With a Single Spell

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The little cottage at the edge of the swamp wherein old Roggit had lived out his life was not, strictly speaking, a part of the village of Telven. However, located as it was just over a hill from the edge of town, it was near enough that Roggit had been accepted as a Telvener; no one had protested when his apprentice, Tobas, had called on the villagers to attend his master’s funeral.

Of course, quite aside from any fine distinctions about the village boundaries, it was never wise to anger a wizard, or even a wizard’s apprentices, not even one as untrained as Tobas surely was after merely a year or two of study under a man who had been in his dotage and on the verge of senility for as long as anyone remembered.

As a result of these considerations, in addition to the usual morbid curiosity natural upon the cremation of one of the area’s older and more eccentric inhabitants, the ceremonies drew a good crowd, with more than half the townspeople in attendance. As Tobas saw them all silently departing after the fire died, he realized glumly that he could not say a single one — old, young, or in between — had come out of honest friendship or sympathy for either the dead wizard or for himself, the surviving apprentice.

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