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Synopsis

lem gets a call that is every mother's worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn't recognize her mother. And she doesn't answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.

Clem travels the site of her daughter's accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin's strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

Fynhallow

Isle of Gunn, Orkney

May 2024

It's almost sunrise.

A magenta streak across the horizon, a smooth, glittering sea.

The ranger's dog is barking, a wild, staccato squeal that splits the calm.

She shouts at him now to be quiet, her voice growing louder, her pace quickening as she moves toward him. He's a springer spaniel, two years old, easily roused. But he's never barked like this before. As though he's afraid.

Fynhallow's sand is soft, silken white, a seam that joins the Isle of Gunn to the North Sea.

The silhouette of the dog noses and whines at a dark shape by the caves that run along the outcrop. It must be a dolphin, she thinks, perhaps a pilot whale. Except there's no fin, no shape of a tail.

She sees the shape of two legs, and gasps.

The curious odor that she caught earlier registers: something has been burning. The wind was in the wrong direction before, but now she catches notes of flame and meat. The dog paws the ground near the body; she sees the hands are bound together at the end of bent, blackened arms.

Her pulse racing, the ranger reaches for her phone and flicks on the torch, and when the harsh white light falls on a charred grimace she drops the phone to the ground with a shout.

It lands upward, the white glare of the torch falling on the body. It is clear that the person is dead.

And her torchlight picks out another shape farther along the bay. She breaks into a sprint, talking to the dog as he follows her, soothing him.

Somewhere, embers glisten in a nest of twigs like rubies.

She lurches to a stop, just where the tide meets the sand. At her feet is the body of a teenage girl, a Nirvana print visible on her sooty T-shirt, tattoos of mermaids and beer cans on her forearms. Her face is encrusted with blood. The ranger crouches, noticing the dog is licking the girl's foot and whining.

Oh God, she thinks, fear thumping in her throat. Was this an accident, or murder?

She moves her fingers to the girl's neck, gasping with relief as she finds a faint pulse.

The girl is still alive.

Quickly the ranger snatches up her phone and begins to dial.

CHAPTER TWO

Fynhallow

Isle of Gunn, Orkney

January 1594

ALISON

I wake to the smell of fire.

I rise quickly, scanning the earthen floor of the cottage lest the carpet of ferns I have placed to hold the heat has set alight. Silver moonlight pours through the cottage window that overlooks the bay. Above my bed, the posy of herbs I fastened to the beam is silvered with frost. The air is filled with winter's teeth.

I wrap my shawl across my shoulders against the chill and make for the stove, enjoying the warmth. It is not yet dawn, and no one else stirs, not even the chickens in the rafters nor the calf that Beatrice has taken as a pet. Outside, an owl calls, and I stiffen. An owl is an omen. It brings a message.

I hold my breath, listening for the owl's tidings. These should unfurl inside my mind as a thought with edges, an instinct. But only the faces of my children come, and I realize with a start that I cannot hear either of them. Edward and Beatrice are restless sleepers, often calling out in slumber, even responding to each other, as though they inhabit the same dream. But tonight, there is only the call of the owl and the distant wash of the sea.

Edward's bed is empty. I tear back the coverlet and search beneath the straw mattress lest he has fallen beneath the ground, dissolved into vapor. He is not there.

"Beatrice?"

She does not stir. I lunge toward the gaping square of the neuk bed, set into the stone wall of the cottage for warmth. The calfling is curled up on the coverlet, where it usually is, for Beatrice likes it to sleep with her. But my daughter is gone.

A cold terror sluices around my shoulders, enclosing my heart in ice. Have the children been taken? William is yet in Kirkwall, repairing the stonework in the cathedral. When last we spoke, he had redoubled his efforts with the cohorts there who seek to overthrow the earl. And although the plot has yet to take shape, their consultation has not been without danger-the calfling that sleeps now in my daughter's bed was born of the milking cow we found put to death outside our front door five nights afore. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear.

I pull on my kirtle, cloak, then my cap and boots, before dashing into the night air, scanning the field and the byre for any sign of the children. No sign of them. William tore out the hedges that ran along the bank so we could keep watch for approaching visitors, but in the dark no such view is afforded. The black sky is clear, a full moon fixed above, creating pools of light and wells of deep shadow.

"Edward? Beatrice? You must call if you hear me!"

All is silent.

And still, the wind carries the musk of an open flame.

I hasten after it, heading first to the caves that run along the outcrop above the beach. Behind me, the owl lifts silently toward the moon, its white wings set aglow by moonlight. But then it curves around behind me, headed toward the brae behind our cottage.

That is where I am to go.

Voices swirl in the air as I near the top of the brae, though the clamor of my heart is enough to drown out almost all sound. The climb to the towering rocks is fearsomely steep, and for much of the year it is almost impossible to traverse on account of ice or flooding. The children often take their sledges out in the snows and hurl themselves down apace, and I watch, praying for their safety. It is sheer desperation now that helps me climb to the top, tearing my boots on the rocks as I do. Drenched with sweat, I grasp the base of the rock that stands at the top of the hill and pull myself to the summit.

I am careful to conceal myself as I peer down into the fairy glen below. The glen is named for the spiral of rocks found there, which legend says marks the spot where the fae meet. Tonight, it seems a different kind of gathering is occurring. Two score men and one woman congregate around a large fire in the center of the spiral, smoke pluming toward the sky. As my thoughts begin to untangle from the snare of blind fear, I remember-tonight is no ordinary moon. It is the Wolf Moon, the first of the year, marking a season of change, bravery, and loyalty.

I crouch behind the rock, aware that someone is drumming, and someone is speaking. It is difficult to hear their words, but then a figure amidst the crowd takes a familiar shape, and I realize that it is my mother. She is wearing a long cloak made of wolfskins and a helmet of deer horns. She approaches the fire, holding hands with two others. A girl, and a boy, both wearing cloaks of wolfskins.

Edward and Beatrice.

I open my mouth to call out, but then I recognize others in the group. The woman singing and drumming the bodhran is Jonet. She and I played together throughout many a summer on Fynhallow when we were children. The two men standing in front of the fire with crossed halberds are Solveig Anderson and David Moncrief, the blades of their weapons glinting in the flame.

The gathering is the Triskele, the oldest clan of magic-wielders in the world. And they are initiating my children.

I creep down the other side of the hill toward another rock, my mind wheeling for answers. I am outnumbered, and the Triskele will not halt an initiation ceremony at my bidding. They will not hesitate to cut me down if I attempt to stop it.

Even though I was once one of them.

So I watch, my heart in my mouth, as the children answer questions posed to them by the halberd bearers. They must answer the questions correctly, or face being impaled. I scramble to my feet, the impulse to protect them overcoming my fear of their weapons. But as I move from behind the rock, poised to hurl myself down amidst the crowd, I see David and Solveig stepping aside, and the children kneel by the fire, their hands in the air in supplication.

The drumming grows faster, and a wild cry rises up from the group.

I watch on as Duncan, one of the older members of the group, large as a bear, approaches Edward, carrying what looks like a black slab of stone. But I know it is not a stone-it is a book. A book with black pages, its binding made from a tree.

The group begins to sing along to the drumbeat, a long, sustained note held in unison. My son holds the book to his face.

Suddenly, he lets out a long scream, a cry of anguish. My instinct is to race to him to see if he is well, if he is injured. But then Beatrice also shrieks like a wounded creature, and some long-buried memory rises up of my mother telling me to do the same.

My children are not merely being initiated into the Triskele. They are being ordained as Carriers, by signing the book.

One's purest signature is the sound of one's fear.

And The Book of Witching holds them all forever.

I lie still in bed, nerves jangling, anxious for my children's return. When dawn inches across the fields like a gold sheet drawn across a bed, I hear them tiptoeing into the cottage, trying not to rouse me. I force myself to lie still instead of jumping up to drill them with questions. Beatrice is merely six years of age and does not know my mind on the matter of the ritual. But Edward, at twelve, knows I will not stand for the Triskele.

I refuse to be wounded by his decision, however. He is yet young enough to be persuaded, and my mother is very persuasive. It is she who is responsible for this infraction, not my children. They are simply caught up in a family dispute.

It takes a great deal of patience to wait until I am free to head to my mother's cottage. She is choleric in the mornings, and besides, I need time to soften my anger. And I ought not to abandon my chores. I go into the field and let the sheep and goats out of the byre, scattering oats for them across the frosted ground and breaking the ice in their water trough. The well is similarly frozen over, and I gather a bucket of stones to break the surface before drawing water and carrying it home in buckets.

Beatrice and Edward are usually up by dawn, the noise of the chickens a blare through which even the dead could not sleep. But today they do not stir, exhausted from last night's initiation. I think of William, and how I dare not tell him. What if he had been here? Would my mother still have taken the children from their beds?

Unlike me, William would not have hesitated at the sight of the weapons wielded by the Triskele. He would have risked his life to stop the children being initiated.

I serve them oatcakes at the stove, picking motes of ash out of Beatrice's hair-remnants from last night's initiation.

"Are you well, Mother?" Edward asks. He can see I am ruminating.

I kneel between them. "I saw you last night. In the glen. You know my mind on the Triskele."

"But you are Triskele, Mama," Beatrice says, flicking a look at her brother. "Grandmother said you would be pleased."

"No, she didn't say that," Edward scolds. He glances at me, guilt written large upon his countenance. "She gave us a choice. She said we ask your permission, that you would likely say no. Or we could go with her in secret."

"And you chose to go in secret," I repeat slowly. "Despite knowing I would be displeased."

His cheeks burn, and he lowers his eyes.

"I want to be like you," Beatrice says, reaching out to touch my hair. She hates that her own hair is blonde, like William's, and not dark, like mine and Edward's. "And it was fun, Mama."

Edward scoffs. "You were scared."

"I was not scared," Beatrice flings back.

"You said the fire was scary."

"I said it was hot," she snaps, eyes blazing.

I tell them to be quiet, for my head is throbbing after a night of little sleep. "You must not tell your father," I say. "Agreed?"

"Why?" Beatrice asks, puzzled. "Will he be cross?"

"Yes, but not with you."

"With who, then?"

"Grandmother," Edward answers.

I head across ice-hardened fields under a glancing white sky, the mountain's round head blanched by a scree of cloud. The weather is wild again this morning, hard rain driving sideways as I make for the brae where my mother's cottage stands. Much of Orkney's land is fen, swamp, mire, sinuous lines of sandstone and basalt rimming the coastlines. But Gunn is heavily forested, copses and boscages undulating through deep valleys to the cliffs. Storms have rendered this woodland treacherously muddy, tree roots roping across the path. The old wych elm that marks a hundred paces to the pool has shed its golden leaves, standing naked save its fresh coat of lichen and beard of rooty branches. I am mindful always when I take this path of the coal seam that runs alongside, the signature of a dead forest from long ago. I appreciate the black line of it, the afterlife of all the trees and leaves that once flourished like the wych elm providing warmth and light in our homes so many years on.

I have been wary and cautious since I was a bairn. The only one of my mother's six weans to survive past adolescence, I sense I was her least favorite, or the one who inherited the fewest of her traits. I am more like my father was-quiet, preferring to wander the halls of my own mind than those of any dwelling wrought of stone or wood. My mother is bold as a wildcat, born for war-our family heralds both from the old clans of Orkney and the Vikings that usurped them, and surely my mother would feel at home on a longship, wielding an ax. Her nickname for me is peerie moose, which means "small mouse," on account of how quiet I was as a child. Or at least, that was how she explained it. She said I had a penchant for both hiding away from her and keeping so still and so quiet that I could never be found. I would both infuriate and scare her half to death, slipping inside a bale of rushes or a coffer while she called my name, frantic. When she shares such tales-laughing at the memory of it while using it to illustrate what a torment I was as a child-I wonder why my younger self sought to worry her so. I must have heard the fear in her voice as I hid in the dark, quiet as a rock.

Copyright © 2024 by C. J. Cooke

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