Two days later he rode into the Charcoal Burner’s clearing. He looked so pale and worn that the Charcoal Burner was in high hopes that Saint Oswald might have relented and pushed Blencathra on his head.
“What is that you want from me?” asked John Uskglass, warily.
“Ha!” said the Charcoal Burner with triumphant looks. “Ask my pardon for turning poor Blakeman into a fish!”
A long silence.
Then with gritted teeth, John Uskglass asked the Charcoal Burner’s pardon. “Is there any thing else you want?” he asked.
“Repair all the hurts you did me!”
Immediately the Charcoal Burner’s stack and hut reappeared just as they had always been; the trees were made whole again; fresh, green leaves covered their branches; and a sweet lawn of soft grass spread over the clearing.
“Any thing else?”
The Charcoal Burner closed his eyes and strained to summon up an image of unthinkable wealth. “Another pig!” he declared.
John Uskglass was beginning to suspect that he had made a miscalculation somewhere — though he could not for his life tell where it was. Nevertheless he felt confident enough to say, “I will grant you a pig — if you promise that you will tell no one who gave it to you or why.”
“How can I?” said the Charcoal Burner. “I do not know who you are. Why?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Who are you?”
“No one,” said John Uskglass, quickly.
Another pig appeared, the very twin of Blakeman, and while the Charcoal Burner was exclaiming over his good fortune, John Uskglass got on his horse and rode away in a condition of the most complete mystification.
Shortly after that he returned to his capital city of Newcastle. In the next fifty or sixty years his lords and servants often reminded him of the excellent hunting to be had in Cumbria, but he was careful never to go there again until he was sure the Charcoal Burner was dead.
Delia Sherman is the author of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove, and The Fall of the Kings (with Ellen Kushner). She has also written two novels for young adults: Changeling and The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen. The Freedom Maze, a middle-grade historical novel about time travel and slavery, is coming out from Big Mouth Press in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and in numerous anthologies, and she has new stories forthcoming in the teen vampire anthology Teeth and Ellen Datlow’s urban fantasy anthology Naked City.
Sherman has only written one other story about a wizard — the Duke of Malvoeux in The Porcelain Dove, who was truly pure, mad evil, and preyed on small children. This story, too, is about an evil wizard, or it is according to the eponymous wizard, anyway.
“No matter what I try to write about,” Sherman says, “somehow it always, on some level or other, boils down to finding and making family outside of the ties of blood.”
And this story is no exception. In it, Nick Chanticleer finds himself in need of a safe haven and finds it in an unlikely place when he becomes the accidental apprentice to a self-proclaimed evil wizard who runs a bookshop called Evil Wizard Books.
For some people there is no place more magical than a bookstore. A bookstore is bigger on the inside than the outside, because it contains entire populations and worlds that exist only between the pages of the books within.
In bookstores, we are reminded not to judge a book by its cover — advice that applies as well to the volumes on the shelves as to the people who man the stacks.
Wizard’s Apprentice
Delia Sherman
There’s an evil wizard living in Dahoe, Maine. It says so, on the sign hanging outside his shop:
EVIL WIZARD BOOKS
Z. SMALLBONE, PROP.
His shop is also his house, which looks just like an Evil Wizard’s house ought to look. It’s big and tumble-down, with a porch all around it and fancy carving around the eaves. It even has a tower in which a light glows balefully red at hours when an ordinary bookseller would be asleep. There are shelves and shelves of large, moldy-smelling, dusty leather books. Bats nest in its roof and ravens and owls nest in the pines that huddle around it.
The cellar is home to a family of foxes.
And then there’s the Evil Wizard himself. Zachariah Smallbone. I ask you, is that any kind of name for an ordinary bookseller? He even looks evil. His hair is an explosion of dirty grey; his beard is a yellow-white thicket; his eyes glitter behind little iron-rimmed glasses. He always wears an old-fashioned rusty black coat and a top hat, furry with age and broken down on one side.
There are rumors about what he can do. He can turn people into animals, they say: and vice versa. He can give you fleas or cramps or make your house burn down. He can hex you into splitting your own foot in two instead of a log into kindling. He can kill with a word or a look, if he has a mind.
It’s no wonder, then, that the good people of Dahoe, Maine make a practice of leaving Mr. Smallbone pretty much alone. Tourists, who don’t know any better, occasionally go into his shop to look for bargains. They generally come out faster than they went in, and they never come back.
Every once in a blue moon, Mr. Smallbone employs an assistant. A scruffy-haired kid will appear one day, sweeping the porch, bringing in wood, feeding the chickens. And then, after a month or a year, he’ll disappear again. Some say Smallbone turns then into bats or ravens or owls or foxes, or boils their bones for his evil spells. Nobody knows and nobody asks. It’s not like they’re local kids, with families people know and care about. They all come from away foreign — Canada or Vermont or Massachusetts, and they probably deserve whatever happens to them. If they were good boys, they wouldn’t be working for an Evil Wizard, would they?
Well, it all depends what you call a good boy.
According to his uncle, Nick Chanticleer was anything but. According to his uncle, Nick Chanticleer was a waste of three meals a day and a bed: a sneak, a liar, a lazy good-for-nothing.
To be fair to Nick’s uncle, this was a fair description of Nick’s behavior. But since Nick’s uncle waled the tar out of him at least once a day and twice on Sundays no matter what, Nick couldn’t see any reason to behave any better. He stole hot dogs from the fridge because his uncle didn’t feed him enough. He stole naps behind the woodpile because his uncle worked him too hard. He lied like a rug because sometimes he could fool his uncle into hitting someone else instead of him.
Whenever he saw the chance, he ran away.
He never got very far. For someone with such low opinion of Nick’s character, his uncle was strangely set on keeping him around. Family should stick together — which meant he needed Nick to do all the cooking. For a kid, Nick was a pretty good cook. He also liked having somebody around to bully. In any case, he always tracked Nick down and brought him back home.
On Nick’s eleventh birthday, he ran away again. He made a bologna and Wonder Bread sandwich and wrapped it in a checked handkerchief. When his uncle was asleep, he let himself quietly out the back door and set out walking.
Nick walked all through the night, cutting through the woods and staying away from towns. At dawn, he stopped and ate half the bologna and Wonder Bread. At noon, he ate the rest. That afternoon, it began to snow.
By nightfall, Nick was freezing, soaked, and starving. Even when the moon rose, it was black dark under the trees, and full of strange rustlings and squeakings. Nick was about ready to cry from cold and fear and weariness when he saw a red light, high up and far away through the snow and bare branches.