‘So, what have you gotten yourself into?’ Angela asked, smiling as she went back into the sitting room and began to tidy. I followed, continuing my earlier work of dusting crumbs off the chairs.
‘I’m not really sure,’ I admitted, honestly. I crouched beside one seat and picked a couple of bits of potato chip from the upholstery. ‘Do you think it’s a good idea that I go?’
Now that Qasim was gone I didn’t feel so certain about the whole plan. Angela started rearranging the DVDs, putting them back in the order only she understood. She looked thoughtful.
‘I think anything’s a good idea if it’s what you want,’ she said eventually.
‘Way to be cryptic,’ I said, taking my crumbs to the kitchen bin. Angela followed, leaning on the breakfast bar as I washed my hands.
‘This is pretty amazing,’ she said, handing me a hand towel. ‘You’re going to learn to heal and displace and scry and all that. You are being handed a massive opportunity. I don’t think Mum and Dad ever learnt those finer arts.’
‘Mum could heal little things,’ I said quietly, and we both fell silent, as we often did when one of us accidentally mentioned our deceased parents or brother. It had been three years since the tragic day a storm had rolled in from the sea, destroyed our seaside family home and killed our mum and dad and big brother Aidan. It still hurt every day, and every night, when I relieved it all in my dreams.
‘Yeah, she could,’ Angela agreed softly. She reached over the breakfast bar to take my hand. ‘You could be healing all sorts of things in a few weeks from now. You could be displacing all over the countryside. You might be writing your own spells.’
‘I’ll be scrying,’ I added, perking up again. ‘I might even be able to start scrying you.’
Despite my love of the art, I’d never been able to perform it. I’d heard that it was easiest to begin with things or people you know really well, but I’d never even been able to scry my own sister.
‘You might be the next White Elm Scrier,’ Angela suggested, squeezing my hand. We both laughed, because that was a little optimistic.
‘How good do you think the chances are of people getting picked as apprentices?’ I asked, and Angela shrugged lightly.
‘I suppose there would be a few councillors old enough to be looking, but I think a lot of them would be too young,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I think you have to be about forty or something to have an apprentice.’
‘If I learn enough, I might even have my own apprentice one day,’ I said, allowing my imagination to run free. Angela released my hand and went to get the vacuum cleaner from its cupboard.
‘Maybe you’ll teach your apprentice to clean up after herself,’ she teased. I rolled my eyes and went to take it from her. I could take a hint.
‘When I have my own apprentice, I’ll be too busy saving the world to have to clean up my own messes,’ I told her as she plugged it in. ‘You’ll see.’
It wasn’t until much later that I learned this, but even as I joked around with my sister, my experience was being repeated, four dozen times over, with young sorcerers all around the world. An eighteen-year-old surfer paddled back onto Australia’s sunset-soaked beach and noticed a silvery gleam in the shallows. He scooped the pebble out of the sand, and, surfboard under one arm, walked to shore where he met a smiling, unfamiliar wisp of a man. In South Africa, a dark-haired girl was hanging out her laundry. A wet towel brushed against her glasses, marring her vision, and as she took them off to clean them against her dress, a blurry glimmer of silver caught her attention. She returned her glasses to her eyes to bring into focus the engraved pebble sitting amongst her laundry. She admired it for a long moment before closing her fingers around it experimentally; a fresh-skinned, round-faced woman with soft brown hair approached out of nowhere. In Japan, a brother and sister pair danced energetically at a nightclub, surrounded closely by friends and acquaintances. The younger of them, the sister, had had too much to drink, and stumbled. Her brother laughingly pulled her up, but both paused when they saw the little stone on the floor beside the girl’s spike heel. Both snatched for it at once and fought for it even once they were upright. A man just a little too old to be there tapped their shoulders and beckoned them to follow him away from the pumping music. There was a pretty sixteen-year-old sorceress in north-east England curling her hair; a German teenager coaching junior soccer; a pair of identical twins outside Vancouver on a horse-riding camp…There was even a homeless boy in Manchester reaching into a drain, hoping desperately to find money, even just a few pence. He spotted something shiny and his cold and dirty fingers closed on the pebble.
In short, my life was not the only one changed that day, nor was it the most significantly changed, and it would take me many months to really realise it, but my life was about to drastically transform and this was the day it started.
My life had been changed drastically before.
None of us had foreseen this storm. It had rolled in out of nowhere. I was upstairs in my room when it hit, reading. I’d hardly noticed it coming, except to realise that the sunlight had suddenly dulled, forcing me to switch my light on. The rain was heavy and fast, pounding on my window, strong winds lashing tree branches against the house walls. It wasn’t until a branch was ripped from a neighbour’s tree and flung at my window, cracking the glass, that I got scared, grabbed Cedric (the stuffed rabbit my grandmother Merit had handmade for me for my first Christmas, completely out of scraps of material) and hurried downstairs to find my family. My mother, Elysia, I met on the stairs, coming up to find me. She led me to the sunken dining room, where my older siblings, Aidan, twenty-one, and Angela, not quite twenty, were waiting, looking panicked. I asked them where our father Darren was, and they told me he was outside. Mum left Angela with strict orders to stay inside with me, while she allowed Aidan to go outside and help Dad tie down the outdoor furniture. She herself went upstairs to collect all the most important family treasures and bring them to the much safer sunken dining room.
Outside, I heard a sickening, crunching snap as a massive old tree was uprooted from the dirt. Angela and I ran to the nearest window to helplessly watch as Dad and Aidan desperately struggled to get back to the house despite the high winds, before the huge tree toppled towards the big house, its thick trunk mostly obscuring both men from my view, almost as though to protect Angela and I from watching their deaths. Angela gave a strangled cry of horror, but an instant before either of us could move or call out to Mum, there was a deafening crash, and the entire house shook as the tree landed on it, smashing through the roof.
My sister and I screamed, clutching each other in terror and collapsing to the floor as the ceiling above us caved in, furniture from Angela’s bedroom pouring on top of us along with leaves, twigs, small branches and a lot of sharp rain. Without thinking, I cast my first ward around myself, Angela and Cedric with only my hand, protecting us from harm and preventing any physical object from passing through the invisible bubble…
I opened my eyes, and the entire scene melted away immediately, immaterial like the dream it was. The more real knot of fear and grief in my stomach lingered. I stared at my ceiling as my heartbeat slowly returned to its normal pace. I was accustomed to this daily ritual. It was the same every night, and every morning.
Mum and Aidan were killed immediately. Dad officially died upon arrival at hospital, but his heart had stopped in the ambulance and the paramedics weren’t able to restart it. The coroner later said that with head injuries like his, regaining a pulse wouldn’t have been enough to give us our dad back. He was gone, really, at the same time as his wife and son. Angela and I lost them all at once.
Eventually I dragged myself out of bed and set about making myself presentable. It always took a long hot shower, several changes of clothes and about ten minutes of hair styling before I chose to simply leave my hair out, wear the clothes my sister had just washed and laid out on my bed the day before, and felt prepared to face the d
ull and uneventful life that was mine.
‘Why, good afternoon,’ somebody joked as I entered the dining room of the flat. I glanced at the clock above the kitchen sink – not yet eleven. It was a Sunday. Eleven a.m. on a Sunday was practically equivalent to seven a.m. on a weekday.
‘Hi,’ I replied to my aunt. She smiled indulgently and pulled out the chair beside her so I could join the family at the table for a late breakfast. I’d forgotten that they were coming over, although I shouldn’t have, because Aunt Leanne, her husband Patrick, and their daughter Kelly often came over on Sundays.
‘Did you have a good sleep?’ my aunt asked, affectionately brushing a stray lock of my hair out of my face.
‘Yes,’ I lied with a convincing smile. She suspected nothing, and was not sensitive enough to notice the teensy flick of energy that always accompanies untruth. It was a white lie, more of a half-truth really, because yes, I had slept all night and was well-rested. She didn’t need to know that I’d had a bad dream, and she especially didn’t need to know that it was the same bad dream I’d had every night for over three years.
‘Orange juice?’ Uncle Patrick offered, reaching for my glass even before I nodded.
‘How many pancakes, sweetheart?’ Aunt Leanne asked while her husband filled my glass. She patted my hand kindly as though I were a little girl. At seventeen, not far off eighteen, I was definitely not a little girl anymore, but in this family I would always be the baby. My sister Angela and our cousin Kelly were twenty-three, and I’d once also had an older brother, who would now be twenty-five if he were alive. It was very hard to convince my aunt and uncle that I was grown up now, especially considering that they hardly considered Ange or Kell to be adults.
‘Um, just two,’ I said, looking around behind me so I could see into the kitchen where my sister and cousin were standing over the stove frying pancakes. They were the same age, and shared blood, but from behind, Angela and Kelly couldn’t have looked more different. Kelly looked much like her father, with her freckled white skin, her thick red curls and curvier, shorter shape. Angela, on the other hand, was taller and slimmer, very fair skinned, and her hair was straight, some strange colour caught between blonde and very light brown. She looked like our father, I supposed, as did Aunt Leanne, his surviving sister.
Following the tragedy I relived in nightmares every night, Angela and I were taken in by Aunt Leanne for a few months. It was lovely to be loved and supported, but the tension ignited between my aunt and sister as they’d both petitioned the courts for custody of me had made the experience uncomfortable. When Angela was made my guardian, we’d moved out of my aunt’s place, and their relationship had improved dramatically.
‘You really should sign up for the newsletter,’ Aunt Leanne was telling Angela as a plate of pancakes appeared in front of me. ‘It’s not like those mortal newsletter people, where they pass on your details to marketing companies. The White Elm’s not like that. Your details are safe; it just opens up a direct channel of contact between you and the council. It means they can send you updates and information at any time. And if you signed up, I wouldn’t have to bring over mine every month.’
She said that, but she would, anyway I knew, just like she brought over bread rolls, milk, junk mail and random coupons. Aunt Leanne wouldn’t want us to go without a thing – especially not potentially important news direct from the magical government.
My entire family were witches (people with old magical blood, the opposite of mortals) and sorcerers (people who could produce spells). Some witches were not powerful enough to do sorcery, and hence were only witches, and some who practiced sorcery were not witches. Blood didn’t necessarily determine power or ability to use magic (after all, there were cases of powerful sorcerers born into families in which there was absolutely no witch blood) but it was generally a pretty good indicator. Magic went back a really long way through Dad and Aunt Leanne’s family, the Byrnes, beyond the scope of the family tree, but none of us had ever been able to produce particularly impressive magic when we tried. Except me – just that once.
We didn’t know anything about Mum’s side, except that her mum was Greek and her dad (a writer, apparently) had disappeared just after she was born.
‘I will, I just keep forgetting,’ Angela said, glancing at me significantly and returning to the kitchen to retrieve her own plate. Aunt Leanne had been on her case to sign up for the monthly White Elm newsletter ever since the Lisandro incident half a year ago. What she didn’t know was that the White Elm had managed to find us without us ever signing up to the newsletter, and that next time we received anything from the council, it was likely to be much more informative than a public newsletter.
‘The White Elm needs as much support as it can get these days,’ Aunt Leanne said, cutting her pancakes into little pieces. ‘It’s important to show where your loyalties lie.’
When one of the council’s most prominent members had very suddenly and publicly mutinied, our society had been rocked in a very real way. The White Elm council had always been trusted and followed, if sometimes grudgingly, so what reason could their most popular councillor have for wanting to leave? It had to be a good reason, many people determined, and they’d cancelled their subscription to the White Elm’s newsletter, trying to cut off the council’s ability to contact them further. The White Elm had been fiercely discouraging this, especially as whispers of Lisandro’s travels became louder and more persistent. Rumours said that he’d been seen in Hungary recruiting followers, and that Jackson, who had left the council with him, had been spotted repeatedly in parts of Western Europe and along the east coast of the USA. According to Aunt Leanne, however, by the time these rumours reached the White Elm, there was no trace of any of their former councillors. Some people thought that this was a good thing – that Lisandro was clearly much cleverer and more gifted than the council, and a powerful contender for their loyalty should he ask for it.
Aunt Leanne was not like those people. A staunch believer in the council, she read the newsletter every month and occasionally wrote in to share her support. She frequently quoted the newsletters like they were scientific journals, and religiously drilled into her daughter and nieces the importance of supporting your chosen side.
‘They’re being very careful with their words these days,’ Aunt Leanne commented as she skimmed over her newsletter for the thousandth time. ‘They’ve put into action a long-term plan to protect communities and the council’s future from threat, but they haven’t written what they’re actually going to do.’
I silently ate my breakfast, avoiding everybody’s eyes. All things going smoothly, I was part of that plan. If I were on a council and I had spent half a year looking for a former colleague who had managed to totally evade all attempts to locate him, and I had absolutely no clue where he was or who among my society were even still on my side, I probably wouldn’t be publishing my grand plans in a monthly newsletter, either.
‘And they aren’t putting photos in anymore,’ Kelly complained. ‘They haven’t published a single picture of any of the new three councillors. Usually when they bring somebody new on, they do a huge feature so you can sort of get to know them. Then they hired these new people and just did a small article, with no pictures or last names or anything! No one seems to have seen them or to know who they are. You don’t even know if they’re real people. What’re their names again, Mummy?’ Kelly paused and looked to her mother, but Aunt Leanne’s mouth was full, so Kelly took a guess. ‘Jadon, Therese…Audrey?’
‘Aubrey,’ my aunt corrected once she’d swallowed, ‘Teresa and Jadon, from France, Romania and America, respectively. That’s all we know.’ She took a sip of her cooling coffee. ‘I suppose they’ve got their reasons for withholding their youngest councillors’ identities. It’s not that important that we know what they look like, after all. It was good to see that they brought on another sorceress this time around – brave girl.’
‘More juice, Aris
tea?’ Uncle Patrick asked me. I looked up at him. Uncle Patrick shared no blood with me, but a lot of the time I liked him more than either his wife or daughter. He was easy-going and slow to anger, a perfect combination in a mentor, which he’d become for me when I hit adolescence. A former teacher, he’d home-schooled me through my secondary school years and also worked with my mother to correct my various emotional issues.
At that moment there was a sharp knock at the door. Angela looked straight up at me.
‘Uh, yes, please,’ I said, looking over my shoulder towards the front room as my sister got up to answer the door.
‘Are you expecting someone?’ Aunt Leanne asked, always nosy. I shrugged while Uncle Patrick poured me another juice. It had been almost a week since Qasim had appeared and told me about the White Elm’s academy, and so far we’d heard nothing else.
Angela returned a few minutes later with a thick stack of envelopes.
‘Post on a Sunday?’ Uncle Patrick asked. Angela shook her head.
‘Who was it?’ I asked, wishing we’d mastered telepathy long ago so she could tell me everything without ever opening her mouth.
‘It was Qasim,’ she said, handing me most of the letters. I shoved my plate away and ripped the first envelope open. My aunt frowned.
‘Qasim? There’s a Qasim on the White Elm.’ She opened her newsletter and began skimming through it.
‘Yes, he was just here,’ Angela said, sitting down again. ‘He was here last week, too.’
Aunt Leanne said nothing for a few seconds, and though I knew she was dying to ask a thousand questions, she was also feeling slightly insulted that we hadn’t thought to tell her this already. She was extremely interested in everything anyone in her family got up to, from what I was doing on the weekend to what Angela got up to at her dull but well-paying receptionist job at an optometry clinic in town. I understood the possessiveness – her baby brother had died suddenly and tragically, and she’d taken it upon herself to take his place in loving and protecting us, his daughters – but that didn’t make it any less annoying at times.
Chosen (9781742844657) Page 4