First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page.
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first.
• Finally… reveal the book!

Happy Friday! I hope you’ve all have an enjoyable week. This has been my first week of days in a while & I have definitely missed being outside in the sunshine. I’m off of watch Six tomorrow, a musical about the six wives of Henry VII and I cannot wait. I’ve had the soundtrack on non stop since I got the tickets and am super excited to finally get to see it live. This weeks book is a historical fantasy, a genre I am loving at the minute, and if the first line is anything to go by, I’m going to love the MC.

“Siyon couldn’t get the damn square to line up, and the hangover definitely wasn’t helping.”

Well… that might not give much away, but I am definitely intrigued! Ready to find out what it is?

Since the city of Bezim was shaken half into the sea by a magical earthquake, the Inquisitors have policed alchemy with brutal efficiency. Nothing too powerful, too complicated, too much like real magic is allowed–and the careful science that’s left is kept too expensive for any but the rich and indolent to tinker with. Siyon Velo, a glorified errand boy scraping together lesson money from a little inter-planar fetch and carry, doesn’t qualify.

But when Siyon accidentally commits a public act of impossible magic, he’s catapulted into the limelight. Except the limelight is a bad place to be when the planes themselves start lurching out of alignment, threatening to send the rest of the city into the sea.

Now Siyon, a dockside brat who clawed his way up and proved himself on rooftops with saber in hand, might be Bezim’s only hope. Because if they don’t fix the cascading failures of magic in their plane, the Powers and their armies in the other three will do it for them.