Chapter 1

Life is like a trigonometry problem. When we start it, every step becomes difficult. At many places, we think let’s quit, do another one, but at the end, we proudly say, hence proved. 

– Gaurav Sharma 

     “Dad, Mr. Edwards is weird!” 

     I got into the cart and threw my logbook into the back, not caring that it landed in an open sack of dried onions. “He gets so excited about who comes into the city, how many carts I count on the west road, how often the carts come in from the docks on the south… He lives three blocks from the docks, but I don’t think he has even seen the sea!”

     My dad reached back and took the book out of the onions and brushed off the dirt with a large, calloused hand. He handed it back to me before he gently urged the horse forward. “Ellie, it is those details that have made him one of the richest men in Orn!”

     “If he is so smart,” I said in between bites of the sandwich my mom had packed for my lunch, “why do we spend so much time logging all of the businesses in town, even the businesses of the merchants that don’t hire him?”

     “Well…” 

     As my dad drove, he scrunched his face up, and his long eyebrows nearly touched the outside of his wild, unkempt mustache. “It probably helps him with future business. I don’t know… If he is doing it, I suggest you pay attention.”

     A cold wind blew across the path, making the wheels creak against the sides of the cart. Winter was still refusing to make way for spring. I pulled my thick, three-sizes-too-large leather coat around my shoulders.

     “He isn’t doing it. That’s my job. He makes me go out there twice a day and mark all these little boxes.” I flipped open to a page in the logbook. “Then I go back to his office, and it’s addition and multiplication and averages and something he calls deviation… I hate math! Do I have to keep going there?”

     My dad brushed aside the hair that had fallen in front of my eyes, mixing the dried earth from his hands with the ink splotches I’d earned from my work that day. “Ellie, you don’t really mean that, do you? You get so excited by what some of those numbers mean that it’s the first thing out of your mouth when you see your mother. And you have been filling pages with numbers for as long as you could write. You’re good at it, and besides, you’d never be happy working the farm with your older brother. Mr. Edwards picked you himself to be his apprentice. He sees the gift in you. I think it has been good for you—and for the family. He had you work with those numbers, which you say you hate so much, just to convince your mom and me to let you work for him. And because of those numbers, and the small changes to watering spacing and fertilizing, we grew more onions last year than any year I can remember. I thought some of his ideas were crazy too, but he is smart! It was a good season for us. Thanks to him. Thanks to you too! You don’t really want to grow onions when you are old and tired like me, do you?”

     I turned a few pages back in my book, to some of the calculations Mr. Edwards taught me and made me do for the past season. Yes, the farm was doing better. The numbers and formulas my dad could never identify, calculated it was doing just over 21 percent better. No, I didn’t want to be a farmer, but I certainly didn’t want to be a bookkeeper stuck in an office all day, every day. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be. A part of me still held on to a childish dream that I would never admit to my father.

     As we jostled our way over the stone streets of the outer market, I looked over at the raised stage in the middle of the plaza and thought about the day I saw Alozar and started to dream about magic. 

     I was eleven years old and was spending longer days at school preparing to take my trade. I missed the time I used to have following my dad around the farm.

     One day, my mother told my dad that she needed some wax from town and suggested he should bring me along to the market. He said something about how this was a terrible day to go to the market, but then he looked at her, and then at me, and smiled. Then, just like he did when I was a little girl, he joked that I wouldn’t fetch much. He put an onion sack over my head and threw me over his shoulder. Then he kissed my mother, carried me outside, and carefully placed me in the back of the cart. I laughed as I climbed up front to sit next to him. That day, every bridge we crossed, every time the road changed from dirt to large smooth stones to regular bricks, reminded me of earlier trips and yet seemed to bring an unexplained anticipation. 

     When we neared the market, I heard an excited clamor. I looked over at my father and understood his hesitation when my mother suggested we go. He pursed his lips and scanned the large crowd that was gathering. My father was not a fan of parades or public celebrations, but the scale of what I saw fascinated me. People packed the streets so closely they could barely turn around, and still they were having hundreds of interactions: talking, eating, buying and selling. I was amazed that so many people lived in and around our little town! Then, suddenly, all of that focus shifted at once to the raised platform in the middle of the market. 

     The wealthy farmers had moved from their usual place of privilege, and instead there was a row of metal pillars holding up ropes and multi-colored flags. My dad murmured something under his breath. But he stopped the cart, led me to the outside of the mass of people, and lifted me up on his shoulders. Then Alozar came out, dressed head to toe in bright fabric and ribbons, his sandy hair almost covering his eyes. He introduced himself to the crowd and teased the town mayor. His show was amazing! He melted a large metal jug with fire, he disappeared and reappeared, he made plants grow. I’m not sure if that made my dad excited or angry. People cheered! Children pushed each other to get closer. It was lunchtime when his show ended. “I must go now,” he had said, “to support our kings in the wars far to the north, but I give thanks for the warm welcome of this noble village.” 

     I jumped off my father’s shoulders and joined the crowd as it pushed forward: young men wanting to fight in the war, small children giggling as he showered them with fairy powder, and boys and girls near the age of thirteen begging him to take them on as his apprentice. 

     “Alas!” he replied as he gave his final bows, “I dare not take one so young to the dangers that lie before me.” He scanned the crowd with his finger, pausing momentarily on my outstretched hand before stopping on the spoiled brat of a tulip farmer’s daughter, who was six weeks older than me. “But this young child shows promise. I will visit again before you are of age to take a trade, my dear, and give you a test to see if that magical spark within you grows. Farewell, my good people, farewell!”

     She thought she was chosen for her trade on that bright, colorful day. I would be chosen on a damp foggy one a year and a half later. Alozar wasn’t there, and I had abandoned most thoughts of wizards and magic. I was with the one person I wanted to be like more than anyone in the world.

     My oldest brother, Jacob, had first been apprenticed to a local fisherman whose route was within the safe confines of our harbor, but he snuck onto the merchants’ cutters so many times that his master eventually released him. He told me that while he loved being out on the water in the harbor, what he really loved was to navigate—using the stars to know where he was when there was nothing else to look at, finding the right course to a destination and then finding his way back again. He had borrowed the navigator’s sextant every day for a month and duplicated it during his free time. To the great displeasure of our mother, he would take me out into the onion fields on warm summer nights and teach me to use it.

     It was before the harvest, right before my thirteenth birthday, and the beginning of my opportunity to find a trade and a master to teach me. I was sitting in the schoolhouse. The teacher had spent the morning explaining, for the third time, how to subtract when you needed to borrow, and I was not paying attention. At some point, the lesson must have ended because I heard the words “gold coins.”

     My focus was back on my teacher, and I heard her explain that there was an old tree between our little farming schoolhouse and the city that had died of some disease. It was to be cut down and used for the bonfire for the festival. Before then, some crazy old man wanted to pay whichever child could guess the height of the tree the closest. There were only two rules: we had to be younger than thirteen, and we couldn’t climb it. 

     Some of the more reckless boys and girls of course tried to climb the tree, measuring ropes in hand. There were several bruises and one broken leg caused by that tree and its old rotting branches. 

     Jacob’s summer night lessons gave me a different idea about how to measure the tree. I asked to borrow his homemade sextant and asked if he would come along. I took the sextant, made a little modification, and we walked the couple of miles to the tree. Jacob sat at the base of the tree, telling me I needed to do this on my own, and that he knew I could. I measured out twenty yards from the tree and with the sextant measured the angle to the top leaf. Because it was farmland, everything around the tree was essentially flat. With a wave to my brother, I sat in the dirt to do my calculations.

     After I turned my number in with the rest of the children, I started to doubt that my idea would really work. But every time I mentioned that, Jacob smiled and asked me to explain how the math worked. Explaining it to him gave me confidence. By the time the day of the festival came, I was so sure I was right that I returned to the tree in the morning, with my dad in tow, to add a little flair.

     “You know, Little Beetle,” he said, carrying a wooden pole and a large sign, “I don’t know exactly which direction the tree is going to fall. They will try to get the top of the tree to fall near here, away from the crowd, but it could be ten to twenty feet off.”

     “I know, but can you imagine the look on Petya’s face if it did come down right on this sign?”

     My dad scrunched his face until his eyebrows almost touched his mustache. He did not approve of my rivalry with the tulip farmer’s daughter. But he kept walking with me. When we got to the tree, we measured out the distance of my prediction in the direction my dad said the tree was most likely to fall. My dad drove the sign I had made with my name and my prediction into the dirt.

     “Ellie,” my dad said as he went back to the cart, “I have to set up my stand so we can try to sell some onions on this ridiculous day. I’ll be back when your mother and brothers get here for the grand cutting down of the tree.” He said that with mock enthusiasm. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

     When the time did finally come, it seemed that everyone in town was gathered in a wide circle around the old tree. Kids my age were crossing their fingers, hoping their guess was the right one. Fathers were placing bets on what they thought the number would be and whether or not their child would win. Mothers were trying to keep laughing toddlers from running inside the circle, warning them that they might get hit by the falling tree. I smiled as I watched them. I knew they weren’t nearly close enough to get hit.

     Finally, an old man that I thought I had once seen in the city with my dad came forward. He thanked the children for participating and handed a plain sack of coins to the mayor. The mayor moved to the outside of the circle with his family, but the old man just stepped to the side and watched as two of the young men from the woodworker’s shop took turns hacking at the base of the trunk.

     Without warning, and without knowing why I did it, I broke into the circle. Before my mom could stop me, I ran up and stood behind my sign. She probably shouted, but I didn’t hear her. I just heard the tree crack free of its stump and felt the rush of the wind as it came down.

     The top dead leaf on the top branch brushed my nose.