To celebrate the publication of Kate Macdonald’s debut mythological fantasy The Shetland Witch, we’re sharing a four-part series of excerpts! You can read the first excerpt here and the second here. Before we check out the third 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 3 from The Shetland Witch

by Kate Macdonald

It was early evening. A tall woman was standing on wet ground on the edge of a low cliff, looking north at the savage crags and filthy white slopes of a vast rock in the sea. Large white birds with vicious yellow beaks roosted there. She recognised them, but not the place. There was nothing else out there except frothing grey sea.

She turned away from the rock. The heaving water and sodden grass made her feel even colder, and she began to shiver, wrapping her arms around her body. These were the ends of the earth. They were green and wet, and so cold. She had been lying stunned on the ground for a long time. Hunger raked inside her, and she trembled with a weakness she did not remember feeling before.

Where was she? Aeons, moments ago she had been lying crushed on a mountain path in the snow. Her cheek still felt the gravel. And then there had been that awful spinning forward thrust of her forced flight, that made her feel sick.

She would not remember it.

Where was she?

Scraps of dirty grey cloud trailed over the tongue of low ground that she was standing on. It sloped upwards from the cliff edge to the boggy higher ground where birds sat like balanced stones on their nests. She stood looking at them vacantly, and seemed to shrink into herself. She was so wet, and so cold.

Where was she? This was not her home.

Automatically she stretched to her full height, ignoring the clammy linen against her body, and flexed her arms. She tried to gauge what strength she had, the limits of her powers. Her body seemed tired but still strong enough.

She spoke aloud. No-one answered.

She bent down and held a hand over the green grass. It did not make the change she expected. She wrinkled her face, frowning.

She blinked, and felt satisfied. Suddenly she was looking at the world from a spider’s height and through spider eyes. She returned to human form. That was enough, for now. 

She turned again to look at the strange thing on the rocks. Waves crashed against the sheer slab faces and against the white walls supporting the tall shining tower. It was incomprehensible, and she shivered again. She would look for a cave, or perhaps go inland and find a hut. She was tired. Her powers would return.

She turned resolutely away from the thing she did not understand and began to walk away from the cliff, testing the ground cautiously. She stepped awkwardly into a scraped hollow in the ground. A rabbit burrow? Then she saw a short black and white bird with a beak as colourful as a flower. It stood on the cliff edge looking at her disapprovingly. How strange. A nest in a burrow. The woman nodded at the bird and moved forwards again. She stopped to look around in disbelief. Why was it so cold? And so wet? She called on Helios, but the sun stayed hidden by thick cloud.

The stocky birds perched on their tussocks stared down at her from their ridges. She made her way over the wet ground and began to climb the slope. The cloud turned into drizzle, and the water in the air darkened the heavy blue cloth of her gown even more. 

She stalked onward with disdain, picking her way through the pools in the watery brown ground. When she stumbled, she muttered crossly to herself. She stopped and stood still to draw on the power that she carried, but it would not work. She snorted with anger. She was too cold, too tired. With a creeping trickle of fear, she did not know whether she would be the same person here that she had been before in her own place. 

She continued doggedly to walk up the steep slope, holding her skirts out of the wet grass with one hand, the other hand waiting to take her weight if she tripped. For the first time that she could remember, she felt that here she might fall.

She arrived at a clump of green leaves and white fluffy flower heads dancing on thin stalks, and stared at the large grey chick that perched on its tussock. It was blocking a faint route through spongy black mounds. Without thinking, she made a silent request, and the chick took flight. It circled clumsily and then disappeared in the mirk to the east.

She grinned with satisfaction. That had worked. Good. She was merely cold, not powerless. 

*

She had felt the tension among the birds. They were intimidated, and yet they were not flying off their nests in panic. They sat on their nests of grass, hunkering down as if they could sense a storm front coming. She hadn’t wanted a flock of terrified birds reeling up in a wave against the sky, so she had put a grip on them all. She thanked them for their quietness.

The woman walked eastwards through the damp white air. Water coalesced on the birds’ feathers. It was raining now, cold streaks of water washing briskly through the white mist that smelt of fish. 

There was someone else here.

She walked past the young sorceress who was squatting like a bird among the others and gave no sign that she had noticed her. 

When the woman in the blue gown had gone far enough, she changed shape into a frog, and moved silently back to where the young sorceress had been, leaping from pool to pool. The sorceress was standing up now, as a human, looking at something glowing in her hand. The frog found that she could arrange things so that the sorceress could not move, and changed her form back to human again. She walked closer to look at the sorceress. Her powers were working properly now. But then the sorceress turned her head to look at her. 

‘Hi,’ the sorceress said. ‘My name’s Avril. You’re not getting your feet wet, are you? It’s a peerie bit boggy around here.’

‘Ah!’ the woman said aloud, in surprise, but then she frowned. She did not know this human language. She couldn’t use it.

<Take me to warmth, and food. Now.>

The young sorceress looked at her for a few moments and seemed to decide that she could only obey. She turned and led the way through the brown pools to a trackway made of wooden billets raised high above the boggy ground. The tall woman climbed up on to it thankfully, and followed the sorceress downhill. She held herself straight and walked steadily, though her head was swimming and she was shivering. Her cold wet gown dragged behind her on the rough wood.  She would not show any weakness.

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