The rest of the room seemed to be a display area for souvenirs and curiosities the old wizard had picked up over the years. A glass cabinet contained a variety of human and humanoid skulls along with a few shrunken human heads hanging by their hair. Another contained crystals, polished sections of coloured stone and the fossils of strange, multi-legged creatures frozen in black slate. Shards of broken pottery lay scattered across one of the tables, some of the pieces glued back together to make two thirds of an elegantly decorated urn.

     A row of shelves along one wall held large glass bottles containing the partially dissected corpses of various creatures floating in a yellowy fluid. Other, smaller bottles contained powders and liquids labeled with words Tak wouldn't have recognised even if they hadn't been written in such crabby, spidery writing. A table on the other side of the room, partially hidden behind a suit of armour on a stand, had a large sheet of paper spread out on it, coiling up at the edges and held down by what looked like large nuggets of gold. From what he could see, it appeared to be a map, although he'd never seen a map before and had no real idea what they looked like. More maps, if that was what they were, were stuffed untidily in an open chest nearby, rolled up tight and tied with coloured ribbons.

     A large part of the room was hidden from sight by a tall free standing cabinet with doors of polished and varnished orangewood, and Tak was wondering what mysteries it contained when there came the sound of a chair being pushed back behind it and a young man appeared, dressed in a similar manner to himself. He was the most beautiful, perfectly proportioned man Tak had ever seen. Golden haired like himself but with eyes of piercing, emerald green. His handsome face was distorted in a sneer of contemptuous amusement, though, as he crossed the room to stand before the boy and stare down at him.

     "So, Gomm's new sweetcheeks. In person at last. Welcome to Castle Nagra, young man."

     He held out a hand and Tak took it automatically. The man's hands were soft from years of easy living and the nails were neatly manicured.

     "My, what rough hands you have," the man said, fingering the boy's calluses. "Have to do something about that. He doesn't like rough hands on his delicate skin. You might find yourself thrown out into the snow while he goes looking for a pretty princeling to be his new playmate."

     "Master Tak, may I present master Philip Gable," said Trobo. "Master Philip is the master's first apprentice and you will obey him as you would the master himself. Serve him well, and one day you may be an apprentice yourself, and eventually a wizard in your own right."

     "A wizard, imagine that!" cried Philip gleefully. "Power over the lives of men and the fate of nations. When he first brought me here he had to use spells to control me, just like you, but when I discovered the power that could be mine I chose to stay of my own free will. Of course I had to sleep with him, but now he's got you he won't want me for that any more. He likes 'em young, you see. Young and fresh. Sweet and tight." He stroked the boy's cheek with one long finger. "I have to say, you're even better looking in real life than you were in the crystal ball. I may make use of you myself from time to time. What about you, Trobo? You interested in our new arrival?"

     "Such things hold no interest for me, as you know," replied the houseman flatly.

     "Oh yes, that's right," the impossibly handsome young man said as if he'd forgotten, although he very obviously hadn't. "But then, what does? You don't seek company for your bed. You have no friends. No social life at all. You never ask for any time off. You never leave the castle at all except when we need special supplies or new servants. He's the perfect servant, on the surface at least, but what terrible vices does he practice in private, when the rest of us are asleep? Must be something pretty dreadful if it's worse than buggering little boys, eh Tak? What could possibly be that terrible? Makes you wonder, eh?"

     "You should return to your studies," replied Trobo, completely unperturbed. "The master will not be pleased if you have not memorised the words of the Auchon in time for tomorrow's ceremony."

     "I will be master one day, Trobo," Philip almost hissed, "and then you will serve me!"

     The houseman nodded as if this were the most obvious fact in the world, and then he led Tak out to continue his tour of the castle.

     Molos Gomm and his household occupied only a small part of the largely empty, half ruined castle. The living accommodation was in the lowest two floors of the keep and most of the wizard's laboratories and workrooms were in the adjoining towers. A couple of rooms in the bailey had been converted for the use of Janov Parla, the caretaker, and his wife, Betta, who did the cooking and the cleaning. They also took a small horse and cart into a nearby town twice a week, for supplies. They had a daughter. A fifteen year old that Tak never saw and whose name he never even learned. She lived with relatives in the town, and both her parents would die before letting any of the castle's other occupants set eyes on her.

     "And now, master Tak, I must return to my duties," Trobo said when the tour was over. "You will return to the master's bedchamber and await his return. You will find some books on the bedside table, I suggest you put the time to good use." He turned to go, then paused and turned back as a thought struck him. "You can read, of course." Tak nodded. "Yes, of course. Then go and do as you were told."

     Alone for the first time, Tak tried to run away, not knowing where he was going but only desperate to get as far away from this hideous place as possible. He saw the steps down to the ground floor ahead of him and knew that the door was just a few yards away from its bottommost step. He willed himself to go that way, but his feet took him along the corridor instead. Along the inner courtyard and back to the south wing. Back to the room he'd been told to return to.

     He cried out as he opened the door and stepped in, but his limbs refused to obey him. He was a prisoner in his own body, a body that belonged completely to the grey wizard. It was all he could do to even think of disobedience. Actually disobeying was as impossible for him as flying.

     The books were there on the table, as Trobo had said they would be. One was treatise on local history full of hand drawn images of fat, insolent people and elaborately annotated family trees. Another was a compendium of local myths and legends, several pages of which were marked with loose leaves of paper. Reading was the last thing Tak wanted to do right then, though. He wanted to run away. He wanted to grieve for his parents. He wanted to scream and cry until his throat burned. He did none of these things, though. Instead he opened the history book at its first page and began to read.

☆☆☆

     Thomas turned his face away, not wanting his wife to see the emotion he was suddenly feeling, but they knew each other far too well and she leaned across to touch his hand.

     "He turned up at sunset, right on time," he said, “but I don’t remember anything after that. It must be one of the memories Tak erased when he learned how to cast amnesia spells on himself. Those spells are dangerous! You could wipe out all your essential spellcasting knowledge without meaning to. You don’t do a thing like that unless you’re really desperate.”

     “What kind of person could do a thing like that to an innocent boy?” wondered the demi shae in a soft voice.

     “The next thing I remember, it was the next morning, after the grey wizard had abused him again and left to begin his day’s work. Although the memories of the abuse itself are gone, I remember how he felt afterwards. The shock and surprise. The sheer disbelief at what was happening to him. And there was pain, as you would expect. By far the worst thing, though, was the shame. It almost destroyed him. And he couldn't give any outward sign of it either. The hypnosis spells compelled him to remain calm and obedient no matter how much he screamed inside."

     Thomas sighed. "He survived, though. Somehow. He had a tremendously strong spirit, but the price he paid for his survival was terrible. Something died inside him, or perhaps it just went into a kind of dormancy as I have vague recollections of some kind of spiritual rebirth later in his life. Hopefully I'll remember in more detail later. At the time, though, he survived by learning not to mind what was being done to him. His memories of his parents and his sister faded until he scarcely thought of them any more and it began to seem that he had always lived in Castle Nagra."

☆☆☆

     Tak cast his first spell at the age of fourteen.

     He'd been studying magic for nearly two years, practising the tongue twisting syllables of the magic words until they tripped off his tongue with practised ease. He exercised his supple hands, now soft and smooth, by dancing coins across the backs of his fingers, both hands at the same time, and he studied the memory tricks Molos Gomm taught him until he could take a single glance at a crowded room and describe everything it contained in detail hours or even days afterwards.

     Near the start of his magical training the grey wizard had tested his ability to store magic in his body, needing to know if he was physically capable of using magic before he wasted years of training on him. Philip had tied him to a post in the inner courtyard, pulling the leather cords so tightly as to completely immobilise him and threaten the circulation in his limbs. Molos Gomm had then approached him and spoken a single word as he touched a bony finger to the boy's chest, and the chill of the wind on his bare skin had been replaced by an agony greater than any he'd imagined possible. He'd had no idea how long it lasted, but it had seemed like hours and he must have lost consciousness at some point because his next memory was of falling forward into the weedy grass as Philip cut him free. Both he and Molos Gomm seemed pleased, though, so he must have passed the test, whatever it had been.

     Now, a year and a half later, Tak knew that the grey wizard had placed a tiny amount of magic in his body and then observed to see whether he had enough control over it to expel it. His bondage had been to prevent him from injuring himself in his convulsions of agony. Afterwards, though, he came to feel a dawning sense of new worth as he came to realise what the test meant.

     He was now an apprentice wizard. Him, Tak Eweela! How proud his parents would have been! (How horrified, but he stopped himself from thinking that.) He tried to conjure up a mental image of them, but found to his surprise that he was no longer sure what they'd looked like. His father had had a beard, he knew that, and he thought it had been bushy and ginger, but that was about it. Oh well, it wasn't really important.

     The fact that Molos Gomm had had his parents murdered had also been forgotten for now, although in later years he would remember and tearfully vow vengeance upon the grey wizard. For now, though, the memory had been gradually but irresistibly wiped out of his mind by the grey wizard's repeated insistence that he'd been there by chance and had saved him from a similar fate, something that Tak currently firmly believed.