What shocked me was that my father raised his hand to my mother. I saw that, and I saw as well that she suddenly wasn’t there, but across the room, and she said that she would not live like that. If he didn’t care for what their daughter was—and she might add, that my sister was her father’s daughter as well as her mother’s—then he could leave. She said that with tremendous quiet, dignity like stone. A queen couldn’t have given her will more weight: it was a cathedral, or a mountain, when my mother said no.

So my father left. Not too much later, England had a witch-finder general for the first time in three hundred years, and laws that had grown dusty in the law-books sprung to life once more with all the malevolence of long-dead inquisitors. 

And when the witch-finders local and particular constituted themselves, my father was among their number.

***

As I begin revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, I will be posting character interview excerpts for the main cast of the novel. This week’s excerpt comes from the interview with Trevor, Emma’s cousin.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.