The night he discovered his ability, so great was Hans's excitement that he was unable to sleep. He didn't understand this new power, nor did he know where it came from; all he knew was that he was wild to try it out on anyone and everyone who crossed his path.
And try it out he did. As soon as he awoke the next morning, he ensured that his governess – a bony spinster who regarded everything, including Hans, with a look of sour, pinch-faced disdain – suddenly and inexplicably decided to resign her position. His ancient tutor couldn't hide his look of utter confusion whenever he found himself dismissing Hans early from his lessons. Perhaps best of all was when he forced his brutish ninth brother, Thorfinn - who had so often been the one to hold Hans down while Magnus and Gunnar punched him in the stomach – to strip off his clothes during an important state dinner. The sight of their red-faced mother dragging the half-naked Thorfinn from the dining room by the ear, yanking him past baffled barons and shocked ambassadors while ignoring his frantic protests that he couldn't help it, couldn't control it – was like nothing Hans had ever seen in his life, and he'd had to bite down on his tongue to keep from laughing.
Ever since the night in the stable with Sitron, Magnus and Gunnar – his chief tormentors – had been petrified of Hans. The same fear overtook Thorfinn following the state dinner, and soon all three of them seemed to figure that the best way to deal with Hans and his terrifying gift was to pretend that he was completely invisible. Whenever Hans entered a room, Magnus, Gunnar and Thorfinn would jump to their feet and make a hasty exit, taking care not to look at their youngest brother lest he decide to make them spend the rest of their lives thinking they were a flock of chickens – or worse. This suited Hans just fine; the expressions of complete terror that crossed their faces whenever he so much as looked at them almost made up for years of torment at their hands.
Almost.
The cruelty and indifference of his brothers had made Hans's childhood a lonely one, and he had spent years longing for someone – anyone - to play with. But now that he had the ability to push others into spending time with him, he found himself harbouring no real desire to do so.
Strangely enough, he also had no wish to become closer to his parents. His mother was a vain, distant woman who loved the idea of having thirteen sons much more than she loved the boys themselves, and as such, Hans had been raised by a series of nannies and governesses. His father was no different; he had always seemed to Hans a stern, cold man who regarded all of his sons (save for Haakon, the eldest, who would succeed him one day) as little more than nuisances.
The remoteness of his parents, coupled with his brothers' malice, had meant that Hans had come to prefer his own company to that of others. He did enjoy taking lessons with his fencing-master, and the knowledgeable young stable-lad who helped care for Sitron could almost be considered a friend; but Hans had long ago decided that solitude was best, and if anything resembling loneliness ever threatened to overtake him, he pushed it out of his mind the way he pushed thoughts into the minds of others.
This was not to say that imposing his thoughts on others was easy. In order to do so, Hans had to summon that pulsing, throbbing energy from deep inside him and concentrate with all his might on pushing it out through his voice and his stare. The amount of effort this required was tremendous, and it often left him with an excruciating headache. On one occasion – a particularly memorable one that involved Hans suggesting to his haughty twelfth brother, Niels, that his pants were full of insects – the headache had been so bad that Hans had vomited, darting behind a curtain to disgorge the contents of his stomach while Niels ran shrieking down the corridor, brushing at invisible bugs and making frenzied attempts to pull off his trousers. The headache had been worth it, however: Niels, with whom Hans shared a bedchamber, was so thoroughly frightened by the incident that he begged the king to let him study abroad, just to put as much distance between himself and his little brother as possible. A mental nudge from Hans was all it took to get their father to agree, and soon Niels had been shipped off to boarding school in Corona, leaving Hans with a spacious chamber all to himself.
Hans was glad that Niels had departed for Corona, because he found that his body was beginning to do strange things, and they were things that made him desirous of as much privacy as he could possibly obtain. He was getting taller, and hairier, and his voice was becoming deeper. To his chagrin, he also noticed one day that a crop of shiny, red pimples had begun to spring up across his forehead.
Too bad pimples don't have minds, he thought ruefully, as he inspected them in his looking-glass. If they did, I could push them and make them go away.
And just as his body was growing, so was his power – and his proficiency in using it. Within a few years, he was able to take control of another person's mind with no more effort than it took to blink an eye. He had started out needing to speak each command or suggestion aloud, but before long, this became unnecessary: he was eventually able to make someone else's will his own with nothing more than a glance and a thought.
To his delight, he also discovered that his ability worked on animals. If he focused his mind on a bird in a treetop, he could call it down from its perch and feed it breadcrumbs from his hand. He could make the stable's notoriously bad-tempered donkey stand still while he brushed it, and one night when a lone wolf attempted to sneak up on the palace's flock of sheep, he was able to convince it to turn away using only the force of his thoughts.
There was one perplexing exception to the effects of his ability, however, and that was Sitron. No matter how hard Hans tried, no matter how much he concentrated, he couldn't work his power on the horse he had raised since foalhood. He would look into Sitron's large brown eyes and attempt with all his might to transmit his will to him, but it never worked; the horse would simply gaze back, unsure of why his master was staring at him instead of feeding him a handful of oats or rubbing his flank with the currycomb. It bothered Hans to see Sitron so confused, and in time, Hans gave up on trying to push him and resigned himself to training the horse the old-fashioned way: with skill, patience, and a great deal of effort. Strangely enough, Hans didn't mind this at all: their dressage and jumping sessions brought them closer together, and having to work for something was an oddly refreshing change for Hans, who had quickly become accustomed to being able to rearrange the world to suit his own preferences.
Even though he was unable to use it on Sitron, however, his power had been a gift unlike anything he had ever dreamed of. It had granted him freedom from sour old governesses and boring tutors; it had given him the ability to charm the very birds down from the trees; and it had freed him, at long last, from the torments of his brothers. Yet one thing bothered him: where did his power come from? Was he the only person in the world who possessed it, or were there others like him?
He had searched in vain for answers to these questions. After dressing himself in rough, cheap clothing and dirtying his face to hide his royal identity, he had visited a number of so-called soothsayers and magicians who plied their clandestine trade in the back alleys of the Southern Isles' capital city. He had asked them if they knew – hypothetically, of course – how someone might come to obtain the power of sovereignty over others' minds, but not one of them had been able to provide him with a satisfactory response. One of them – an ugly, squat little man with a boil over one eye – had even attempted to convince Hans that he himself was capable of granting this power by means of a homemade elixir, a bottle of which he offered to Hans for a mere forty kroner. Hans, who knew a con attempt when he saw one, had declined the offer (and, for good measure, mentally pushed the man into forgetting to claim his twenty-krone consultation fee).
The failure of these attempts to procure knowledge about his ability unsettled Hans. He had spent most of his life in near-isolation, but it was not until he realized that there might be no one else in the world with powers like his that he truly began to feel isolated.
Why him? he wondered. Why would God – or nature, or fortune - bestow such a great gift upon an unlucky thirteenth child…upon the lowest, least-loved member of a family whose only talent was that of spreading misery?
These kinds of questions kept Hans awake at night. As he tossed and turned in his bed, he wished that they were simple ones…the sort of questions whose answers could be found in books. But that was ridiculous; there was no such thing as a book on people with inexplicable magical powers.
Or was there?
