Contents
Prologue
1 Cloaking Spell
2 Tranquility Spell
3 Transformation Spell
4 Summoning Spell
5 Benevolence Spell
6 Love Spell
7 Calamity Spell
8 Revelation Spell
9 Divination Spell
10 Memory Spell
11 Protection Spell
12 Spell for Courage
13 Resurrection Spell
14 Concealment Spell
15 Reanimation Spell
16 Healing Spell
17 Vanishing Spell
18 Illumination Spell
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
They have been called many things.
Years ago, when their nomadic ways led them north to where the mountains were covered in ice and the winter nights were long, the villagers called to them, “Häxa, Häxa!” and left gifts of lutfisk and thick elk skins. When they moved farther south, they were Sangoma and as honored as the village’s own traditional healers. In the east, they were the fearsome Daayan; in the west, they were called La Lechuza and were rumored to have the ability to transform into birds. They’ve been called healers and seers, shape-shifters and conjurers. Wise ones. Heretics. Witches. They’ve been welcomed and revered as often as they’ve been feared and despised. History books throughout the world are filled with tales of their spilled blood — blood spilled willingly or unwillingly.
A family by the name of Blackburn was known to be particularly talented. Their talents delved deep into the realms of intrigue — clairvoyance, telekinesis, divination. They used their gifts to heal the sick or to ease the passing of those they could not heal. They used their gifts to help build towns or to defend them. Some of them were lovers, some of them fighters; a fair few were both. For centuries, over lifetimes, the truth of their power seemed everlasting, a blooming flower that would never wilt, a full moon that refused to wane. That is, until Rona Blackburn made the fateful decision to move to an obscure island off the Washington coastline and brought that long line of impressive family talent to a rather catastrophic and unexpected end.
Anathema Island sits at the tail end of the San Juan archipelago that winds through the cold waters of the Salish Sea. The word anathema refers to something dedicated to the gods. Coincidentally enough, it can also indicate someone accursed, someone damned, someone doomed. A fitting name, it would seem then, for an island buffeted by rain-bearing winds and cloaked in a sky so gray that the ocean and the heavens seemed one and the same. It was a place so remote and so inconsequential that cartographers rarely bothered to mark it on maps.
The island’s absence from atlases didn’t matter to the swell of Lhaq’temish families who’d inhabited it for centuries. But that flourishing community fled and scattered throughout the archipelago like leaves in the wind with the arrival of eight daring settlers, who never bothered to ask if the land already belonged to anyone else.
Mack Forgette, having failed to find his fortune in the gold mines of Canada’s caribou country, was the first of the eight to arrive, in 1843. Soon after came Jebidiah Finch, an experienced farrier. The man they all called Port Master Sweeney had been a trapper. It was his keen eyes that kept watch over the small dock on the southwest corner of the island. Forsythe Stone, an evangelical pastor, imagined leading his fellow islanders away from the debauchery and immorality that tend to infect men left to their own devices. Avery Sterling was a talented carpenter. Simon Mercer came from a long line of farmers. Otto Birch, the good German, migrated from a small town in northern California. And they all considered themselves quite lucky with the arrival of Doctor Sebastian Farce, his black medical bag, and his opium ampoules.
Each man claimed his own piece of land — a few hundred acres on which he kept goats and sheep — and built a small shack where he slept with his boots on. A meal was a piece of hard cheese or jerky carved with the same knife used to dig out splinters and ingrown toenails. They shat outdoors alongside the goats.
It would be another few years before their wives and children would join them. And so, it was in this way that the menfolk of Anathema Island lived. Until one blustery day, at the cusp of yet another long, hard winter, they received a rather unexpected and uninvited guest.
“She was alone you say?” Jebidiah Finch asked.
Port Master Sweeney nodded. “If you don’t count the two dogs, if you can call them that. They were some six hands tall, like mythological monsters. But they were nothing compared to her. I’ve never seen a woman so large. She towered well over my head. At first, I thought one of you unlucky bastards might have ordered himself a bride, but it seems the woman is here on her own.” The port master shuddered then, remembering the other unmistakable feature of this giantess: one glass eye that twisted angrily in its socket. The glass eye a shade of violet not found anywhere in nature.
“Perhaps the lady is a witch,” Otto Birch suggested.
The other men laughed, but the port master did not join them.
“Yes, tell us, man,” said Mack Forgette. “Where might we find this heretic?”
“I am pleased to say that I do not know” was Sweeney’s stoic response.
Avery Sterling turned to Sebastian Farce, who until then had been sitting in quiet contemplation. “What do you make of this, Doctor?”
“She may be an unusual woman,” the good doctor said after a moment, “but she is still a woman. How much trouble can she cause that we men would not be more than able to counter?”
“I do not think it wise to underestimate her,” the port master said, still shaken. “Mark my words, Rona Blackburn will prove to be a violent and capricious windstorm. God willing, she has no aim of staying!”
Oh, but Rona Blackburn most certainly did.
Rona soon picked out her own plot of land — one hundred eighty acres that stretched along the bottom of a rocky hill and only a stone’s throw from the shoreline. Quickly, much more quickly than natural for a man much less a woman — even one of Rona Blackburn’s stature — a house appeared. She filled her new home with reminders of her previous one on the Aegean island she had loved so much: pastel seashells and a front door painted a deep cobalt blue — a color the yiayias always claimed had the power to repel evil. Then she set up her bed, made a pit for her fire, and erected two wooden tables. One table she kept bare. The other she covered in tinctures and glass jars of cut herbs and other fermented bits of flora and fauna. On this table, she kept a marble mortar and pestle, the leather sheath in which she wrapped her knives, and copper bowls — some for mixing dry ingredients, some for liquid, and a few small enough to bring to the mouth for sipping. And when the fire was stoked and the table was set, she placed a wooden sign — soon covered in a blanket of a late December snow — outside that blue front door.
It read one word: Witch.
For all the things people have said about Rona — and they’ve said many things — no one could ever say she lacked a sense of humor.
Throughout that first long winter, and well into the following summer, the Original Eight steered clear of Rona Blackburn. They did not lend a hand or make any other offering, of friendship or otherwise.
Rona built a fence and raised a small barn. She purchased a few chickens and goats from a reclusive family whose presence on the other side of the island the others had failed to notice. She found a beehive in the woods and moved it closer to her house. When spring finally arrived and the bees awoke, Rona harvested the most succulent honey. She planted a garden that exploded in a profusion of sunflowers, zinnias, dahlias, lavender, rosemary, hyssop, thyme, and sage. In the hot summer months, there were carrots, cucumbers, beans
, and tomatoes the size and shape of small boulders.
And all the while, the Original Eight kept their distance.
And then.
The eight were felling trees to build a steeple for their church. As per Forsythe Stone’s instructions, the steeple would be tall — tall enough to be seen from every part of the island, a holy arrow that would point the godless and faithful alike toward righteousness and glory.
The leather strap used to drag the felled trees up the hill weakened and snapped, sending an avalanche of logs back down the hill and clipping Sebastian Farce on the way.
No one remembered who suggested bringing the doctor to Rona. Perhaps it was Sebastian himself, though by the time they reached Rona’s door, Sebastian had stopped making much noise at all.
Rona must have known that saving one of them could be the path to either acceptance or repudiation. For centuries, Blackburn women had been run off for perceived offenses less serious than causing someone’s death. Nonetheless, Rona stepped aside and allowed the men to carry the injured doctor through her cobalt-blue door. Once the patient was settled, she sent them on their way.
Blackburn women had never been much for an audience.
With Sebastian’s blood still sticky on their clothing, the men turned and headed back to their shacks. Some of them were gravely quiet. Others were wide-eyed and chatty, the adrenaline compelling them to recount the disaster time and again.
Sebastian Farce awoke the next morning, his wounds miraculously sealed, and his blood pumping, as it should, through his veins and not onto the floor.
For the next two days, Rona tended the doctor’s wounds while he read from her treasured volumes of Greek myths, her two dogs curled up at his feet. In the evenings, under a sky full of stars, they passed a rosewood pipe and discussed their shared avocation. He spoke of his leather tourniquets and opium tincture. Rona told him about magicked stitching and countless herbs. At night, they sealed their affair with whispered oaths and christened the bedsheets with sweat.
And then, just three days after the accident, Sebastian Farce reminded himself of his marital vows, of the wife and three children he’d call for in a few months’ time. Telling himself that Rona was nothing more than a brief moral blunder, he snuck out the back door of Rona’s cedar house, skirted the sleeping beasts in the yard, and walked home with the shame of his actions tucked between his legs.
Eventually he told the rest of the men of his misdeed, and they all laughed nervously and easily forgave what they decided was a blameless indiscretion.
“You were beguiled,” said Simon Mercer.
“Undoubtedly the victim of some kind of black magic,” agreed Otto Birch.
“She must have muttered an incantation over your sickbed,” Mack Forgette offered, “or slipped a tincture down your throat.”
“My God, man, how else could you explain yourself,” the port master exclaimed. “To bed a woman such as that? A woman such as her? It was a temporary madness to be sure!”
Thankful that they had evaded the eyes of the witch, the other seven men chose to forget that she had saved one of their lives and hoped she would find her way off the island, if not immediately, then certainly before the arrival of their wives and children.
Sebastian Farce could not forget as readily. He became consumed with darker thoughts.
Unable to sleep at night, Sebastian’s mind began to wander. If Rona had the ability to bewitch him, to use her charms and enchantments to heal him, didn’t it follow that she could just as easily use black magic to harm him? His wife? His children?
Rona was thinking no such things. But she could feel Sebastian Farce’s paranoid thoughts creeping into her mind like an invasive weed. In a short time, this man — whom she had kept warm in her own bed, had fed with food prepared with her own hands, and had baptized with the sweat of her own body — began to fantasize about finding her floating facedown in the lake. Rona was aghast at how quickly his fear and guilt had curdled into hatred and contempt.
The summer droned on, with its long hot days and even hotter nights. Autumn came, painting the island trees with its golden hues. In late October, they awoke to winter’s first dusting of snow. And then, exactly one year after Rona had first arrived on the island, Sebastian Farce decided to take matters into his own hands.
“If we are to purge the island of her,” he said to his brothers in arms, “we must do so now, before she pollutes the minds of our wives and our daughters. And before our sons fall prey to the wiles of the witch.”
They came carrying firearms and torches, ignorance and fear. Their fear rained down on Rona’s burning house like ash. It blinded them to how the flames merely licked her side, like the rough tongue of a wild cat. They didn’t see how easily she strode out the back door with her beasts at her side, how their bullets pierced her skin and then melted, leaving a torrent of liquid lead in her wake. They didn’t see how she stood hidden in the trees, a dark shadow against the night, the hounds beside her growling like low rumbles of distant thunder. Cradling the swell of her growing belly hidden under her skirts, Rona watched the Original Eight burn her home to the ground.
Later, drunk on whiskey and the exhilaration of the hunt, the men sifted through the remnants of Rona’s home; they found nothing but a hypnotic purple glass eye, staring up at them through the ashes. They brazenly mounted that eye on the wall of the Willowbark General Store alongside the rest of their trophies — stuffed pheasants and wild turkeys and the head of a black-tailed deer. Forsythe Stone, the evangelical pastor, likened it to staring into the eye of a storm. He claimed it proved them heroic. In truth, it was further evidence that the Original Eight were simply a bunch of damn fools.
Rona returned in the dead of night, waking them with a piercing scream that chilled their blood and shattered their eardrums. She banished the darkness with a blinding light that they later swore radiated from her fingertips. And she brought with her something far more terrifying than fire: an army of wooden leviathans, hybrid monsters carved from trees, so tall they blocked the moon. The foolish men could only watch, blood spilling from their ears, as Rona’s monsters tore down their homes. Even they had to admit it was fair reparation: an eye, as they say, for an eye.
But for Rona, simple retribution wasn’t enough. She knew how much they wanted her to disappear from the island, how much they wanted all trace of her to vanish as cleanly as the tide erases footprints in the sand.
So, when Rona felt that familiar urge to leave, to carry on with the nomadic ways of every witch that came before her, she searched for a spell that could silence the call in her blood. Rona wanted Anathema’s animals to thrive on the oxygen from her lungs. She wanted to carve out the island’s landscape with her own hands and for its rivers to flow with the sweat from her own brow.
Her search for such a spell led her to the branches of the Blackburn family tree. She traced limbs that reached to the heavens and bent back to the earth again. She followed roots that stretched across all parts of the world and were inscribed in languages that had been dead for centuries. And there, buried deep beneath those gnarled roots of that ancient family tree, Rona found one.
She cast a binding spell and etched its words into her own skin, strengthening it with the potency of her own spilled blood. Using the sharp blade of her knife, she also carved the name Sebastian Farce into the parts of her he had blessed with his mouth: her hips and thighs, the curve of her neck, and the swell of her breasts.
When her daughter was born, Rona picked up the knife and pricked the bottom of her infant’s foot. Their mingled blood spread like an ink stain across the mattress, and Rona crooned that spell once more, this time as sweetly as a lullaby.
A binding spell requires one to peel back the layers of her soul and stitch them to another entity entirely, such that she is no longer herself, but a chimera made of her own flesh and blood and something else. It is black magic, wicked and terrible, and as Rona learned all too well, black magic always comes at a wicked a
nd terrible price.
Rona’s daughter Hester possessed none of her mother’s natural talents for magic. Until she was nine years old, that is. At that age, she could suddenly run faster than any man — or boy — on the island. Hester became the fastest sharpshooter west of the Rockies. Many claimed that it was the threat of a gun clenched in her small hands that kept a single drop of blood from being shed during the Pig War between the United States and the British Empire — as long as you didn’t count the poor pig. But Hester’s gift for speed was both the start and the end of her abilities.
Starting with Hester, no Blackburn woman ever again possessed the full range of her ancestors’ gifts, gifts that should have been her birthright. Instead, the gifts were splintered and parsed — each generation benefitting from only one. Should this splintering of talents have been the only unintended side effect of Rona’s binding spell, perhaps the Blackburn daughters could have been content. But sometime in her nineteenth year, Hester awoke to find she could think of only Andreas Birch, the son of the good German, to the exclusion of all else. Just as suddenly, Andreas was similarly afflicted. For three days, the two were consumed with exploring all of the ways their bodies fit together. On the morning of the fourth day, Hester awoke alone. She later found Andreas back behind the grocery counter. His face, red with shame, was the only evidence of their passionate affair until the second Blackburn daughter, Greta, was born nine months later.
A Blackburn woman’s love story only ever lasts three days. When it is over, the man returns to his life, to his children and his wife if he has them, never once acknowledging — often times, not even to himself — the part he played in the creation of another Blackburn daughter.
Rona wanted to expunge the names of those foolish men from all of history. She did not expect that by doing so, she’d inadvertently tied their bloodlines, one by one, to her own until it was Blackburn blood that had the greater claim on Anathema Island. In casting her vindictive spell Rona unwittingly damned every future Blackburn daughter to heartbreak and a loveless union.
The Price Guide to the Occult Page 1
