Excerpt from Plague Land by S.D. Sykes, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And what shame. For the face of their sacrifice is stitched into my memory like a tapestry. A tapestry that cannot be unpicked.

But this is not the beginning of my story.

It began before. After the blackest of all mortalities. The Great Plague.

Chapter One

It was a hot summer's morning in June of this year when I first saw them – advancing towards Somershill like a band of ragged players. I would tell you they were a mob, except their numbers were so depleted that a gaggle would be a better description. And I would tell you I knew their purpose in coming here, but I had taken to hiding in the manor house and keeping my nose in a book. At their head was John of Cornwall, a humorless clenched-fist of a man, whose recent appointment to parish priest rested purely upon his still being alive.

My mother bustled over to me. She had spied the group from our upstairs window, despite her claims to be practically blind. 'Go and see what they want, Oswald,' she said, digging her pincer claw into my arm.

I had been trying to decipher last year's farm ledgers, but the reeve's handwriting was poor and he had spilled ale upon the parchment.

Mother poked at me again. 'Go on. It's your duty now.'

'Yes, little brother,' said my sister Clemence, from the corner where she skulked with her sourly-stitched embroidery.'Though I'm surprised you allow such people to approach by the main gate.'

'I'll send Gilbert to deal with them,' I said, determining not to look up from my work.

'You can't. He's attending to the barrels from the garderobe.' I had my back to Clemence, but I sensed she was pulling a face.

'You sent him there yourself, Oswald.'

'Then I'll send somebody else.' I looked to Clemence's servant Humbert, a boy the size of a door who was holding both of his enormous hands in the air so that Clemence might wind her yarn about his fingers. His boyish eyes never leaving his mistress's face.

She laughed. 'You can't have Humbert either. He's too busy.'

Abandoning the ledgers, I descended to the great hall where one of the visiting party was now knocking at the main door with intensifying boldness. Lifting the heavy latch I found the culprit to be John of Cornwall, though he quickly dropped his wooden staff on seeing my face and not that of a servant's on the other side of the threshold. I might have reminded him that such a wooden staff should have been deposited at the gatehouse, like any other potential weapon, but seeing as our gatekeeper was now employed as our valet, I did not challenge him.

'A girl has been savaged in the forest,' John of Cornwall told me, without so much as a formal greeting.

I hardly knew what to say to this announcement and must have let my mouth hang open a little too long.

A man with the skin of a cankered apple then bowed.'The girl's dead, my lord. Gored by a wild animal.' When I continued to remain silent, the man looked about uneasily at his companions.

I found my tongue quickly, as they clearly thought me foolish. 'Was it a wolf attack?' I asked.

The man shook his head. 'No wolves left in Kent, sire.' 'But perhaps they've returned? Nobody has hunted the creatures since the outbreak of the Plague. As far as I know.'

John of Cornwall pushed the man aside. 'My lord. It is another creature responsible for taking the girl's wretched life.' His entourage groaned before falling silent and looking to me again for a response…

From Plague Land by S. D. Sykes. Published by Pegasus Books. Reprinted with permission