Once upon a time there was a young apprentice wizard named Horace. One day his master caught him daydreaming. “You are useless,” the old man complained. “What have you learned in your years of apprenticeship?” Horace hung his head. “Well?”

“I can make a stool hover in the air,” he said.

“But only a small stool and only for a moment,” his master reminded him.

“I can make myself disappear,” Horace said.

“But only on moonless nights.”

Horace searched his mind for something more. “I can curse people and make them slip in a mud puddle,” he said finally.

The wizard shook his head. “I have tried my best, but you will not listen and you will not do your lessons. I wash my hands of you! Now take your things and go.” So Horace gathered his few books (and one or two that were not his) and left to seek his fortune.

The almost-wizard wandered the land until it became clear that no one would pay him to make stools rise from the ground and, it being the dry season, there were few mud puddles about. He was soon obliged to vie for employment with the most ordinary laborers or use his limited talents for thievery. This would not do at all.

He had nothing of value except his spell books. (Well, most of them were his.) For a full week Horace poured over the pages of the books as he never had when he was an apprentice. Most of the spells were well beyond his abilities and called for far too much effort. Still, he was certain he would find a spell to help him win his fortune. His confidence had begun to wane when he found a slip of parchment tucked between two pages of his master’s book. Here was the answer to his dilemma: a potion that gave him mastery over the spoken word. With this potion he would not only be able to see words, but also to snatch them out of the air and make them do his bidding.

Now in any other land this might have been thought a useless talent, but this kingdom traded in stories the way others traded in cloth or barley or tea. The most prosperous citizens of this kingdom (apart from the royalty, of course) were the storytellers. Each year at the harvest festival, the King held a great storytelling contest. People came from every corner of the kingdom to listen or compete. Prizes were awarded for every age and every type of story, but there was only one grand prize winner. The prize for the best story of all was one thousand gold coins: enough to live like a king (or at least a duke) for many a year.

Horace may have been a fool, but he was a clever fool. He knew he could not pass off another’s story as his own and he certainly could not invent one. But with this potion he would have the ability to snatch the best parts of the best stories from the best storytellers and stitch them together to make the greatest story of all! The prize was his for the taking!

And so he brewed his vile concoction and took to the roads with a great empty satchel. Every tavern and inn boasted a storyteller and the first inn he came to featured one of the very best. Horace eagerly took a swig of his potion. The potion tasted so foul he nearly spat it back out. He had not thought it would be quite so awful, but it was indeed worth the discomfort. The air filled with small puffs of words and great streams which wound themselves into images before evaporating. Horace watched as one big oaf grunted in answer to the barmaid’s question. The grunt emerged as a toad and thudded to the table. The barmaid’s empty chatter appeared as tiny butterflies that flitted about her head before dissolving into the air.

Clearly this potion was a marvel, but could he really capture the words and put them to his own use? He tested it. Two rugged men sat near him. The nearest man claimed acquaintance with a woman of fantastic proportions. Horace snatched the image as it emerged from the man’s mouth. “Excuse me,” he said in explanation, “that fly was annoying me.”

“You made me lose my thoughts,” the man grumbled. And, indeed, he spoke no more of the woman that lay within Horace’s fist. It took all of the wizard’s willpower not to laugh out loud.

That night Horace sat among the guests of the inn and listened to the storyteller. He watched in amazement as the man’s words emerged from his mouth to form pictures that floated around the room, brushing up against each patron before evaporating.

Horace left the inn the next day, but he did not go far. He stole back on that moonless night to stand unseen by a window. He watched the audience more than the storyteller and when he heard them ooo and aahhh with pleasure, he snatched the words out of the air and tucked them into his bag. The rest of the words fell to the floor and shattered. No one but Horace seemed to notice.

“Why have you stopped?” the innkeeper asked the storyteller.

The man shook his head. “I seem to have forgotten the story,” he said. “This has never happened to me before.”

“Well I will not pay a full evening’s wage for half a story.”

The storyteller just shook his head as if he had woken from a dream. “Where could it have gone?” he muttered. “Perhaps if I try a different story . . .” But he was too befuddled to tell another.

Now, the innkeeper had a daughter. Jane was only five- or six-years old, but she was curious enough for two children. She listened so carefully that people said she could see with her ears and hear with her eyes. And perhaps this was true for while her father argued with the storyteller, Jane began picking some invisible something off the floor.

“What do you have there, Jane?” asked the barmaid.

“The broken story,” she said.

The barmaid nodded. She had children of her own and understood that you should never laugh at a child. “And what will you do with the pieces?”

“I will show them to Grandfather. He will know how to fix it.”

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Picking Up the Pieces by Lisa Wright © 2006