“What?” I took the book out of my daughter’s hands and opened it at the publisher’s imprint page. Aha . . . they certainly weren’t fairy tales. The Other Word publishing house. They publish books and various printed materials for Others. For Light Ones and Dark Ones, indiscriminately. Of course, they don’t produce anything really serious: genuine spells are either too secret to be printed, or they can’t survive the mechanical application of the text to paper. Some things can only be conveyed by the spoken word and by example. They print the very basics—secrecy isn’t particularly important here: if a book like this finds its way into an ordinary shop (as sometimes happens), people will think it’s a children’s book or a fantasy penned by some graphomaniac. The book was called The Childhood of Remarkable Others.

“Is this some kind of textbook?”

“For reading out of class. Stories about the childhood of great magicians.”

I didn’t get to study in the magician’s classes. In those years they didn’t find so many Others, and setting up special classes for them was regarded as impractical. So I did my learning on the job . . .

I leafed through the chapters about Merlin, Karl Cemius, Michel Lefroid, and Pan Chang. I stumbled across a chapter about Gesar and smiled when I read the first lines: “When the Great Gesar was a little boy, he lived in the mountains of Tibet. He was an unattractive, sickly child, he often caught cold and was even given the offensive name Djoru, or ‘Snotty.’ No one knew that Gesar was really an Other, one of the most powerful magicians in the world. The only one who did know was a Dark Other, Soton, who dreamed of making Gesar a Dark One . . .”

“Look further on,” Nadya begged me impatiently. “About Erasmus . . .”

“Was Erasmus of Rotterdam really a Prophet?” I asked in surprise, opening the book at the page that had been marked. The bookmark was pink, with little fairies out of some Disney cartoon on it. “Ah, Erasmus Darwin . . .”

The author certainly didn’t make a great effort to vary the introductions for his young readers. But that actually lent the narrative a certain epic quality.

“When the great prophet Erasmus Darwin was a little boy, he lived in the small village of Elton in Ireland. He was always a dreamy and romantic child. He often used to run out of the house and lie in a field of blossoming clover, examining the little flowers. Erasmus was convinced that plants could love like people, that they even had their own sex life. He wrote his remarkable poem The Loves of the Plants about this. But that was later . . .”

I closed the book and looked at the title page. A textbook of extracurricular reading for middle and senior school age. I snorted.

“Daddy, do you really think I don’t know anything about sex life?” asked Nadya.