Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Fynhallow

Isle of Gunn, Orkney

November 1594

EDWARD

He sits by the stove in his cottage, biting his nails.

It is beginning, he knows it.

Deep down, in that wordless place that speaks only truth, he knows that everything he saw is starting to happen.

“Edward?”

Edward’s father, William, comes in through the door, carrying a bucket of fresh water from the well. He sets it down with a heavy thud, then lowers to check his son.

“Yes, Father?”

“How is your head?”

Strangely, the wound on the right side of his forehead has eased, but the muscles around his shoulders have started to scream, as though someone has tried to pull his head off his shoulders.

“It is well. Thank you, Father.”

His grandmother stirs the pot on the stove before pouring it into a cup. She pauses to pluck out what Edward thinks are two sticks, before the shape of them makes sense—they are bones. She is making him a potion, not soup, as he’d hoped.

“Drink this,” she says, passing him the cup, and he stares down at the murky liquid, his stomach turning. He has witnessed his grandmother grind animal bones to powder before pouring them into her brown bottles for various illnesses. On a wet night, she’ll hasten outside to collect slugs to boil, or deer droppings, which she claims are wonderful for treating the sweating sickness. She’ll scoop frogspawn or leeches out of the pond, though neither of these are as vile as the strange plants she grows in her garden. One of them is more beast than plant, for it has teeth and eats insects.

“Drink it,” she insists, and Edward raises the cup to his lips.

“Do no such thing, Edward,” his father says. William regards Mhairi with a cold eye. “I’ll have no witch potions in my house.”

“Now is not the time for this,” Mhairi snaps. “The children have had enough fighting among the adults.”

“Is Mother a witch?” Beatrice asks uncertainly from her bed.

“Of course not,” his father says, and Edward sees his grandmother flinch.

“Orkney has never punished its magic folk,” his grandmother says in a low voice. “Nor will it begin to.”

Her voice is confident, and Beatrice is assured. But Edward sees the look that travels between his father and grandmother. He knows well that they do not like each other, that they have never seen eye to eye. But now there is a mutual knowledge that swirls about the cottage like a bat, so real Edward feels he could reach out and touch it—his mother’s arrest has unleashed something on the island. Or perhaps it is spreading farther than Gunn. In his mind’s eye he sees a shadow creeping over all of Orkney.

He lies in bed, barely breathing, listening to the sound of his sister’s inhalation fall into a steady rhythm, the sticks crackling in the fire and the soft croon of the chickens in the rafters.

He thinks of that night in January, on the Wolf Moon, when he was initiated into the Triskele. His grandmother had told him and Beatrice what the ceremony would involve—that those members who lived in Orkney would come to welcome them, and that they would have to kneel before the bonfire while ancient melodies were sung, invoking the old gods and demons who once belonged to the clan. She warned him that The Book of Witching would require his “signature” in the form of a scream, and when Solveig held the book in front of him he had worried that he would not be able to produce a sound, given that his throat was tight with exhilaration.

But then Solveig had opened the book, revealing its strange, black pages without words, and an image had begun to stir.

And what he saw drew out the loudest, most harrowing scream of his life.

Later, he asked Beatrice if she had seen anything in the book, and she had shaken her head.

“It was just black pages,” she said, disappointed. “I don’t even think it’s a real book.”

She had pressed him then, curious as to why he would ask such a thing. But he didn’t tell her what he saw.

He will never tell. But he knows he must, he must do something to stop it from happening.