This is the first book in The Black Magician series that Trudi Canavan wrote and in this story an orphan teenage girl named Sonea gets caught up in a protest.

As the crowd of people that Sonea was with threw their stones at the magicians, as the day was called the purge, and in her anger towards the magicians, Sonea discovers that she can do magic and it happened right in front of the magicians. Then what happen was she threw a stone and made it go through their magical barrier.

This stone that Sonea threw then hit a magician named Fergen on his temple and knocked him out. Then the magicians killed a person that was standing next to Sonea. They then saw that it wasn’t the person that they just killed as they realised that it was Sonea. She then ran and as she accepted her friend named Cery help she went into hiding and Cery took her to The Thieves.

As the magicians were looking for her and at the time Sonea and Cery believed that the magicians wanted to kill her.