Excerpt

Prologue

The mage had a name, of course, but Akwar was too young to linger on such things when it came to such wayfaring enigmas as this traveler who carried wonder within him as certainly as he carried the gnarled staff that never left his side. The moment of the man's arrival was seared into his memory, striding in along the dusty road from Visithor, robes muddied with travel, his long stride loose with the bearing of a man who carried the wide world with him, and who never doubted there would always be another horizon to chase.

He came to Dorsten shortly after the spring planting, when the fields lay freshly turned, waiting for the rains that were soon to come.

The village, as Akwar would come to understand they always did, chose Papa to meet him.

Papa was the village.

Whenever a plow cut too deeply into a neighbor's field, or a family's irrigation ditch stole water from another, people came to Papa, whose name was Halitar. When cattle wandered, harvests needed organizing, or tempers rose enough that fists would follow, they came to Papa. He settled arguments, planned the rituals of planting and harvest, and somehow still found time to tend his own family fences, livestock, and fields.

As a young boy, Akwar secretly resented the villagers for stealing so much of Papa's time.

During the first days the mage spent in Dorsten, that resentment only grew.

Akwar was excited, but anxious.

The arrival of the mage tilted his world, bringing a sense of difference to what had been the everyday certainty of his life. The mage filled him with a sense of something that was both fear and excitement, but that he could not explain.

Nothing in Dorsten looked different, yet everything did.

He felt rejected when Papa consigned him to staying home with Mama rather than allowing him to follow them as Papa escorted the scholar across the countryside, exploring the broken rock formations south of the village and the cool caverns that wound beneath the eastern hills. Papa showed the mage where the spring floods carved new channels through the valley and explained how the shifting winds of the summer storms gathered thunder until lightning split the sky. Akwar overheard conversations about the migrations of elk, the habits of bears, and the hunting patterns of the hawks that nested along the cliffs west of the woods.

When the pair returned to the hearth for a late supper, Akwar saw the mage listen with the attention of a student rather than the authority of a learned man, and despite losing so much time with his father, Akwar had been proud.

Only later did Akwar understand that the village had chosen Halitar as much to shield themselves as to honor him.

"Mages do not understand villagers," Papa once told Mama when he thought the boys were asleep. "And villagers do not understand mages."

Akwar, however, could never keep his eyes off the visitor.

The mage was tall and willowy, with long arms and long legs that moved with a fluid grace that made even ordinary gestures seem deliberate. His fingers curled gently when he spoke, yet, as he gestured, Akwar was certain he could see pale wisps of magelight in their wake. The man was young, with only a light scrabble of beard across otherwise smooth cheeks. Excitement followed him wherever he looked. When he spoke, his hands danced through the air with movements as naturally enchanting as watching bees glide from flower to flower.

Watching him, listening to stories of distant lands and unseen wonders, Akwar felt something stir inside him.

Longing.

When the mage departed Dorsten, Akwar buried Papa beneath an endless stream of questions. Where had the man learned such things? Had Papa seen magic? Could lightning truly be commanded? Were the stories about the great sorcerers true?

Papa's patience wore thin.

"The villagers are not wrong to fear," he said. "Mages are not to be trusted."

To Papa, mages were ramblers. Drifters. Travelers who followed dusty roads to destinations beyond even Visithor and into the dark places beyond civilized lands.

They were best avoided.

"Keep your eye on the plow row," Papa said. "That is good, honest work. Dorsten is your home. The people here are your life."

"I understand," Akwar said.

And yet he did not.

The years that followed deepened the memory.

Papa had met the mage and lived to tell the tale. Watching from a distance, seeing the caution with which the villagers gave the traveler room, and the easy confidence with which the man accepted it, Akwar found himself returning to those few days in the quiet moments of his existence.

He remembered the mage's long fingers fussing at some loose thread on his sleeve one moment and sketching invisible patterns through the air the next.

As Akwar grew older, he decided these were more than tricks of memory.

Wishes rather than true memories.

Alone in the fields, while following a plow behind the oxen as Papa had taught him, or carrying water from the stream as Mama commanded, Akwar often found himself imitating those movements, curling his fingers into impossible shapes, imagining that his gesture had coaxed lightning from a cloud or thunder from a clear sky. He invented stories of himself, standing before kings and monsters alike, traveling the lands, and wielding the same mysterious powers whispered to belong to Talik E'Tari, Lord of Visithor, and the other great sorcerers.

Nothing ever happened.

Still, he never entirely stopped trying.

Because in those quiet moments, Akwar wished he could have been his father.

Just for a single afternoon.

For then he would know what it was like to stand beside a holder of magic. To watch him work and hear him speak.

And, maybe, to learn how to wield such powers himself.