CHAPTER TWO

Autumn

Coursework: Writing to Inform “My Life and Purpose”

My name is Autumn Rose Al-Summers. I am almost sixteen years old and a Sage. As a guardian, I have one purpose in life: to defend humans, namely the students of Kable Community College, against the Extermino, a group of Sage who do not follow the rule of our monarch and who commit such terrible acts their scars have turned to gray.

My grandmother, whom I lived with for eight years at St. Sapphire’s School in London, is dead. Therefore, as a minor by human law, I am compelled to live with my parents in a sleepy seaside town on the south coast of Devon, possibly the most Sage-deprived place on Earth.

My people, the Sage, are feared, ridiculed, and held in awe by the humans of this dimension due to their self-administered wish to be ignorant of our culture. This is demonstrated quite perfectly by my experience of being a guardian: I started at Kable a year ago, and ever since have faced merciless bullying, with few friends to my name.

Thankfully, I am about to embark upon my last year of compulsory education as far as humans are concerned, and all I have to do is endure ten more months of torture before I am free of the system and the required two years as a guardian. Yet, despite my hate of the place, you insist on my continuing to A-level at Kable. But I assure you: the Damned will set down their knives before that occurs.

Moving on. I have blond hair. Auburn streaks. Natural, I might add. Liquid amber eyes. My legs are too short. My skin burns far too easily. (There, I will point out, are the simple sentences you complain my writing lacks.)

And the worst thing? (I have inserted a rhetorical question. Am I ticking the grading-rubric boxes now?) The thing that means as a Sage, I can be singled out and targeted? The thing that means I am instantly identifiable as not belonging to the human race?

My scars.

All Sage bear them on their right side, and each Sage’s scars are different, like a fingerprint, serving as a reminder of what we are, what we possess and what we wield.

There. That is my life.

P.S. I refuse to type my work, so you, sir—and the examiner, if my work is called for moderation—will have to, as you put it, “decipher” the elegant, curling script I was tutored in from age six. Furthermore, I found this whole exercise to be offensive to my intelligence. In its entirety, the coursework could have been written in half a lesson; setting it as summer homework was unnecessary.

I scanned through the sheet again, feeling my lips flatten. Drivel. It was drivel—albeit truthful drivel, but such a rant would earn me a detention, or at the very least a caution. Yet the lure of causing a stir remained, forcing me to slide it into a plastic envelope and place it into my schoolbag, ready for the first day of the new academic year.

Returning to my mirror, I grabbed a brush and roughly pulled it through my thick hair, wincing as it tugged on the blond tangles. Deciding I could not be bothered with straightening it, I mumbled a few words and watched as it smoothed out. After running an eye pencil around my eyes, I grabbed my satchel and jumped the stairs in one, knowing I was verging on being late.

“Mother! I’m flying to school, so you don’t need to drop me off at the ferry.”

Hearing no answer, I rounded the corner into the kitchen, which turned out to be empty. I grabbed a freshly made piece of toast and stuffed it into my mouth.

“Mother!” I attempted to yell, the sound muffled by my stolen breakfast.

The call of “Living room!” came back and, hurrying into the hall, I pushed the door open to see her curled up on the divan with her laptop, busy typing away. I frowned at the figures and symbols spread across the screen.

“I’m flying to school.”

She sighed, placing her laptop aside and standing up to peck me on the cheek. Noticing my expression, she shut the lid on the laptop. “It’s a work assignment. Speaking of my job, you know you’ll be home alone for most of the week while your father and I are working in London, don’t you? So no wild parties. Understood?”

I sighed in exasperation, a habit I had around my mother. “It would be fruitless to plan a party. Nobody would come.”

“Hmm,” she hummed, casting a cynical eye over me. “Be good, either way. I’ll probably be gone before you get back, but there is plenty of food in the freezer and I’ve left some pizzas and some meat stuff in case you want any of the girls around, okay? You shouldn’t need to go shopping; we’ll be home on Thursday. Autumn, are you even listening?”

Busy creating a spell to transport my satchel to school, I clearly wasn’t. “I’m positive I can survive for four days. It’snot as though you haven’t been away before.”

My satchel disappeared into thin air and I retreated into the hallway, grabbing my scabbard off the rack, feeling the familiar weight of my sword balanced on my left hip as I fastened it on. I wouldn’t normally take it, or the knife that joined it, but this was the first day of the term: I might as well keep up appearances and make an impression on the new students. Tugging on my blouse and rolling my skirt up a couple of inches, I slipped my flimsy little dolly shoes on, teasing a strand of hair back into place.

“Oh, Autumn, I don’t know why you do all of that,” my mother said, peering into the hallway after me. “You’re beautiful without all that makeup and when you let your hair curl you look just like your grandmother.” She placed her hands on my shoulders and rubbed them in circles. I shrugged them off.

I’m a match in the darkness compared to her beacon of elegance and decorum. Strike me and I’d struggle to even fizzle; she would burn for hours.

“It’s what all the other girls do, so don’t fuss.”

She backed off. “You know you don’t have to wear makeup and short skirts to fit in, Autumn. Just be yourself and they’ll accept you.”

I scoffed then, ignoring the mirror because I knew it would reflect the scars that encased the entire right side of my body. Twisting and turning beneath my tights, they were a bright red, tapering to burgundy along the tips. Like the blood grass in the garden, my grandmother always said. Imperata cylindrica. Learn your Latin. They faded to ochre and yellow on my arms, before lapsing into pale gold across my face.

“Except being myself is being a Sage, and no one around here likes a Sage.”

Rolling my skirt up even further just to emphasize my point, I placed a hand on the door.

“Then at least take a coat, it’s supposed to rain today.” She unhooked one off the rack and held it out to me. I stared at it like it was an explosive object until she let her hand fall, allowing me to glare at her instead of the coat.

“It’s not going to rain.”

“You should take one anyway.”

“It’s not going to rain,” I repeated, still glaring.

“But the weatherman predicted—”

“Mother, I take my magic from the elements; I’m sure I know whether it’s going to rain or not!” I snapped, a spark of fire flickering to life on the tip of my index finger. Quite used to my volatile emotions, my mother simply placed her hands on her h*ps and I knew I was in for a lecture on fire safety. Not wanting to stop and hear it, I opened the door and navigated my way between the overgrowing fuchsias alongside the path, neglected over the past weeks.

“I do not want such an attitude in this house, Autumn Rose Summers! I’m tired of your lack of respect!”

Closing the low, whitewashed garden gate behind me, I stepped out onto the oak- and maple-lined pavement, leaves already surrendering to my namesake. I paused as the latch dropped and clicked shut.

“My name is Al-Summers, not Summers.”

She disappeared behind the maple tree in our front garden, the slam of the door telling me she had heard me.

Your mother is not like us, Autumn. She is human. Sagean blood does not run in her veins like it does in your blood, or your father’s blood.

But Father cannot use magic, Grandmother.

Carrying on along the sidewalk, I felt my spirits drop. The prospect of the first day back to school was not a happy one.

Magic sometimes skips generations.

Castigation was the name of the game at Kable, and it had left me despising every jibe-filled hour, flourished and garnished with stares, whispers, and an aura of fear that followed me like the wind chases the rain.

But why, Grandmother?

The curriculum was slow, too, but I had learned one thing: adaption was a means to survival.

It has good reason, child.

“Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning!” my batty neighbor Mr. Wovarly called over his fence, gesturing to the peach-tinted sky. “It’ll rain later. Be careful you don’t catch a chill, m’dear!”

I forced a smile and nodded my head with unneeded exaggeration. “I will, Mr. Wovarly.”

I dodged his tiny terrier, Fluffy, who was leaping at the gaps in the fence, barking his small head off. Letting the smile fade, I ran the last few steps of the street and leaped into the air, feeling the familiar thrill of taking to the skies. Gaining height, wind whipping my hair back into a mess, I soared higher and higher, leaving the trees of my road far behind.