We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Louis Sachar’s first adult novel, The Magician of Tiger Castle, a fantasy of forbidden love, a crumbling kingdom, and the magic all around us. The Magician of Tiger Castle publishes with Ace on August 5th.
We’re also excited to have an audio excerpt from the novel, read by Edoardo Ballerini. Click here to jump straight to the audio excerpt!
Long ago and far away (and somewhere south of France) lies the kingdom of Esquaveta. There, Princess Tullia is in nearly as much peril as her struggling kingdom. Esquaveta desperately needs to forge an alliance, and to that end, Tullia’s father has arranged a marriage between her and an odious prince. However, one month before the “wedding of the century,” Tullia falls in love with a lowly apprentice scribe.
The king turns to Anatole, his much-maligned magician. Seventeen years earlier, when Anatole first came to the castle, he was regarded as something of a prodigy. But after a long series of failures—the latest being an attempt to transform sand into gold—he has become the object of contempt and ridicule. The only one who still believes in him is the princess.
When the king orders Anatole to brew a potion that will ensure Tullia agrees to the wedding, Anatole is faced with an impossible choice. With one chance to save the marriage, the kingdom, and, of most importance to him, his reputation, will he betray the princess—or risk ruin?
Princess Tullia had been born defective.
Her biggest defect was being born a princess. King Sandro needed an heir, and that meant a prince.
Dittierri had tried to blame me for that too, even though the potion I had given Queen Corinna was solely for morning sickness. I never claimed otherwise, but I had only been at the castle for about two years then and was not yet fully aware of Dittierri’s propensity to twist the truth.
Princess Tullia’s other defect was her eyes. Her left eye was brown, and the right one was blue.
When she was young, she liked to visit me in my workshop and play with the mice I used for my experiments. Her brown eye always seemed to be in deep contemplation of something or other, while her blue one sparkled with joy. She charmed me.
But this was during the Renaissance, and there were well-understood standards of art and beauty. Perspective and symmetry were essential.
Tullia was asymmetrical.
* * *
As she grew up, of course, she came to understand what it meant to be betrothed, and accepted it as her duty even though Prince Dalrympl was more than twenty years older. “Love is for poets, Anatole,” she told me with the haughty authority of a thirteen-year-old who believes she fully understands the way of the world. “Only peasants can afford to marry for love. For merchants and traders, it is just another business contract. And for royalty, it is an alliance.”
That was two years before Pito came to the castle.
Inside my workshop, I brewed a kind of tea from the powdered wings of the African moon moth. From what I’d been told, Tullia had been in a constant state of hysteria since Pito had been locked in the dungeon. I added galingale and turmeric to the tea. When she was young, we had tea parties in my workshop. While I sipped some rare and fine variety, she especially enjoyed anything made with galingale and turmeric.
I removed a urine glass from a cabinet. In the sixteenth century, any physician worth his salt kept a ready supply of urine glasses. It was a symbol of the profession, much like the stethoscope is today. I owned more than a dozen, as I had a propensity to drop things.
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The Magician of Tiger Castle
I could diagnose most diseases simply by the color and odor of my patient’s urine. I’d find a cure by mixing various ingredients with the urine and then observing the changes. I was able to detect twenty-four distinct shades of yellow.
It wasn’t Princess Tullia’s urine I needed, however, but her tears.
With a goblet of moon moth tea in one hand and the urine glass in the other, I carefully stepped around the pile of black sand and then walked backward, pushing through the twin curtains of beads and shells.
The princess’s chambers were on the third floor. I took the back staircase, the one mostly used by servants. I was in no mood to run into any courtiers or courtesans, who, of late, often greeted me with snide remarks and looks of either contempt or pity.
I knocked on the door to the princess’s chambers with my elbow. The moment Tullia’s handmaiden, Marta, opened it, I realized I should have made some moon moth tea for her as well. Marta immediately let loose with a barrage of incoherent complaints that I could barely follow as she switched from one incomplete thought to another.
I sidestepped around her and entered Tullia’s drawing room. Two chairs had been overturned, and the drapes from the large bay window lay in a heap on the floor. Shards of pottery and broken glass also littered the floor. There was no sign of the princess.
I followed Marta’s eyes to a closed door. “I finally got her to bed,” she said, with a sense of relief. “Don’t disturb her!” she shouted as I placed my hand on the doorknob.
Holding the urine glass in the crook of my elbow, I entered the inner chamber.
The princess was tied to her bed. A strip of red satin was tied over her mouth. Her eyes were wide open. I could see hopelessness in the brown one, but the blue one shone with determination.
I set the goblet and urine glass on a bed stand, and, bracing myself for a storm of fire and fury, I removed her gag. Instead, all I got was a tightly controlled “I’m glad you’re here, Anatole. I was hoping you’d come.”
I’d started on the ropes when Marta shouted, “No!” and pulled my arm back.
The princess’s maidservant was considerably stronger than me. “You can leave, Marta,” said the princess. “Anatole and I need to talk in private.”
“But you haven’t slept in—”
“Get out!” shouted Tullia.
Marta let go of my arm and backed toward the door. “If you knew what I’ve been through…” she said to me.
“Out the other door too!” ordered the princess.
“But I’m not supposed to…” Marta started, then fled the bedchamber. A moment later I heard the other door open and slam shut.
I finished untying the ropes, then offered Tullia the goblet.
She took a small sip and smiled. “Galingale and turmeric,” she said. “Like old times.”
“African moon moth wings too,” I said, not wanting to deceive her. “For your nerves.”
“Good, I need to think clearly,” she said. “We haven’t much time. They’ve locked Pito in the dungeon.”
“I know.”
“You have to get him out of there!”
I didn’t know what she expected me to do. For one thing, Harwell, the keeper of the dungeon, may not have been an actual giant, but he was the largest human I’d ever seen. I couldn’t even take on Marta.
“You can easily sneak past Harwell,” the princess said. “He can’t hear.”
That part was true. The prison guard was deaf.
“The dungeon door will still be locked,” I pointed out.
“You can steal Harwell’s keys. He won’t notice. Cast a spell on him, if you have to! Then you can give Pito a potion to make him invisible.”
Unlike Dittierri, Tullia believed there were no limits to my magic.
I told her I knew of no invisibility potions, and that I didn’t cast spells.
The princess frowned, but was not ready to give up.
“Surely, you can give Harwell something to knock him out. Then help Pito escape.”
I gently explained that even if I came up with some sort of reason why Harwell should drink a potion, I wouldn’t be able to communicate it to him. Besides, if Pito escaped, leaving Harwell unconscious in the dungeon, there would be little doubt as to who was responsible.
Tullia clutched my arm. “Pito did nothing wrong!” she exclaimed, shaking it. “It’s my fault he’s down there!”
I could see terror in her blue eye, and only sadness in the brown.
I told her she shouldn’t blame herself. “It takes two people to have…” I began, putting it as delicately as I could, “a romantic rendezvous.”
I could feel my face redden as I said those words. In some ways, Tullia was like a daughter to me, and it was difficult for me to talk about such things.
“What Pito did to you would have been… untoward,” I continued, “even if you weren’t a princess. You’ve promised yourself to another.” I avoided saying she was betrothed, since that word had become something of a private joke between us.
“Pito did nothing to me! There was no romantic rendezvous, as you call it. Although, I did wish he would be a little more… untoward.” Her blue eye twinkled.
“All we did was read together,” she continued. “And only because I told him it was a duty of the apprentice scribe to teach me English.”
She explained that they would meet every day in the library, and read to each other from Utopia, a book written by an Englishman named Thomas More. Utopia was a mythical island somewhere off the coast of South America. Everyone was equal there. “No kings. No queens. And no princesses!” she pointedly added. And nobody owned anything on the island of Utopia. Everything was shared, so there was no need for fences or locks on the doors.
These were radical ideas, but they didn’t explain why Pito had been put in the dungeon.
“I also made him read to me from another book,” Tullia admitted.
She said it was a collection of Italian love poetry. “I’d close my eyes and pretend the words were his, meant only for me.
“Some of those poems were very untoward,” she added. Her blue eye twinkled again, even as tears fell from the brown one.
“I love him, Natto! You have to save him.”
I pressed the urine glass against her face, collecting her tears, first from the brown eye, and then also from the blue.
“I have a plan,” I assured her.
Excerpted from The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar. Copyright © 2025 by Louis Sachar. Excerpted by permission of Ace. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, excerpt read by Edoardo Ballerini. © Louis Sachar ℗ 2025 Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.
