My passage from boy to manhood, abrupt and hard, bestowed on me many life lessons. Prime among them that happiness should be held at arm’s length in a pair of smithy tongs because, if you try to embrace it, you’ll be seared to the bone.
I was entering my sixteenth summer when father gave me the greatest joy of my life up to that point. Unknown to me, he spied me at sword practice, disarming the brute of a smith’s son, Flodwig. Just because you stand taller than other boys and your chest is as broad as a yearling bull’s doesn’t mean your muscles can beat your opponent like an iron bar. Not when the one you are up against is as swift as the bird of that name and as smart as a fox in a monastery hen coop.
Sorrowful as I am, I could not help smiling at his gawping expression when his practic
