Remember that I had been living virtually as a hermit all by myself in the forest, through the longest half of a cold, muddy, uncomfortably wet and dreary winter, as was typical in that climate and place. While I had managed to survive quite comfortably under those circumstances, I must admit I had let slide some of the more rigorous standards of personal cleanliness that had been pounded into my youthful ears by my various elders, and so I hadn't been engaging in the daily washes in boiling basins of hot water and tallow-based soap that were so much a part of the common rituals of life in the village, nor of necessity had I been taking the customary weekly baths of total immersion in large, bronze and copper tubs filled with heated water to provide a more thorough cleansing than a simple daily wash could provide.

And, too, since I had no clothes except those I was wearing on my back, it was hardly convenient for me to strip naked in the middle of winter so that I could pound my shirt, trousers, and jacket clean against a handy, flat rock in a nearby brook. So I must admit, from the standpoint of the standards of strict personal cleanliness that were so much a part of life in the community in which I had been raised, I may not have been quite as pristine and pure in my person as was normal among there, though I must point out that the villagers were, as a people, almost fanatically clean.

Added to this, of course, was the simple fact that I was, at that time, just approaching my mid-teens, and I had not yet entirely outgrown the young boy's indifference to personal grime, so that it hardly mattered to me, really, whether I was clean or whether I wasn't, but because it was also a fact that I had been raised with strict habits of daily washings and constant attention to one's personal hygiene, I had managed to keep both my body and clothes in a reasonably clean state, despite all of the forces in my life at that time pushing me in the contrary direction.

In my person I was still a bit shorter than the average adult male, which in my community was perhaps not especially tall as compared to some other peoples. I had green eyes, a pale skin that tended to freckle under the slightest exposure to sunlight (and since freckles were considered something of a blemish in the eyes of the villagers, that was another nail in the coffin of my social acceptability) with reddish-brown hair that had grown so shaggy and long with my months in the wild that it had constantly been getting in my eyes and my mouth until finally I tied it back with a loose strip of brown leather into what the girls called a ponytail. My eyes were a bit too close together, and my nose was large and knobby, as was common among many of the interbred, interrelated families in the village, so that my face gave the general impression that my two eyes were trying to hide, with only moderate success, behind the enormity of my nose.

I have been told that my features aren't as unattractive, taken as a whole, as that description might make them seem, though with the typical excruciating self-loathing of adolescence I was, at that age, quite certain that I was the singularly most repulsive man who walked the face of the earth.

As I said, I hadn't yet grown to full manhood, though I had the promise of greater accomplishments in that area in the form of truly enormous, puppy dog feet that had outgrown the last pair of soft leather shoes my uncle had given me. Using more ingenuity than many might have given me credit for, I had converted them into loose sandals which I wore strapped around my ankles with my toes protruding comfortably from the open fronts.

My hands, likewise, were large and clumsy, and I was always knocking over something or the other, or ramming a finger or a palm into a thorn or other sharp object, or burning myself on my own fire, so that it seemed that my hands were constantly covered with blisters, scabs and cuts in various prominent places.

Since my uncle had been a tanner, he had provided me with clothes made mostly of scraps of leftover leather that my aunt had, with considerable housewifery skill, sewn into trousers, a shirt, and a heavy, thickly lined black leather jacket that had been a lifesaver for me during the colder months of the winter. Since I was still growing, my arms and legs were long and thin, not yet filled out into proper adult muscle tone, but over the months since I had moved to the forest the clothing my adoptive parents had given me had, because of my own continuing growth, become a bit tight. The thought had crossed my mind from time to time that as I kept growing I was going to have to find something of a larger size to wear, but fortunately, though the trousers and shirt were starting to strain a bit at their leathery seams, I could still wear them with reasonable comfort and suitable modesty.

I may have spent more of my precious parchment, here, describing what I looked like at that age than may be appropriate, and I am aware that Malcolm teaches that modesty is an important virtue for any true wizard to possess, so that I may have violated one of his more basic rules already in this journal by talking about myself so much, but there are more reasons than mere vanity for my desire to impart to any possible readers my appearance at that time in my life.

One of the points I am trying to get across, then, is that I had, indeed, been living as a virtual hermit in the wild for some months, but I was hardly a savage, filthy and ragged, crouching in a muddy hole in the ground. I suppose possibly in another few months I may have been more rough-looking and less clean, but that time had not yet come. I might have been a strange sight, huddled comfortably between my lean-to of densely woven pine branches on one side and my small, crackling fire on the other, but I was hardly a barbarian.

Now that I have described my own appearance, it is only appropriate that I do likewise for Malcolm as I first saw him. It was late afternoon and I had added a variety of roots and dried weed seeds to the water I had boiling on the castoff brass pot with the crack along the rim that I was heating over my fire, not entirely sure what the resulting soup would taste like but certain, from experience, that it would be nourishing at a minimum and, hopefully, moderately appetizing of flavor.

I had arranged a part of an old stump before the fire as a comfortable wooden chair that kept my backside off the cold ground and I was seated on this with my sandals, still strapped to my feet, held out to catch the warmth of the blazing fire so that their soles were steaming slightly while the heat soaked pleasantly through to my feet. I reached out from time to time to stir the random-flavored soup with a hardwood stick from which I had carefully peeled the bark to prevent it from chipping off into the soup, though normally such constant stirring was unnecessary because I had long since learned that if I kept enough water in the pot there was little danger of burning the ingredients, whatever they might be. But I had, that night, added a few of the more flavorful tree fungi that I had happened to run across that afternoon in my wanderings, and I was concerned that this added texture might result in something closer to gravy than mere soup, and gravy was notorious for burning (in my adolescent mind, at least), so I was watching the fire with more care than would normally have been the case.

We had had a heavy snowfall some days before, followed by temperatures that were at least slightly above thawing, so that there remained piles of sloppy, half-melted snow heaped everywhere in the forest, surrounded by large patches of exposed ground covered with flattened, decaying, fallen leaves and occasional icy puddles. It had been a cloudy, overcast day and night was coming with no sunset but rather with a simple fading into the kind of impenetrable, dull blackness that was typical of that time of year.

I had been taught, as a child, that the wilderness was a terrifying, horrible place filled with all kinds of wild animals and the occasional supernatural monster just waiting for innocent children to fall into their clutches, but in all of my time there, I had never run across anything more fierce than a chattering, scolding, overbold chipmunk or two. The larger creatures, such as woodland deer and even an occasional bear, seemed more eager to escape as quickly as possible from my approach than to attack me, and I had long since grown careless of keeping watch over my small patch of territory. There was nothing to keep watch against, after all, or so I had come to believe.

I was idly stirring the pot with my stick, my thoughts wandering in no particular direction, when I heard a sudden clearing of the throat and a soft voice not far away in the gloom said mildly, "Excuse me."

I felt a flash of panic that was purely biological and passed as soon as it had come, for if I had never yet met any dangerous animals in the forest, that went double for those few humans who occasionally wandered this far from the village. They were, for the most part, people in more or less the same circumstances as myself, not-quite-outcasts who had been compelled to try to find a living from scrounging in the forest because there were simply no place for them in the village itself.

I had met freelance loggers who collected what loose, fallen wood they could find, to sell it back in the village, as well as both men and women who gathered wild nuts, fruit, and those rare and succulent fungi which grew in the forest and were much desired by the gourmets of the town, though it had been my experience that those same gourmets paid so little to those who brought the delicacies to them that it was hardly worth the effort to bother to gather them.

I had also met a few hunters who killed waterfowl and larger birds and occasional squirrels and even what deer and other larger animals that they could manage to track down and subdue, though since the villagers as a whole disliked the taste of wild game, that was hardly a profitable profession and those who practiced it, by my experience, did so either from desperation or from some deeper, more questionable character trait that led them to enjoy the killing of innocent wild land creatures. And, of course, I had also met other hermits like myself, who lived in the forest not so much as a means of earning a living from the village but simply because they found it easier to survive there, away from their fellow humans.

For the most part, however, such inhabitants of the wilderness were very widely scattered, and we seldom had much to do with one another. In fact since I was totally independent of the village, or trying to be, I had set up my camp further away from its boundaries than most of the others, so that I seldom ran across even those few who gathered what they could from the woods to sell it to the people of the town, but even so, occasionally one of the other of my fellow semi-exiles came my way, and while I had never made any effort to seek any of them out, since I had no real need of the company of my fellow man at that time, I had never gone out of my way to avoid any of them, either.

I admit, as I heard the polite voice at the edge of my camp, I thought with a sigh that I would have to share my soup, and that meant that I'd have to go out gathering again tomorrow, but I had spent more than one hungry night trying to sleep over the nagging discomfort of my grumbling, empty stomach, and I would never have thought to deny anyone in similar straits a share of my fodder.

I rose to my feet and squinted against the glare of the small fire into the gathering darkness. "Hello," I said, more or less at random, since at first glance I could see no signs of anyone. "Come on up and warm yourself before the fire, if you want," I offered, waving my hand toward the flames. "If you're willing to wait till it's simmered a bit more, there's plenty of soup, if you're hungry."

"A most generous offer, young man, and thank you," the voice said, and a dark form separated from the gloom and stepped forward.

I had expected to find myself in the company of one of my fellow exiles whom I had already met, since I had, after all, been wandering among them since I was barely old enough to walk, so that I knew most of them at least by sight if not by name, but the man who stepped toward the fire and held his hands out eagerly to the flame was a complete stranger to me. As I looked at him I felt the first true pangs of uncertainty and I wondered briefly if he might be entirely safe to be alone with, way out there away from all signs of human habitation. Remember, now, that I was an adolescent boy with my long hair tied back in a tight ponytail at the base of my skull, with reasonably amiable features, I suppose, but my close-set eyes and large, knobby nose could well have been defined as boorish or even dim-witted by those of an unkind disposition. I was dressed in garments of black and dull brown leather sewn together into patchy patterns of somewhat arcane appearance, and since I had been stubbornly outgrowing my clothes for some months, they were almost as tight against my body as if they were my own black and tan, shiny, scar-streaked skin. My big hands were covered, as usual, with scabs, half-healed cuts, and bruises, and my big feet were stuck in nearly-invisible sandals, so that in the dim light it probably appeared that I was standing barefoot on the cold, snowy, icy ground.

I'm not saying that I was ugly or frightening as such, but thinking back on it, I probably looked much more mysterious and unnatural than would have been the case under more normal circumstances. Of course in a reasonable light I should have appeared much more common (and much cleaner, I suppose) but in the fading evening gloom I must have presented a sight to give even the bravest of men pause. Admittedly at the time I was as small as the half-grown boy I was, but then many of the creatures of fairy tale were described as no more than shoulder-high to a normal human, and they were said to be monstrous flesh-eaters of inhuman savagery and overwhelming strength.

If my appearance was threatening in a fairy tale way, the newcomer to my small camp was threatening in another, for he was, to all appearances, a remarkably ordinary-looking man of middle age, comfortably paunchy and nearly bald, with little more than a horseshoe fringe of dull brownish hair circling his ears and the back of his head. He was dressed in a simple white tunic that fell down to about his knees, with gold-brown trousers of some kind of silk-like material covering his thin legs, and over his shoulders he wore a loose-sleeved robe that seemed, in the dim firelight, to be shining in the color of rich blood. On his feet he wore ankle-high boots of the same flaming color as his robe, with long, curling toes that seemed to be attempting to impale his ankles with every step.

The garments were hardly suitable for even the reasonably mild winter of that climate, in fact to my inexperienced eyes they seemed the kind of clothes one might wear in a nobleman's court rather than for a walk in the forest, even in more summer like weather. As the man turned his back to me and sank down with a contented sigh on one side of the piece of tree stump, politely leaving me plenty of room to sit at his side, I saw that he carried a leather backpack thrown across his shoulders as his only concession to the wilderness, but even that was so small that it seemed impossible it could contain more than a single shirt or perhaps an extra pair of shoes.

I'm not saying that there was anything frightening about the man's appearance, except for the simple fact that no one but a fool or a madman would be dressed in such a bizarre way under such circumstances. Or possibly someone who had no alternative, someone who had been forced to flee into the wilderness with absolutely no chance whatsoever to prepare for it. The wild thought crossed my mind that this fellow might be some exiled king driven from his throne at hands of an enraged mob or a scheming relative, and while such ideas might have seemed romantic to a child hearing about it while safely tucked in his bed miles away, for someone who was actually out all by himself in the forest with such a person, it was much less charming. Besides, I had never much believed in those types of stories, and it seemed to me to be much more probable that I was sharing my small bonfire with a maniac, with absolutely no one for miles in any direction to come to my rescue if he should suddenly turn violent or dangerous.