Excerpt from The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I think my acute sense of smell and of taste had a lot to do with my success. Intuition also played a part, but really, intuition is little more than paying attention to the world around you. While I may not have known why I made the choices I made, the knowledge was somewhere inside me.

Sadly, while my other faculties have remained intact, my senses of smell and taste have been greatly diminished. Only strong and bitter flavors can get through to me now. I prefer an onion to a fig. And, alas, I've had to switch from tea to espresso.

2

The First Tiger

I was there when the first tiger was delivered to the castle. It arrived by horse-drawn cart. Two knights in full regalia rode along beside it, carrying the red, green, and black banner of Oxatania. In the sixteenth century, knights were only used for spectacle. Gunpowder had rendered them obsolete for warfare.

The tiger was inside an iron-and-wood box, with only a small slot for food. The box reeked after the three-day journey from Oxatania. Who knows how long it had been kept inside it before that? In 1523 kings and queens didn't concern themselves about the humane treatment of animals. To be fair, they weren't overly concerned about the humane treatment of humans either.

The tiger was a gift in anticipation of the upcoming wedding between Princess Tullia of Esquaveta and Prince Dalrympl of Oxatania. The marriage had been arranged twelve years earlier, when the princess was only three.

I had been in my workshop, dissecting beetles, when I was startled by a tug on my tunic. "I'm betrothed, Natto!" the three-year-old princess had proudly told me.

She couldn't pronounce the L in Anatole.

There was no door to the archway that separated my workshop from the castle corridor, but I'd hung two curtains made of beads and shells on either side of it. These not only added to my mystique as court magician, they warned me if anyone was coming. Princess Tullia, however, had a way of slipping through the curtains without making a sound, often startling me.

"Congratulations!" I replied. "Who's the lucky man?"

Her face scrunched up in confusion. What man was I talking about?

Since then, gifts had been sent back and forth between the two kingdoms. At first these were simple tokens of friendship, but as the wedding date drew closer, the gifts became increasingly extravagant, as each king tried to outdo the other.

When the tiger arrived, the wedding was only six months away. Once the Oxatanian knights had departed, King Sandro raised his hands to the heavens and bellowed, "What am I supposed to do with it?"

Queen Corinna, who had a predilection toward the unusual and exotic, suggested that the tiger be served at the wedding banquet. The kitchen steward immediately protested. He warned that tiger meat might be tough and stringy. In addition, the king worried that the Oxatanians might be insulted if we butchered their most generous gift.

An even bigger problem than what to do with it was how to reciprocate. That task fell to Dittierri, the king's regent. I took secret pleasure in seeing the regent's anguish as he fretted over finding the perfect gift.

But I had problems of my own. The day before the arrival of the tiger, twenty-two sacks of black sand had been brought to me from Iceland.

Xavier, the finance minister, had been with me when the sacks were hauled into my workshop. He was younger than me, with fiery red hair, but the pressures of his job had taken a toll. He had bags under his eyes and had developed a facial tic.

According to him, the kingdom of Esquaveta was on the verge of bankruptcy. All wages would have to be cut by half. A number of soldiers had already deserted.

We couldn't squeeze out any more taxes from the popolo minuto. As it was, all land, crops, and livestock were considered the property of the king. If an ox or horse died, the peasant who had tended the animal was forced to compensate the king for his loss. Similarly, if that peasant died, his family had to compensate the king for the loss of a worker.

Excerpted from The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar. Copyright © 2025 by Louis Sachar. Excerpted by permission of Ace Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.