So it was that in the days of King Therian and Queen Elivessi, it came to pass that their eldest child, a son who went by the name of Carthal, was…well…

“Bored.”

The young Lord Carthal—though not so young as all that, as he would hotly proclaim, for his thirteenth birthday had just passed—kicked a heel against the stone of the pillar he leaned against.

“Bored,” he said aloud again. “Bored, bored, bored.”

“I am sure I can find something for you to do,” said a voice from behind him.

Carthal did not so much jump as levitate. “Perri!” he shouted when he had control over his voice again. “Don’t do that to me!”

His sister, who was eleven and then some, looked at him with the scorn all sisters treat brothers with when the situation seems right. “If you listened at all, you’d have known I was coming. And if you’re so bored, come wash the dishes while I make cakes.”

“Wash the dishes?” Carthal made a face. “That’s servant’s work. Or girl’s. Do it yourself.”

Perri swung her wooden spoon at him, and he ducked. “You’d better not let Mother or Father hear you talk like that. Father, especially. He’d say you’re never too big to hit.”

“Well, I’m too fast to hit.” Carthal leapt out of the way and danced around the room, laughing. “Can’t touch me, can’t touch me!” And before Perri could come up with an answer, Carthal was gone, running off towards the royal forest where he spent much of his time.

“It isn’t fair,” Carthal said to himself later, whaling away at a tree with a stick moodily. “I’ll be Prince someday, and then King after that—unless Perri gets it, but I get first crack at it, as long as I get married first—shouldn’t I be learning important things, like diplomacy and strategy and how to keep the kingdom strong?”

His stick broke with a resounding crunch, and he threw it away angrily into the bushes.

“Ow!”

Carthal whirled, one hand going to his belt. He wore only a dagger, but that would be enough to defend himself against a common thief or something of the like…

“No harm, no harm,” said the man who crawled free of the bushes, holding up one hand (he needed the other one to lean on). “I mean no harm, I was just trying to sleep…”

Carthal looked warily at the man. He didn’t look like a beggar, exactly—more like a farmer who’d gone for a stroll and gotten lost in some brambles. Or no, not even a farmer—that cloth was much too good for a farmer’s clothing under the stains and rips…

“Who are you?” he asked, staying well out of reach.

“No one that you need concern yourself with, young Lord Carthal—oh, don’t seem so surprised, if you go about proclaiming that you will be Prince one day, people are bound to guess who you are, as the King and Queen have only the one son.”

“I thought I was alone,” Carthal said pointedly. “And you haven’t answered my question. Who are you?”

“I have answered your question. I simply haven’t given you an answer you wanted to hear, so you’re ignoring it. A bad habit in a ruler…unless you learn to use it properly.”

“Use it?” Carthal was intrigued. Mother and Father only ever scold me for being rude—they never said it could be useful…

“Yes, use it. A ruler knows his face, his body, his mind, and his spirit inside and out, and can call upon their capacities at will. He must be able to become instantly as hot as the furnace’s heart, as cold as the glacier’s tip, as dry as the desert’s sand, or as welcoming as a summer’s wind.”

Carthal sat down with his back against a tree. “Four,” he said. “Mother talks about fours a lot when she tries to teach us how to use vica. I stopped listening when I found out I didn’t have much.”

“Not much can be useful still,” said the man. “Can you light a fire?”

“Not a big one. And everything has to be dry. Father can make a fire light up even if the tinder’s wet.” Carthal knew his tone had turned sulky, and didn’t much care.

“But that ability to light a spark could come in handy,” the man said. “Especially if you had enemies who knew how to watch for the great uses of vica that most vicobor must have—they always seem to show off, don’t they?—and miss the tiny, insignificant sparks that could ignite a conflagration which would scorch a forest clean…”

Carthal blinked. He’d never thought of that.

“Show me a little of your small vica,” the man commanded, picking up a dry twig and setting it in the center of a clear area. “Set that on fire. Just a bit will do at first.”

Carthal began to focus his attention on the end of the twig, trying to push away every other thought the way Mother always said. As usual, hundreds of fascinating thoughts began to invade his mind. Carthal made a face but tried to hang on.

“No, no, no!” the man exclaimed. “Stop that at once! What do you think you’re doing?”

“Trying to use my vica,” Carthal said meekly.

“Not like that, fool of a boy! Can’t you feel it’s not working for you? You’ll need another way. What happens when you try to do it the way you were taught?”

“I…start thinking about other things. Interesting things. Stories I heard, and ways to make them different, or pictures I saw, and what the places they show are really like…”

“Excellent.” The man clapped his hands. “Better than I could have hoped. Think about those things instead.”

“Think about those things instead?” Carthal frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. How will I set the twig on fire if I’m not thinking about it?”

“That’s the trick, boy, isn’t it?” The man chuckled and picked up the twig, holding it out to Carthal. “Practice at home, somewhere you won’t roast anything. Think about all your fascinating thoughts, but in the back of your head, keep the thought, ‘Oh, yes, and I want that twig to burn, too.’”

“All right,” Carthal said dubiously, accepting the twig. “I’ll try.” He twirled it between his fingers for a moment. “But what if—”

He looked up. The clearing where he stood was empty.

“Well, I knew he was a vicope,” he said aloud after a moment. “But he must be very good if he can just—” He snapped his fingers. “Poof like that.” He laughed. “Either that or he’s not all human…” Carthal shook his head. “But that can’t be. All the other races died out a long time ago.” He sighed. “As much as I’d have liked to meet them.”

Tucking the twig into a pocket, he started for home. Dinner would be ready soon, and Mother tended to fuss if he wasn’t there.

Late that night, though, he slipped into his bathroom, laid the twig in the middle of the bathtub, and let his mind wander. What were the other lands beyond the seas and mountains like? Would he ever be able to go exploring to see them, and write the tales that would make others feel as though they’d been there themselves? Or would he have to stay at home forever, because a King should never leave his land—

He sneezed hard enough to almost topple himself off the edge of the tub.

Smoke had gotten up his nose. The twig was a charred skeleton of itself. And as Carthal reached out to touch the ashes, he suddenly understood everything Mother had said about how working vica felt so wonderful.

xXxXx

Carthal practiced his new way of doing vica almost obsessively, sometimes missing meals over it and causing his mother to cluck at him a bit, though she softened when she noticed how much he ate once he was reminded of food.

Every few days, he would slip away from the palace and run off to the forest. True to form, after a few minutes, the man—‘Just call me Uxo,’ he’d said at their second meeting—would arrive, coming from a direction Carthal never saw, and their lessons would begin.

“Everything has its season,” Uxo told him at one of these lessons, holding a pine tree sprout in the palm of his hand. “Everything has its time.”

“Everything?” Carthal asked, stroking the tiny tree with the tip of one finger.

“Everything.” Without warning, Uxo closed his hand, crushing the tree.

Carthal jumped back with a yelp.

“What’s wrong?” Uxo asked.

“You killed it!”

“Indeed.” Uxo opened his hand and let the crushed sprout fall to the forest floor. “But without the death of trees, we would have no wood to burn, no paper to write books with…”

“But that little tree couldn’t give you any of that! It was just a baby, and you killed it!”

“It will return to its origins,” Uxo said, sliding the sprout to one side. “It will nourish others like itself. For every sprout that grows into a great tall tree, hundreds die.”

Carthal frowned, but nodded. “I think that makes sense,” he said, “but it sort of makes my brain hurt too.”

Uxo chuckled. “That’s not surprising. It took me many years to learn that lesson thoroughly. Even when I was a grown man, I still hadn’t learned it completely—I thought that all life could prosper and flourish, that nothing ever had to go wrong…”

“What happened then?” Carthal asked when Uxo trailed off.

“I learned differently,” Uxo said with a finality Carthal sometimes heard in his father’s voice, which meant he wasn’t to speak of the matter anymore. “And I have never forgotten that lesson.”

Carthal opened his mouth to ask another question, saw the look on Uxo’s face, and changed his mind. “Have you ever traveled outside our land?” he asked instead.

“Oh yes.” Uxo’s face cleared. “I have spent—well, probably just about as many years as you’ve been alive—traveling all over our fair world of Trycanta. Let me tell you about some of the places I’ve been, and some of the things I’ve seen…”

Stories became a regular part of their time together after that, as well as lessons.

And so time passed, as time has a way of doing. (No one ever mentions the incidents where Time stays in the driving lane.)

Carthal grew from a boy into a young man, and his sister Perri began to grow into a woman. Some of the princely duties Carthal had longed for began to fall on him, and he found that they weren’t nearly as much fun as he’d thought—but at the same time, they were ten times more fun than that.

It took some getting used to. Fortunately, so did most of Uxo’s thoughts and lessons.

Carthal still found time, at least once a week, to slip away and get to the royal forest. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he panted one sunny afternoon, dropping to his knees in the clearing, sure Uxo was there already. “I had…strategy…”

From somewhere nearby, a small snap, like a pine needle popping in the fire. “Carthal, if you are there, do not speak,” said Uxo’s voice. “This message can only play once, so I dearly hope my vicoda to hear your voice is accurately tuned. I will no longer be able to meet you in our usual place. If you still wish to be in touch with me, search under a thick oak tree you can see from where you are. The ground at the root is freshly disturbed. Make good use of what you find there, and you may well find me. I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavors, dearest of boys.”

Carthal sat back on his heels, catching his breath now not only from his run but from a shock. Uxo gone? How, where, and most importantly, why?

Quickly, he got up and looked around him. Father and Uxo had both taught him to identify trees, and two separate voices murmured mnemonics in his head as he studied bark and leaves and growing patterns. Finally, he found the tree Uxo must have meant and began to scrabble in the dirt.

A very few moments of labor netted him the prize—and what a prize!

“How could he just leave this here?” Carthal murmured, staring at the enormous faceted emerald. It was the biggest jewel of its kind he’d ever seen, most definitely including his parents’ regalia—Dulian tastes ran to the understated, which in Carthal’s eyes meant ‘dull’. “It’s gorgeous!”

A sudden sheen ran across the surface of the emerald, as though it had heard his words and approved.

Carthal tucked the emerald away inside his belt-pouch. “Stay in there and stay safe,” he told it. “I’ll see what you’re for later.”

For Uxo would never have left him this gift unless there was some significance to it. What that significance was, he didn’t yet know. But he was going to find out.