The second was fear. I hadn't mastered the candle trick then, and though I could do it now with ease I hadn't progressed much farther than that in my studies. I'd come back to Klahd to start over again with the basics and work my way up. How long would it take? I had no idea. What if, after all this time, I turned out to have no real magik talent? How would I deal with that? What if I couldn't learn to be the wizard everyone but my partners thought I was?

The third was loneliness, but I suppose that was good, in a way. I left behind friends who'd been my support through thick and thin, who'd given me the confidence to take over situations that I, as an apprentice magician (and would-be thief) never dreamed I'd be controlling, let alone involved in. It was time to strip away that protection and find out who I was. I also needed the solitude to study magik. I couldn't do it in front of a crowd. I needed to be able to fail, and learn from those mistakes without anyone correcting them for me. I needed to know my limitations, hard as that was. I also needed to learn how to deserve the friends I had. There had been times I could look back on now with the shame they deserved when I had been an unimaginable jerk to the people nearest and dearest to me. Being on my own for a while would be good for me.

I wasn't entirely alone in my self-imposed exile. Here, in the inn that we had sort of inherited from a madman named Isstvan and which I now more or less owned, lived myself and three friends. Gleep was my young green dragon. Buttercup, a war unicorn I'd acquired from a retired soldier named Quigley, was Gleep's best friend. Bunny, a drop-dead gorgeous woman, was the niece of my former sort-of-employer (there are a lot of sort-ofs in my life), Don Bruce, Fairy Godfather of the Mob. Bunny, for all her baby-doll looks, had a great brain. She'd been M.Y.T.H. Inc.'s bookkeeper and accountant, and had come with me to be my assistant and