"Prologue" by Laura Peregrin

            A boy pushed a broom across a wooden floor. It wasn’t, the boy reflected, as if it was even his broom. It would be more accurate to say that he was the broom’s boy. He had belonged to the broom for as long as he could remember, and the broom belonged to a wizard. Most boys his age – approximately 13, though his memory wasn’t perfect – held firm views regarding wizards and magic. Some cherished an excited and extravagant belief in dragons, bright explosions and wicked potions whilst others talked loudly and confidently about their disbelief. The boy, however, knew about magic, and he knew that it involved chalk, smells, crucibles, stains, and sootmarks on the floors, the walls and, on a few occasions, the ceiling. It involved the broom and, by extension, himself.

            Today was no different. He and the broom had a rhythm, and the rough noise it made across the floor was soothing. He was diligently erasing a magic circle, chalked in various dusty colours across most of the uneven floorboards. The green was proving particularly stubborn. It would in all likelihood need the mop later. The eldritch signs, and runes suggestive of a non-Euclidean geometry, might have troubled a more imaginative viewer, but the boy brushed them until they were nothing more than a swirl of dust motes in the dull air, and then gone. You could breathe magic in this room. It made the boy cough. There were no windows, so the boy always brought a stub of tallow candle with him to light the corners and show any bits he might have missed. There was soot today as well as chalk, and some other more liquid stains across one edge of the circle. Definitely a mop job.

Except – the candle light picked out something lying inside the circle. He pushed it with the broom, and it fluttered incongruously before settling just by a half-erased sigil. A feather! The boy was rarely curious about anything, but something about the lightness of it in this perpetually darkened room caught his attention. He squatted down on his haunches to have a look at it. It was a pale colour, not exactly white but not exactly any other colour that the boy knew either. If he looked at it from a different angle, it almost seemed that the colour changed. One edge was blackened as if burnt, and some parts had been bent and ruffled. He picked it up, and with uncharacteristic gentleness smoothed the damaged edges. It felt warm, like something that was very hot a while ago. The crucibles he scrubbed sometimes felt like that. The crucibles, however, didn’t feel soft or make a whispery noise under his fingers as he rubbed them. He slipped the feather under his grubby tunic, where it settled against his skin like it belonged there. He looked furtively at the door as he did so, wondering if the wizard wanted the feather too, and if he was somehow stealing it, being a bad boy. But he had found the feather on the floor, whilst cleaning up – surely the wizard didn’t want something that was about to be cleaned up. Maybe he would ask the wizard about it later…

He never got round to mentioning it to the wizard, but surely if the wizard had wanted it, he would have said something.

Late that night, the boy crept to the fire pit and lit his candlestub from the embers. Shielding it with his hand, he carried it back to the alcove that contained his straw bed. He drew the ragged curtain closed, settling himself into the flickery, slightly fetid gloom. He could hear and feel his heartbeat, loud and erratic even though he had already heard the yells and thuds begin that characterised the wizard’s nightmares. The knife he had forgotten to return to the kitchen after preparing the wizard’s evening meal was sitting ready on the bed, next to the feather itself. For a moment he hesitated to apply the knife to such an obviously, disturbingly, perfect thing but the plan was clear in his head. He had watched the wizard writing tonight, seen the way the pen seemed like an extension of the wizard’s hand and mind. He knew that the wizard’s power came from words he read or wrote down in his spellbooks. The boy was determined that he, too, would learn to read and write, and for that he would need a pen.

The boy’s face was scrumpled into a frown of concentration as he chipped away at the quill of the feather. Even so, the knife slipped and nicked the flesh of his hand. The blood seemed unnaturally bright in the candlelight as it flowed over the hand and the feather. The boy sucked at his hand, and reached for a rag to clean the feather. It didn’t need it. The blood was seeping into the quill, like ink. There was a reddish tint to its glistening colours now. He checked the nib – it seemed to be ready. He had a scrap of coarse paper ready, but had forgotten the ink. Instead, he tentatively touched the feather to the cut. It hurt – not just the scratch he had expected, and the background of the cut itself, but a deep, sharp, stabbing hurt, like something was cutting to the centre of him. It was over in seconds, though, and the boy held the loaded quill above the paper. A strange, expectant, excited feeling coursed through him. Suddenly, he knew how to write, and what to write. He began with:

‘My name is Ramael’