George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

They run until they come to the other edge of the forest. On this side is a highway that lies in another world, the world we call the real world.

A world where the only magic is the magic of metaphor.

A world where love is the spell that casts out fear.

A world where a deer is just a deer.

In this world, the deer that was once a wizard leaps fleet-footed across the highway, into the safety of the thicket on the other side.

Peter S. Beagleis the author of the beloved classic The Last Unicorn . His first novel, published when he was just nineteen, was the critically-acclaimed A Fine and Private Place . Other major novel-length works include The Innkeeper’s Song, The Folk of the Air, and Tamsin . Beagle is also a prolific author of short fiction, most of which has been gathered in the collections The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, The Line Between, We Never Talk About My Brother, and Mirror Kingdoms . For his work, he has won many awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, Mythopoeic, and Locus awards.

According to legend, when young Romulus began building the city of Rome, his twin brother Remus mocked the effort by leaping over the walls. Romulus was so enraged that he slew Remus, and swore that the same fate would befall anyone who dared pass over the walls of Rome.

Sibling rivalry isn’t always this brutal, but it’s usually pretty close. We weren’t all raised by wolves, but you’d never know it from watching the way some siblings go at each other. In his recent book Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art of Sibling Smackdown , author Daniel H. Wilson raises this sort of hazing to an art form, cataloguing 126 techniques for achieving family domination, from ear flips and tripping to wedgies and wet-towel snaps.

Jealousy over simple things — like popularity or grades or how much mom loves you — can lead to some pretty bitter feelings, so just imagine what sort of jealousy might be provoked by discovering that your sibling got the wizard gene and you didn’t. Of course, no matter how much siblings may squabble, you can be sure of one thing — nothing unites them like someone from outside the family coming around and picking a fight.

“You can’t kill him,” Mr. Luke said. “Your mother wouldn’t like it.” After some consideration, he added, “I’d be rather annoyed myself.”

“But wait,” Angie said, in the dramatic tones of a television commercial for some miraculous mop. “There’s more. I didn’t tell you about the brandied cupcakes—”

“Yes, you did.”

“And about him telling Jennifer Williams what I got her for her birthday, and she pitched a fit, because she had two of them already—”

“He meant well,” her father said cautiously. “I’m pretty sure.”

“And then when he finked to Mom about me and Orlando Cruz, and we weren’t doing anything —”

“Nevertheless. No killing.”

Angie brushed sweaty mouse-brown hair off her forehead and regrouped. “Can I at least maim him a little? Trust me, he’s earned it.”

“I don’t doubt you,” Mr. Luke agreed. “But you’re fifteen, and Marvyn’s eight. Eight and a half. You’re bigger than he is, so beating him up isn’t fair. When you’re… oh, say, twenty-three, and he’s sixteen and a half — okay, you can try it then. Not until.”

Angie’s wordless grunt might or might not have been assent. She started out of the room, but her father called her back, holding out his right hand. “Pinky-swear, kid.” Angie eyed him warily, but hooked her little finger around his without hesitation, which was a mistake. “You did that much too easily,” her father said, frowning. “Swear by Buffy.”

“What? You can’t swear by a television show!”

“Where is that written? Repeat after me—‘I swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer —’ ”

“You really don’t trust me!”

“ ’I swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I will keep my hands off my baby brother—’ ”

“My baby brother, the monster! He’s gotten worse since he started sticking that Y in his name—”

“ ‘—and I will stop calling him Ex-Lax—’ ”

“Come on, I only do that when he makes me really mad—”

“ ‘—until he shall have attained the age of sixteen years and six months, after which time—’ ”

“After which time I get to pound him into marmalade. Deal. I can wait.” She grinned; then turned self-conscious, making a performance of pulling down her upper lip to cover the shiny new braces. At the door, she looked over her shoulder and said lightly, “You are way too smart to be a father.”

From behind his book, Mr. Luke answered, “I’ve often thought so myself.” Then he added, “It’s a Korean thing. We’re all like that. You’re lucky your mother isn’t Korean, or you wouldn’t have a secret to your name.”

Angie spent the rest of the evening in her room, doing homework on the phone with Melissa Feldman, her best friend. Finished, feeling virtuously entitled to some low-fat chocolate reward, she wandered down the hall toward the kitchen, passing her brother’s room on the way. Looking in — not because of any special interest, but because Marvyn invariably hung around her own doorway, gazing in aimless fascination at whatever she was doing, until shooed away — she saw him on the floor, playing with Milady, the gray, ancient family cat. Nothing unusual about that: Marvyn and Milady had been an item since he was old enough to realize that the cat wasn’t something to eat. What halted Angie as though she had walked into a wall was that they were playing Monopoly, and that Milady appeared to be winning.

Angie leaned in the doorway, entranced and alarmed at the same time. Marvyn had to throw the dice for both Milady and himself, and the old cat was too riddled with arthritis to handle the pastel Monopoly money easily. But she waited her turn, and moved her piece — she had the silver top hat — very carefully, as though considering possible options. And she already had a hotel on Park Place.

Marvyn jumped up and slammed the door as soon as he noticed his sister watching the game, and Angie went on to liberate a larger-than-planned remnant of sorbet. Somewhere near the bottom of the container she finally managed to stuff what she’d just glimpsed deep in the part of her mind she called her “forgettery.” As she’d once said to her friend Melissa, “There’s such a thing as too much information, and it is not going to get me. I am never going to know more than I want to know about stuff. Look at the President.”

For the next week or so Marvyn made a point of staying out of Angie’s way, which was all by itself enough to put her mildly on edge. If she knew one thing about her brother, it was that the time to worry was when you didn’t see him. All the same, on the surface things were peaceful enough, and continued so until the evening when Marvyn went dancing with the garbage.

The next day being pickup day, Mrs. Luke had handed him two big green plastic bags of trash for the rolling bins down the driveway. Marvyn had made enough of a fuss about the task that Angie stayed by the open front window to make sure that he didn’t simply drop the bags in the grass, and vanish into one of his mysterious hideouts. Mrs. Luke was back in the living room with the news on, but Angie was still at the window when Marvyn looked around quickly, mumbled a few words she couldn’t catch, and then did a thing with his left hand, so fast she saw no more than a blurry twitch. And the two garbage bags went dancing.

Angie’s buckling knees dropped her to the couch under the window, though she never noticed it. Marvyn let go of the bags altogether, and they rocked alongside him — backwards, forwards, sideways, in perfect timing, with perfect steps, turning with him as though he were the star and they his backup singers. To Angie’s astonishment, he was snapping his fingers and moonwalking, as she had never imagined he could do — and the bags were pushing out green arms and legs as the three of them danced down the driveway. When they reached the cans, Marvyn’s partners promptly went limp and were nothing but plastic garbage bags again. Marvyn plopped them in, dusted his hands, and turned to walk back to the house.