesty’, but the rare respect and caution in the wizards voice suggested that they must be very important indeed. Certainly not somebody whose meeting should be interrupted by a mere servant.

“Yes, I understand the importance of time in this matter. But with respect, Your Majesty, we’ve known of this complication for twenty years, and time was always going to be – my answer is the same as it’s always been. Sir. My King. As I have told you every year, no matter what riches you offer me, my skills, as well as fate itself, have limits. Waking Princess Talia wouldn’t un-curse her, it would only burden here with a more tangled destiny. If you want to remove the curse, you must find the witch who – well in that case, I’d say that your options are political. Either disinherit the princess or appoint one of the younger twins as regent. I don’t presume to be your advisor, You Majesty, but with respect, you did contact me looking for advi – well, yes, you contacted me looking for magic, and that is something I will not provide in this case, just like I said last year, and the year before. Your Maj – Your Majesty, I do not get into petty squabbles with witches; if you’re looking to hire a bounty hunter then you will have to look elsewhere.”

Owen backed away from the door. There were no guests in the tower, he was certain of that. The wizard must be using something very magical to talk to someone very important, and that wasn’t his business.

He went downstairs to get started on dinner. As he stepped foot otno the ground level, the three kitchen drafts started whipping about him; Starlight, light and sharp, playing with his hair; Thunder, clumsy and forceful, barrelling straight into his shins; Sunshine, moderate and inquisitive, pushing its way into his apron pocket and seeking out the glass. Soon, all three of them were circling his head, whispering into his ears: what’s going on/what is happening/what did you find?

“The tower dome broke,” he whispered to them, and they tossed about his head, picking up on his agitation but not understanding the problem. He lit the kitchen fire and left the soup pot to Sunshine’s supervision while he headed out to the spring to fetch tomorrow’s water. Firewood was a precious commodity up on the mountain, and the three little drafts of wind could direct the fire’s heat much better than he could. Sunshine would have the soup hot in no time, using only a single piece of a log.

Sunshine and Starlight, being thin, fragile drafts, never ventured outside the tower where the mountain winds might tear them apart. But Thunder, bigger, stronger, and not particularly careful, whipped up under Owen’s shirt for protection and went with him out to the spring to fill two large buckets: one for the kitchen and Owen, and one to be lugged up to the eleventh floor, the wizard’s quarters, for his bathroom. It wasn’t the wizard’s bath day, and there were no guests, so work was light; on a busy day, he could be carrying ten or fifteen buckets up those stairs. The coming winter meant less water hauling, so he didn’t particularly mind the way it bit at his hands and face, freezing his fingers and nose. Inside the kitchens, the drafts were a cool chill, but compared to the air outside, Thunder was comparatively warm against his body.

It was tempting to carry the bucket up the stairs in one hand and the wizard’s dinner tray in the other, but Owen had dropped enough trays and suffered enough beatings to have stopped trying that years ago. He filled the wizard’s bathroom first and then went back for the dinner, taking the stairs as quickly as he dared so that the soup would reach the wizard as warm as possible. The old man was half-collapsed in a large armchair by his own fireplace, lit with a feeble magical flame that struggled against the approaching dark and chill. Even behind the insulation of layers of rich tapestries, the room was cooling with the loss of sunlight, and the wizard glared at the little flame as if winter was its fault. Owen did his best to ignore the struggling flame, did his best not to remember previous years of flames roaring in the grate, and settled the dinner tray on the table next to the wizard.

The wizard’s hands were trembling. With no strangers to impress his grandness upon, they were free of the weight of their usual rings and jewels, his left hand adorned only with the single iron ring topped with a brilliant sapphire that he always wore. But still, they shook. They were cupped around a small hand mirror that Owen, having developed a sense for such things over the years, could see was magical in some way, though he had no idea what it did.

The wizard glanced at Owen as he set the tray down and grunted an acknowledgement that passed for thanks. Owen swallowed, trying to keep the tremble out of his own body, and said, “M-master.”

“Hmm?”

“There’s… there’s a problem. In the library.”

“In the library, you say? What kind of a problem could there possibly be in the library?”

“One of the glass panes. It’s broken.”

The wizard closes his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and let it out. He picked a piece of bread from his dinner tray and nibbled it. He did not look particularly surprised. “You plug the hole?”

“It was a bit large to plug, Master. It, uh… I put many layers of cloth over it, but…”

“That’ll do. It can wait until after tomorrow.”

“But sir, the books! The damp – ”

“It can wait, I said! It’ll be easier to repair later. I have more important things to do tonight.”

Owen nodded reluctantly. The library was full of parchment and vellum and even, in some of the nicer tomes, precious paper. He wasn’t sure how much damp those things could take, but the wizard did, presumably, know these things, and if he said it could wait, well, Owen supposed that it would have to wait. It wasn’t until he was well out of the wizard’s presence that he began to wonder if the man’s judgement was going. The wizard’s strength faded year by year, and the tower’s strength faded year by year, and Owen wasn’t sure what would happen to him when one or the other finally collapsed.

He made his way back down the stairs. The fourteenth floor was the library and the wizard’s private workshop and main study, and the twelfth and thirteenth were for storage of the sorts of items that the wizard didn’t want petitioners pawing through – treasure rooms, and the eleventh was the wizard’s personal quarters, including his smaller study. On those floors, only Owen and the wizard were allowed. Below that was his more public workshop, and rooms for treasures he wanted to show off, and guest quarters and reception rooms and suchlike. The bottom two floors were the ones that Owen thought of as ‘his’; the kitchens and the laundry and the repair workshop and the servant’s quarters. The tower was designed so that guests coming in could be swept up two levels of grand staircase into a luxurious sitting room, or if they were unable to climb the stairs then they could stay in a small but cozy guest quarters tucked into one side of the bottom floor, without ever having to see the servants’ areas. The quarters had room for several servants, but Owen was the only servant in the tower; he’d been the only servant in the tower since he’d been abandoned here by his mother fourteen years ago, when he was just one year old. Just him and the wizard and, for six months of the year, an endless parade of strange faces with stranger problems from a world below the mountain that he didn’t understand.

He wondered if the wizard would live long enough to see the pass clear of snow again, and the petitioners come back.

He ate his own share of soup and bread, prepared the dough for tomorrow’s loaf, and headed off to bed. He didn’t dare waste the wood for a fire, not knowing how severe the winter would be, and instead simply piled enough blankets onto his bed that he wouldn’t feel the cold for very long. The three drafts paced his room like near-silent guards, and that was comforting, although Owen wasn’t sure what they could protect him from, exactly.

Owen was an early riser, needing to be up in time to prepare the wizard’s breakfast and get the tower in order for the day, but it was early even for him when he found himself abruptly woken by starlight blowing back and forth sharply across his face. Danger/different/new thing/not safe!

Owen was on his feet immediately, tying his apron on, as if that was going to do anything. “Where? What happened?”

Outside/person/front door.

“A petitioner? This late?” Somebody coming up the mountain this close to winter must be truly desperate indeed. But all three of the breezes were dancing about him now, and they weren’t usually so upset by petitioners, unless they brought dogs with them. And if the problem was a dog, Starlight would simply have said so.

Front door/front door/front door.

There was something heavy in Owen’s apron pocket. As he headed for the door, he reached in and pulled out the shard of glass. Without really thinking about it, he unwrapped it and held it like a knife, ready to protect himself from whatever intruder had the drafts so agitated – and immediately cut himself on the sharp edges. He hissed, wrapped the bottom of the shard in the dusting cloth to make a makeshift handle, and held it at his side as he approached the door – only to remember that ere steps away was the kitchen, full of actual knives that would probably make much better weapons, if it came down to it.

He hesitated near the tower entrance, wondering if he should go for a knife, but just then, somebody knocked on the other side with a force that shook the old oak door in its frame. So he stepped forward and opened the little viewing panel to look outside.

The petitioner was an old woman. Most of her was wrapped up against the chill, but the face peeking out from under multiple shawls (old and threadbare and rougher than any of the fabric in the tower) was unmistakably a very old woman. Stringy grey hair peeked out from her coverings around her face; wrinkled skin hung off her jaw and nose and brows. She looked up at him with one good eye, the other a blank white orb, and grinned a broad grin with a total of five teeth in it.

“You must be the boy, then! What’s your name?”

Owen didn’t move or speak. He’d lived with a wizard far too long to do stupid things like give mysterious strangers his name.

She just grinned wider. “Smart boy. There might be hope for you yet. Well, are you going to let me in?”

He let her in. “It’s a bit late to be coming up the pass, ma’am.”

“Yes, I agree. You two have such horrible timing. You’ll kill an old woman, you will. Is there tea?”

“Yes, I can make tea.” Not wanting to risk insulting her by asking if she could handle the stairs, he guided her into the small ground-level sitting room. “The wizard’s not up yet, he – ”

“Well, tell that lazy old coot to get his arse out of bed and come say hello to his sister!” she bellowed in a voice that, for a moment, Owen believed might actually travel up all ten flights of stairs. “I come all the way out here and he wants to sleep in? Lazy brat.”

Owen felt his whole body freeze at the mere idea of anyone daring to call the wizard a ‘brat’. “You’re his sister? I… didn’t know the wizard had any family.”

“Knowing my brother, there’s probably a world of things you don’t know yet, boy,” the woman growled. “But you will, boy. If it takes the last breath in my lungs, you will.”