The king looked around slowly at the assembled court. “There are five of us, then,” he said, “a good number for a dangerous mission. We’ll start preparations at once, and I shall write to other royal courts in the western kingdoms to tell them to expect us. We’ll leave right after Easter.”

But we ended up with six people in our party, not five. Two weeks later, while the constable and assistant constable were still making lists of what we needed and pulling boxes out of the storeroom, a lone horseman rode up to the castle at sunset.

I had been out walking, trying to harden my body enough to be ready for a trip of hundreds, indeed thousands of miles. Even the best magic can only do a limited amount to compensate for physical weakness. As I walked I ran through spells in my mind, deciding what magic I should review because it might be useful in a strange land.

It was so cold that the snow squeaked underfoot. I came back to the castle as shadows became deep blue and the sun tinted the western sky crimson.

I paused before the drawbridge, breathing hard and enjoying the view, then noticed a figure emerging from the woods below the castle hill. He had a long sword slung from the saddle, and his horse was lathered in spite of the cold day.

Yurt was so peaceful that normally I would have assumed that it was a friend coming to visit. But thinking about people captured by bandits had made me uneasy enough that I started putting a paralysis spell together, just in case.

Halfway up the hill, the horseman noticed me. He was silhouetted against the sunset so he was only a shape, not a face, but he looked like a young man. He swept off his hat and waved with it. “Hello, Wizard!” he called as though he had known me all his life.

Even when he reached the top of the hill and pulled up next to me, I did not at once recognize him. He had jet-black hair, was dressed in black leather, and had a gold hoop in one ear in the latest fashion for young aristocrats. Were it not for the friendly smile, he would have appeared intimidating as well as strange. And yet there was something oddly familiar about him.