Extracts from The Angel Makers -The Village Wise Man

Sari is fourteen years old when they carry her father out, carry him through the village lanes, his face bare and blank to the wide sky, carry him through the summer wildflowers that bloom alongside the river, carry him to the cemetery. It is a public end for a private man, infused with the drama that makes village life bearable; a final chance to be the centre of attention, something that Jan Arany had never sought. Sari doesn't cry, because that isn't her way; instead, she wraps a cloak of silence around herself, and lets the other village women do the wailing for her. Her silence almost gives the impression of absence. It is misleading.

Her father had been a Wise Man, respected, a táltos , and they'd lived for all of Sari's life on the outskirts of the village, in a wooden house with steps that creaked, the grass in front of it worn thin by the feet of villagers in search of cures, help or salvation. Her father had been a big man, tall, broad-shouldered, light-haired – unusual in that place – a wide face like the sun, Sari thinks: warm, but remote. The villagers had loved him and feared him in equal measure. They just fear Sari.

As long as she can remember, she's been skirted by whispers wherever she goes. Her father had tried to explain it. ‘It's because they loved your mother,' he said, but that's never made sense to Sari. She loves her mother too, a wraith-figure whom she's never met, only heard about, and woven her image out of stories and imagination; a young woman – barely older than Sari now – who had left her family, smiling, to marry Jan Arany. Still smiling, she'd swollen with Sari inside her, and then split open at Sari's birth, and died.

‘I didn't want her to die,' Sari would say to her father, after someone or other had hissed witch behind her back.

‘I know,' he said, ‘But they just think it's unlucky, that's all.'

That's not all, though, and Sari knows it…