In the midst of The Greatest City Known To Man, a city surrounded by high stone walls and lined by a deep and murky moat, there stood a lone and somewhat listing tower. Ivy crept up the stone base of the tower, the greedy tendrils burrowing deep between the stones and dislodging the mortar that quite literally glued the whole thing together. The ivy was older than most living humans, and the tower would have long ago toppled if not for the magical intervention of the tower’s inhabitants: a celebrated and fearsome wizard…and his lowly apprentice.

A great wooden door, its oaken planks bound in iron, formed the tower’s only entrance. A sign written on a large piece of vellum was affixed to the door by four iron nails, which had long ago gone to rust and now left red-brown streaks down the parchment’s surface. The sign—scrawled in an ink of such deep crimson that many suspected it to be dragon’s blood—read simply:

Wizard NOT For Hire

No swords; No stones; No dragonslaying;

No magical artifacts;

No ladies nor lakes;

No enchantments, curses, hexes, spells, or cantrips

Potions negotiable, inquire within

(NO LOVE POTIONS)

Despite the sign, a small hand, skeleton-like and ephemeral in the darkness at the base of the tower, reached out and knocked quietly—once, twice, three times—on the door.

A lantern hanging in an iron bracket suddenly sprung to life, bathing both the entryway and diminutive interloper in warm light.

“NOT. For. Hire.” A voice boomed out so impossibly loud that it shook the tower, causing mortar and dust to rain down on the visitor.

“Uncle!” Another voice, this one quieter and feminine, drifted out from within the confines of the tower. “Don’t be so rude, it’s just a child.”

“Well they should have said so!” He harrumphed.

A moment later the door opened and a woman emerged. Gretchen was nearing the end of her third decade, the crows feet just starting to take hold at the edges of her eyes. Her hair was a deep raven black and spiraled down in tight ringlets until it reached her hips.

“Can I help you?” Gretchen asked.

“I—uh, I’m looking for the great wizard Bartholomew. I need his help.” The girl’s eyes—for the visitor was indeed just a small girl, standing barely taller than Gretchen’s waist—were wide, already welling with tears.

“I’m sorry, my uncle Barty isn’t taking commissions at the moment.”

“Oh, please!” the girl cried. “My poor Princess has gone missing. My cat. I—I haven’t seen her since last night.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, honey. I’m sure she’ll turn up,” Gretchen tried to console the girl.

“You don’t understand, she never runs away! I think something terrible has happened. Can’t you help?”

Gretchen was about to rebuff the girl again, but couldn’t quite get her lips to form the necessary syllables. Not as she looked down at this girl, wretched with worry, the twin poof balls of her hair quivering and trembling as she tried unsuccessfully to sniff back tears and snot.

“Why don’t you come in for tea. You can tell me about Princess,” Gretchen said, her last shred of resistance finally broken. She turned and beckoned inside, the girl following meekly after.

The base floor of the tower had been set up as a reception area to receive visitors. It would have been the height of foolishness to invite visitors up into the heart of the tower after all; that was the wizard’s refuge, their inner sanctum. A great stone hearth lay cold and dormant against the far wall. Gretchen snapped her fingers and suddenly the hearth sprang to life, flames licking up from logs that hadn’t been present a moment ago, bathing the room in a dry, comforting warmth.

“Please sit,“ she said, directed the girl towards an overstuffed velvet chair near the fireplace.

The girl’s eyes, already impossibly large, had gone wider yet at the casual display of magic. “You’re a great wizard too!” she exclaimed. “You can help Princess!”

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“Let’s hold on a moment,” Gretchen said as she poured tea from a ceramic tea service housed on a nearby table. “Why don’t we start with your name.”

“Elizabeth, ma’am. Elizabeth Miller.”

“Your parents run a mill in the city?”

“Yes ma’am, Miller’s Fine Flours over in the Trade Quarter. I’ve never been to the Arcane Quarter before tonight.”

“Well, best you don’t linger too long or poke into any shops once you leave here, understand?” Gretchen brought the girl a cup of tea along with a warm blueberry scone, steam rising from the scone’s surface as if it had just come from the oven.

The girl nodded silently as she accepted the scone. Gretchen placed the tea on a side table next to the chair.

“So, a mill in the Trade Quarter. Is that the last place you saw Princess?”

The girl nodded again, this time over a mouthful of scone. “Last night,” she said once she’d managed to swallow. “She guards the mill, keeps the rats and mice out. She’s never left before. I put up some signs this morning, but no one has seen her.” Her eyes were starting to well up again.

“There there, don’t worry,” Gretchen tried to reassure her. “I tell you what. I’ll come by tomorrow morning and see if I can’t find your Princess, okay?”

“Oh, thank you thank you thank you!” the girl exclaimed, manners forgotten in her excitement as tiny crumbs and flecks of blueberry skin shot forth from her mouth.

Gretchen smiled as a warm glow suffused her chest. It felt good to help people. Even if she hadn’t, technically, helped the girl yet. After all, how hard could it be to find a missing cat?

The girl quickly finished her scone, and Gretchen showed her out. She hadn’t touched the tea.

“Straight home, no dawdling,” Gretchen said in a stern voice. “The Arcane Quarter is no place for a little girl at night, you understand?” The last thing she wanted was a distraught mother coming to the tower tomorrow asking to find her missing girl.

The girl nodded, her poofy hair recoiling, bouncing back and forth. Then she shot off at a sprint and was quickly lost in the darkness.

Gretchen stood in the doorway for another moment, watching. A high-pitched buzzing sound bounced around the receiving room before it moved in closer. The buzzing stopped suddenly as a small man, no larger than the palm of Gretchen’s hand, alighted on her shoulder. His metallic green dragonfly wings shimmered in the lamplight as he folded them behind his back.

“Your uncle is going to be furious,” the fairy said.

Gretchen started marching up the steps of the tower, her fairy companion Bumblebee riding on her shoulder.

“Yes, I know,” she said dejectedly. “But I couldn’t do nothing! The poor soul was heartbroken.”

“I understand why you did it,” Bumblebee said. His voice, considered a rich baritone among his kind and even earning him a distinguished solo spot during the last Winter Solstice Fae Choral Extravaganza, nevertheless sounded high-pitched to Gretchen’s ears. “You are very noble. For a human.”

“Thank you, Bumblebee,” she blushed. Receiving praise from a fae creature was not an everyday occurrence.

They finally crested the spiral staircase and entered the main living area, where a massive fire blazed in the hearth. The popping, cracking logs and voracious flames suffused the room with such a cheerful, cozy warmth that Gretchen knew her uncle must have layered in some emotionally-amplifying magic. Not that she minded, it felt great in here.

Her uncle sat in a chair near the fire. His head rested awkwardly on the seatback cushion—an uncomfortable looking position, to be sure. She hoped he didn’t wake with any neck pain. A thick book sat on his lap, its pages closed around the wizard’s excessively long beard, which he had apparently used in place of a bookmark. Gretchen sighed and rolled her eyes. Wizards.

Not that she was in any position to judge, given that she was herself a wizard. Well, a wizard in training. Okay, an apprentice, if one really wanted to split hairs. She hated that term though. She was a grown woman, almost forty years old. Far too old to be considered an apprentice. But wizards lived for hundreds of years, so they just worked on different timelines than regular humans.

She sighed again then took the book gently from her uncle’s lap and placed it onto a nearby shelf. The room was lined with bookshelves, all of them bursting at the seams with books, tomes, scrolls, and every nature of oddity imaginable.

“What do you keep huffing about?” the old man asked, stirring. “You sigh loud enough to wake the dead.”

“Only loud enough to wake the ancient and decrepit, uncle, not the dead,” she quipped. “And nothing.”

The wizard laughed, then he looked over at his niece, eyes narrowing. “I sense a binding on you. An oath. Tell me you sent that beggar away.”

“Yes, I sent them away,” she said. “But, I, uh, did invite her in for tea first. And listened to her plight.”

“You did more than that!” he said, voice rising. “You agreed to help, didn’t you?!”

“I, uh—” she stammered, looking at her feet. “Yes, uncle. I agreed to help her. She was just a little girl! How could I turn her away? She looked so miserable.”

“You say no, that’s how you turn her away. You say no so that you’re not bound by an oath! These mortals don’t know, they don’t understand the gravity of their requests. You should know better.” he shook his head, clearly disappointed. “What did you agree to do?”

“I’m sorry uncle, you’re right. This should be an easy oath to fulfill, though. She just lost her cat Princess is all,” Gretchen explained, hoping to ease the man’s worries.

“You WHAT!” he bellowed. “You agreed to rescue a princess?”

“No, I agreed to find a cat. Named Princess.”

“My girl, in our line of work that is entirely the same thing.”