George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

“Whatever I have,” said Jam, “belongs to him, if he needs it.”

“That’s a good brother,” said the Emperor.

Jam felt the tingle, the flow, like something liquid and cold flowing through his arm and out into Gan’s body. And in a few moments he was out of breath, as if he had been running for half an hour.

“Enough,” said the Emperor. “I told you to heal yourself, not make yourself immortal.”

Gan sat up, swung his legs off the bed, rose to his feet, and put his arm around Jam’s shoulders. “I had no idea you had so much strength in you.”

“He’s been collecting it his whole life,” said the Emperor of the Air. “Everyone he meets, every tree and blade of grass, every animal, any living thing he has ever encountered gave a portion of their power to him. Not all — not like that trivial stone — but a portion. And then it grew inside him, nurtured by his patience and wisdom and kindness.”

Patience? Wisdom? Kindness? Had anyone every accused Jam of such things before?

Gan hugged Jam. “We can go home now,” he said. “I to the Emperor’s house, and you to your true family. But you’re always my brother, Jamaica.”

Jam hugged him back. And with that, Gan was gone. Vanished. “I sent him home,” the Emperor explained. “He has a wife and children who have needed him for long years now.”

“What about Mother? I mean Mrs. Fisher? What she did to Gan. To me . Taking away even my memories of my family!”

The Emperor nodded gravely, then gestured toward Gan’s bed.

Mrs. Fisher lay there, helpless, her eyes open.

“I’m kinder to her than she was to Gan,” said the Emperor. “Gan did no wrong, yet she took from him everything but life. I’ve left her eyes and ears to her, and her mouth. She can talk.”

Then Mr. Laudon stood beside the bed. “And that will be Laudon’s punishment, won’t it, dear lad? To take care of her as Jam once cared for Gan — only you get to hear what she has to say.” The Emperor turned to Jam. “Tell me, Jamaica. Am I just? Is this equitable?”

“It’s poetic,” said Jam.

“Then I have achieved even beyond my aspirations. Go home now, Jam, and be a great wizard. Live with kindness, as you have done up to now, and the power that flows to you will be well-used. You have my trust. Do I have your loyalty?”

Jam sank to his knees. “You had it before you asked.”

“Then I give you these lands, to be lord where once this poor thing ruled.”

“But I don’t want to rule over anybody.”

“The less you rule, the happier your people will be. Assume your duties only when they demand it. Feel free to continue high school, though not at Riddle High, alas. Now go home.”

And at that moment the house disappeared, and Jam found himself on the sidewalk in front of the home where in fact he had lived for the first twelve years of his life. He remembered now, how he met Mrs. Fisher. She came to the house as a pollster, asking his parents questions about the presidential election. But when Jam came into the room, she rose to her feet and reached for his hand and at that moment he was changed, he remembered growing up with her as his mother, and being Gan’s brother, and the tragic incident where “father” knocked him down and damaged his brain. None of it true. Nothing. She stole his life.

But the Emperor of the Air had given it back, and more besides.

The door to the house opened. His real mother stood there, her face full of astonishment. “Michael!” she cried out. “Oh, praise God! Praise him! You’re here! You came home!”

She ran to him, and he to her, and they embraced on the front lawn. As she wept and kissed him and called out to everyone in the neighborhood that her son was home, he came back, Jam — no, Michael — murmured his thanks to the Emperor of the Air.

Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree — is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside . Learn more at www.majipoor.com.

For most people, learning magic is no easy feat. It’s not really the sort of thing you can just puzzle out for yourself in your spare time. I mean, what are the chances that anyone’s going to accidentally stumble across just the right incantation or just right quantity of eye of newt? Sure, you might be one of the lucky ones who gets invited to some sort of amazing wizard academy, but most practitioners of the arts are just going to have to suck it up and apprentice themselves to some crotchety old coot.

Being a sorcerer’s apprentice typically involves a lot of scut work — sweeping floors, emptying chamber pots, polishing beakers. And the most frustrating thing is, you’ve probably learned just enough magic to get an enchanted broom to do the job for you, but not enough to actually make it stop.

Our next story points out that while fiction would have us believe that most wizarding masters are ancient graybeards, some aspiring magicians may in fact find themselves apprenticed to attractive female wizards. However, for an amorous young man, this can be a mixed blessing. This story also points out that the ways of the heart can be as tricky, mysterious, and potent as any other form of enchantment.

Gannin Thidrich was nearing the age of thirty and had come to Triggoin to study the art of sorcery, a profession for which he thought he had some aptitude, after failing at several for which he had none. He was a native of the Free City of Stee, that splendid metropolis on the slopes of Castle Mount, and at the suggestion of his father, a wealthy merchant of that great city, he had gone first into meat-jobbing, and then, through the good offices of an uncle from Dundilmir, he had become a dealer in used leather. In neither of these occupations had he distinguished himself, nor in the desultory projects he had undertaken afterward. But from childhood on he had pursued sorcery in an amateur way, first as a boyish hobby, and then as a young man’s consolation for shortcomings in most of the other aspects of his life — helping out friends even unluckier than he with an uplifting spell or two, conjuring at parties, earning a little by reading palms in the marketplace — and at last, eager to attain more arcane skills, he had taken himself to Triggoin, the capital city of sorcerers, hoping to apprentice himself to some master in that craft.

Triggoin came as a jolt, after Stee. That great city, spreading out magnificently along both banks of the river of the same name, was distinguished for its huge parks and game preserves, its palatial homes, its towering riverfront buildings of reflective gray-pink marble. But Triggoin, far up in the north beyond the grim Valmambra Desert, was a closed, claustrophobic place, dark and unwelcoming, where Gannin Thidrich found himself confronted with a bewildering tangle of winding medieval streets lined by ancient mustard-colored buildings with blank facades and gabled roofs. It was winter here. The trees were leafless and the air was cold. That was a new thing for him, winter: Stee was seasonless, favored all the year round by the eternal springtime of Castle Mount. The sharp-edged air was harsh with the odors of stale cooking-oil and unfamiliar spices; the faces of the few people he encountered in the streets just within the gate were guarded and unfriendly.

He spent his first night there in a public dormitory for wayfarers, where in a smoky, dimly lit room he slept, very poorly, on a tick-infested straw mat among fifty other footsore travelers. In the morning, waiting on a long line for the chance to rinse his face in icy water, he passed the time by scanning the announcements on a bulletin board in the corridor and saw this: