It began with a lowborn farm girl from a modest trading village on the rim of the Outskirts. Branway was a river town on the maps, though the river had withered to a brownish rill after years of devastating late-summer droughts. One day, while tilling in the shielings where the village ended and the wide wastelands began, the girl stumbled upon a leather pouch just lying there in the parched loam. The pouch was filled with a golden spice that smelled sweet and irresistible.

Her name was Rosalind. She was a shy, inquisitive, diligent girl of eleven who liked to tend to her rabbits, hum the old songs, and help her mother in the kitchen. She didn’t get along with the other children in the village. They mistook her shyness for snobbery, and her droopy eye and slightly bowed legs made her subject to incessant torment. One of their favorite pranks was to sneak up on Rosalind, pull on her long cherry-red braids, and scamper off before she could smack them.

Her parents were creaky-boned fieldhands who toiled from sunup to sundown in the service of a strict liege lord who provided meagerly for his tenants, who numbered too few to maintain his sprawling lands. Their quarters, not much more than a two-room shack on an acre of arid earth, sat on the edge of his fief. The only time Rosalind saw her Ma and Pa for more than a glance was on their one rest day at the end of the fortnight, when they would take her and her older brother across the border to pick silverberries and trap terra-voles. These forays were not only delightful but occasionally lucrative. Some of the more prosperous landsmen would pay half a queenscrown or more for a terra-vole caught within their borders.

Rosalind was always dreaming about the green pastures, shaggy foothills, and fog-tufted mountains that marked the Outskirts, wondering what lay beyond them. All of nature seemed to beckon to her with promises of new and exciting worlds full of peril and adventure. Someday, she told herself, she would leave Branway forever in search of bigger and better things. But until then, she had to make do with life as an indigent farm girl.

Rosalind’s one friend in the world was Portnoy Anselm, magician, physician, loremaster, and proprietor of Legumes and Leeches, a potions-and-notions shop on Kettle Road that catered to sages, alchemists, illusionists, and necromancers of all shapes and stripes. (It should be mentioned that before they could purchase Portnoy’s wares, all necromancers were required to produce a letter, notarized with the blue wax seal of the Brotherhood of Spellweavers, pledging that they were enthusiasts only and not black-arts practitioners looking to cause mischief.) Whenever she had a moment to spare from her field duties and daydreaming, Rosalind could be found in Portnoy’s shop rummaging through his storerooms and bookshelves.

Half of Branway considered Portnoy a menace; the other half branded him a dangerous eccentric. Some years earlier, a spider of super-extraordinary size, a mutated shortcoming of one of Portnoy’s experiments with arachnidian venom serum, had gotten loose and bitten a young boy while he was playing in a sandhole. Portnoy had taken all precautions and devenomed the creature so that its bite would be harmless to adults, children, and large animals. But for this particular boy, who was frail and sallow and seemed predisposed to all manner of physical calamity, the trace amount of venom in the bite was lethal. For ten days, the boy’s life force ebbed. Portnoy worked himself ragged day and night to come up with an antidote. But alas, despite his efforts, the boy died. Many called for the wizard’s banishment, and some for his head. But the people of Branway had a reputation as fair-minded folk, a reputation they wished to protect. A tribunal of magistrates was assembled to decide Portnoy’s fate. Arguments were presented, and the absence of any malicious intent on Portnoy’s part was taken into account. In the end, the court judged that the magician was not responsible for the boy’s death. However, from then on, most of the villagers dared not venture too close to the Double L. “Who knows what else he has in that shop of his,” said the smith. “Giant scorpions? Pythons? Terra-voles the size of mules?” “He’s a doddering old dunce,” said the parson. “I don’t care for the notion that a man of dwindling faculties is permitted to have deadly animals in his keeping. It’s lunacy! They should be taken away.” “But who would remove them?” said a midwife. “I, for one, would refuse to volunteer for such a job, even if the payment were my own queendom.”

One frosty December afternoon, Rosalind brought Portnoy a spoonful of the strange gold spice she had found in the fields as a cheer-up gift. The magician was intrigued by the spice’s intoxicating odor, having never encountered anything like it. He performed a series of trials and was amazed at the spice’s versatility in elixirs, incenses, and cooking powders—and even more so by its incredible ability to conduct fire. He knew at once that he needed to keep the spice’s combustible properties a secret. Even a thimbleful of the stuff would be enough to scorch half the countryside. If the wrong folk ever learned of what it could do…

After much toil, Portnoy discovered how to reproduce the spice in his herbarium and refine it so that it was safe to handle and ingest. He promised to supply Rosalind with half of the remaining portion to use as seasoning in her baking, which delighted her to no end, but only if she agreed to keep it away from open flames and tell no one of where it came from. Rosalind gave him her word and was soon charming noble patrons and visiting dignitaries with her ambrosial cakes and confections.

Rosalind’s older brother was named Skliros ("bright-eyed" in the dialect of the Outskirts). He was rosy-cheeked and handsome yet ill-tempered, and he was bitterly jealous of his precocious little sister. One day, he followed her to the Double L and hid behind a dead tree that haunted the roadside. Here he waited until Rosalind left the shop. It was almost suppertime, and the road was painted over with shadows and dusklight. Rosalind was hurrying up the road, fearing her parents would whip her for her lateness, when she was accosted by her brother.

“What are you doing here?” she said. “You should be at home helping Pa with—”

Before she could finish, Skliros knocked her to the dirt, kicked her in the ribs, and stole the leather pouch she was carrying. Later, as he was sifting through the fragrant gold spice that felt like ribbons of silk as it trickled through his fingers, he found thirteen strips of dried maple bark on which Portnoy had written everything he’d learned about the spice, including where to find it, its uses, dangers, and how to reproduce and refine it. Wishing to safeguard his work should something happen to him or the spice’s secrets be discovered, the wizard had stuffed the strips into Rosalind’s pouch. But in his haste and folly, he’d forgotten to tell the girl what he’d done. Scrawled at the bottom of the thirteenth strip was a piece of magic that Portnoy, old dunce that he was, had neglected to scratch out: instructions for how to unrefine the spice, returning it to its full, fire-conducting potency.

The next day, Skliros gathered everyone into the village square. His eyes aglow with red fire, he accused his sister of blackcraft and denounced Portnoy for exposing her to the black arts. He presented as evidence only one of the strips of maple bark, not revealing the existence of the other twelve. This time, the Branwayers dispensed with the pretense of fair-mindedness. They bound and gagged the defendants, and a mockery of a trial was conducted right there in the square. Rosalind and Portnoy were banished from the village; if they set foot within its borders ever again, they would be sent straight to the gallows. Rosalind’s mother fainted on the spot and slipped into a prolonged illness that eventually destroyed her. The last image Rosalind had of her was of her limp body being taken up by her cousins and carried into the farmhouse.

Some whispered that the exiles disguised themselves as gypsy proprietors of roving roadside pavilions who swindled unsuspecting travelers with parlor tricks; others, that they combined their magics to install themselves as king and queen on an island across the Grey Sea. But after a number of years, the village gossip had ceased and the names Rosalind and Portnoy were recalled only by the wrinkly old-timers, who refused to utter them.

As for Skliros, the day after his mother’s body was consumed on the pyre, he left Branway with the pouchful of spice and Portnoy’s writings. Soon he was reproducing the spice himself and traveling from village to village and town to town, selling the refined “Firesugar” to innkeepers for their kitchens, and the unrefined variety to masters-at-arms for their arsenals. Of course, the unrefined variety was priced higher than the refined kitchen-ingredient variety, and it so happened that the masters-at-arms were more willing buyers than the innkeepers. So Skliros soon transacted only with them. He threw himself into a pit of greed, and wisdom had no place in his dealings. Without considering the repercussions, he was soon selling the spice not only to warriors of good repute but also to weapons-merchants, the oiliest, crookedest, most cutthroat scoundrels in the land. Two such transactions would inaugurate the destruction of Branway and all of the surrounding lands.

The realm of Golgloth lay a week’s journey north of Branway, and Hrathglyde shared wide pasturelands with Branway to the south. As fate would have it, these two realms were the most ancient of enemies. Bound by the Treaty of Fytwilde and subsequent accords, Golgloth and Hrathglyde had established cessation of open hostilities, free trade of goods and services, and a pandemic peace, though not mutual disarmament. No one could agree on that—or perhaps no one had made the attempt. The treaty, flawed though it was, had remained inviolate for over two hundred years. Then along came Skliros with his Firesugar.

Two merchants, one of whom frequented Golgloth’s ports and the other Hrathglyde’s trading posts, each took a cartload of the Firesugar off Skliros’s hands. The merchants sold their purchases (with exorbitant markups, of course) to their respective clients, who in turn presented them to the Premier of Golgloth and the High Chancellor of Hrathglyde with much pomp and grandeur. The two masters-at-arms (who happened to be half-brothers; the one at Hrathglyde was an exiled Golglothian by-blow) assured their chieftains that once this magical ingredient was added to their firepowders, their supremacy would be certain. Both leaders took their good fortune as a sign from the gods that their country would now, finally, after long years of weary peace, drive its enemy into the dust and expand its territory from ocean to ocean.

Skliros, greedy and ignorant, had plunged his village into the center of what would forever be remembered as the War to End All Wars.

Next Chapter: Part Three: Diversions, Digressions, Discoveries, Chapter V