By the time the door shut I was already halfway to my dresser. I quickly shunted aside all thoughts that a woman some seven years my senior was going to confess her undying love for me (she was nearly my SISTER, after all), and set about donning my clothes. It was early in the morning; I could hear songbirds twittering their melodies beyond my window, and the light that filtered in was young and pale.

Hardly a soul could be heard stirring outside. It would be a sleepy day outside our manor, in the farms. Every day was a sleepy day, of course, but that was the way most of us preferred it. Would that the rest of the world could be as languid -- keeping our stomachs full relied in part upon the perennial boredom of others.

I cracked open the door and bellowed down the stairs. "Do we have any callers?"

"No! The sun just rose! Get your bloody clothes on!" That was Dana, of course, not Mother. I don't even know why I asked; Father always handled business involving bookselling, so as to better impress (extort) his customers, and he didn't trust me to go anywhere near the smallfolk. One of these days, he'd let me. And then he'd be impressed, indeed.

I must admit, however, that impressing my father was of less concern to me at that moment than impressing Dana. Tall, witty, golden-haired and ivory-countenanced, she was all the sorts of things that made a young man think stupid things, and I was just growing old enough to think them. "Have you seen my glasses?"

No answer came.

So, I appealed directly to the object in question. "Counfound it all, where are you hiding?" I must have spent ten minutes wading in the books and dirty linens that littered the floor, but my glasses evaded me as surely as the gift of sight.

Dana's voice drifted in again. "Hurry up!"

There they were, nestled between two stacks of particularly aged books. "I'm coming," I promised, flinging open the door and nearly rolling down the stairs.

Waiting at the bottom was Dana, sipping at a small teacup. "Welcome back to the realm of the living, m'lord. Care for a spot of tea?"

"I haven't a taste for it and you know that," I murmured, dodging around her to head for the kitchen. I whirled between an aging pastry, two mugs of water and a slice of bread before I found myself sitting across from Dana at the table.

She let me eat for a few minutes before speaking. "I was told an interesting story, a week or so back," she began, crossing her legs. "One of the villagers told me."

I took the cue from Dana's pause and asked, "What was the story?"

"You know Gregor, I'm sure." She gave me a small smile that leaves me wondering to this day if she knew just how well Gregor and I were acquainted. "He'd taken a midnight jaunt into the old forest just behind the schoolhouse, out being a boy and doing whatever things boys do when they're supposed to be helping their father tend the farm or sleeping. Well." She took a dramatic pause and sipped at her tea. "It seems he found a stranger out there. Being the proper, upstanding vassal of Lord Doraster's humble lands that he is, he questioned the man as to his destination and business."

"Mm," I supplied, digging into my bread. This was not going to end well for me.

"Alack!" Dana threw up her arms. "The stranger flung forth his hands and conjured simmering balls of flame! Gregor barely escaped with his life!"

I nearly choked. "...I don't know if I believe that."

"He's told that tale to every farm within miles; it gets wilder every time. And that was when it was only him telling it. Housewives want for gossip, you know, and a wizard moves beyond gossip into the realm of mortal danger." Her foot began to bob up and down. "Last I heard, the stranger summoned a firenewt that pranced around and growled while Gregor fended it off with an oxman's plow. Or a pitchfork. I forget. Oh! There was an elf in it, somewhere, too."

"Th-that's all you wanted to tell me?" I dreaded whatever came next.

"You did the magic," Dana declared, jabbing a finger at me. "Don't think I haven't noticed the loss of my spellbook. What were you thinking, precisely? WERE you thinking? I told you that fire-calling is a terribly dangerous thing to practice on your own and I don't CARE how much talent you think you've got, but if you made even the slightest slip you could very well have set your hair or someone's homestead on fire or even immolated Gregor." Dana breathed, slowly. "And if you must engage in such idiocy, what possessed you to do it so close to that farm, mm?"

I smiled a weak, nervous smile, and brought up a hand to rub at the back of my neck. "Well...I, er..."

Dana grinned, then. She reached out to pat my shoulder, and asked, "More importantly. How big a fireball was it?"