A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 279: The Grave of Heaven

Siobhan

Month 8, Day 15, Friday 11:00 p.m.

Siobhan didn’t discover the loose thread of memory hanging from the seal Grandfather had woven until later, when the thought arose of a man with a posh accent and skin a different shade of brown than hers. She had met the man before Grandfather did, before he even knew the stranger had arrived. The memory was innocuous, but it ached like a tooth just beginning to come loose. She could tell that if she wiggled it, that little wound might grow until something fell out and left behind a hole.

She did her best not to think on it. The vow Grandfather had bound her to helped.

The things she experienced over the next three months helped, too, at least as a distraction from any matters less urgent than day-to-day survival. Siobhan learned hunger and loneliness, rage and sorrow. She learned the solitude that came from no one in the world remembering her name, and the stark purpose born of having only her own wits and guile to keep her from becoming a corpse dumped in some stinking gutter. She learned that neither her wits nor her guile were enough. She learned again and again what it meant to be helpless in the face of power.

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These feelings, she thought she had known before. She had not. This was the kind of knowing that had to be beaten into her flesh and bones and branded line by line into her memory. This new knowledge of reality dug itself into her until it felt like it belonged, until it became part of her structure.

Three months after leaving her house behind, Siobhan curled up in the depression she’d dug between the roots of a massive tree and nibbled on the stale loaf of bread she’d stolen. She had no protein, which did not make a healthy diet or support a strong mind and Will, but it was much more important to sate the rabid, feverish hunger turning her insides into knots.

That night, as the warm, foggy wind blew over her hiding space, she dreamed of hands coated in a slimy, faintly sweet liquid, and a hungry sky filled with pus-boil, green-and-purple clouds.

She woke screaming.The story continues in A Practical Guide to Sorcery Book VII: A Pact of Stars

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