A peek into "Fireside Magic"...

...to distract me from Covid!

Happy Friday folks,

I’ve really enjoyed getting into a weekly flow here. I feel I can write more freely, like scribbling in a diary, and my creative spirit has been given the reprieve from social media that it needed.

Unfortunately, Covid has finally caught up with me - quite annoying, having avoided it so long! Rather than miss this week’s newsletter I thought I’d share something I could compile easily.

So, I decided on an excerpt from each tale in my short story collection, Fireside Magic.

I wish I could introduce them in a mystical, witchy way but Covid’s fogged up my brain! All I can think to tell you is that they’re inspired by magic, Scottish folklore, and the connection between Gaelic language and landscape.

I hope you enjoy them 😊

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Granny Black

“You see the factory, over there? And Hugh Mollison’s garage?”

I nodded, following Granny Bell’s finger. We’d paused on her doorstep, laden with carrier bags from a trip down the town.

“Once upon a time—” Granny wheezed; a cough rattled up her throat. “’Scuse me. Once upon a time that bit of land was wood. All the woods and hills around here were filled with wild creatures: lynx, capercaillie, wildcats, wolves.”

Wind whipped sleet into my eyes, but I withstood it for a moment, trying to imagine nocturnal beasts with eyes green as algae slipping between the puttering cars and shopping trolleys.

“Where did the animals go?” I asked.

Granny Bell wiped the corners of her mouth with a damp hankie. I could hear the fluid burbling in her chest. We ought to be inside; the cold air went for her lungs.

“I’m not sure, lass. I expect anything wild disappeared when the woods got cut down to build the factory.”

Maybe Granny Bell saw concern in my eyes, for I wasn’t thinking of the wild animals anymore. It seemed to me that in the time it took us to walk into town and back, Granny had become frailer, stooping against the door to catch her breath.

She straightened, a mischievous smile parting her lips. “The only heartless, wild beast left to fear in this town is your Granny Black!”

She loosed her familiar chuckle, a laugh so free of bitterness or illness that my worry melted and I laughed too.

---

Auntie Hare

There’s a story about Auntie Lina that can’t be true. Dad likes to tell it at family gatherings. The last time was Hogmanay. It goes like this…

Auntie Lina can transform into a hare. The hare is the old familiar of Scottish witches, their sprightly link between here and the otherworld. Some believe this otherworld to be Fairy, a land without sun or moon, where the hidden ones dance under the hills and silver the air with a language only trees and the wind can understand.

When Lina is a hare, she speeds across the fields (Auntie Lina lives in a big farmhouse in the middle of nowhere) until she reaches the town. In this town, our town, lives a man who Auntie Lina longed to marry. He was a no-good poacher that started courting her when she was sixteen. Granddad scared off the poacher and shut Lina up in her room.

“For her own good,” Dad would say.

Auntie Lina pined, for years and years. But when she grew old enough to leave home, her poacher had already married. She visited the poacher’s doorstep in the guise of a hare and worked cantrips on his wife. She caused three miscarriages and the couple despaired. Eventually, the poacher got wise to this hare following him. He knew it was a witch in disguise.

One night he set his lurcher on it. Auntie Lina had to run like billy-oh to escape. The dog hadn’t been fed in days and hunger made it fast as a whip. Its jaws clenched around Lina’s hind leg. She released a blood-curdling scream.

My Lina, thought the poacher.

He called the dog off with a dried scrap of rabbit.

The next day, he visited Auntie Lina’s lonely old farmhouse. No one answered the door but the poacher noticed a smear of blood on the doorstep. He found a way in through an open window. He called Lina’s name through the house but received only echoes.

He climbed the stairs, called out again. A feathery, faint voice graced the dusty air in reply.

He made his way through the rambling rooms, found a cobwebbed nursery that had never seen a child and kitchens that hadn’t seen a broom (but plenty cats, oh you want to have seen the hair!). Eventually, he reached a bedroom door.

“I’m hurt, I’m hurt,” a voice pleaded.

The poacher found Auntie Lina lying abed in ivory negligee thin as skin, her calf bound with a blood-soaked cloth. The poacher peeled back the sticky dressing and found a deep wound worried by teeth.

“I fell down the stairs,” said Auntie Lina.

“Into a steel trap?” asked the poacher. He’d seen torn flesh aplenty and knew his lurcher’s handiwork.

“You’re here to take care of me, aren’t you? I always knew you’d come back.”

Here, Dad would pause to remind us that Lina likes attention, going so far as to invent rare cancers and phantom pregnancies. The poacher, of course, had seen animals play dead. He knew that it wasn’t a woman lying on the bed, nightwear provocatively disarrayed, but a witch.

---

The Raven Knight

“I shall go into a hare.”

I scent it on the air, a humid, damp smell despite December’s chill. An essence released from the earth’s pores. I’m taught like a bowstring, ready to fly, yet I inch my muscles slowly towards the source of the magic. Frosted grass scrapes against my fur as I lope over the furrows on all fours. If I am in a dream, it’s one I can control.

Christsonday’s spell is working. I can feel the animal’s spirit, panicked by a human presence it doesn’t understand. I force my will against its brute instinct, urging it over an open field. The drone of pipes across the moon-silvered furrows sets foamy bubbles to lather at the corner of my lips. The hare’s blind panic nearly sends me bolting for the edge of the wood but I’m curious. Again, I feel a playful tugging at my soul, as though a gossamer thin thread connects me to the melody winding over the field. I press my human will against the hare’s, spurring the creature towards the sound even as my limbs turn heavy in the bed at home.

The ruins of the old kirk glow with profane fires. My shadow twists upon the grass, more alive than me. Living gargoyles perch atop the graves, inspecting my arrival with dark-brown, bulging eyes. What are they? Miniature beings that could dance on a leaf tip, and others like long-eared cats with clever fingers pliant as birch bark. I know they are the ones who have been pulling out my hair. Tall beings haunt the graves too, and ones that might be tall if their spines weren’t so crooked.

Why would creatures so far from heaven’s light make a Christian burial ground their macabre theatre? Why not the cathedral of trees on our doorstep?

This was our meeting place before God arrived.

The reply rests in my blood like an adder, coiled and venomous.

Wet earth soils the air though the ground is hard beneath my paws. In a dishevelled bed, five miles away, my hands are cold.

Witches writhe among the graves, angel-faced and shaggy haired. Their eyes glint with gilded, tawny light. Nicnevin is of a height with the tallest grave. A crown rears from her head like antlers, though as I inch closer, I see that it is a crown of mottled roots, milk-white and twisted. A silver gown glides over limbs thick and burred as branches. Frost films her skin like the glaze of ice over the gravestones. She beats her palms together while a horned shadow bends over a chanter made from bone. The player’s tapered fingers twirl upon the finger holes with diabolic grace. His reel quickens and the witches’ heels barely graze the earth.

---

Blackthorn Winter

When she was little Fiona reached out of her crib and pricked her thumb on a blackthorn spike.

You’d think the sap poisonous by the way her mother screamed. Before anyone could reach the crib, Fiona had sucked the blood away.

Fiona grew, but the jagged crescent scar on her thumb pad remained. She always maintained that she hadn’t seen the spiny blackthorn branch and had thought she was reaching for the safety of her grandmother’s arms.

“You know fine the pest took Granny not a week before. What a wicked thing to say,” her mother would scold.

Over the years, Fiona learnt never to mention the blackthorn. Her mother was a superstitious pragmatist, who never let a bit of corn fall to the ground when taking in a sheaf, lest next year’s harvest be bad. Or placed rowan over the byre door to keep witches from spoiling Annabelle’s milk. She performed these rituals as her mother and grandmother had before her, and on balance, they worked. They’d lost a couple of young, but no more than a hen would lose to a fox, and they rarely went hungry in winter. But her husband didn’t share her prudence, having been the one to leave Fiona, rosy-cheeked and squalling, in the shade of the blackthorn.

Since then, her mother had indulged in hope. Slowly the old ways slipped from habit and she began and she began to place wishes on the stars.

On All Hallow’s Eve, the Cailleach would cast her cloak over the land, turning the nights so long and black that the cold, jagged light of the stars was the only brightness they could cling to. Fiona would overhear the same wish different ways, falling clumsily from numb lips.

A wish for the cuckoo’s bubbling call. A wish for Annabelle, father’s prize cow, to survive the lean times ahead. Wishes for honey cakes and elderflower wine. A wish for the light to linger just a wee bit longer. Wishes uttered so fervently that their heat might be enough to prevent one freezing to the bedsheets.

Fiona used to wish the winter away, too. How many times had she prayed for snowdrops before Candlemas?

But the blackthorn’s magic hadn’t entirely left her veins.

Fiona had always sucked her thumb, a habit her parents and siblings discouraged. Her mother put her in mittens. Her father warned her that thumb-sucking lead to buck teeth, that no man wanted a horse-toothed wife. Her older siblings jeered that thumb-sucking was for babies. Eventually, her mother resorted to smearing Fiona’s thumb in vinegar. Though, as soon as Fiona got the chance, she dunked her vinegary thumb in the nearest icy burn, then sat on the bank, thumb lodged resolutely back against the roof of her mouth.

If she sucked at the scar hard enough, strange memories entered her consciousness. A bent-backed woman peering over her crib, silvery hair threaded through blackthorn spines. Her eyes shone like crystal, her skin brown and leathery like oak bark. In time, Fiona realised it wasn’t her granny, but she had to be someone’s granny.

---

The Coming of Brìde

They clambered out of the window and into the flowerbed. Death perfumed the air. They hastily scooped aside piles of earth with their bare hands until they’d made an egg-sized grave. Bridget felt relieved when Robyn cradled the bedraggled, pungent thing in her hands and placed it in the earth. No more indignity, no more sun, no more pain. Robyn plucked the biggest and reddest rose, like a fairytale thief, and placed it on the baby owl’s breast. She folded its naked wings, not seeming to mind the stink or the ugly, dark juice dribbling from an unseen rupture. Before Bridget could make a comment about the goddess Athena being associated with owls, Robyn nodded at the mature owl watching them and spoke.

“The name for owl in Gaelic means old woman of the night,” she said.

Bridget glanced down at the translucent, blue lids wrinkled over the baby owl’s orphic stare, then at the chick’s mother, who watched them anxiously from her post. Tawny plumage shrouded its white face like a cowl.

“She does look a bit like a nun,” Bridget admitted.

“An cailleach-oidhche,” said Robyn. Her expression had the same rapt intensity as when she’d spoke about Glaistig. “I’ve often wondered if the ‘cailleach’ part refers to the Cailleach; a giant, blue-faced witch of winter. She’s the summoner of storms and protector of wild animals. Killing any of her creatures is very, very bad luck.”

Bridget’s mouth dried. “Maybe we should say a few words?”

But nothing came to mind. She’d memorised Medea, knew Antigone backwards, yet she could think of nothing fitting for an owl-witch’s funeral. Robyn chewed her lip. “What about this?

“Hail unto thee, Jewel of the night.

Beauty of the heavens,

Jewel of the night.

Mother of the stars,

Jewel of the night.

Majesty of the stars,

Jewel of the night.”

The spell-like chant quickened Bridget’s pulse. Robyn canted the words again while they scooped warm earth over the body. By the time they packed in the dirt, Bridget believed that they were burying a woman – a sorceress. She wasn’t dead, really, just resting in the earth like Merlin in his tree. She desperately wanted to know where Robyn’s strange words came from, but it felt impertinent to ask during a death rite.

So much magic before I’ve even eaten breakfast, she thought.

---

And now I’m going to crawl back under my blanket!

As always, thank you so much for reading. Let me know which excerpt you enjoyed most in the comments.

Kate xx