The Evil Wizard Smallbone by Delia Sherman

Author:Delia Sherman [Sherman, Delia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7636-9192-9
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2016-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

After his day as a rat, Nick slept straight through two nights and the day between. When he woke, he sat up, feeling better than he’d felt in weeks. Tom, who had been asleep on his chest, picked himself out of the covers and meowed resentfully.

“I’m a wizard,” Nick told the little cat. “I passed Smallbone’s test. I’m going to be the best elemental wizard in the world. You just watch.”

Unimpressed, Tom yawned, stretched, curled up on the pillow, and went back to sleep.

It was snowing, one of those heavy, wet snows that Maine can deliver in March. Nick ran downstairs, grabbed an apple from the barrel in the larder, threw open the back door, and called up a wind to blow the snow out of his way.

The wind wouldn’t come. When he tried to reach for his power, there was nothing to reach for, just a damp blankness. Nick was clean out of magic. Furious, he marched, head down, into a wind he couldn’t control and forked the soiled straw out of the pens and washed the buckets and worked the pump and even gathered eggs without a lick of magic to help him. It took him twice as long as it usually did, and the longer it took, the madder he got.

It had all been a trap. He imagined Smallbone up in his tower, carving little ducks and having a good laugh over what a fool Nick had made of himself, blowing out all his magic in a single spell. Knowing Smallbone, that was a whole lot easier to believe than that he actually didn’t mind that Nick had learned magic on his own.

When Nick got back to the house, Smallbone had already eaten breakfast and was sitting in his rocker with Tom on his knees and his foul pipe stuck in his beard. The smell of sausage and onion and sage from the pan on the stove told Nick he was hungry. He got a plate and filled it with scrapple.

Smallbone emptied his pipe into the fire and set it back on the mantelpiece. “When you’re done in here, Foxkin, you might as well come up to the tower. But clean up the kitchen first.”

Nick choked on his scrapple. Was it possible the old man was actually going to teach him something?

Nick sped through the cleanup in record time and ran upstairs. The tower door was wide open, the stairs were lit, the curtain was drawn back, and the workshop was bright and almost neat. Smallbone had draped a sheet over the shelf of wooden carvings, stacked the maze of books, and swept the floor. Beside the worktable, Nick saw the corner of the box of magic he’d bumped into when he was a rat. It looked like an old sea chest, with a seal painted on the lid. He wondered what was in it.

A faint sour smell suggested that Smallbone had missed some of the rat poop. I should teach him my gathering spell, Nick thought, and grinned.

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