The Book of Witching

by C.J. Cooke

In 1594, a woman was accused of assisting a man in his plot to kill his brother. The man was acquitted. The woman was executed at Gallow Ha’ in Kirkwall, Orkney. Her name was Alison Balfour. She was the first of over seventy women to be executed in Orkney on charges of witchcraft.

The more women, the more witches. —Henry Holland, A Treatise Against Witchcraft, 1590

One’s purest signature is the sound of one’s fear. And The Book of Witching holds them all forever.

A long black braid of hair sits over her shoulder like a pet snake—she refuses to wear a coif or forehead cloth, though she knows well it sets the gossips’ tongues ablaze—and she wears her woolen shawl the color of poppies, a forbidden color for peasants like us. The sumptuary laws state that only the rich may wear such colors, and by wearing her shawl my mother risks a fine of ten pounds a day and three months’ imprisonment. But, as ever, she does not give a damn.

Some magic requires circumstance; it works only if the sorcerer is in love, or with child. Some work only if the sorcerer is a murderer, or a priest. There is still much about magic that we do not know.

“Thomas Paplay is a servant of John Stewart,” I say, astonished. “Why would the earl put his own brother’s servant to death?” William asks, shock in his voice. “It is rumored that he attempted to kill the earl.”

And then a sentence that makes Clem’s stomach turn. Arlo’s hands need to be bound.

fiat justitia ruat caelum. I recognize it from my mother’s schooling, when she drummed Latin clauses into David and me. It means: let justice be done, though the heavens fall. It means: seek justice, whatever the consequence.

“So the spiral is a triskele,” she says, googling on her own phone now. “That’s the word for it, yes,” Quinn says. “An ancient pagan symbol meaning life, death, and rebirth as interconnected states.”

This short life is wasted only when one does not use it for good. Even the moon waxes and wanes. Even the earth, immeasurable in her wisdom and brimming with secrets, is yet turning.