“Changed from what? From whom?”
“Of course, I could only guess at the age. I could be off by as much as ten years, in which case, this has no chance of being the boy.”
“Whatboy?” I said, exasperated.
He pressed his lips tether, as if wondering whether to speak. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “The boy from whom I was made.”
I wanted to thump right down onto the floor in shock. “Made? Whomadeyou?”
“My father made all of us,” he said. “He could not birth his own children, I suppose. Or perhaps he could, and the making of magic-workers requires a different way of birthing. I do not know. I have never asked him.”
“So when you said the king was your father...?”
“I meant that he made us, raised us. Trained us to do his bidding.”
All I could think was that Basil would be bursting in his fancy waistcoat with excitement if he could hear all this.
“So, you were a little boy?” I prodded. “A little boy named Sylvester?”
“Years ago, yes. But I doubt I was named Sylvester. I’m not sure who gave me the name. Probably my father. It doesn’t sound like the sort of name given to an urchin, and I was probably an urchin. I almost certainly had no family, no entanglements of any sort. It is simpler that way, you see.”
So the stories of children vanishing in the city were true, it seemed, and even more horrifying than we had imagined when we were sprouts. I blinked. “You were kidnapped and turned into ... this?”
“No.” He sounded impatient with me, as if I was failing to understand something very simple. Perhaps I was. “Not kidnapped. Bought, in all likelihood, as you buy wood to whittle it, or flour to make bread. Shaped for a purpose, by my father, over the course of many years, as I grew to adulthood. I am no more that boy now than a handful of flour is a loaf.”
I wondered what that was like—being a loaf of bread, as he had put it, baked to perfection, rather than the raw dough the rest of us presumably were. Did that sort of thing trouble him at all, or was he so removed from folk like us that such musings were unimaginable to him? But I couldn’t hide my horror. “Who would sell a child?”
He shot me a glance. “You would be surprised,” he said. “Such happenings might not occur in your little hamlet, but things are different in the city.”
“And your fatherboughtthem? Bought children to make them into ... you? And your sisters?”
“Yes.”
I sat, taking it in. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
He looked at me. “You told me about your mother,” he said.
“So ... This is a portrait of who youwere?” I said slowly.
“Perhaps,” replied Sylvester. “I found it in a marketplace. The artist had made several such studies of the local street children, years ago, and was selling off some of his old canvases. This one had enough of a resemblance that I thought it might be possible.”
I looked at the portrait again. I could see no likeness, but then, Sylvester’s perfect face barely looked human. It certainly resembled no other face I knew, as the men in our village tended to look more and more like sprouting potatoes as they aged.
Questions bubbled up inside me, but I didn’t want to ask too many of them at once for fear of him clamming up altogether.
“You said your father made you,” I said. “How?”
“It is a complicated process,” he said. “He made all of us. Me. Clarissa. My other sisters. Thirteen, in all. The transformation process gave us the magical ability, and then he had years to train us in its use, until we came of age, and he deemed us ready to work on our own.”
Thirteen children, at least, stolen or bought, and transmuted by some magicalprocess—the seemingly innocuous word made my stomach turn—into powerful magic-workers.
“And you were the only boy?”
“Not the only one, but the only one who ... succeeded,” said Sylvester. “My father had tried with male children before, but apparently, I was the only one that ever ‘took,’ as he put it. I don’t think he expected me to come along when I did. Twelve is a nice, even number. Thirteen ... well.”
“‘Took?’”
“Apparently, his other attempts failed rather spectacularly.”
