Chapter Three

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!”

Ishiah rolled his eyes, but after two and a half years of hearing that imbecile say that same damned line every other week, in some ways Ishiah had grown to appreciate the familiarity of it.

Instead of getting up right away, Ishiah put the scrap of cloth he was using as a bookmark into the book he was reading—a treatise of warfare during the flooding of the spring rains—and closed his eyes.

“Bring the energy from the head, down to the feet, and back to the head,” Ishiah murmured to himself, breathing deeply and evenly in meditation. “Then out through the hands with intent to focus the spell.”

He held out one hand toward the waiting pile of rope and opened his eyes as his spell took shape. The rope drifted up into the air and tossed itself out the window. Ishiah grinned because he had gotten it to work.

Magic was as difficult to learn as all the books on warfare he was reading. Despite wanting to learn everything he could about magic as quickly as he could, Ishiah found himself needing to take a break all too often. The best way was to return to the books Monrath had supplied, and he read those until they started driving him crazy before returning to the magic ones. He was keeping up with all of the exercises he had been assigned, but adding the magic kept the tedium at bay.

Ishiah finally stood and headed over to the window. “Anything good for me?” he yelled down to the waiting soldiers.

“A few letters and the gardener sent a pot of potatoes for you. He said you can replant them yourself and included instructions.”

“Thanks!” Ishiah called back. “Send it all up.”

When the soldiers stepped away from the basket they had attached to the rope, Ishiah started pulling the rope back inside. He could still remember his first few times doing this and having to stop to shake his arms out. Now he wasn’t even winded when the basket reached the top. He dumped it out like usual, careful of the wide pot with green sprouts popping out of the dirt, and refilled the basket with everything he wanted to send away. It never took long for the basket to get back to the ground, and the soldiers were practiced at getting the basket untied and hooked back to the packhorse. Ishiah waved as they turned around to head back to the capital.

He took his time pulling the empty rope back up, carefully coiling the horsehair so it wouldn’t get knotted and making certain that all of it had safely survived yet another encounter with the basket. When he was sure the rope was secure, Ishiah rested his elbows on the windowsill and looked out into the spring afternoon.

The view hadn’t changed in all the time he had been locked up in the tower. The last peak of the Zel Mountains was just below him, and beyond was the grassy plains of Faltiken. There were no enemy soldiers in sight, no one amassing for an invasion, and Ishiah let out a heavy sigh. He would never wish for war, of course, but company would be nice. If Faltiken did try to invade, Ishiah had no doubt that someone would be sent up the tower with him to act as a second set of eyes when Ishiah had to sleep, and that would be someone he could talk to. Ishiah was desperately tired of talking to the walls and not getting any response.

He turned away from the view slowly, and something suddenly sparkled out of the side of his eye. Ishiah spun back around, staring out at the grassy plain, but he didn’t see anything. He looked away slowly this time, and as his head was turned sideways, he saw the strange sparkles again.

It had to be magic, but what kind he couldn’t even guess. He was barely able to lift the rope successfully every time; knowing what sort of magic might be impacting his vision and pinpointing where it was coming from wasn’t possible just yet. Still, he couldn’t help leaning farther out of the tower to see just where the sparkles originated.

Ishiah looked down just in time to see a man walk into view from the Monrath side of the tower. He circled the tower underneath the window and then suddenly vanished.

That wasn’t normal. Ishiah stared down at the spot on the tower where the man had vanished for a brief moment, before he suddenly heard footsteps coming from the magic library below him.

He wasn’t alone!

Ishiah scrambled into the training room and quickly grabbed a practice sword and dagger, before hurrying into the library where he could stand protectively over the open trapdoor.

“Who’s there?” he called down, half hoping and half dreading getting an answer.

“Who do you think?” a man’s voice replied sharply. “Not many people know how to get into Wizard Rap’s tower without having to climb up a bloody rope. In fact, that number is probably exactly one, especially since I’m going to make certain you don’t remember this encounter.”

Energy flowed from Ishiah’s head, down to his feet, and back to his head, before flowing out from the tip of his sword. A surprised yelp echoed up the stairs, and Ishiah jumped down, carefully skipping steps on the steep spiral. He found a man standing in the center of the library, his arms crossed and a frown on his face. The man’s hair was longer than Ishiah’s, reaching his butt while Ishiah’s was only just past his shoulder blades. It was also a vibrant shade of purple, which matched his wide lavender-colored eyes. He was beautiful, but despite the flower-colored hair, he also looked dangerous.

“Found my grimoires, did you?” the man asked, and while his voice was sharp, the aggressive tone from earlier was gone. “That was a fair attempt at a freezing spell. You show some promise, I admit, but you’re two hundred years too young to be battling with me.”

“How did you get in here?” Ishiah had to ask. He was still holding the sword and knife out protectively, but the excited beating of his heart had slowed. There was something dangerous about the man, yes, but after living most of his life in the army, Ishiah could tell when the aggression necessary to attack was missing.

“Please, I built this tower. Let me tell you, if you thought your little freezing spell was hard, try magicking up an entire tower from stones you magically mined from inside the Rapparees Mountains. Name’s Zelimir, by the way. Call me Zel. Who are you?”

“I’m Ishiah,” Ishiah replied. “I thought this was Wizard Rap’s tower?”

Zel grinned and this time the excited beating of Ishiah’s heart was caused by just how pretty Zel’s smile was. Ishiah’s sword was dipping toward the ground before he noticed his guard had dropped, but once he had, he leaned the sword against the banister and dropped the knife onto the bottom stair. There wasn’t any point in holding them if he wasn’t going to use them.

“It’s amazing what gets lost in five hundred years and what doesn’t. When I built this tower, the mountains were called the Rapparees because of how sharp the peaks are. Don’t ask me when someone started calling them the Zel Mountains and decided my name was Rap instead.” Zel fell silent and appeared to be studying Ishiah. Since Ishiah didn’t know what to say in reply to that—and he was kind of afraid that something idiotic and besotted would come out—he kept his mouth shut. “You’re obviously one of Gabrielle’s get. She had those eyes too, and she had just enough of a magic touch to break the protections I had on my tower to keep intruders out. You’ve got a bit more than a touch of magic in you, which is why my fraying spells finally broke on me and you got into my workroom. I knew I should have come back to renew them, but laziness, you know.”

What Ishiah was beginning to realize was that Zel couldn’t abide by silence. His words weren’t just chatter, but every time he closed his mouth on a finished thought, a moment later it was open and running again.

“And what with my accidentally knocking Gabrielle out of the tower when I came to see who had broken my protections, I was a bit embarrassed to come back. She fell on the brambles that had grown around the tower in my absence. Ended up blinding herself, among other injuries. Luckily her beloved prince found her quickly enough, and I used the magic from his tears to fix her up. I got rid of the brambles, of course, and then since I wasn’t exactly using the tower when she came back twenty or so years later, I told her as long as she didn’t destroy my tower she could use it as she liked. I’m guessing you’re the result of that?”

Zel finally paused for breath, so Ishiah quickly cut in. “I’ve been assigned here,” he explained. “On watch to ensure the Faltiken Army doesn’t invade again.”

“Oh, yeah. That was the war Gabrielle was involved with. Both times, if my memory serves. Nasty people, those Faltikens. Like to turn their wizards into slaves. I stayed out of that country for my first few hundred years until I could conceal what I am.”

This time Ishiah didn’t wait for a break, cutting in at the end of a sentence. “So, why are you here?”

“I already told you. You broke into my workroom.”

“That was almost two years ago,” Ishiah cut in before Zel could continue. The babbling was annoying, yet at the same time it was kind of endearing. That, and it had been so long since Ishiah had had any sort of conversation that he was enjoying every moment of it. Besides, the way Zel’s face animated with happy eagerness when he was talking about the past, disgust when he was talking about the Faltikens, and shined with pleasure when he spoke about magic was absolutely beautiful to watch. If Ishiah didn’t need to ask his own questions, he wouldn’t have any problem with letting Zel chatter on uninterrupted.

Zel shrugged. “I was on the other side of the world working with another wizard on a project. She needed my expertise on shielding spells, which was about the moment when my shield on my workroom broke. I felt that you were only reading the books, and her project was far too interesting to leave just because you were curious. I knew you had to have some magic to break through my degrading spells, but I never thought you’d be able to teach yourself as much as you have. I’m glad I finally got over here. You need a teacher, and you need to have enough knowledge to make a decision. You’ve already elongated your life by about thirty years with the magic you’ve been using. If you want to continue working with magic, you need to understand that with magic continuously coursing through your body, you’ll live until something kills you. That’s not a decision you can make overnight.

“There’s a reason magic became a lost art, you know.” Zel continued speaking as if his last statement hadn’t zinged through Ishiah, sending utter shock and a dozen panicked ‘oh shit’ lines running through his brain. Magic could really make a person live forever? Ishiah had to believe it, considering he was looking at the wizard that had personally built a tower far older than any human could ever hope to live, let alone how old Zel himself claimed to be. None of the grimoires he had been reading had mentioned that, but Ishiah thought that was because by the time anyone usually got to a grimoire, they had already been warned.

Thirty years wasn’t too bad. He would definitely outlive Haines, but probably not baby Gabby. If Ishiah stopped using magic right now, he wouldn’t have to endure seeing Gabby, and any of Gabby’s children and grandchildren, live and die. If Ishiah ever had any children of his own—which he hadn’t planned to, given how much political drama his own birth had caused—he would watch them die too. It was utterly horrible to think of.

But the magic felt so right, so pure. He loved working with it. Magic was hard, but so was sword work, and he diligently practiced that every day too. Stopping something he loved because of having to endure something so terrible made sense, and yet in some ways it also felt like giving up, and that was almost as bad.

“You see, when everyone knew about magic, bad people would learn it so they could subjugate others and live forever.” Zel, oblivious to Ishiah’s inner turmoil, was still talking. Ishiah latched onto his words as a convenient distraction. This wasn’t a decision to be made in an hour, not when it could affect what could be a very, very long life. “The good wizards at that time—it was a few centuries before my time, you understand, but my mentor was there and she told me all about it—well, they got together and managed to defeat the evil wizards and place a spell of forgetting on the world. It didn’t work so well in Faltiken. Magic is really weird over there. Don’t ask me why—I hate traveling over there and have no interest in figuring out that mystery. Anyway, so most of the world forgot, but every once in a while, someone like you or me stumbles back upon it and we make the decision whether to study or to return to forgetting. You need to make a decision soon, before it gets to be too late to turn back.”

“I need to think about it,” Ishiah replied in a rare moment of silence. “I can’t make a decision right now.”

Zel nodded. “That’s fine. If you decide to give up magic, I’ll seal my workroom back up and make you forget both the room and magic ever existed. It’s not too late for a spell like that to take hold. I’ll continue on my travels, and you’ll finish your posting here. You’ll live a bit longer than most, but not considerably, and it will be a regular human life. If you want to keep practicing magic, I’ll stay and teach you.”

Ishiah’s heart immediately jumped at those words. A companion to talk to during the long months of exile would be amazing, and looking at and listening to Zel would certainly brighten every moment. The man was far too beautiful.

“Until then, what do you have to eat around here? I’m starved.”

Ishiah laughed. “Let’s go to the kitchen and find out.” He retrieved his sword and knife and started climbing the stairs back up into the main rooms of the tower, Zel right behind him.