The Crow Folk by Mark Stay #Extract #TheWitchesOfWoodville

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.  

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