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Once upon a time, there was a good king and queen who had thirteen sons. There was Richard the Ready, William the Willing, Andrew the Able, Edward the Excused...

Look, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking if I keep spinning a yarn this long, your long johns'll get longer. Trust me, you don't know what I'm sparing you from. Besides, we have to get through this to get to the good stuff. I've been tomatoed for less so bear with me.

There was Tibalt the Timid, Peter the Polite, Samson the Stinker, Bartlett the Blinker, Iggy the Iffy, Maldon the Muller, Bruce, Victor the Valliant and last and certainly least, Robert the Rotten. How rotten was he? He was so rotten barnacles passed. He was so rotten his horse faked a limp. He was so rotten he killed Irving. Poor little guy. Sweet kid, his cousin, but as dumb as a yam. When they were six, Robert made Irving punch his arms through a couple of loaves of bread and said, "Let's play muscles!" Then he marched him down to Mad Gull Cove, tossed a cracker in the air and that was the end of Irving, the white meat anyway. They could never prove it was intentional but Robert came home with his hands up.

Now, the good king died naming Victor his successor. Since none of the other brothers actually wanted the job they applauded the decision. All except for Robert, that is. His blood boiled at his father's slight, fueled by the fire of all consuming jealousy, and quite possibly undiagnosed gout. He vowed to himself that the kingdom would quake for celebrating a pretender to his throne, that Victor would cower and crawl and beg for forgiveness for imagining he could ever be his brother's better. Robert grew even more rotten as the day of the coronation drew near. So rotten he darned his socks and everyone else's. I know, what's with me and underwear? It's just these castles get drafty.

Anyhoo, King Victor's coronation was a joyous celebration for many reasons. He and his queen, Betina, along with his brothers and their partners, had all recently been blessed with baby daughters; the twelve princesses of the court. (You can whistle at the next chapter if you're so inclined.) And while everyone was toasting to futures and stuffing their bellies, you know who was scheming in the shadows waiting for his chance at revenge.

He watched the old nurse put the last child to sleep in the nursery before she left to huddle the Royal Dairy Cows for a motivational speech. Then he crept sinisterly up to the bassinets.

What to do with so many heirs? Taking his brothers on one by one would be time consuming, and why wait when he could kill twelve birds with one stone? It wasn't personal. It was business.

He grabbed an oil lamp from the nursery wall and used it to set the room's canopy on fire, but one of the king's guards saw him trying to escape and alerted the others. Robert was seized and the children were spared a horrible fate in the nick of time.

They called for Robert's skull to be crushed. They called for his neck in a barbed noose. And that was just the women. The entire kingdom demanded he be burned and buried, but as enraged as Victor was, he couldn't bring himself to speak the words. Instead, he banished his brother to the dungeons, never to be seen or spoken of again. It was a good plan at the time.

His cell was dark and dank. It would take forever to figure out where that leak was coming from. His straw bed had someone else's groove in it. He had only a candle to cast a little light and keep him warm, yet the flame seemed cold, and sometimes looked like there were a pair of eyes peering out from it. After many days of watching the flame flicker with all the sighing, an unnatural thing happened. The candle seemed to stretch and grow while the eyes darting in the flame became real. A real pair of beady yellow eyes on a real head of the partially transformed figure of a man - Ivan the Magician.

No character in the kingdom could summon the gooseflesh like Ivan, the wicked advisor who'd once had the ear of Robert's grandfather before trying to kill him and steal his queen. He escaped an angry mob by transforming himself into a candle, intending for it to burn out and set him free when the coast was clear. But the White Witch sussed him out, and imprisoned him with his own trick by casting a spell that the candle would never melt. He'd been locked in that dungeon for sixty years, waiting for the right stooge to come along. Now his forgotten, fiery head blazed before Robert, smiling like a lunatic welcoming a lightning storm.