The Magician of Tiger Castle

Queen Corinna⁵ and the regent Dittierri,⁶ growing impatient, order Anatole¹ to abandon the experiments and begin the poppy regimen immediately. Defeated, Anatole¹ descends to the dungeon one last time. He tells Pito³ the experiments are over. Pito,³ playing Six Men's Morris with Harwell,⁸ offers quiet sympathy: a waste of Anatole¹'s talent, like having Michelangelo paint a barn.

Then, as Anatole¹ mentions he must give Tullia² poppy tears that morning, Pito³ asks with genuine confusion who Tullia² is. The potion has worked. Anatole¹ races up the stone stairs, nearly faints from overheating, and resolves to defy the queen.⁵

He replicates the exact formula for Tullia,² adding Pito³'s single heartfelt tear. She drinks the goblet, recoiling at the unfamiliar taste. When King Sandro⁷ later questions her, she cannot understand why anyone would doubt she intends to marry Prince Dalrympl.⁴ The king⁷ declares Anatole¹ the greatest magician in all the land.

At the wedding banquet, Anatole¹ sees Prince Dalrympl⁴'s face clearly for the first time and recognizes the jutting chin and cold blue eyes. It is the nobleman who attacked Babette.¹⁰ His stomach turns. He watches Tullia² charm the prince,⁴ touching his sleeve and laughing, completely unaware she once loved another man.

When Pito³ is brought in for execution, his face blotched with blue welts from a harmless potion Anatole¹ gave him that morning, Anatole¹ must act. He lights a corpse flower smoke packet and shouts that the prisoner³ has the Blue Death. The banquet hall erupts in panic.

Through the smoke, Harwell⁸ raises his axe, but brings it down on Pito³'s chains instead of his neck. Anatole¹ and Pito³ gather meat scraps and bones, stuff them into Pito³'s old clothes drenched in blood, and Anatole¹ drags the bundle to the moat wall. He throws it to the tiger below.

Hidden in Anatole¹'s workshop, Pito³ helps create a potion to ruin Dalrympl⁴ permanently. It will change his voice to a childlike squeak. But first, Anatole¹ must deliver an itch-causing unction made from Amazonian spitting spider venom. Pito³ recalls a ritual from ancient Greek texts: a handshake, used to confirm mutual trust.

Tullia,² unaware Pito³ is alive and assisting, agrees to help postpone the wedding. She wears a glove filled with the unction to the magistrate's office and, when Dalrympl⁴ fails to understand the unfamiliar gesture, runs her gloved fingers gently down his cheek.

That night, the prince⁴ appears at Anatole¹'s workshop, his face bloody and swollen from scratching. Anatole¹ applies leeches, then gives him a goblet containing the antidote mixed with the voice-changing potion. Dalrympl⁴ demands it, and witnesses hear Anatole¹'s protests that the potion is untested. The king⁷ notes his objections are duly recorded.

At the cathedral, Tullia² recites her vows of eternal love and subservience with theatrical perfection. Dalrympl⁴ steps forward in his dazzling gold uniform and repeats his vows, but his voice emerges as a high-pitched, breathlessly excited squeak, like a five-year-old girl. Laughter erupts from the congregation.

The bishop tries to smooth over the moment, but Dalrympl⁴ shrieks that he does not get nervous, confirming the absurdity. Questions about his anatomy and manhood echo from the crowd. A fight breaks out between Esquavetians and Oxatanians, spreading through the packed cathedral like fire.

Anatole,¹ trying to escape, is knocked unconscious. When he wakes, the floor is littered with bodies, including the pretty blond Oxatanian woman who sat beside him at the banquet. He staggers outside to find the festival pavilions burning. Soldiers and civilians lie dead in the streets. The wedding of the century has ignited a war.

Anatole¹ returns to a castle under siege. Oxatanian forces surround the walls, cannons are en route, and Dalrympl⁴ makes two demands. First, Tullia² must give herself to him willingly and gratefully, for everyone to witness. Second, Anatole¹ must be fed to the tiger.

The Oxatanian ambassador commissions an obedience potion, and Anatole¹ pretends to comply, using rose thorns and Dalrympl⁴'s sweat as a personal identifier. Tullia² agrees to fake-drink it, planning instead to kill Dalrympl⁴ with her jeweled knife on their wedding night. But when she visits the workshop, she discovers Pito³ alive inside, cleaning up after his months as a hidden fugitive. She is furious at Anatole¹'s deception.

Before the confrontation can resolve, her handmaiden Marta¹¹ bursts in, sees Pito,³ and screams. Tullia² drags Pito³ into the secret passageways she has known since childhood. Guards ransack the workshop. Queen Corinna⁵ arrives, holding a jagged shard from the broken potion pot, which pricks her finger as she threatens Anatole.¹

Harwell⁸ appears at the workshop archway, holding a cudgel. Anatole¹ expects arrest or death. But Harwell⁸ grunts a command to follow, steps over the unconscious guards he has just disabled, and leads Anatole¹ to a wall sconce. He pulls down the iron arm, and a gap opens in the wall beneath it.

Anatole¹ wriggles through into a narrow passage. Before the wall seals shut, Harwell⁸ smiles and admits he can hear too. Inside the tunnel network, Anatole¹ crawls, climbs steep notches carved into stone, and eventually finds Tullia² and Pito³ in a hidden room filled with knightly armor. Tullia² discovered these passages as a lonely child.

The three don armor, and Tullia² leads them through the wall and out a high window. They climb down the exterior using knobs and footholds designed by the castle's original architect. Refugees watch as three knights circle the castle, cross the lowered bridge, and march directly into the Oxatanian encampment.

Disguised as the monk Galen and his children Ippolita and Marcus, the three fugitives are taken in by Capuchin monks returning to their mountain monastery. Winter snows isolate the community. A bear rampage has devastated the monastery: wine barrels toppled, goats scattered, and a rare fifth-century St. Augustine manuscript shredded when a bear tried to eat the sheepskin pages.

Anatole¹ treats frostbite with tree fungus and wax, and a mauled monk with bread mold poultices. Tullia,² disguised as a boy, works with the goats, her mismatched eyes hidden beneath her hood.

Pito³ undertakes the painstaking restoration of the manuscript, working from scattered shreds and filling gaps through what the abbot¹³ calls divine inspiration. For months, the rhythms of prayer, labor, and simple meals create an unexpected peace. Then a merchant named Bruno arrives with news: King Sandro⁷ is dead, and Queen Corinna⁵ has remarried a king who only whispers.⁴

Tullia² and Anatole¹ leave for Torteluga while Pito³ chooses to remain with his manuscript. On the treacherous western trail, Tullia² alternates between fury at Pito³'s abandonment and a desperate hope he will follow. A bear blocks their path.

Anatole¹ rolls their only cheese wheel toward it; the bear swats it over the cliff edge and bounds after it. Tullia² declares Anatole¹ enchanted the cheese. Later, bandits ambush them. Tullia² kills two with her jeweled knife while Anatole¹ takes an axe blow to the chest, stopped by the hardened trencher bread beneath his robe.

Just as the remaining bandits prepare to rush them, Pito³ appears, twisting a rope around the axe-man's neck. He followed after all. When Tullia² demands to know why he changed his mind, he jokes that she is a pain in the donkey. But his eyes never leave her face.

In Torteluga, the three devour charred potatoes bought with a ruby pried from Tullia²'s knife. By chance, they encounter Captain Mario Cuvio,⁹ the great explorer, drunk and wrapped in an orange veil at an inn called the Hummingbird. Recognizing Tullia²'s mismatched eyes, Cuvio⁹ agrees to take them on his final expedition to America.

Pito³ must win a chess game against the captain⁹ to secure his passage. At the market, Anatole¹ shops for tea, dried peppers for scurvy, and ginger for seasickness. He cannot resist lingering at a tea vendor's stall, sniffing each variety. A hand seizes his hood.

Three young men drag him forward, and Dittierri⁶ steps through the crowd in a white fur coat, arresting Anatole¹ for the abduction and murder of Princess Tullia.² The innkeeper of the Hummingbird witnesses the capture but, true to her establishment's motto, does not chirp. Anatole¹ is bound and thrown into a carriage, beginning the three-day journey back to the castle and the tigers.

Anatole¹ is bathed, dressed in his favorite blue silk shirt, and escorted to dine with Dalrympl⁴ and Queen Corinna⁵ in a chamber drowning in gold. Dalrympl⁴ never speaks above a whisper, relaying everything through the queen.⁵

Over courses of smoked eel, goose, and goat leg, Anatole¹'s terror slowly transforms into recklessness. He reveals he knows about Babette¹⁰'s lace, the boots, the sword slash. He admits the voice potion was deliberate, not an accident of physiology. When a golden urn of 'Oxatania's finest tea' is poured, Anatole¹ drinks and recognizes it as reconstituted swamp water.

Dalrympl⁴'s giggling voice explains: Oxatanian mathematicians deciphered Anatole¹'s logbook. They replicated the Luigi potion. Both king⁴ and magician¹ have drunk it. Dalrympl⁴ will rule for ten thousand years, and Anatole¹ will live chained in the dungeon below him forever.

Anatole¹ is dragged down the stone stairs, manacled to the wall, and left in absolute darkness. On the first night, a familiar creature crawls onto his chest and nestles into the axe-cut slit in his robe. Luigi¹⁵ has found him.

Dalrympl⁴'s immortality lasts only fourteen years. Believing himself invincible, he climbs a ladder into the tiger moat to impress a girl who laughed at his advances, armed only with his saber. The tiger proves the more persuasive arguer. Anatole¹ remains in the dungeon through nine conquests of the castle, passed from one occupying force to another like old furniture too heavy to move.

He becomes a legend: a holy man whose mumbled Latin blessings draw pilgrims. An English duke eventually coaxes him out around 1615, and the duke and duchess patiently nurse him back to coherence over fifteen years before being killed in yet another siege.

Anatole¹ wanders Europe, then sails to America in 1703. In Philadelphia, he meets a family whose youngest daughter, no older than six, points a stick-sword at his throat and demands to know his position on slavery. Her brown eye holds concern and curiosity. Her blue eye flashes defiance. Anatole¹ weeps.