Chapter One

Kingdom

“I understand you are a sorcerer.”

The speaker was a vast example of humanity, a truly gigantic man who easily could have been mistaken for a giant with dwarfism, if there were such a thing. He was heavily armored in thick leather, atop chain mail, underneath a fur cloak that appeared to have been manufactured from the remains of an entire bear.

He was from the northern climes, clearly. There was no reason to wear this much clothing on the southern side of the Ailing Mountains.

“Yes, indeed,” Osraic said. “I am a sorcerer. Can I be of service?”

This was only a partial truth.

“I am Cant of the Warven tribe. I have need of magics.”

Cant was standing in the middle of Osraic’s tiny shop, which was at the edge of the only slightly larger town of Lantor, one of the northernmost settlements in the nation of Kalspar.

Lantor was one of a chain of mud towns, so named because the streets were a perpetual morass of thick mud. This was in part due to the snowmelt runoff from the mountains, and in part because the range had a tendency to attract and retain storm systems.

Much of the mud from the mud town appeared to have found a new home on Osraic’s wood floor thanks to the heavy boots of the man from the Warven tribe.

“Of course,” Osraic said. “Is it a remedy you’re looking for? I have a number of potions on-hand for any variety of ailments.” He gestured around the room, which was wall-to-wall with exotic items.

“No, nothing like that,” he grumbled. “Do these offer protections?”

“Ah yes! These are fortune charms. They will improve the luck of the wearer threefold.”

“Hah. And what if you are a man with only bad luck? Does it triple your misfortune?”

“That’s not how they work, no. Ha-ha. So, no remedy or charm for you, then, Mr. Cant. A potion?”

“It’s Cant. There is no ‘mister’ or ‘sir’, there is only Cant of the Warven tribe. And you seem young for a sorcerer. Have you no master?”

Osraic looked young because he was actually very young, which was the reason he had elected to set up his first shop in a distant little mud town rather in than in the city. Well, it was one of the reasons. Another was that he wasn’t formally a sorcerer yet, but nobody this far from the center was going to check.

“Mine is the only name on the door, Cant of the Warven tribe. I’ve no need for a master.”

Cant grunted and stared at the door. “I can’t read. What does it say?”

Osraic sighed.

“Osraic Tal Nar Drang. Sorcerer. And again, that’s me. I would proffer my city papers if you require further proof, but as you’ve said, you can’t read so I don’t see how this would help. But, see the nice symbol?”

Most of the town of Lantor couldn’t read either, so the symbol on the door—an owl, more or less, rendered by a carver who didn’t know what an owl looked like—was mandatory. Most of the shops on the main road followed a similar symbol-based method of self-identification. All except for the alehouse, which used to have a sign up until either a boisterous wind or a boisterous guest tore it down. It hadn’t been replaced because if there’s one thing everyone knows the location of, it’s the nearest alehouse.

“You have too many names, you people,” Cant muttered. He was holding up a gingerroot homunculus and looking puzzled about it. “And, that symbol on the door looks like a baby covered in feathers. I walked past here thrice before asking someone on the street. You should fire whoever did that for you. I thought sure this was a nursery for malformed infants.”

“A valid complaint. I’ll take it up with him when next we speak. But in the meantime, once more, what can I do for you?”

“I told you, I need a sorcerer. How many times shall I repeat this?”

“Yes, yes, but for what? Potions are right over there.”

“I don’t want any of these trinkets. I need to hire a sorcerer. I need for you, Osraic Tal Nar Drang, to accompany me, and for this I will give you gold. I assume you southerners still do business in gold and at least that much hasn’t changed since the last time I came down the mountain.”

Osraic was oddly pleased that Cant remembered his entire name.

“Accompany you where?”

“That is a complicated question.”

“It’s really not.”

The door behind Cant opened. Osraic couldn’t see who had come in, at first, because the northerner was blocking his view. He could hear her voice just fine, though.

“What’s taking so long?” she asked.

He didn’t recognize the voice, and when the voice’s owner stepped around Cant, he didn’t recognize anything else about her either.

“It’s impossible to hire a sorcerer in this town, it seems,” Cant said. “The only one they have appears to be too stubborn.”

The woman was much more human-sized than Cant, about the same height as Osraic. She had brown hair, pulled back behind her head and partly hidden in a fur-lined hood that hung from her shoulders, attached to a heavy cloak. Her face was freckled, and she had maybe the most amazing green eyes he’d ever seen.

Those eyes looked him up and down. “You there, call your boss down so we can discuss terms.”

“He says he’s the sorcerer,” Cant said.

Another ten minutes passed in which Osraic attempted to reiterate his bona fides to the young woman without sounding cross about it. He didn’t want to sound cross because while going over his résumé he realized first, that her eyes were actually emerald green, which was simply extraordinary, and second, that she was most likely an elf. He’d never met an elf before, and was tempted to go wherever it was she wanted him to go just to get to know her better.

“I apologize,” the girl said. Cant called her Atha, and Osraic was busy rolling her name around in his mind during her apology. “I’ve never met a sorcerer without a beard. I assumed it was mandatory for your profession.”

“I’ve never met a man without a beard,” Cant said. Osraic decided the large northerner was making a joke, as it was not difficult to find a clean-shaven man south of the Ailings. Cant either had a very dry wit or was a poor joke-teller.

“It seems the two of you have traveled a long way specifically to hire me for some reason,” Osraic said. “So why don’t we—”

“We needed a horse too,” Cant said. “And dried food.”

“Yes, and those things as well. But as you’ve said, the reason for this is complicated so maybe—”

“And rope.”

“Yes fine! How about if I close the shop and we go down the road to the alehouse, sit down and have ourselves a few pints and maybe you can tell me what mad quest shook you off the side of the mountain and through my front door. Would that be all right?”

Cant shrugged. The elf smiled.

“That’s a splendid idea,” she said.

Borric’s Saloon was easily the most important establishment in town. Nearly everyone who worked on the main street of Lantor spent at least part of their day there; was large, bright where it needed to be and dark where it didn’t, surprisingly clean, and served food at least two measures above edible.

And of course there was the ale.

“This is the only reason to bother with this side of the Ailings!” Cant said, regarding the drink in his half-drained stein.

“There’s no ale in the north?” Osraic asked.

“There is,” Atha said, “but only in the baldest definition of the word. Alcoholic, and brownish.”

“Stay clear of the ale in our travels, sorcerer,” Cant barked. “If it doesn’t make you ill, the next day you’ll wish it had.”

“Yes, our travels. Why don’t you tell me more about that? Before I agree to anything?”

Osraic had no intention of agreeing to go anywhere further than Borric’s with the two northerners, no matter how often Atha transfixed him with those eyes. But he was willing to seem interested for quite a long while.

Atha smiled. “I think first I would like to see some demonstration from you, master sorcerer.”

“Call me Osraic.”

And I am no master, he thought.

“Osraic, then,” she said.

“A demonstration of what?”

“Use your magics. No large feat, just a minor proof.”

Something Osraic learned early in pursuit of this career was that there was really very little true magic in the world. It existed, certainly, but not as widely as anyone unfamiliar with the profession believed. Most times, when called upon to prove himself he could get away with a simple sleight-of-hand. The art of “magic” tricks was nearly as important to a professional sorcerer as scholarship and the innate ability to manipulate true magical energy. Sleight-of-hand and real magic was often indistinguishable to citizens.

Osraic debated whether Cant and Atha would be swayed by a disappearing coin or one of a thousand card tricks he knew. Elves were reputed to have better eyes than humans, and might not be counted upon to fall for a proper misdirection, so it was a risk. And he wanted to hear their story.

“Do you have a quill?” he asked.

“I don’t,” Atha said. “I can read, but have no need to write. Cant does neither.”

“How about an arrow?”

“Yes, those I have.”

On the floor at her feet was a large sack, from which she extracted a single arrow. He took it, and examined the sack.

“You have a bow in there?” he asked.

“No, not there.” She pulled a hairpin from the brown tangle on her head and held it up in the sunlight. It turned out to not be a hairpin at all. “This is my bow.”

“Enchanted!”

“Yes, obviously. You’ve no idea what a pain it is to carry a longbow everywhere.”

Osraic wanted a closer look at the bow. He knew of this enchantment but hadn’t ever tried it; examining a stable one would be helpful. He wondered why they weren’t bringing the sorcerer who’d done that for her to go on this trip of theirs, but decided against asking.

“Why didn’t you have the quiver enchanted as well?” he asked instead.

“I tried once, but arrows the size of toothpicks have a tendency to go missing.”

“That was a disaster,” Cant said. “She was afraid to speak the words to resize the arrows for fear one had become lodged in an awkward place.”

Atha laughed. “It would be an embarrassing way to die.”

Osraic studied the arrow. “You make your own,” he observed.

“There are no armories from which to buy such things in the mountains. But trees and birds we have plenty of.”

“Falcon?” he asked, sniffing the fletching.

“Very good.”

“Are you going to fondle it all day or will you be demonstrating your magic, sorcerer?” Cant asked.

“Right.”

Osraic held the arrow, tip down, on the table. Beneath his breath he muttered the necessary phrase, and let go. The arrow remained upright, point-down, apparently balanced in place.

“This?” Cant said. “This is a vagabond trick.”

Osraic twirled his finger above the arrow, and it began to spin in place.

“Is that better?” he asked the large man.

“Marginally better,” Atha answered. Cant only grunted.

With a twitch of his fingers the arrow rose off the tabletop and turned until it was horizontal with the surface. With another twitch Osraic made it drift toward Cant’s face until the point was inches from his eyeball.

“And now?” Osraic asked.

He sincerely hoped this would be an adequate demonstration, because it was just about the only trick he could perform reliably.

The ability to levitate small, light objects was one of the first things any sorcerer learned. It had a surprisingly wide range of applications, so wide it was possible for most to make a perfectly respectable living without advancing any further. Osraic expected to reach a much more advanced level of aptitude in time, but he hadn’t yet.

Also, if called upon, Osraic couldn’t have used the arrow as a weapon. The full degree of force he could apply to the arrow would at best have caused it to bump into Cant’s face gently. He was confident so long as the eyeball was the target he would not be called upon to do this.

Cant and Atha shared a meaningful glance.

“This is sufficient proof, thank you,” Atha said.

Osraic gestured and the arrow floated to the elf. He spoke the words, and the object was released. It fell into her waiting hand.

“Now why don’t you explain what you need from me?” he asked.

“Very well,” Atha said. “We seek the Cydonian Kingdom. I’m certain you’ve heard of it.”

Osraic laughed. But for some reason, he was the only one laughing.

There was a legend. Nobody knew how old it was, or if it represented some sort of true history, and if it did, what that history might have looked like.

But the legend itself, everyone knew.

The Cydonian Kingdom—known by most as simply the Kingdom—was supposed to have been the birthplace of all the races of the world: humans, elves, giants, trolls, goblins and so forth, from a single ancestral people. The inhabitants of the Kingdom—a race of beings called Cydonians—lived harmoniously up until the day they didn’t any more, an event known as the Fall.

Every take on the legend came with a different version of what caused the Fall: a war; a plague; an accident; and so forth. The Fall of the Kingdom was an entire literary genre unto itself, and whether those stories were to be found among the histories or in the fictive mythologies depended on whose library one happened to be standing in.

Osraic didn’t take the Kingdom seriously in any real sense, but he did have a favorite version of the Fall. It was the one his mother told him.

There was a mighty sorcerer named Orsak—sometimes Orak, or Ossic, or a half-dozen others including Osraic’s own name—who came to rule the Kingdom. At that time, magic was much more common and much more important, which meant Orsak’s power, as the ruler of a land of mighty sorcerers, was tremendous to a godlike extreme. This was a problem when Orsak went mad.

In some accounts, the madness was due to grief over the loss of a true love, which is how the poets and the bards told it. Other accounts told of a betrayal, and an act of violence meant to kill Orsak, which succeeded only in causing his derangement. This violence was a physical blow or a magical spell, depending.

A less popular account had the sorcerer falling into a great sleep and dreaming the spells that caused everything that came next. As a child, that was the one Osraic preferred, because it was the least horrible. As an adult, he leaned toward the violent attack / betrayal story as the most plausible, when he bothered to entertain the idea that it was true at all.

What came next was that Orsak spoke a new set of spells of a kind nobody had ever attempted before. These spells took the combined attributes of the Cydonians and divided them up. No longer were his subjects as tall as giants and as clever as goblins and as strong as trolls, and so forth.

It was the most implausible part of the story, so far as Osraic was concerned, because none of the races were just one or two things. Elves could be tall, and strong, and fast, and so could goblins. Trolls were strong brutes, but had a capacity for cleverness. Humans could perform magic, but were as capable as any of brutishness and stupidity, and all of the other traits that had been assigned to other species. The whole thing only managed to simplify the races into caricatures.

Really, the only way the story made sense was that it provided an explanation as to why humans were the one race that could manipulate magic.

As the story went, once the entire population of Cydonia had been de-mongrelized by his spell, Orsak scattered the races across the realm and sealed the gates of the Kingdom, which made it an origin story for the entire world. That was another reason not to take anything regarding the Kingdom seriously, because nothing in the world Osraic knew was this simple.

The mad sorcerer king then either died, continued to live alone in the vast and empty land he had personally depopulated, or left the Kingdom as well, only to walk the world in a series of incarnations. Again, it depended on whose version was being told.

Some adhered to the theory that the Kingdom was a true physical place to actively seek out, and that Orsak had left clues to its location in different parts of the world. One day—and this was the redemptive part that every version of the myth seemed to have—someone worthy would come along and either find the clues or otherwise piece together the location of the Kingdom, and enter.

Not that it mattered. It was only a myth.

Cant ordered a new round of ale as Osraic tried to figure out what the two of them could possibly mean.

“The Kingdom is a fairy tale,” he said. “Everyone who isn’t a child knows that.”

“I happen to know a fairy,” Atha said. “She didn’t think there was anything imaginary about it.”

“You’re actually making my point for me.”

“It’s very real, young sorcerer,” Cant said. “And we need your help to find it.”

“Why my help?”

“It’s said to pass through the gates at least one of each race must be represented,” Atha said.

“One of each kind is the exact wording of that passage,” Osraic said. “It could mean race; it doesn’t have to. And a lot of things are said when it comes to the Kingdom. It’s said one must also defeat a dragon, and drink the tears of a raven. Or an owl. Or a hawk. I have personally met two scholars who’ve devoted their entire adult lives to a debate on the correct bird’s tears, and I don’t even know if birds weep. But you’ve skipped those debates on the necessary requirements and gone with all races. Also, why me when Cant here is a perfectly acceptable human representative? You’ve forgotten all the other races and doubled up on one you already have.”

“Yes, but he isn’t a sorcerer, and we need one of those.”

“Why is that?”

“There’s a spell,” Cant said.

“What kind of spell?”

“We are not sorcerers, or we would tell you.”

Osraic took a large gulp of the ale. It was really annoying to learn that after all of this mysteriousness, the story he’d been waiting to hear was just another foolish Kingdom quest.

There had always been, and always would be, people who had convinced themselves they’d cracked the secret behind the Kingdom’s location. Some of them were ranting loners, but a few had the charisma to convince others or the finances to pay them. Every few years, it seemed, there was a formal expedition planned. All of them failed, sometimes spectacularly so. Osraic had an entire volume on the more famous Kingdom quests, and it made for highly entertaining reading.

“If it’s a spell, where is it written?” he asked.

“On the stones of the world,” Cant said.

Osraic rolled his eyes. He had only a modest tolerance for stupidity before what most people considered an off-putting level of sarcasm settled in, and Cant’s answer had just about tipped the scale.

“Really. The stones of the world. Not in a book or anything useful. Do you mean for me to read a cliff face?”

“And Orsak’s words fell upon the stones of the world,” Atha recited, “and rent the earth in twain.”

“I… don’t think I’ve heard that version. Where’s it from?”

“The Benja Codex.”

“The Benja Codex doesn’t exist.”

“You say this a great deal, sorcerer,” Cant said. “I’m not sure you realize how often. You’re a very untrusting sort.”

“It doesn’t exist,” Atha said, “and yet, I’ve seen it. You noted the distinction, I trust?”

The Benja Codex was nearly as legendary as the story of the Kingdom itself, which was why it was so unlikely for these two northerners to have stumbled across a copy. It was the ur-text from which all the other renditions of the tale sprang. The last historical mention of it was a thousand years old.

“I did,” Osraic said. “In your version it wasn’t Orsak that rent the earth in twain, it was his words.”

“When they fell upon the stones,” Cant said.

“And it’s your interpretation that these words are a spell, and these stones are non-metaphorical.”

Atha and Cant shared a meaningful look.

“It’s not precisely our interpretation,” the elf said. “But we will show you, and you can decide for yourself.”

“Well, I’m very sorry,” Osraic said, pausing for an unexpected yawn, “but I’m afraid you two are going to have to find yourselves another sorcerer.”

“We’ve already decided on you, Osraic Tal Nar Drang,” Cant said. “It’s been settled.”

“I would love to, but really I can’t… Cant. I can’t. I have the shop…” he yawned again.

Why am I so tired? he wondered.

“Are you feeling all right?” Atha asked.

“I’m fine. Seems this ale has gone right to my head.”

“Yes,” she said with a smile. She had a lovely smile. He wanted to tell her that before she ran off on her ridiculous quest, but surely a nap first would be a decent idea. “The ale is quite strong, isn’t it?”

“Thank the gods he’s awake.”

Osraic didn’t like horseback riding. It was essentially impossible to get around in the countryside without hopping onto a horse, but he’d set up a shop beneath his residence and could walk everywhere he wanted to be—Lantor wasn’t at all large—so he simply didn’t spend much time in the saddle. He didn’t even own a horse.

This meant he tended to suffer more frequently and more intensely from saddle-sore than most people. On this occasion, he was woken up by it, which was a new experience entirely.

Cant’s voice came from directly behind Osraic, but he was far too disoriented initially to figure out why that was, because it turned out he was still on top of the horse that was causing him so much pain.

He was also dizzy and out of balance, but that wasn’t a significant problem as he appeared to be lashed to something steadier than him. That thing turned out to be Cant.

“Why am I tied to you?” he asked, but not quite loud enough to be heard.

His eyes began to focus, revealing a landscape he was unfamiliar with. They were in a mountain pass. The terrain was rocky and almost without vegetation of any kind.

He knew a type of cactus that grew out of harsh rocky outcroppings of the sort they were encountering. The plant’s juice made for an excellent poultice when mixed with the proper secondary ingredients. He also knew the plant didn’t grow south of the Ailing Mountains, and further that he had just seen one.

“Stop struggling, sorcerer,” Cant said.

Atha rode up next to them, her green eyes looking him up and down. “He’ll need water,” she said. “We stop at the next clearing.”

Osraic tried to speak, but she was right: he needed water, and food, and a few other things that didn’t involve being tied to a horseman on the wrong side of the mountains.

They drugged me, he realized.

The path they were on opened up to a flat area mostly clear of snow and with a small pool of water for the animals. Atha brought her mount to a halt, along with a second, riderless, horse that was carrying the bulk supplies. She dismounted, and a few seconds later was helping Cant untie himself from Osraic.

“Easy,” she said, although it was hard to say to whom she was speaking.

Osraic had never felt so weak before. Once off the horse he tried to stand but collapsed immediately into the elf’s arms.

“I have you.”

Atha was surprisingly strong, but then it was the first time he’d been supported by an elf so he had no idea what the standard was. Elves tended to be thin and lithe, and were usually described as graceful and elegant. Atha was far from elegant, but sorcerers were supposed to have beards so who was he to say?

She helped him to the edge of the water and sat him down on a rock that was blessedly not shaped like a horse’s saddle, her hand on his shoulder to keep him still.

“Can you hold yourself a’right?” she asked, after a moment.

“Yes.”

She left him there. Staring at the pool of ice-cold water Osraic decided he had never been more thirsty in his entire life, but he had his wits about him enough to understand that throwing his body into the pool in order to obtain some of that water was not a wise course of action. It might, however, wake him up.

What am I wearing, he wondered.

He was in a heavy fur cloak he’d never seen before. Then his hand went from the soft fur to his chin, where he discovered stubble. Two days. It’s been two days.

Atha returned with a canteen, and knelt beside him.

“Drink,” she said. “Slowly, not all at once.”

He sipped the water, which was cool but not nearly as cold as what the horses were sampling. It was without question the greatest thing to ever pass his lips, and he began to chug it down manically, before her hand came down and pulled the canteen away.

“I said slowly. You’ll just vomit it back up again if you aren’t careful.”

“You drugged me,” he said.

“That we did, yes.”

“And you gave me too much.”

She looked over her shoulder at Cant, who was unloading some of the gear from the supply horse.

“It might have been a dose for a… larger man, yes,” she said. “I’m afraid our friend Cant overestimated.”

“Tell me what it was.”

“The drug?”

“Of course, the drug.”

“Cant?” she called “What did you give him?”

“The man called it Lot’s…something.”

“Lot’s Fortitude?” Osraic asked.

“Yes, that’s it!” he said. “Odd name for a potion, but we couldn’t well go to the local sorcerer for it, could we?”

“It’s a tranquilizer for cattle.”

“I did buy it in the stable.”

To Atha, Osraic said, “I need salt. Right now.”

“That will only increase the thirst.”

“And nullify the poison that idiot fed to me. Salt pork, salt beef, hard tack, whatever you have.”

It was an hour before Osraic calmed down enough to decide he wasn’t going to die. His first gulps of water had not stayed down, as Atha predicted, but the next sips did, as did the dried beef strips that followed. The entire time he ate, Cant eyeballed him angrily, because he was digging into provisions that were meant to last longer than this.

Atha started a fire, which seemed unnecessary until the sun started to set and the cold emanating from the land beneath their feet became more self-evident.

“I assume,” Osraic said, “that if I start down the path in that direction I’ll eventually end up at Lantor?”

“It’s dark,” Cant said. “It’s not wise to travel the hills at night, sorcerer.”

“In the morning, then.”

“On foot?”

“You have an extra horse I assume is meant for me.”

“It’s a northerly horse. He only travels in one direction.”

“You made that up.”

“I may have.”

Atha stood up from the edge of the fire pit. Her cheeks were red from the heat and her green eyes danced with the flame.

“You don’t want to travel alone,” she said, “with no sword and no clear idea of where you’re going or how to get there. You’ll never make it.”

“Yes, because the people who kidnapped me are a reliable source of information.”

“I’m sorry about that. We didn’t have a choice.”

“You could have tried hiring another sorcerer. There are at least three within a days’ ride of Lantor.”

She smiled. “It had to be you.”

“Why is that?”

She didn’t answer. Her attention had been redirected to a space somewhere over Osraic’s shoulder. She’d gotten very still.

“What do you hear?” Cant asked quietly. His hand was already buried in his furs, looking for what Osraic assumed was the hilt of a weapon.

“Not sure,” she muttered. “I think we share the clearing with something other than rock right now.”

“Lion?”

“Possibly.”

Osraic held his breath. He’d never seen an Ailing Mountains lion before. He’d seen captive ones, as a child, but rumor was the wild versions were twice as large. He was both excited to see if this was true and worried that it might be.

Atha studied the darkness for a few heartbeats and then shook her head.

“It’s no lion,” she decided. “This is something larger.”

“Larger?” Osraic asked.

“Yes. And airborne.”

“A dragon?”

“Not a dragon,” Cant said, as Atha pulled out her quiver. “If it was a dragon there would be no question. Now keep quiet and still.”

Osraic went back to holding his breath, and ruminating on the number of different things he knew about that were larger than a lion and smaller than a dragon, could fly, and were predatory. He couldn’t think of any.

With her quiver slung over her back, Atha pulled the longbow out of her hair and whispered something. Osraic strained to hear the command, but couldn’t quite pick it up. Whatever it was, the bow responded appropriately. And quickly. Osraic blinked, and the longbow was in her hands at full size.

She held it parallel with the surface, put one hand on the shaft of an arrow, crouched, and waited.

Her eyes were closed. This was, he realized, so she could regain the night vision she’d lost because of the fire.

When she fired, it happened so quickly Osraic was ready to ascribe it to another enchantment. The arrow was out and notched, the bow raised, and the arrow loosed, and it happened between heartbeats. Considering how rapidly his heart was beating, this was very fast.

The arrow flew nearly straight up and apparently hit its mark, making a sick sort of noise Osraic last heard in a butcher’s shop. He still hadn’t seen what was out there, and didn’t until it fell to the ground a few yards from their campground.

“A greathawk,” Osraic said, jumping to his feet.

“Yes,” the elf agreed.

The beast was taller than Cant, with feet large enough to wrap around a man’s head and talons sharp enough to remove that head. Atha’s arrow was buried in its brown feathery underbelly, and had found the creature’s heart.

Even half-crushed by its impact with the rocky earth and gored by the weapon that killed him, Osraic was worried that the thing might jump up and attack when the elf crouched down and pulled out her arrow

“I don’t understand,” Osraic said.

“When they attack is when they are most exposed,” she said. “Provided one knows where to hit them.”

“But greathawks don’t hunt by night.”

“No,” she said. “They don’t.”

The attack by the greathawk was enough to shelve any discussion of Osraic venturing home on his own, at least until the following morning, when he was disappointed to see his companions had no interest in changing direction.

“You will never make it back,” Cant said, as Osraic stared up the wrong path. “Cities are built on straight throughways and flat ground, but up here the path is dictated by the land. Lost men die in the hills, even in the spring.”

“The horse knows the way.”

“That horse was bought in Lantor on the same day we retrieved you, sorcerer. She is just as lost. Now are you going to help or continue to whine?”

Helping meant reorganizing the distribution of weight. The third horse had been tasked with most of their provisions while Osraic had been unconscious and tied to Cant. Now that he was awake and reluctantly prepared to ride unaided, they had to move things around.

This only took a few minutes, though, and then Osraic was in the saddle and faced with a decision.

Atha rode up next to him.

“We go north,” she said. “There’s nothing for you the other way except for death.”

Appropriately enough, they stood only a few yards from the body of the greathawk.

“You won’t escort me back, then?” he asked.

“No. You’re welcome to stay here and sulk, but I wouldn’t recommend it. This is a common area for travelers, but you’ll find most of the people you meet up here are less friendly than we are.”

“Maybe. Maybe I’ll meet some people who don’t try and drug me the minute we’ve been introduced.”

“We apologized for that. But you didn’t leave us with much of a choice.”

“You left me with no choice whatsoever. That’s what kidnapping is.”

She laughed. “You need to relax, sorcerer. We’ll take care of you.”

“I didn’t need taking care of in Lantor. Nothing was trying to kill me there.”

“Are you so sure of that?” She patted the head of his mount. “By the way, her name is Jenna, and she’s nearly as frightened as you are, so talk to her. We have a long day of travel and it would be better if neither of you were spooked the entire time.”

Osraic’s anger—at himself, at his companions-cum-kidnappers, at the horse that was brutally harming his posterior—subsided over the course of the day. The view afforded him as they descended the northern face of the Ailing Mountains was often breathtaking, and as much as he resented the circumstances that brought him there he was thankful for the experience.

They were nowhere near the top of the range, and had truly never been, as the pass they had used when he was still unconscious cut between two peaks rather than summiting one of them. This was just as well, as he’d read about the troubles men and animals had at that elevation, not just with heavy winds and deep snows, but also with things that should be taken for granted, like air thick enough for breathing.

Osraic was still higher and further north than he’d ever been before, seeing things he’d only ever read about or examined in etchings. The open sky was so vast and close that for the first time in his life he understood why some men wrote poetry. He’d seen cloud banks that were close enough to touch, and distant storms writing sigils in lightning.

Their descent was heading for a forest floor he couldn’t see due to a perpetual ground fog. He’d have thought they were lowering themselves into a cloud if not for the pine forest poking through.

And he saw dragons.

At first he didn’t even grasp what he was looking at. The problem with being so high up in such an open space was that he lost all understanding of distance and size. In the cities and mud towns he’d grown up in, how far he could see was limited by how many things were in the way—buildings, trees—and how bright and plentiful the evening torches were. He was unaccustomed to an unobstructed view that went for miles in all directions. So when he saw the dragons, they were so far away he initially mistook them for peculiar birds of the approximate size of actual birds, and not monstrous lizard beasts the size of houses. It wasn’t until one of them expelled fire—playfully, it appeared—that he realized his mistake.

Osraic must have gasped audibly at the sight, because he caught Cant’s attention. They were riding with Atha in the lead and Cant in the rear. Whether this was because they were concerned he might wander, or fall off his horse, he wasn’t sure.

“Don’t worry,” the large man said. “We shouldn’t expect to face a dragon until we’ve reached the gates of the Kingdom.”

“Right. What if one of them decides to show up early?”

“Well that would just be bad luck. Perhaps we should have taken one of your charms.”

He rode up beside Osraic.

“Here,” he said, “have a look.”

Cant pulled out a vial and handed it over.

“What’s this?” Osraic asked, holding it up. It was blue glass with a clear liquid inside. He might have thought Cant palmed one of his potions from the shop, but the container was unfamiliar.

“Tears of a raven, of course.”

Osraic handed back the vial.

“You’re both mad,” he said.

“So you say. When you see what we have seen, you might consider if madness is such a terrible recourse.”

“How do you mean to defeat one, when the time comes?”

“Have you ever met a dragon, sorcerer?”

“I haven’t, no.”

“When the time comes, we’ll probably just negotiate terms. They’re mostly quite reasonable.”

“I can never tell when you’re joking.”

Cant laughed. “That’s because I never am.”

They didn’t stop riding until the sun fell past the western edge of the mountain range. By then everyone was starved. Osraic felt a bone-deep soreness and general exhaustion he wished he could have attributed to the aftereffects of the drug, but which likely had more to do with the riding.

Before the sunlight disappeared he took a look back at the hills they had spent the day climbing out of, and was pretty sure he could spot the point where they emerged from the clearing that morning. It didn’t seem far at all. But, as with the dragons, distance and size expectations were confounded by the scale of the mountain range.

Atha helped Osraic off the horse, and then ignored him for several minutes while she spoke to his mount.

“She says you didn’t talk to her,” the elf said, after what sounded like an entirely one-sided conversation. “I told you to talk to her.”

“You can talk to animals?”

He couldn’t recall any lore on elves having the ability to communicate with animals. There was no lore on anyone having that innate ability, actually. There was a spell that could do it, but it was complicated, and Osraic was years away from even attempting such a thing. That was provided it even worked, which was doubtful. About three quarters of the volumes on spells were flim-flam.

“Anyone can talk to animals,” she said. “You should try.”

“I’ll rephrase. Do they talk back to you?”

“In their own way, yes.”

Cant clapped him on the shoulder. “I would not press this point, if I were you,” he said. “We have to make camp. Let her tend to the animals. They did do all the work today.”

Making camp didn’t involve a fire this time. For most of the day, a sharp wind had been cutting through the heavy furs, leaving Osraic raw and uncomfortable, if not actually cold. The undermost layer of his clothing was damp with his own sweat, though, and whenever the wind touched it he shivered.

But there was no firewood to be found in this terrain, and what they’d been carrying had been used up the night before. They were somewhat less likely to attract the attention of another greathawk without a fire, but probably more likely to freeze to death before morning.

The three of them spent the next hour chewing dried meat and drinking water, which only made them feel colder. Nobody spoke, but this could have been as much from exhaustion and the amount of energy involved in chewing dried food as from any residual belligerence.

“Can I see your bow?” Osraic asked, both to break the silence and because he’d been wanting to examine it closely since Atha first showed it to him in the tavern.

I was warm that day, he lamented.

Atha shrugged, and removed it from her hair.

“Alavas,” she whispered, and as before it jumped to a normal size in her hands. This time Osraic was watching carefully, and still didn’t see it happen. It was as if the bow had only two sizes, and jumped between them without pausing at any of the intermediate sizes first.

He took it from her.

“Is it specific to you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Alavas,” he said.

Nothing happened.

“As I said.”

“I believed you. I was just curious. This is the most powerful enchantment I think I’ve ever touched. Who did it for you?”

She and Cant shared a quick glance.

“I’d rather not say at this time,” she said, “if that’s all right.”

“Yes.”

Maybe he should have gone on this damn quest, he thought, instead of me.

Osraic would have said this aloud, but his reading of the enchantment on the bow was much more interesting than any answer they could have provided.

Magic was a craft, just like anything else.

Most people thought of it in the same way they thought of blacksmiths. That is, a smithy could forge a sword, and nobody who later held that sword would be able to discern the technique used to make it, beyond a general understanding of fire and hammered metal. But the truth was, magic was more like carpentry. To an untrained eye it might appear that a chair, or a table, or a house was assembled in a process as mysterious as that of the sword-maker. An experienced carpenter, though, could examine the joints and ascertain how the object was assembled, and in what order.

So it was with an enchanted thing. If one knew how to read magic, it was possible to see the joints and hinges and figure out how the enchantment did what it did.

“Are you going to give that back, or fondle it all night?” Atha asked.

“Sorry,” he said. He held it out for her to take back. When she touched it, he held on for an extra half-second, enough time to examine the part of the spell that made it particular to her. “It’s an amazing piece of work.”

“The bow, or the magics?”

“Both.”

He nearly understood the spell, which was surprising enough on its own. He had plenty of experience reading other sorcerers’ enchantments—this was an essential element of apprenticeship—but never anything so complex. He had imagined it as something that would take hours to grasp. But the only part he couldn’t quite get had to do with the different materials that made up the bow. Mostly, he couldn’t figure out how the drawstring had never broken.

Osraic decided he wanted to know more about the sorcerer who had performed such a complex enchantment, but it was too dark and too cold for any further conversation. Atha returned the bow to her hair and the three of them huddled together for mutual warmth, and slept.

“All right, let’s stop here.”

The loose collection of individuals that constituted the Tenth Avenue Writers’ Underground was assembled in a haphazard fashion across the surprisingly spacious living room belonging to Wilson Knight. The room had several appropriate places to sit and lounge, including the floor, which was covered in a heavy pile carpet and was deemed by many to be quite comfortable in the event a short nap was needed.

The room was a part of a seventh floor condo, which was either owned by Wilson’s parents or by Wilson himself, depending on who asked and what kind of mood Wilson happened to be in at the time.

It was Wilson who told Oliver to stop reading. Under most circumstances this interjection would be considered rude, except: everyone expected rudeness from Wilson as a matter of course; and Oliver was glad to be stopped. The truth was, what followed was another two pages of description of a forest that just didn’t work, ending with the note MORE WORLD-BUILDING GOES HERE.

Oliver put down the pages and looked up expectantly, but for the moment, Wilson looked as surprised as everyone else in the room regarding his interruption.

“Do you have notes?” Oliver asked.

“I… yes. I mean, that seemed like a good place to stop. You don’t have a lot more, do you?”

“Not a lot more, no.”

“It’s quite a bit already,” Wilson said. “What you’ve done so far.”

“It’s a start.”

“For the purposes of the assignment, it’s more than enough. You didn’t write an entire epic in a week, I’m just assuming.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then let’s talk about what you’ve got here.”

If it seemed like Wilson was a little too professorial for someone who was, age-wise, a peer to the entire writer’s group, that was because the Tenth Avenue Writers’ Underground—which everyone called either TAWU or “the woo”—was his idea. More exactly, people involved in it got involved because Wilson Knight ran the thing.

There were two reasons for this. First, Wilson Knight had a MFA in creative writing from a university everyone had heard of. Second, and possibly more importantly, Wilson Knight had been published.

Neither of those facts meant nearly as much to the people who had accomplished both of those things as they did to the people who had not. The publication involved a short story in a literary magazine that was so obscure, if Wilson (or anyone else) announced one day that the magazine itself was a work of fiction, nobody would be all that surprised. But the value of having been published far outweighed the exposure from it, the money he might have made in selling it—if any—or even the quality of the piece itself. (In truth, hardly anybody had read the story either, for the same reason nobody had really heard of the magazine it was featured in.) The value came from the accolades that followed.

Wilson Knight was a certified Important Generational Voice. There had been more articles published on the significance of Wilson Knight, author, than things published by Wilson Knight, author, by a factor of at least ten.

This didn’t mean Wilson was not a good writer. By all accounts, he was very good indeed, it was only that the people who had first-hand experience with his prose were greatly outnumbered by the people who only knew of it by word-of-mouth. It was probably true that were Wilson to never write another word, he could still survive as an Important Generational Voice in literary circles for several years. Whether or not this theory was put to the test depended on when and if he actually finished his novel.

“Fantasy is a challenging first choice,” Wilson said, somewhat grandly. “Bold, I mean.”

“All right,” Oliver said, not sure whether or not he agreed with this but willing to take whatever ride his ostensible mentor was thinking of taking him on. “Why do you say it’s bold?”

“It’s a well-worn path, isn’t it? An entire genre built on mimicry of an early, original voice.”

“You mean Tolkien.”

“Of course I do. I don’t mean any disparagement when I say this, by the way. It’s generally a respected genre.”

Oliver thought everything Wilson just said was disparagement, and he doubted anybody in the room took it as anything less than precisely that.

“I think that’s an over-simplification,” he said.

“Sure, sure. A little reductionism to make a nuanced point.”

Wilson used more expensive words when challenged. If he ever got into a hot enough argument, he’d likely start speaking entirely in Latin.

“And what’s your nuanced point?”

“That you shouldn’t start a quest to find your own voice by imitating someone else’s.”

The writing assignments for the TAWU were given out weekly, and based on nothing more than whatever letter Wilson felt particularly close to that day. Since there were ten members, all in various states of skill and experience, there was no expectation that each week would result in a new bit of writing from all ten. In fact, the likelihood that any of the participants would have something corresponding to the letter handed out in the prior week was pretty low. Mostly, everyone brought in what they had to share when they were ready to share it, which made Wilson’s whole letter-assignment concept kind of silly.

Also, single letters as writing prompts was a pretty limited system.

Still, it tended to work more often than not. For the most part, the weekly discussions about the act of creating fiction proved sufficient to inspire two or three new pieces a week, and the letter was a decent jumping-off point.

Oliver had been coming to TAWU for a year. For six months of that year he wasn’t at all sure he even wanted to be a writer, but he very much enjoyed discussing other people’s attempts at it. Sometime around month seven Oliver decided everyone else in the group—possibly excepting Wilson, although it was difficult to tell since he never showed anything—was a worse writer than he was. But, since Oliver had never written anything he had no way to prove this.

It was another five months, give or take a week, before he actually gave it a try. That was the week the letter K was assigned.

Well, no, that wasn’t entirely true. Yes, the week in which he finally wrote something coincided with the letter K, but there had been other letters before K, letters that sat at the top of the blank word document on his computer screen, alone and abandoned, with no inspirational collection of additional letters used to form words and then sentences and paragraphs, adding up to things someone might call a story.

Then came K. Everything felt different with K, although Oliver couldn’t begin to explain why. For starters, as soon as he got the letter—while still in Wilson’s living room, even—he decided K stood for Kingdom. By the time he got home he had the first sentence: “I understand you are a sorcerer.” And then he was writing, and he didn’t stop until he was well past the TAWU minimum word-count and further, on his way to what he imagined was a full novel, written in under a week.

It didn’t end up being a novel—not yet—but he was pretty proud of what he’d accomplished.

All of which made Wilson’s reaction kind of disappointing.

“Hang on,” Tandy said.

Oliver thought Tandy was a pretty good writer. She liked to write about serious things using dangerously large compound sentences and making what seemed like decent observations about the human condition. The biggest problem she had was that very few people seemed willing to concentrate long enough to figure out the gist of those observations, because despite being a good writer, Tandy wasn’t an interesting writer.

“Don’t we all learn how to write by imitating others?” she asked.

“Do you mean fan fiction?” Gerald asked.

Gerald was not a good writer, but he was an excellent rabble-rouser. Saying fan-fiction in front of Wilson was a lot like waving a red cape in front of a bull while also blasting the bull in the ear with an air horn.

“I don’t mean fan-fic,” Tandy said quickly. “I mean we learn to write by reading, and if we assume we like what we’re reading, of course our first efforts are going to be imitative based on what we enjoyed, conscious or not.”

“Yes, yes, but that isn’t my point at all,” Wilson said. “My point is, this particular sub-genre is derivative when you’re doing everything right. That’s the goal. Whether one is performing an homage to the source text or writing something deliberately contrary to it, all versions of the sword-and-sandal epic are a conversation with Tolkien. And there’s nothing wrong with that! All I’m saying is that given this is Oliver’s first attempt at something he can call his own, that the challenge of finding himself in his writing is going to be that much harder when he’s attempting to occupy a space that’s already taken. And it has to be taken, if he’s doing it properly.”

This assertion broke the group up into a number of mini-conversations and debates that Oliver could barely keep track of and wasn’t sure whether or not he should even bother. The topic soon strayed from any direct critique of what he’d written into the concept of originality, the implicit challenge of writing something truly original, and the source of inspiration and creativity in the act of creation.

It was interesting, or rather it had been interesting, the first five or six times the debate came up. But after a year, he doubted he was going to hear anything different than the other times, so he elected not to participate actively.

He also wasn’t sure he should participate actively.

Presenting his own writing was a weird experience. After all the time he’d spent in the group, listening to other people’s stuff and actively engaging them on what they’d just read, he now felt as if he had a duty to be silent and wait for opinions to form. Or for a decision to be reached. Like he was listening to his parents argue about something he’d done, while he was still in the room: surely, the punishment would be agreed upon shortly.

Oliver was only half-listening, then, when he made eye contact with the other person in the apartment not directly engaged. Her name was Minerva. She was Wilson’s live-in girlfriend-slash-something-something-fiancé. Everyone called her Minnie except for her boyfriend, and her parents, probably.

Wilson was the sort of person to favor full names in all circumstances. As Oliver had a rather long name—his last name was Naughton, but due to some complicated family dynamics he had two middle names—he was glad Wilson’s preference didn’t go beyond surnames, or they’d never get anything done.

Minnie was a petite, auburn-haired, adorable woman with turquoise eyes and about fifteen different versions of a smile. Each one was devastating. There were times when Oliver thought she had to be invented by someone, as he didn’t think it was possible for the natural world to produce her without some kind of guided supervision.

There was, he reflected, a pretty decent chance he was in love with her. This wasn’t necessarily extraordinary, as he couldn’t imagine a world in which everyone didn’t also feel this way. It fit in perfectly well with all the other known facts about the universe: the sun rises; the sky is blue; everyone is in love with Minerva.

She was standing at the edge of the kitchen, a bystander to the TAWU meeting, as always. Very, very occasionally, she would interject an observation, but it always felt like a protest vote sort of circumstance. She wasn’t a writer, and more precisely, she had no interest in becoming one. (If one were to measure the identification of a person as “a writer” with the minimum standard of “writing things”, one third of the regulars in the writers’ underground weren’t writers at all. Until recently, Oliver would have been one of them.) Sometimes, Minerva sat quietly at the far end of the room, and maybe once or twice brought in cookies. On certain occasions, she wasn’t even in the apartment. Those were the bad weeks.

Minnie gave him a little head gesture, which he interpreted to mean, come over here, and so he did. This in no way interfered with the debate.

Once he got close enough, she took his elbow and pulled him into the kitchen.

“It’s really good,” she said.

“It’s…”

He lost his train of thought. She did that to him.

“The Kingdom. It’s really good. Wilson thinks so too.”

“Are you sure? He’s trying to talk me into writing something else instead.”

“That just means he thinks you’re worth rescuing.”

“Rescuing? Like a puppy?”

“Yes, like a puppy.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Then you aren’t paying attention, except I know you are. C’mon, Ollie, he props up the bad ones and tears down the good ones.”

He had noticed this, but this observation led him in the direction of thinking unkind things about his ostensible mentor, so he dismissed it. Hearing it presented so baldly by someone he would have expected to be on Wilson’s side was a little jarring.

“Why does he do that?” he asked.

“The good ones need to be challenged to get better. The bad ones need encouragement just to become good. I mean, that’s what I think. He could just be out to destroy the good ones.”

Oliver laughed, because he wanted to think she was kidding. She hadn’t delivered one of her fifteen known smiles with the line, though, so he couldn’t be sure.

“Listen, you should get back in there,” Minnie said.

“Yeah, probably.”

“Oh, and what are you doing later?”

“What?”

This was the longest private conversation he’d ever had with Minerva and his head was exploding. He thought he was out, and then she asked the most terrifying open-ended question she could have asked that didn’t involve an explicit sex act.

“Tonight,” she repeated. “A bunch of us are going to that new club. You’re invited if you wanna come.”

“Thanks, okay, sure. No, I mean. No, can’t. I have to work.”

“Aw, too bad. Next time?”

“Sure, next time.”

The debate ended to the complete satisfaction of nobody as usual, and then came the final part of the meeting: the critique circle.

Oliver had already managed to detach himself from the current reality to some degree, in that he was no longer in the moment so much as he was sitting outside of it and watching dispassionately.

Practiced disengagement was more or less his default mode. In it, he managed to be involved but at the same time listening to a running meta-commentary in his head. It was like having his own narrator accompany him through life. About the only times he could remember being fully engaged was when he was talking to Minnie, and when he was writing.

The critique circle was pretty painless, because everyone there had certain predilections, which led to similar-sounding criticisms, which fit pretty much anything placed in front of them.

Take Ivor. He had a lot to say about the title. In the two or three minutes in which he had the floor at least half was taken up by this. On the occasions when the piece being critiqued had no title, he’d talk for twice as long, specifically to crowdsource a title for the author.

Jennifer took a similar approach, only she had a habit of finding one particular word—not the title, since that was taken—and talking at length about how striking the word choice was and why it worked.

Then there was Tandy and her Big Themes and Gerald’s fascination with alliterative passages, and Danny’s love of dialogue. And so on.

Oliver didn’t know any of these people outside of this particular space. They didn’t do anything socially together—or if they did, it was without him—and there was never any time to discuss their lives above and beyond fiction writing. Because of this, Oliver, in self-narrative mode, had been providing them with their own backstories.

Ivor, in his late thirties, was chubby and unshaven. He had a job during the week, which required him to shave daily, so when Saturday came around he treated himself by not doing it. Ivor was unreasonably preoccupied with how much things cost. He carried a real estate property values spreadsheet around in his head, and could tell you how much it cost to buy a condo in any part of the county. He was also single, not currently dating anyone, and liked to blame women—as a monolithic whole—for the fact that he was unable to find love.

Aside from the physical observations—the man was indeed chubby and unshaven—everything else was either deduced observationally by Oliver or invented whole cloth. Oliver no longer knew where the line was between reality and something he made up. Since he doubted the day would come when he got to know Ivor well enough to figure out where that line was, he didn’t much care.

Tandy was probably a lesbian. She had a habit of staring overlong at Minerva when Minnie was in the room, which Oliver only noticed because he had the same habit. She was a copy editor for one of the five or six literary magazines that hadn’t gone out of business yet thanks to the Internet. This either made her a stickler for textual precision and clarity—and a complete lunatic about semicolons—or those innate tendencies were what led her to copy editing. Tandy liked to wear sandals in all but the worst weather, along with lots of brown clothing, and carried pinecone-and-allspice potpourri in one of the pockets of her jacket.

These were the most thorough backstories Oliver had, because Tandy and Ivor had been there as long as he had. Others were just initial impressions written out into longer sentences. Gerald, for instance, spent too much time gaming online, but had a girlfriend who also spent too much time gaming online, so she was a good match. Nathan was in his early twenties and was attending community college part-time. Ollie didn’t have a profession for him yet, but it was something that required clean fingernails.

Most of the rest of them were represented largely by mental index cards with two or three words on them, and a lot of the time those words weren’t even going to make it to the final draft. Like Bibi, who’d only been to three meetings. Her card said “boobs”, because so far that was all Oliver had noticed about her. Undoubtedly, the longer she participated, the more likely it was his eyes would drift northward—to focus on what she was saying—and east and west to review other physical characteristics which may come in handy when he got around to building out her imaginary life. Until then, “boobs” was it.

Interestingly, he had almost no backstory for the two people he was most likely to have real facts on: Wilson and Minnie. For Wilson, what he had was the hagiographic edition, which was surprisingly short on real details. As for Minnie, Oliver didn’t want to ruin her by inventing a life outside of the condo that was anything less than amazing.

The bullet-point version of the critique circle, on the subject of the quality of The Kingdom, was:

In spite of all the back-and-forth regarding the merits of the fantasy genre (specifically the ‘sword-and-sandal’ variety) the group tended to follow Wilson’s lead: The Kingdom was good, but put it down and go write something different.

Then, Wilson ended the TAWU meeting with a new letter—P—and the group was adjourned.

Oliver didn’t stick around for any after-meeting conversation. He never did, which could have been why he had to invent everyone’s backstories. A couple of times, he became convinced that the others were meeting outside of Wilson’s condo, and Ollie simply wasn’t invited, but he always either talked himself out of this or convinced himself he didn’t care, depending on his mood.

Either way, he wasn’t along for socializing. Plus, he was about to be late for work.

The condo was conversationally identified as belonging to Wilson, but nobody in TAWU was actually sure if this was true. What was true was that it was on the top floor of a walk-up brownstone in the center of Tenth Avenue, which meant the place was worth a substantial amount more than it seemed either occupant was capable of owning. The owner—be they Wilson or Minnie—was either independently wealthy due to some sort of unusual windfall, or they came from a wealthy family that earned money via a more traditional long-term means.

Oliver liked to think the money was on Minerva’s side, but he wasn’t sure why he preferred that. Maybe, in his own backstory, he was secretly harboring a wish to steal her away from Wilson, and had a complex fantasy of them running off using her father’s credit card, making it all the way to a Caribbean island before daddy cut off the funds in a fit of pique, because he always liked Wilson’s family and wanted to punish his little girl for going against him. Then Oliver and Minerva would be forced to go native, live off the meager earnings of their menial jobs, share a cot in the back of a bar, and maybe later solve a murder mystery.

Maybe.

The condo was part of one building in a row of buildings that were attached to one another, all the way down the street to the end of the block. The same thing existed on the opposite side of the street, with the middle occupied by a grassy median that was called a vertical park. It had statuaries and fountains and ran all the way down the length of Tenth.

Oliver worked in a coffee shop two blocks away, on Market Street, a stretch of road that featured some of the most high-end shops in the country. Oliver couldn’t afford to buy anything on Market, except possibly the coffee, and only because he got an employee discount.

It was in the shop, a year earlier, where he’d seen the sign posted advertising an opening in the Tenth Avenue Writers’ Underground. He took it down almost as soon as it went up, because they had a strict policy about that sort of thing and also because he wanted to reduce the competition for this presumably coveted opening.

Wilson and Minnie didn’t know he worked there, and he liked that just fine. They lived in a world where top-floor condos on Tenth Ave were affordable things, and where they could just up and head to “that new club”—whatever that was—without having to budget ahead of time for a night out.

Oliver took the five cement steps down from the door of the brownstone to the street, and suffered a moment of disorientation. The high walls of the buildings created a kind of forced perspective, in which he felt even smaller, somehow, as if standing beside a mountain range instead of a seven-story walk-up.

At the far end of the street, around a flagpole, a flock of birds circled, on their way to settling at the high edge of the cornice, where there was probably a nest of some kind. The mountain range effect conspired with what he had to admit was probably an overactive imagination, and for a half-second he thought he wasn’t looking at nearby birds at all. He was looking at faraway dragons.

Write something new, he reminded himself.

He already had something in mind. It came to him as soon as Wilson handed out the assignment.

“P is for Phone,” Oliver said aloud, to nobody. Nobody responded.