It was a quarter past midnight, four weeks before Midwinter’s End Eve, and a thirteen-year-old boy was dangling precariously from a disintegrating homemade rope hanging from outside the darkest tower of Gormincrag, the Rehabilitation Center for the Re-Education of Dark Magic and Wicked Wizards.
(That, by the way, is a long and fancy name for a jail, and not just any old jail, the most secure and impregnable jail in the wildwoods.)
The boy’s name was Xar (which is pronounced “Zar”—I don’t know why, spelling is weird) and he really, really, really should not have been there.
He was supposed to be INSIDE the prison, not OUTSIDE it, dangling fifty feet above sea level from one of the windows. That’s one of the most important rules about prisons, and Xar really should have known that.
But Xar was not the kind of boy who followed the rules.
Xar acted first and thought later, and this was exactly what had led him to be put in the Gormincrag Rehabilitation Center in the first place, and given him the reputation of being the naughtiest, wildest boy born into the Wizard kingdom in about four generations.