Oh, I love Merlin's Mistake! I read it in India when I was a kid, and I have a copy still. I should re-read; it seemed like the kind of thing that would hold up.
I haven't re-read it very recently, but I remember it held up beautifully the last time I did. I was so happy in first-year Latin in high school when I discovered I could now read Tertius' evocation of the serpent coiled around Brian's arm: Serpens invisus, serpens saevus, audite! (He uses the plural imperative where it should be singular, but what the hell, it's a spell; we're lucky the case endings actually match up.) "It must have been a Cornish, not a Welsh serpent. They're the only ones that have mercury for blood."
. . . The Encyclopedia of Fantasy tells me there's a sequel, The Testing of Tertius (1974)! I have got to find this.
and they go on a quest to find their parents and get menaced by a jackal-headed man in a graveyard.
If you ever get hold of this one, I think I need to read it.
A book of fairy-tales of the world. There's a really spooky one about three sister witches, one with one eye, one with two, and one with three, and a boy and a talking red bull.
Great. I have read this, because it is chiming vaguely at the back of my head; I have no idea what collection it was in. I'll try to find it for you.
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I haven't re-read it very recently, but I remember it held up beautifully the last time I did. I was so happy in first-year Latin in high school when I discovered I could now read Tertius' evocation of the serpent coiled around Brian's arm: Serpens invisus, serpens saevus, audite! (He uses the plural imperative where it should be singular, but what the hell, it's a spell; we're lucky the case endings actually match up.) "It must have been a Cornish, not a Welsh serpent. They're the only ones that have mercury for blood."
. . . The Encyclopedia of Fantasy tells me there's a sequel, The Testing of Tertius (1974)! I have got to find this.
and they go on a quest to find their parents and get menaced by a jackal-headed man in a graveyard.
If you ever get hold of this one, I think I need to read it.
A book of fairy-tales of the world. There's a really spooky one about three sister witches, one with one eye, one with two, and one with three, and a boy and a talking red bull.
Great. I have read this, because it is chiming vaguely at the back of my head; I have no idea what collection it was in. I'll try to find it for you.