Chosen (9781742844657) (5 page)

I looked back at my sister intently, silently begging. I wanted to go. I was going to learn how to scry, and maybe join the White Elm one day and matter and make big decisions, but right now, my sister stood between me and that future.

‘It's not a family decision,' Angela said finally. She shrugged. ‘I'm not Aristea's mother; I don't make decisions for her. If she wants to go, that's up to her. Are you interested?'

I stared at her. I shouldn't have been surprised. Angela was always like this – totally perfect.

‘Yes,' I managed. I swallowed. ‘Yes, I'd love to attend the White Elm's academy.'

‘Excellent,' Qasim said, standing. Angela and I did the same. He shook our hands. ‘I hope you'll understand when I request that this conversation does not leave this room. At this time we are trying to keep this very quiet, so I would prefer that you do not disclose anything pertaining to my visit to anyone until Aristea actually enrols.'

‘We understand,' Angela agreed immediately. Qasim nodded once, grateful, and withdrew a card from his pocket. My sister accepted it.

‘You can write to the White Elm at this post office box. I'll be in touch with further information. Thank you for your time.'

‘Yes, the same to you,' Angela said, walking with him to the front door. I stayed where I was. Had all that really just happened? I heard them exchange goodbyes and I heard the front door click shut. Had Angela really just said goodbye to Qasim,
the
Scrier for the White Elm? It sounded insane; I had to have imagined it. I hurried into the front room and wrenched open the door Angela had just closed.

Outside, there was nobody to be seen. Our quiet street was as devoid of activity as the rest of the suburb, and the rain had settled into a sort of drizzle.

‘I did imagine it,' I murmured, shutting the door again. Angela laughed and locked it.

‘No, he was here. But he'd be long gone by now. He's probably in Cambodia by now.'

‘Cambodia?'

‘Well, probably not, but he wouldn't have hung around waiting for a bus, would he?'

I realised that the White Elm contained some of the most powerful sorcerers in the world, to whom displacement was probably easier than running. Why had I entertained the thought that our visitor might be walking to fifty houses around the world? He'd popped up out of nowhere when I'd pocketed that stone. Qasim was clearly an accomplished Displacer.

‘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 dull 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.