I am delighted to feature Mark Stay's The Crow Folk on the blog today and to have an extract for you to sample. This is the first in The Witches of Woodville Trilogy and was published on 4th February by Simon and Schuster.
Faye Bright
always felt a little bit different. And today she’s found out why. She’s just
stumbled across her late mother’s diary which includes not only a spiffing
recipe for jam roly-poly, but spells, incantations, runes and recitations... a
witch's notebook.
And Faye has inherited her mother’s abilities.
Just in time,
too. The Crow Folk are coming. Led by the charismatic Pumpkinhead, their strange
magic threatens Faye and the villagers. Armed with little more than her mum's
words, her trusty bicycle, the grudging help of two bickering old ladies, and
some aggressive church bellringing, Faye will find herself on the front lines
of a war nobody expected.
Fall in love with the extraordinary world of Faye
Bright -it's Maisie Dobbs meets The Magicians.
Extract
June, 1940
War rages in Europe. The
defeated British Expeditionary Forces and their allies have retreated from
Dunkirk, and France has fallen to Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. In Britain, food is
rationed, and children are evacuated from cities to the countryside to escape the
coming bombardment. With so many men away fighting, it falls to the women on
the home front to keep the country running. The Women’s Land Army helps on the
farms, the Air Raid Precaution wardens watch the skies and the Women’s
Voluntary Service supports them all. Men too old to be conscripted sign up for
the Local Defence Volunteers (soon to be known as the Home Guard) and prepare
for invasion.
Meanwhile, in a quiet village
in rural Kent, strange things are afoot . . .
PROLOGUE
A field in
England
Under a sunset sky streaked
with pinks and yellows, a scarecrow stands alone in a field. A sorry sight in a
tatty red gingham frock that was once someone’s Sunday best, she has a sack for
a head, buttons for eyes and stitches for a smile. Draped in a musty old shawl,
she hangs on her cross like forgotten laundry. She has a name, Suky, but her
mind is as empty as her pockets.
Across the tilled soil comes
the metronomic clonk of a cowbell.
A figure stalks over the
field, swinging the cowbell like a priest with incense, but he moves
unnaturally, limbs all herky-jerky. His dusty dinner jacket billows behind him,
his scuffed top hat at a jaunty angle. Jackdaws warn him off with salvos of kar-kars, but he keeps coming. His
head: a pumpkin of prize-winning orange. His smile: a jagged sawtooth. His
eyes: triangles of black.
The jackdaws know enough to
fly away as he approaches, leaving Suky alone with him. He rattles the cowbell
some more to ensure they don’t come back. The echo dies and there is only the
gentle rumble of the breeze. The air is summer-sweet, the soil flaky, the sky
turned blood-red. Pumpkinhead slips the cowbell into his dinner jacket as he
moves closer. He circles Suky, his feet skipping like a dancer’s, then he
cradles her sackcloth head and whispers words in a language not heard since his
kind were banished.
The words sink inside her,
filling her to the brim. It takes time. Pumpkinhead is patient.
Suky shudders, her straw
stuffing rustles and she looks up, a light in her button eyes.
‘That’s it,’ Pumpkinhead
tells her. ‘Here, let me help you.’ He takes a folding knife from the band in
his top hat and cuts her bonds.
Suky’s head darts around. A
frightened newborn. ‘You are free, sister,’ he tells her. ‘We all are.’
A jangling and clanging comes across the field. Suky
looks to the horizon where a
dozen or more scarecrows dance in a parade towards her.
Suky’s sackcloth head creaks
as her stitches form a smile.
About the Author
Mark Stay co-wrote the screenplay for Robot Overlords which became a movie
with Sir Ben Kingsley and Gillian Anderson, and premiered at the 58th London
Film Festival. He is co-presenter of the Bestseller Experiment podcast and has
worked in bookselling and publishing for over twenty-five years. He lives in
Kent, England, with his family and a trio of retired chickens. He blogs and
humblebrags over at markstaywrites.com.
You can follow Mark here: Twitter | Website
Book link: Amazon UK
Thanks to Mark Stay, Simon and Schuster and Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the extract and a place on the tour.
Check out these great bloggers!
Thanks so much for the blog tour support x
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