Book halp

[Norellicus]

A friend of mine has had a dilemma for a while in trying to locate a book that he read for all of 10 minutes as a kid, never picked up (it felt too heavy for him at the time, being 12), and moved on. Now that he looks back though, he's intrigued by it, and is trying to find it again. His information to go on is...broad, at best, so searching topically is a search for a proverbial needle in a haystack.

So I offered to put out an APB on the offchance someone recognizes what little he remembers of the book and can pinpoint it for him. Don't spend a lot of time searching for it unless you really feel like it, this is mostly just a contextual recognition search. What he remembers:

A book published not later than 1995 and probably after 1970 from age, type of cover, etc. The book could be young adult fiction or regular fantasy.

I remember no title or author or character or place names.

One of the first scenes is two friends practicing fencing at some kind of fencing school, probably in a college. One of them refuses a one-on-one challenge from the other that doesn't require a particular form to be used, commenting that the free style the other guy uses is too much for him. They repair to the house of one of them, where his family also lives, and night falls. Some kind of portal or portals open and dire-wolf-type beasts come through and attack the house. Everybody grabs swords and fights them off, and it is revealed that the family has had such contact in the past. At some point shortly after this the two friends either go or are taken through the portal in to some kind of fantasy world.

At that point I stopped reading.

[Souj]

I googled

One of the first scenes is two friends practicing fencing at some kind of fencing school, probably in a college. One of them refuses a one-on-one challenge from the other that doesn't require a particular form to be used, commenting that the free style the other guy uses is too much for him. They repair to the house of one of them, where his family also lives, and night falls. Some kind of portal or portals open and dire-wolf-type beasts come through and attack the house. Everybody grabs swords and fights them off, and it is revealed that the family has had such contact in the past. At some point shortly after this the two friends either go or are taken through the portal in to some kind of fantasy world.

and the 1st link that showed was this

why's he "intrigued" by it if he can't remember anything about it? lol

[Norellicus]

It's not that he can't remember anything about it, he never read far enough to remember specifics, and didn't care enough about the book when he first read the first bits to finish it. Now he wants to finish it.

Found it though, http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Duke-Keep.../dp/0380722070