Tom Swinton is not looking forward to the summer. His parents are dead, and he is going to have to spend the holidays in his boarding school. But when he receives a mysterious letter inviting him to come to his uncle’s farm, he is determined to go, even though he has never heard of this uncle, James Swinton, commonly known as Jack.

His uncle seems genial enough at first; but the silver-haired and silver-eyed boy, Kit, who does most of the work about Mundham Farm, is fearful and strange; and the attractive young woman, Zita, who keeps house and prepares mysterious potions, is certainly no ordinary housekeeper.

Jack reveals to Tom that he needs his help to protect the farm from unspecified forces, and his principal duty will be to work with Kit to ”make the wards” – which is a way of surrounding the farm with some kind of magical protection. Jack explains that the farm can only be properly protected if a Swinton performs this ritual, and since Tom is the last of the line, it is up to him to protect Mundham. This is the first inkling Tom has that he may himself have magical powers.

The forces threatening the farm are the Samdya, a tribe of noble but wild and violent supernatural beings, who sometimes take a kind of human form and for whom the balance of the world is important. Tom meets one of these mysterious beings in the woods near the farm, and she tells him that the reason the Samdhya are constantly attacking Mundham is because they want to rescue one of their number who has been held captive by Jack for many decades, maybe even centuries. By now, Tom knows that Zita and Kit are also held against their will on the farm and it is not long before he realises that he too has no way of escaping: he is bound by Jack’s evil spells. Jack tries to win Tom over by offering to show him his dead parents, whom Tom longs to see, and for a while he is taken in by false images of his mother and father; but when he finally witnesses the scene of his parents’ death by drowning, the awful realisation dawns that it was Jack who summoned up the terrible storm that swept over the boat and killed them.

When Jack imprisons Kit, Zita and Tom in what appears to be a glass box, but is really a kind of parallel world, it takes all of Zita’s considerable magical powers to help them escape, but they are not free for long.

Tom confronts Jack on several occasions, but Jack is very powerful and always emerges victorious. When the awful sound of the Samdhya wardrums announces that they are gathering and are about to descend on the farm to rescue the captive, Tom knows he must find a way to overcome his enemy.

Once Jack is defeated, trapped inside his own magical creation and flung to his death, the farm and its inhabitants are released from the painful spells in which he had enmeshed them, and peace is restored between the Samdhya and the humans.

© 2021 Little Island Books (كتاب ): 9781915071156

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