Prologue Old Stories Coalton County, Ohio June, 1870 The scent of wood smoke and roses always took him back there, to the boy he was and would never be again. The Roses came for them during his tenth summer. In those days, Lee was slight of build, though his father always said his big hands and feet predicted height and broad shoulders when he was grown. He was the youngest, a little spoiled, the only one of four children to display the telltale signs of a wizard's stone. His parents complained that it took him two days to do a day's worth of work. Not lazy, exactly, but largely inefficient. They had been back only a fortnight after a month on the run. It was a mistake to come back. Lee knew that, afterward, but his father was a farmer, and a farmer can't afford to stay out of the fields too long during the growing season. Besides, the Roses' previous attacks had been hit-or-miss affairs. They would sweep through the village on the river, search the outlying farms, and then disappear, sometimes for as long as a year. Bandits, their neighbors called them, and speculated that they'd been soldiers in the recent War of the Rebellion. Only seven years before, Confederate General John Morgan had led his raiders through these southern Ohio hills.