Cover

‘Use the Charter,’ cried Kargrin. ‘Defend yourself!’

Rage filled Clariel. Her nostrils flared open as she exhaled and almost closed shut as she breathed in. She picked up one of the massive benches and threw it up at Kargrin, but he jumped away, across twelve feet or more to the next beam end, an impossible jump were he not aided by some magic. Clariel dropped her knife and ran towards him, raging. She swarmed up the wall, her fingers thrust into the tiniest cracks between stones, dislodging ancient mortar, but even so she could not find enough hand- and footholds. She fell back, immediately circling to find a weapon, something to throw at the enemy above her. But even as her hand closed upon a fallen piece of stone the size of an apple, a glowing net of Charter marks fell on her from above, wrapped itself around her three times and bound her as securely as a spider ever tied a fly.

Title Page

Dedication

To Anna, Thomas and Edward,
and all my family and friends
and
to the memory of poet, kind-hearted
cynic and good friend
Andrew Etheridge
1963–2012

This book is set approximately six hundred years before the birth of Sabriel.

Five Great Charters knit the land

Together linked, hand in hand

One in the people who wear the crown

Two in the folk who keep the Dead down

Three and Five became stone and mortar

Four sees all in frozen water.

Maps

prologue

Old Marral the fisherman lived in one of the oddest parts of Belisaere, the ancient capital of the Old Kingdom. A proud city with high walls to defend against living foes, and rushing aqueducts to keep out the Dead, one tiny corner of the great metropolis lay outside the protection of both wall and water.

Known to all simply as the Islet, it was a rocky island just beyond the city’s southeast sea tower. Joined to the mainland by a rough stone causeway save at the highest tides, the island was inhabited by the poorest of the poor, the fisher-folk who had lost their boats, or drank too much, or had suffered some calamity that kept them from the city’s more prosperous fishing harbour further to the north.

No one knew what had caused Old Marral to come to the Islet. He had been there as long as anyone could remember, living in a shack made of driftwood and torn sailcloth, distinguished from the dozen or so other hovels on the Islet only by its doorway, in which a heavy curtain made of hundreds of shark teeth knotted onto a discarded fishing net served as a door.