Last week, to celebrate the publication of Kate Macdonald’s debut mythological fantasy The Shetland Witch, we shared the first part of a four-part series of excerpts! Before we check out the second excerpt, here’s a reminder of the blurb:

Hazel is an archaeologist, working in Unst, on the most northerly coast of the Shetland Isles.
She’s digging on Ishabel’s land. Ishabel is a retired professor of botany, and one of the remaining three Shetland witches, along with Maggie the artist who is getting too casual about shape-changing in public, and Avril the wildlife warden with too many birds to guard.
Maggie discovers that Hazel is also magical, and she becomes a Shetland witch.
Then Atropos arrives, to look for her shears that she sent into hiding to the ends of the earth thousands of years ago. She has to protect them from Zeus.
How will the witches protect the islands from a Fate and Zeus?
How will Hazel learn how to do magic again?
How will she cope with Tornost, a malignant trow with a penchant for eighteenth-century manners?
The Shetland Witch is a novel about living in the north, about sisterhood and belonging, and the power that women wield when they work together. As past and present collide, we are reminded that history, however old and mythical, is always with us.

Available in paperback, hardback and as an ebook.

The Shetland Witch is out now – you can order yours on Amazon

Extract Part 2 from The Shetland Witch

by Kate Macdonald

Thursday was the penultimate day of the dig. On Friday they would wrap it all up and close down the excavation, so today they had been using the good weather to finish off sections cleanly. Hazel had been on recording duty for most of the day, and was still checking the photographic archive after Fintan and the others had gone back to their rented rooms and bar suppers. 

A tall woman drove along the track in a muddy black car, parking just as Hazel was putting her laptop in her rucksack. She asked for a look around. Hazel obligingly unwrapped a trench from its tarpaulin, beginning to explain what they’d been doing, but then realised that the woman wasn’t looking.

‘Hang on a peerie meenit,’ the woman said. 

Hazel straightened up and looked around. There wasn’t anything unusual to explain in this part of the dig.

‘What is it?’

‘I want tae show you somethin. My name’s Maggie, by the way.’

Maggie had plucked a tough-looking grass stem from the untrimmed edge of the field. It carried a yellow flower like a dandelion.

She held her hand out, with the stem on her palm.

‘Er, hawkbit?’ Hazel guessed, wondering what was special about it. 

‘Hawkweed. No very common here, or in Scotland.’ Maggie agreed. 

‘So it’s fairly rare?’

‘Yes. Maybe I should o picked a different flower. But it doesna matter whit it is: look.’

The flower on its stalk lay stiffly on Maggie’s palm, and then it was a steel peg. 

‘What?’

Maggie changed the peg back again to the hawkweed, and then the hawkweed back to the peg. Nothing else changed. Just the grass, and then the steel. 

Hazel heard a car going past on the road in the valley, behind the raised mounds of peat that surrounded the site. There were gull cries, and the wind blowing up from the voe. 

She found herself grinning happily. This felt familiar. 

‘Can you do it again?’

Maggie changed the hawkweed to metal, and the peg back to a grass. She did it again and again, smiling quietly, looking at Hazel each time, as if she were trying to gauge from the younger woman’s expression what she might be thinking next. 

Each time the grass changed Hazel was sure she could almost see how it happened, and she began to think about molecular alteration. She had worked through several years of science at school and four years in an archaeology degree since the last time she’d done magic. She wasn’t used to analysing it scientifically. What she was seeing today shouldn’t be possible. The certainties of science were in danger of dissolving in her head, so she applied her mind to think it through empirically.

What was the operating force? The cellulose of the grass stem was carbon, hydrogen and oxygen; how had it changed into steel? Steel was an alloy of iron, but she couldn’t remember what it was blended with. It was altered in the presence of heat. Of course. Maybe what Maggie was doing was producing a highly concentrated form of heat. Hazel had been to a steelworks once, on a school field trip. The ferocity of the elements in combination there had felt like cosmic forces colliding. Not like this gentle shift from one form to another.

‘How muckle magic hae you done?’ Maggie asked. 

‘Just playing, when I was wee. I could stop the wind. I could make my toys move.’

Maggie nodded. ‘Ony shape-changing?’

‘Twice, maybe, by accident. But later I made myself forget about it. When I was twelve, not being different from everybody else suddenly became really important. And then we did James the Sixth in history and the witch trials put me right off.’

‘That soonds like sense. Want tae hae a try noo?’

Maggie taught Hazel how to change the grass into steel. Finally, Hazel remembered. It had not been like this before, when she was younger, because then she hadn’t known enough about what she ought not to have been able to do. But she had known then what to do and she had done it. And now she could do it again. The same things worked in her mind when she gave the command. It was knowing what to ask, what to say.

Now, she had to face the fact that she encompassed a juddering incompatibility in herself. She was able to make a thing happen, empirically observed, and yet know full well as a scientist that molecules could not be moved about like that. 

But setting rationality aside, she could not suppress the joy of knowing that the weird moments and odd events in her past were unquestionably true. They could not be called dreams or false memory. But she had to make sure.

Maggie watched her in the gathering dusk as Hazel hammered the peg with a mallet into the edge of the trench. The blows fell on the metal with ferocity.

And then Hazel stopped, and tugged at the peg, which was firmly rooted in the soil.

‘I did it,’ Hazel said, looking up, a bead of sweat dripping off her face, and the mallet still held in her hand. ‘I changed the grass to steel.’

‘You did,’ Maggie agreed.

‘But how …’ Hazel began to ask.

‘Come and hae a coffee at the Skervie Café in Scalloway on Saturday mornin. I’ll explain it aa. Ten thirty OK? See you then.’

Maggie got back into her car, turned it in the narrow field opening, and drove off, waving. Skirls of joyous fiddle music drifted out of the car window, and Hazel was left standing in the field at dusk with a peg in her pocket that had not existed half an hour earlier.

She looked with sudden suspicion at the boulders in the neighbouring field, but none were moving.

She surreptitiously checked on the peg during the next day, and it did not change back. In the evening in her rented holiday chalet she tried to change a blade of grass into steel, and that worked. But she didn’t know how to change it into spaghetti, or string, or a stone, or how to make it fly. 

She did discover that she couldn’t film the transformation on her phone. The video ended with the grass pinched between her finger and thumb, as if nothing else had happened. And when she filmed the peg itself, it was a peg, and stayed a peg even after the moment when it changed to grass. The magic was not recordable. But it had happened.

But how? She wanted to know more, so much more.

The Shetland Witch is out now – you can order yours on Amazon