As Oliver made the long walk north toward the River Tembus, the sky darkened and the overhead spark lamps flickered to life, their amber light fading the brightly painted signs and awnings of the Merchants District to monotone.

  Rocks and pebbles ground underfoot as he climbed the levee wall, and he found himself making a game of balancing, stepping heel-to-toe, on the remnants of the spark rail. He paused at the memory of an enormous metal carriage running up and down the track, pulling barges along the river. But then after a long winter, the spring thaw revealed the copper track was missing. Only a line of broken stone remained, like the spine of some long-dead animal.

  He slid back down to the familiar roads of the docks and spied a line of spark lamps off by the piers. A dozen or so vessels were moored at each: trade ships, barges, and smaller craft. Oliver passed them all silently until his stepfather’s ship came into view.

  ‘The Snipe,’ a two-masted brig, had seen better days. The paint along its hull was peeling, the bare patches covered in barnacles. Its once crisp white sails now hung yellow and frayed, and a pair of rusty cannons sat on deck as likely to explode as they were to fire.

  Oliver made his way up the gangplank and onto the vessel, quiet save for a solitary voice singing a slow, sad song.

  “Think of her face as the waves pull you down,

  The battle is done, the fighting is over,”

  Stepping quietly, Oliver tried to go undetected, to find somewhere to bed down for the night.

  “Think of her bust as the sharks gather round—”

  The deck creaked beneath him.

  “Where have you been, boy?” the silhouette of his stepfather, Messer, asked with a barely detectable trailing slur. The man had been drinking.

  “I’ve just… been doing odd jobs around town for food.”

  “I can tell when you’re lying, you know that? You always sound so damn polite,” the man said, his shadow looming as he stood.

  “No, Dad—”

  “It’s ‘Captain’, boy. Or sir,” Messer corrected.

  “Yes, yes sir—”

  “So, where is it?”

  “What, sir?” Oliver asked.

  “This cornucopia of food, boy. Surely, you’d share your good fortune with your ‘captain’? Or…” As Messer stepped forward, the pale light revealed handsome features pulled tight with disdain. “Have you been wasting time with that damn fool spark again?”

  “No, I—”

  “Such. A. Liar. If you haven’t been doing anything useful, you have chores to do. Haul up that old swivel gun.” Messer’s stare was piercing.

  “Wha-what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “But, but… last time, I fell.” Oliver rubbed the bruise on his arm.

  “Then you need to learn.”

  It wasn’t a matter of learning. Oliver simply wasn’t big enough. He knew it, and he was damn sure his stepfather knew it too.

  “Maybe your books are a distraction.” Messer narrowed his eyes.

  “No-no… sir,” Oliver stammered out. What was his stepfather threatening?

  “Then hop to it.”

  “Yes. Yes, sir.”

  So, Oliver climbed down the hatch and, in the flickering light of a failing spark lamp, searched below deck for the old swivel gun. Broken barrels lay ramshackle, their forgotten contents still staining the floor. Piles of abandoned gear from long-deserted sailors were wedged in every nook and cranny, and off in a corner, tangled in a cargo net, lay the mass of black iron his ‘captain’ had demanded.

  It weighed more than he did, and freeing it from the net was no easy task, but Oliver managed and rolled it onto a burlap sack.

  “You do not want to find out what happens if you scratch my deck,” Messer called from above.

  Body trembling, Oliver put his shoulder into it, dragging the iron gun across the hold while the sack kept it from scraping the floor. The old ship creaked and groaned at the boy’s efforts.

  Feeling sick, he wound a frayed rope down from the block and tackle mounted above the hatch and twisted it through the iron loops that served as the gun’s handle.

  He pulled on the rope, but nothing. Even with the pulley, he just wasn’t strong enough, and when he climbed it, trying to use his weight to hoist it, he found himself hanging in midair.

  Oliver kicked his feet up, and they found purchase against the hatch. He twisted upside-down and, pushing, straining with his entire body, the old rope stretched with a creak.

  As the gun lifted into the air, he tried to hold the rope with his knees, but it slipped, burning his legs, so that every step forward came with a half-step back.

  The gun was level with him, hanging just below the hatch, and Oliver was trying to figure out how to get the Bastard’s thing the rest of the way up, when he heard a pop and a snap, and another and another.

  He was weightless, falling. The sound of impact, the sickening crunch of steel against wood, Oliver landed between two runners, wooden boards that ran the length of the cargo hold. They kept the gun from crushing him, but he was pinned beneath, its weight pressing against his diaphragm.

  A few minutes later, his ‘captain’ climbed down to check on him.

  “Uh, you’ll be all right. Lucky it didn’t land on your spine. Hell of a bruise though, boy.”

  “Help…” he wheezed.

  “You scratched my deck. There will be consequences.”

  “—Help,” he repeated.

  “First, you owe me the truth.” And with a grunt, the man rolled the gun, some, but not all, of the way off. “Where were you today, boy?”

  Oliver bit his lip. He didn’t want this man poisoning his one chance. “Nowhere… just around town.”

  “Fine.” Messer scowled. “Consequences…” Heaving the gun to one side and leaving Oliver lying on the floor, struggling to suck in breath, Messer climbed up to the main deck, pulling the ladder up after himself. A minute later, he reappeared at the hatch, holding two books.

  “Grandfather’s…” The stinging in Oliver’s chest kept his protest to a whisper.

  Messer’s eyes flashed with rage. He wound up and tossed one of the books high into the air. A distant splash followed.

  “Shall we try again?” Messer asked.

  Once Oliver had confessed everything, Messer lowered the ladder.

  “You may have just lucked your way back into my good graces. That old witch must have a fortune in there. Bring me something good, and maybe I’ll even forget about your… perversion.”

  And as his stepfather walked away, he heard the man utter, “useless fairy.”

  ? ? ?

  Oliver woke to a sharp yank at the roots of his hair. Startled, he knocked his head against the wooden base of a cannon and felt flecks of rust tickle his cheeks.

  An older boy stood over him, holding a folding knife in one hand and a shorn clump of Oliver’s hair in the other. “Should I cut it all off? Make you look like a man at least, that might help with Dad.” It was Rafe, his half-brother, who at seventeen had three years and four inches on him. Rafe was Messer’s true son even if he and Oliver did share a mother.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Oliver tried to get to his feet, but Rafe was standing on the tarp he’d been sleeping under, so he had to tug the other side out from under the cannon’s wheel before he could free himself to stand up.

  Rafe tossed the hair to the wind, folded his knife, and put it in his pocket. “You ain’t gonna be a wizard, you know that, don’t you?” He snorted. “I could make a bigger spark on carpet.”

  Still groggy, Oliver shook it off and walked toward the gangplank.

  If he stayed quiet, Rafe usually shut up sooner or later, but not always.

  “Dad and I have a job. We’ll be back in a week. He said to tell you, you’ve got a mark to get to. Don’t give him a reason.” The older boy shoved him, pressing into the fresh bruise on his back.

  Then, quick as a blink, Oliver put his hand in and out of Rafe’s pocket, grasping ‘something.’ He groaned, hunching over. “I’m going, I’m going.”

  And as he made his way down the pier, a wad of seaweed hit him in the back of the head. “Don’t forget,” Rafe called after him.

  When he passed the next ship and the Snipe went out of sight, Oliver stopped to retrieve the ‘something’ from his pocket.

  The morning sun glinted off its steel blade. It had a sandalwood handle. Oliver ran his fingers against the rough ends of the hair it had cut. He unfolded the knife and let it drop into the harbor.

  ? ? ?

  “Couldn’t Ms. Scaggs have been a little more specific than ‘come back tomorrow’?” Oliver muttered to himself.

  It was a ten-minute walk from her front step to where he could see the nearest clock tower in the market square. He’d made the trek back and forth once per hour, only knocking on her door once per trip, afraid of pestering her.

  The clock showed twelve this time, his fourth trip. He reached her door… again, and knocked… again. But no answer.

  Frustrated, he paced around the block. Her townhouse was the rightmost in a short row of three. It was of an older style than the other two and stood roughly twice their size. The house in the middle was abandoned, boarded up with fire damage, and the other displayed a ‘for sale’ sign behind a dusty window.

  Sighing, he knocked again. This time her head poked out.

  “Enough already. Everybody knows witches don’t get up before noon,” Scaggs said, rubbing her eyes.

  “So, you are a witch?”

  “That’s just what everyone calls me. The wizards won’t call me a ‘wizardess’, but you don’t see any green skin, do you? No knobbly nose?”

  Oliver snorted a chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?” She shot him a look.

  He tensed up. “I… I thought it was a joke… sorry. I’ve never heard of wizardesses before.”

  “Well, now you have. Follow me.” And when she turned to reenter the building, he saw the black housecoat she was wearing wasn’t black at all. The front was just covered in soot.

  The foyer was clean and comfortable with couches and chairs, but as she led him down the hallway, the first floor became cramped and cluttered. Crates lined the walls, some empty, some sealed, some half-full of raw materials: various rock salts, and bottles of clear fluid. Curiously, several rooms had been bricked off… maybe to create a larger one?

  While the kitchen was nicely kept, there was no formal dining room. That, Oliver presumed, was one of the rooms that had been repurposed.

  She showed him to an iron door at the back of the first floor and opened it onto an enormous stone chamber covered in a thick layer of the same soot as her housecoat.

  “Get started in here,” she said.

  He stood dumbfounded. The chamber not only included the bricked-up rooms from her house, but most, if not all, of the abandoned neighbor as well. It was, in fact, the largest room he’d ever been in, in his life, outside of church. He cast a worried glance toward the ‘wizardess.’

  “Chop chop, boy.” She smirked ever so slightly. “Let’s see if you’re worth anything.”

  He looked at his hands and wiped them on his tattered breaches.

  “Get to it,” she said sternly. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just… just…”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have a bucket? Or something?”

  “A bucket?… cute,” she said, amused, and left Oliver with the mountain of ash.

  Having no idea how he was going to make a dent in it, much less clean the entire room, he tested scooping it into his hands, and they became a grimy black mess. Then he transferred the ash from his hands to the front fold of his shirt. It had been dingy and yellowed, and three sizes too large, and now it was also covered in soot.

  He peeked into the hallway. If he tried to take the soot anywhere, he would just track it through the house. So, after letting out a long, exacerbated groan, he ducked back inside the chamber.

  Still… it might be possible to shove most of the ash into one corner. He tried pushing it with his feet, and the black powder seeped through the holes in his shoes, crunching between his toes.

  “Oh, dear Songs,” Scaggs’ voice came from behind. She stood there, her mouth agape, a bucket in one hand and a wad of rags in the other. “I am not that cruel.”

  Oliver snapped to attention, letting the ash fall from his shirt. It hit the top of his foot with a poof.

  “There’s a drain in the middle of the floor.” She pointed to a dip in the ash. “And a water tap across the hall.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  The way she was looking at him, she was considering something. Probably whether to send him on his way and be done with him. He’d seen that look before, on his stepfather. He felt stupid, ‘useless’, but what could he do?

  And as she turned to leave, she said, “A bit of friendly advice. Clean from the top down.”

  ? ? ?

  Ms. Scaggs came by every hour or so to raise an eyebrow at his progress but otherwise hadn’t said a word.

  It made him sick to his stomach, but he had to find something, as his stepfather had put it, ‘that old hag won’t miss.’

  But she wasn’t old, not old-old. Yes, there was gray in her hair, but her face was still smooth, and might even be pretty if she wasn’t so scary… or so covered in soot. Maybe it was just that she was tall and had this way of looking down on you when she spoke.

  He had been hoping to find something in the debris to take, something she might have assumed destroyed, but there was nothing, just endless ash.

  There were, however, many ‘somethings’ just outside the chamber. In a small room, next to the one with the tap, was a shelf full of clocks, brass measuring sticks, fancy pens, and reams of paper.

  Oliver waited until Scaggs checked on him again, and when she left, he very carefully washed his hands. Then standing on a clean section of floor, he wiped his feet and padded out to the hall, over to the room with the shelf.

  He counted two dozen timepieces. Some were large free-standing clocks, but there were a number of smaller ones too, including five near-identical pocket watches, which upon closer inspection, turned out to be stopwatches. Any one of these would save him from another of his stepfather’s ‘chores.’

  The heavy brass felt solid in his hands. It had a clean white face and precise markings.

  “Useless fairy,” he whispered to himself, then sucked in a breath between clenched teeth. Oliver put the watch back on the shelf and filled the bucket with water.

  ? ? ?

  Although he’d washed most of the ash away, the rags, now saturated with soot, were leaving a mottled film over everything he was trying to clean.

  The Sun was getting low. She’d check on him soon, see he hadn’t finished, kick him out, and his one chance would be over and done. He hadn’t told her, he’d already tried every other wizard in the city of Greatwen, all forty-three of them. The four that had actually seen him had all laughed in his face. She was the last.

  And if she knew he’d picked up that watch… A bead of cold sweat ran down his side.

  “Eh, boy, that’ll have to do,” Scaggs’ voice, sounding more than a bit tired, came from behind. “Come on, I believe I owe you some food.”

  She made him remove his shoes and wipe his hands and feet before leading him to the kitchen. Once there, she broke off two hunks of stale bread, handed one to him, and started eating the other herself.

  Fatigue had shoved the haughty discipline from her eyes, replacing it with a tinge of something that looked an awful lot like sympathy.

  “Sorry, I don’t get to the market very often, so things tend to go stale.” She shrugged. “But I do have this.” And she sliced several pieces off a hunk of moldy cheese.

  It tasted wonderful, mold and all, as Oliver’s body relaxed from the almost forgotten feeling of a belly that wasn’t empty. He wolfed down the rest of his bread in an instant, leaving him sitting there, awkwardly watching Ms. Scaggs nibble at hers.

  “Oh, I guess, maybe I was hungry,” Oliver said with a nervous titter before scrunching his nose.

  Shrugging, she broke off another hunk and handed it to him. “And I thought my manners were bad.” She gave the faintest smile, pouring water into two glasses.

  Once they finished, she said, “The sun’s going down. You’d better get going… but there is something I wanted to show you first…” And as she led him back to the stone chamber, she suddenly veered off, entering the room with the clocks.

  He froze.

  “Hey.” She snapped her fingers and motioned him in, then began plucking instruments off the shelf.

  “Oh no,” she groaned when she got to the stopwatches. Picking them up, she began examining each in turn.

  Oliver’s gut twisted, preparing for the worst.

  “I cannot believe…” She shook her head. “I left those out of order… again. There’s a night’s work down the drain.”

  Grumbling to herself, she placed all the stopwatches, as well as a handful of other instruments, into a satchel at her side. “Come on.”

  He blinked, not believing he hadn’t been caught, and followed.

  Once in the chamber, Ms. Scaggs closed steel shutters over the windows. She nudged Oliver against the back wall and handed him a pair of dark glasses. “Put these on.”

  He fumbled a bit, as he’d never worn glasses before, but he’d seen other people wearing them and managed to get them on about the same time as Scaggs knelt in the center of the room.

  Pulling a large red stone, bound in iron, from her satchel, she placed it on the floor and, at the exact same moment, started one of the stopwatches, then ran back, put her glasses on, and stood in front of Oliver.

  “Oops!” She flinched, and with a wave of her hand, the hallway door snapped itself shut.

  Oliver was squinting, struggling to see through the dark glasses, when a bright orange blob erupted from the rock. Tendrils of molten flame twisted through the air, then burst, growing like the bloom of a rose as a wave of heat and light pressed him up against the back wall.

  Very surprised not to be dead, Oliver twisted around. The fiery blossoms extended everywhere except a small bubble around Scaggs, a bubble in which she held him inside.

  When the flames vanished, Scaggs stood there covered in soot. She took off her glasses, revealing two white rings around her eyes. “So… So…” She nudged him, beaming. “What do you think?”

  Oliver fell to his hands and knees, tears stinging his eyes. Stunned, he was on the verge of either laughing or shrieking in terror. He couldn’t quite tell which.

  She coughed, looking on with growing concern. “I guess I should have warned you. You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

  As the shock faded, a single thought emerged from the back of his mind. She was ranked forty-fourth, last. He was worried she wouldn’t be as powerful as the other wizards, but he’d never heard of anyone, ever, conjuring a blast like that.

  Scaggs picked up the now-smoldering cleaning bucket and dumped its water over the remnants of the rock, steam bursting from it. Once it cooled, she plucked it off the floor.

  “Souvenir?” she offered, handing him the lump of obsidian, and helped him to his feet.