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SEBASTIEN was born a very poor boy in the kingdom of Lincastle. A nothing. A no one. Except that he had magic.
And this would mean everything.
Every night before bed, his father told him stories of the great kingdom of Fairendale, the most beautiful of all the kingdoms, ruled by a family with magic. They were only stories to him, until one day the town prophet, a man called Iddo, told him another story, about men who had stolen thrones in the most beautiful land because of their magic.
“But only royal blood sits on a throne,” Sebastien said. Even at eight, he was a sharp boy. He knew the rules of the lands.
“Oh, no,” Iddo said. His eyes flashed. “Only a magic boy sits the throne of Fairendale.”
“But princes are always born with magic,” Sebastien said.
“No,” the prophet said. “Not always. Some are not. Some are not princes but princesses. Some thrones are stolen.” And then he looked at Sebastien as if he knew what was to come.
Perhaps he did. He was a prophet, after all.
Sebastien walked home that night with shaking legs. He had magic. His father also had magic once, before he passed the gift to Sebastien. He had heard about his father’s magic, how he was revered as one of the most skilled in all of Lincastle. Why had his father not tried to steal a kingdom with his great power? His father could have been a ruler. Sebastien could have been born a prince. They could have lived in a large palace with gleaming stone walls and beds that were not lumpy and fires that never went out, instead of the cold cottage that never had enough space to promise restful sleep the nights his mother cried out in pain.
So he asked his father one night, sitting by the fire that would not burn through dawn, wiping the sweat from his mother’s brow as she tossed and turned on a pallet of sticky straw. Why had he never stolen a throne? Why had he not tried to better their lives? Why had he stayed here, poor, dismissed, suffering?
“There are more important things than ruling a kingdom,” his father said.
That was the first time Sebastien realized that they did not believe the same things, he and his father. For you see, there was nothing more important than ruling a throne.
Then his mother died on a starless night, and Sebastien wept silently in a great chasm of grief while he watched his father bury her body. That night a new question began to take shape: Would his mother have died if she had been a queen, with access to medicine and food and warmth?
Without his mother to care for, Sebastien’s father began to teach him magic. Sebastien admired his father for his great knowledge, but he soon exceeded even his father’s skill. “You will do great good with your gift,” his father said, after every lesson.
And Sebastien would nod and close himself in his room, where the question he had asked his father would haunt him even after he closed his eyes. Waking or sleeping, he could not escape it. Why had his father never stolen a throne?
It did not take long before the question became a questioning of himself. Why did he not steal a throne?
His father began to suspect what hid in Sebastien’s heart. One day he pulled his son aside and said, “A man should not go where he is not welcome. You cannot do this, my son. You cannot steal a kingdom. Your mother and I are peaceful people.” His eyes held depths of sadness that even Sebastien could not bear.
Still, Sebastien merely shook him off. His mother would be alive if it were not for his father’s peace. And he was nothing like his father. Oh, no. In Sebastien the need for power and wealth and vengeance grew and grew and grew until it had nearly taken over the entirety of his heart like a black ink blot subjected to water. He began to study the dark magic, beneath the eyes of Iddo. There was nothing his father could do to stop it.
“Never use your magic for ill,” Sebastien’s father told him another day. “Dark magic demands too much.”
His father was a coward. Sebastien could see that more clearly each time he marked another year’s passing on the wall post outside his room. His father did not take a throne because he was frightened of the price magic required. Of course magic demanded something in return. But a wise man could still win at the game, and that is precisely what Sebastien aimed to do.
After one particular lesson with Iddo, Sebastien asked the prophet, “How long must I wait?”
Iddo did not need any more explanation. “A boy of sixteen can rule a throne,” he said, his eyes red around their edges.
So Sebastien waited for his sixteenth birthday with great anticipation.
His father could not see the dark splinters lodged in the blue eyes of his son, for love, alas, is often blind to evil. Love wants to see the person we know lives within, but those we love do not always act like who they really are. And Sebastien had been pulled too deeply into the dark to remember who he was born to be.
So it is that Sebastien’s father continued to teach his son all the good magic he knew, continued to drill him on the dark arts Iddo taught, continued to speak words that Sebastien could no longer hear. And Sebastien continued to plan.
And then, on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, after his father had prepared a loaf of spice bread to celebrate and then hung a protective talisman, shaped like a blackbird, around Sebastien’s neck, Sebastien stole from the house into the darkest night the land had ever seen.
“For you, mother,” he said, and he ran without a single goodbye.