Here's the opening of the newest Yurt book,, a short tale (novelette) that serves as a prequel to the whole Royal Wizard of Yurt series.
THE MAKING OF A WIZARD
Years before the events recounted in "A Bad Spell in Yurt".
1
I knelt on the beach by my cousin, trying to beat his head in with a rock.
It turned out I wasn't any good at beating people's heads in. Even though Halbert deserved it, I told myself. The rock in my hand kept stopping short of his skull. His hair, damp from swimming, spread to one side on the sand, so I pounded that.
"What are you trying to do?" he complained. "Give me a haircut?" He sat up slowly, catching his breath, and glared at me.
At least he didn't decide to tackle me again. He had said something insulting about my swimming, I had replied with something far more witty and learned and (of course) insulting, and he had knocked me down. In jumping back up I had, completely inadvertently, butted my head into his stomach, and I grabbed the biggest rock handy to pound him while he lay momentarily breathless.
Now I just tried to remember what I had called him that made him so angry. It had been an excellent insult, worth using again, but it had been knocked out of my head when he knocked me down. That by itself was reason to pound him.
But the fury had drained out of both of us. "Come on, Daimbert," he said, standing up. "It's getting late. Grandma's probably wondering where we are."
We walked homeward along the beach, the salt from the sea drying on our legs. Long clouds streaked across the westering sun. Both of us tried to pretend we had not been fighting a few minutes earlier; Halbert didn't visit very often, and most of the time I loved seeing him.
When we reached the harbor we headed uphill through the narrow streets, past my family's warehouse, to Grandma's house. It smelled of baking cod.
Washed, dressed, and decorously seated at the table, we watched her fill our plates, suddenly very hungry. "I hope I cooked enough for you boys," she said. "Halbert, you get bigger every time I see you."
My cousin and I didn't look anything alike. I was fairly slight and brown haired, whereas he had the height and width and blond hair of the man my Aunt Elspeth had married. In retrospect, I was fairly impressed with myself for having knocked him over.
"I think I've stopped growing," Halbert said. "I'm already big enough to be a knight."
I put my fork down. "You can't be a knight! Knights are nobly born, or at least from great lordly families."
Grandma laughed. "That doesn't sound like our family!"
Of course it didn't. Our family imported wool from the Far Islands and wholesaled it to the weavers. It had never been a particularly thriving business, especially after my parents had died and my grandmother had again taken over running it. My aunt, Halbert's mother, had certainly seemed happy to leave the City and the family business when she got married. I dreaded the day when I would be the one in charge and would have to determine why we always seemed to get lower quality wool than did the other importers, and why the fees charged on our warehouse seemed to be higher than anyone else's.
Halbert glowered. "Men can be knighted for great deeds on the battlefield. Someone leaves for war as a pikesman, on foot, and comes home a knight, on horseback. Hundreds of new knights were created during the Black Wars."
"Well, that's ancient history, thank God," said Grandma briskly. "We haven't had wars like that for, I don't know, a hundred years, a thousand years? The wizards stopped them."
I didn't say anything. My cousin doubtless had the strength and the agility to be an excellent pikesman, but if he were in a war, he would be facing much more efficient killers than someone with a rock he didn't want to use.
After supper we sat outside on the tiny terrace behind Grandma's house, the house that had been my home as well for the last ten years. A cool breeze came up from the ocean after the day's heat. Below us, closer to the harbor, the lights of the sailors' taverns glittered, and fragments of raucous song drifted up toward us.
Higher up the hill, things were much quieter, and there were fewer lights beyond the street lights, as sober citizens retired early to be ready to start counting up their profits tomorrow.
But at the very top of the hill shone the high tower of the wizards' school. It wasn't very far away-a seagull could have flown up there in no time. But I had never been there, nor had anyone I knew. It could have been a thousand miles from the sailors' taverns, from the wool warehouses, and from the successful businessmen and bankers.