The Lighthouse Witches(8)

We lived in dangerous times. The events of North Berwick many years before were now legendary, the story of how hundreds of witches had raised a storm against King James VI while he and his wife sailed from Norway to Leith, known by all of us. It was witches we were threatened with as children by our parents if we didn’t go to bed. Witches would enchant us, boil our innards or shoot us with a fairy dart, and hand us over to the Devil.

The punishments meted out to the witches of North Berwick were recounted from generation to generation. Agnes Sampson, an elderly woman and a healer from Haddington, was the ringleader. She’d been kept in a scold’s bridle, a fearful instrument wrought of iron that enclosed the head. Four sharp blades penetrated the mouth of the witch to keep her quiet, and doubtless to ruin her tongue for a long time thereafter. In Agnes’ case, the bridle was chained to the wall of her cell, and therefore Agnes was forced to endure countless days unable to speak, eat, or sleep, enduring the humiliation of opening her bowels or bladder without being able to attend to herself, and doubtless in a terrible amount of pain without a moment’s relief.

After spending days thus, she confessed to raising the storm in partnership with the Devil, though I always thought that if I’d had to suffer days on end in a cell wearing such a monstrous instrument, I’d have confessed to being Satan himself. No mercy was bestowed for Agnes’ confession, however—she was swiftly garroted and burned at the stake.

At first, the people were glad of King James VI and his mission to rid the world of witches. Thank God for his witch finders, to protect us all from such wickedness! They well knew the unseen world was all around them, hidden behind a veil but every bit as potent as the summer sun. They knew that magic came in two forms—the good kind, which was used by healers, and the wicked kind, which belonged to Satan.

It turned out that Amy had inherited her mother’s gifts of healing, aided by stones with symbols on them that she said came from the distant north. I recognized the symbols. Finwell had put them all over their house—on door handles, whetstones, shoes, the bottoms of barrels. I’d asked Amy why anyone would go to the trouble of drawing on the bottom of a barrel. “How’s anyone supposed to see it?” I said. She gave me a withering look. “It is not for decoration, Patrick.” And that was all she said.

The stones bore those same symbols, like constellations, arrows, and sometimes like pitchforks, carefully and impressively etched into them by hand. The stones were runes from Iceland, passed down by Amy’s great-great-grandmother. The pictures were magical staves, or symbols. They conveyed messages to some kind of spirit realm and, if used by the right person, had the power to make things happen, good and bad.

I had not put much faith in them. Until I’d seen how they worked.

Amy and I had gathered some fish to keep as pets. Amy had poured them into a bucket and named them.

“They shall have babies,” she said.

“And then we will sell them?” I said. She looked at me as though I’d gone mad. “No. Then I will name their babies. We’ll be the king and queen of the fish colony.”

But the next morning all the fish were floating at the top of the bucket. Amy was really upset. She started slapping herself. I told her to stop.

“They’re just fish, Amy,” I said. “We can fetch more.”

“But I killed them,” she cried. “I didn’t mean to.”

Later that day, she asked me to go to the woods with her. I watched as she hefted the bucket full of dead fish all the way into the forest, then lit a small fire in a clearing. She was agitated, her face still red and puffy from crying. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a large white stone with a red symbol on it. A rune.

“This one is rebirth,” she said, and I looked over the series of crosses and arrows grooved in the stone. The stone was quartz, she said, and was as old as the earth.

“What’s the red from?” I asked, pointing at the stave carved deep into the stone.

“Birth blood,” she said, sniffing. “For hundreds of years, each woman in my family has given of her blood each time she’s birthed a child.”

I wiped my hands on my shirt.

Then she set the stone in the middle of the flames.

She made me hold hands with her over the fire, and we had to sit awkwardly so we wouldn’t get burned. She closed her eyes and said some words in a language I didn’t recognize. I remember the wind picked up and I felt dizzy, but nothing happened. Except, of course, all the fish came alive.

“Look! Look!” Amy shrieked, bouncing up and down and pointing at the bucket. “It worked!”

I tell no lie—those fish had been floating before and now they were all swimming around. I made her pour one out into her palm to show me, and it flopped around, its tiny mouth gasping until she plopped it back in.

I was stunned, but above all, I was happy for her.

I wasn’t yet wise enough to be terrified.





LUNA, 2021



I

Luna swims to the surface of sleep and lurches upright with a gasp.

She had the dream again. The one about her mother killing her.

This time her mother made her sit in the lantern room of the Longing, the sky outside dark and sequined with stars. On the ground, a silky plum-dark liquid swirled around her feet.

“Hold still,” her mother said, and she squeezed her knees together as she had a hundred times before, when her mother braided her hair and ordered her to sit still. Only this time, her mother wasn’t braiding her hair. She was smashing Luna’s head with a hammer. The liquid on the ground was her blood.