Page 1 of Spark of Sorcery

Prologue

Briony

Fresh earth hits the top of the plain wooden coffin, dissolving into the sheets of rain and forming a thick sludge that sticks to the surface.

To one side of me stands my father, silent, swaying slightly in his old winter coat. Beyond him is the priest. He’s wrapped up warm but his face is just as hard and worn as my father’s, and though he says the words he’s meant to, they’re said with no feeling and compassion.

What’s another girl dead after all? One from Slate? One without a mother? One less mouth to feed, one less soul to worry over. It’s not like anyone expected her to go off to the academy and return to anywhere but this wasteland of a Quarter.

No one believed that. No one but her and me.

I stare down at the rapidly disappearing coffin andtry to imagine her laid out down there, in the cold, in the mud, all alone.

How could this have happened? It seems so unfair – so damned unfair – to lose a mother first and then a sister – a sister who had been more of a parent to me than my own father.

I have the urge to leap down into that hole with her, to scrape back the thick, sticky muck with my hands, and pry open the lid.

She’d blink up at me and grin, her nose crinkling.

“Only joking, Briony!”

I’d grab her by the hand, tug her right out of that ugly box and run with her, run with her far far away.

Like I should have done when she was alive.

But she isn’t. She’s gone. Taken from me. And when I can’t take it any longer, when the sight of my precious sister swamped by all that mud has acid sloshing in my stomach, burning in my throat, I turn and run away alone.

No Amelia by my side – even if I think I hear her voice in the wind rushing through the towering branches of the yew trees overhead.

That’s how it will be from now on. Just me.

Apart from the wind, no one calls after me. Nobody tells me to stop. I wonder if they even notice me gone.

I run away from the old stone church and its circle of graves, down the hill, away from the town and out to the woods, plunging into the darkness of the undergrowth, running and running, not caring at the way the branches scratch at my face or scrape against my legs, ripping the only pair of stockings I own.

I just keep running. There’s no point in stopping. There is nothing to stop for, and I don’t want to go back there. Without Amelia, there is no home.

Soon I know I’m lost deep in the forest, the sky gray with the incoming night, the wildlife out here stirring awake – a screech, a howl, a far off bark.

I stop.

Do I want to die? Is that why I came all this way? To fall down a ravine and break my neck or meet one of the old grizzlies and have my innards mauled?

“Do you want to join me, Briony?”she calls far above me as she rushes through the trees.

My face is wet with tears; they roll down my cheeks, run off my chin and drip onto my coat, lost among all the raindrops.

I shake my head.

I’m not ready to go yet,I call back,not until…

Not until I’ve made them pay for what they did to her. For taking her from me. She gave me everything. This is the least I can do for her.

It’s as I say these words to myself – or do I whisper them out loud? – that I first feel it. A force outside my body, pulling me along, as if I am a piece of old metal and it is a magnet.

At first, I pull back against it, peering down at my feet and wondering if I am losing my mind.

But then I think, what the heck? I’ve lost everything now. My sister to the academy, my father to the bottom of a liquor bottle. Neither is coming back.