Extract from Chapter Four: Adamarus

Not so long ago he'd helped dig bodies out from the ruins of Dover or London, or kept injured people alive with a touch of his magic. Even if their sufferings weren't due to him, they were the fault of his family and therefore a responsibility passed down to him. Helping these people was what he saw as duty. Sam had been neither born nor bred to this ideal. But, like several other human words, it helped justify actions prompted in him merely by impulse.

[...]

He came upon a crew of firefighters struggling before a burning ruin. They were trying to work their hose before the blaze caught the few nearby houses left intact. Sam stood across the road, gazing at the fire, his eyes distant. As he stared the flames seemed to shrink. Eventually there were just a few burning embers, which died as he clenched his fists. The whole process had taken him ten minutes of concentration.

Ten minutes of standing exposed and dumb.

"Papers!"

A Brownshirt officer, uniformed, his shiny buttons silly in the ruined street. He was holding out his hand imperiously. Sam dug around and produced his papers. The man flicked through them, looking ready for a fight on any pretext. A single flaw in Sam's documents, one look out of place, and Sam might be forced to get mythological. Which would be embarrassing.

But the papers, as Sam had known, were perfect. Unfortunately though, his look of dowdy submission was badly out of practice, and he peered at the Brownshirt with unabashed curiosity.

Sure enough, this made the man angry.

"What are you doing here, just staring?"

"I don't have anywhere to go."

~Catherine Webb, WayWalkers

Extract from Chapter One: The Linguist

"An eagle scared of heights." That was how one colleague summed up Sam Linnfer. "Probably has a mad wife in the attic, too."

Like all rumours, in time this comment circulated back to Sam, whose boyish face split in a grin of delight.

If there was one thing Sam liked about working as... whatever he was, he enjoyed the mystery accorded him by other people. It gave him great satisfaction to take the same trains, eat the same meals, wait at the same bus stops, and still be above it all, if only in the wild, fantastical tales told by everyone around him.

Though Sam was indeed different, everybody throughout the university somehow managed to know him. His sparky smile and disregard of authority endeared him to the undergraduates, and certainly he was bored at the very idea of the life led by the dons, as they ambled through a daily ritual whose high point seemed by exchanging Latin puns while dining in hall. But neither did Sam truly resemble a student, for despite his seeming youth he had an air of command, one that came from a long, unsung history.

He mostly wore black- a black coat buttoned up around a baggy black jumper, worn over a shapeless black shirt. Sam wore bad clothes as a kind of protection, which no-one had yet penetrated. People speculated, most of them inaccurately, on exactly what shape he was beneath all those layers. The idea that he wore black from vanity never survived a first meeting: with these clothes went a pair of terrible old trainers, and a scruffy blue and grey scarf hand-knitted for him by some person unknown. The whole effect was finished off by cuffs that were never done up, shirt buttons that didn't match and sometimes a jacket, haphazardly patched, that gave him the look of a fashionable scarecrow.

To round off this character, whose contradictions so attracted other people. He had thick black hair, and eyes so dark that they too seemed black. Not that many had met Sam's gaze for long enough to confirm this, since his gaze was something of unrivalled intensity. Though his voice bore the slightest accent, no one was sure where that accent came from. Some said his speech was northern; others held that there must be a touch of Gaelic in him. At one point he was credited with the ghost of a Welsh accent, so it became rumoured that Sam Linnfer had grown up in the wild Snowdonian mountains. A few who cherished difference in any form said he had to be a gypsy. Sam himself, when questioned on his past, was devious.

~Catherine Webb, WayWalkers