other techniques may enhance it. The collection has been laid out to begin with the simplest principles, here.” He pointed to the highest shelf closest to the door. “You will work your way to the right on this first bookcase, and when you reach the end of the shelf, you will begin on the next lower. The first case should require approximately a year.”
Bosk looked around the room with some dismay. He counted twelve cases.
“Did you think an apprenticeship in sorcery would be brief, young Bosk?” said Turjan.
Bosk straightened his shoulders and went to the first shelf to take down the initial volume. It was heavy. He set it on the table. “I see from the vacant place that your daughter is more than a year ahead of me.”
“So she is. That is one of the advantages of being born to sorcery.”
“Then, with your permission, I will endeavor to learn from her as well as from yourself.”
Rianna looked up from her book, but said nothing.
Turjan smiled. “Well, we’ll see what sort of teacher she makes.” At the door, he said, “The midday meal will be in the tower garden. Rianna will show you. And Bosk — the books are by many different authors, and after a time you will find a certain repetition in them, though with variation. That, too, will be important to you.” Then he was gone.
Bosk settled at the opposite end of the table from Rianna and ran his hands over the leather tooling of his book’s cover. The script was so ornate that at first he could not read it, but by following its curves with a finger, he managed to spell out “Laccodel.” He opened it to the first page. It was handwritten, but readable enough, and proved to be a history of Laccodel’s attempts to reproduce the work of an older mage, part diary, part exercise book. Bosk chose a pad and stylus and made a few notes, though he did not at all understand what the notes meant. After a time, he looked at Rianna, who was annotating her diagrams with arcane sigils and tinted inks. She seemed so intent on her work that he hesitated to disturb her. Yet soon enough she glanced up at him, and he thought he might offer a bit of polite conversation.
“What are you studying?” he said.
She added a stroke to the top of her drawing. “The Third Evolution of Mazirian’s Diminution.”
“Ah,” he said, not knowing what else might be appropriate.
“My goal is to perfect it before my tenth birthday.”
“And that will be…?
“Not long. Has Laccodel bored you already? His prose is turgid in the extreme.”
“Not bored. Merely mystified,” said Bosk.
She smiled with pursed lips. “He is a foundation of sorcery. He knew Phandaal himself.”
“Your father spoke of Phandaal when he was at Boreal Verge. Who was he?”
“One cannot study sorcery without studying Phandaal.” She turned to her book once more. “You’ll learn about him and the rest of the great ones if you keep reading.”
He took a deep breath and opened his book at the beginning. Instead of notes, this time he wrote queries on his pad. When he had filled three pages with them, he heard Rianna close her book with a thump. He looked up and saw her gazing at him with her chin cupped in one hand.
“Hungry?” she said.
Only then did he realize that his stomach was clamoring.
The tower garden was at the highest extremity of the castle, a place of multicolored flowers that tilted their petals to face Bosk as he passed, as if they were curious about their visitor. The view from their midst was impressive — the Derna green within its steep banks, the forest stretching north and west, the towers of Kaiin gleaming like a pale mirage on the southern horizon. The meal was set out on a trestle table — cold meats, jellied broths, vegetables steamed with four distinct spices. Bosk sampled them all, pleased that not a single mushroom appeared on any platter.
“We do eat mushrooms,” said Rianna, “but Father thought they would bore you even more than Laccodel.”
Turjan arrived after they finished and asked Bosk what he had learned that morning. Bosk offered his queries, and the three spent the afternoon discussing them, Turjan deftly leading Bosk through concepts he had not quite comprehended and calling on Rianna to expand upon them. Bosk found his zest for the lore of sorcery increasing as every answer provoked new questions. He scarcely noticed the ruddy sun sinking toward the west until it shone in his eyes.
Turjan leaned back from the table. “You’ll do well enough, young Bosk. You have the desire, without which learning is mere rote.” He gazed out at the shadowed landscape. “Have you had enough for today?”
Bosk considered the length of the evening that lay before him. “If you’ll allow it, I’ll look at the book again before supper.”
Turjan smiled at him. “I think you’ll be better served just now by something else.” He turned to his daughter. “You’ve been chafing to show him the doll house.”
She rose eagerly.
“An introduction only,” her father said. “As we decided.”
She was already gesturing for Bosk to follow her.
One flight below was a high-ceilinged chamber that occupied the whole breadth of the tower, with tall windows and glowing sconces alternating on every wall. The center of the space was occupied by a duplicate in miniature of Castle Miir, complete to the roof garden paved with tiny replica flowers. At his first sight of it, Bosk was astonished by the detail of architecture, and even more astonished when, at Rianna’s touch, the outer wall split and swung open to reveal an interior as meticulously executed as the exterior. He knelt to peer at elaborately furnished cubicles, tapestries no larger than kerchiefs covering their walls, delicate chandeliers dangling from their ceilings. He found his own quarters, the bed and wardrobe and even the bath reproduced in toy size, a manikin no larger than his littlest finger standing at the door.
“Two years work,” said Rianna, pride in her voice. “Every bit of it crafted by my hands. I even wove the linens. And watch.” She spoke a phrase that Bosk could not quite make out, and draperies pulled themselves over the windows and the sconces went out, leaving a darkness so profound that he dared not move for fear of damaging something, possibly even himself. Then she spoke another phrase, and hundreds of tiny yellow-green lights, like so many fireflies, sprang into being in chandeliers and candelabra all through the doll house and in tiny lanterns outlining the gate, the courtyard, and the crenellations. There was light enough to allow Bosk to rise from his knees and walk surefooted all around the structure.
“How beautiful,” he said. “And after it is all complete…?”
She crossed her arms and smiled. “Then I’ll learn to make dolls that walk. And perhaps even talk.” She plucked the manikin from his room and showed it to him. It had yielding skin and limbs that flexed, and it could be bent into a sitting position and perched in a tiny chair. Rianna left it so in the main hall, where three other dolls sat at a table much like the one where last night’s meal had been served. One of the dolls was smaller than the others and had long black braids. She straightened that one and set it on a bed in another room. “I tried to convince some of the Twk people to live here. It’s much more comfortable than their gourds.” She took the two remaining original figures from the dining table and set them on a bed on the opposite side of the building. “But they refused.”
“The Twk people?”
“You’ll meet them.” She stepped back and touched the gate, and the miniature castle swung shut.
“You left me at the table,” Bosk remarked.
Rianna laughed softly. “They’re only dolls, Bosk.” A phrase made the wall sconces spring to life, and another extinguished the miniature lights.
He followed her downstairs to supper, which again included no mushrooms.
Laccodel’s book occupied Bosk for many days, and then there was a second volume of Laccodel, and a third. By the time he had finished them and discussed their contents with Turjan and Rianna countless times, he felt he would know and hate Laccodel’s prose style any time he encountered it. Yet his first magical effort arose from Laccodel, a transformation of citrine dust into amethyst, and he could not help feeling triumph at the simple change from yellow to purple.
“Well done,” said Turjan. “And now back again.”
It took Bosk two weeks to manage that.
“Sometimes undoing is the more important of the two,” said Turjan.
“I prefer the purple,” said Bosk, and he changed the dust again and stored it in a vial to remind himself that
