Now She is Witch

Also by Kirsty Logan The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales The Gracekeepers A Portable Shelter The Gloaming Things We Say in the Dark Kirsty Logan NOW SHE IS WITCH VINTAGE UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | AustraliaNew Zealand | India | South Africa Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com. First published by Harvill Secker in 2023 Copyright © Kirsty Logan, 2023 The moral right of the author has been asserted Cover Illustration © Lea Yunk ISBN: 978-1-529-19352-7 This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. To Great Aunt Edith – I hope I’m like you when I grow up. ‘The dead are not separate from the living. The darkness is not separate from the light. They are intertwined.’ – HANNE ØRSTAVIK ‘they are the damsel they are the horse they are riding themselves they are saving themselves’ – REBECCA TAMáS Before my mother tells me a story – our house in the forest is tiny & ramshackle & the winter wind slips freezing through the cracks & my belly is never full & my hands always ache but i dont care when there is a story – especially when it is this story which is the scariest & best – it is about the north witches – they are terrible my mother says – they are rotten & filthy to the core & burned black inside from the raging fires of their power – the north witches my mother says burn so fierce that in the land where they live they created a volcano which is earth & fire & liquid all at once & not one thing at all – a volcano surrounded by black earth & a sea lapping at black sand – the north witches my mother says can transform into ravens & wolves & suchlike other wicked creatures – the north witches my mother says are lit by a sun that stays in the sky all night in the summer & hides entirely in the winter – the north witches my mother says dont need the light at all – not from the sun and not from god – they take Part 1 1 Now She is Outcast Full night. Bitter bone cold. Winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Lux had started on her mother’s grave long before daylight, clearing the nettles from the centre of the poison garden until she reached bare dirt. But the ground was hard as gritted teeth, and she’d had to smash the ice on the well and raise buckets of water and build a fire and heat the water over the stove and pour it on the frozen ground before she could even start to dig. Her hands were swollen and lumpy with nettle stings, made worse by the grazes on her palms, but she was so cold she couldn’t feel it. She hadn’t noticed the meagre light failing, and had kept working into the darkness; the shortest day was over, and now stars swayed in her eyes. She was making the grave in the poison garden so it would stay hidden; no one would venture into the murk behind the house, particularly if they knew it was full of things that could kill them. Since she’d been away, the nettles had grown shoulder-high, but she could see that some of the garden still grew beneath. The dried-up tongue of the foxglove, the curled purple ear of the