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, the second here, and the third here. Before we check out the final 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 4 from The Shetland Witch

by Kate Macdonald

Extract 4 from The Shetland Witch, by Kate Macdonald

When she reached the witches Ishabel was regarding the sky. ‘Is this him?’ she asked. 

Maggie was looking at Atropos, and grabbed Ishabel’s arm. Atropos was looking out to sea, standing with her arms outstretched, as stiffly as a mast. She had pulled off her woolly hat, as if it were too hot, and the strands of her hair that were not coiled in the shining grey plaits around her head rose in the air, waving like snakes. Her hair was crackling. Hazel could hear the sound in the air, like the spitting of water on oil. 

Then she turned and her eyes were black, with a point of red in their centres like two coals beginning to smoulder. 

Hazel opened her mouth to scream. Atropos flung her head back and gave a sudden yell of anger.

And then, there was pandemonium.

Atropos disappeared. A streak of brown and white feathers was flying into the vast grey cloud hanging over the excavation site.

Maggie had dropped her binoculars. In a dizzying instant a black-backed gull was following the falcon, beating its long wings strongly.

Ishabel stiffened, and said quietly to Hazel, ‘He’s here.’

Hazel could feel a vast pressure moving in from the sea behind her, a sense that a monstrous hand was pressing down on the atmosphere, making it thick and gluey. She tried to turn, to look towards the Hill, but she couldn’t move. Ishabel was crumpled in her chair, looking irritated.

<Focus on your breathing. Don’t do anything else.> Ishabel instructed her, and Hazel stared at her, unable to move, held in place by the increased air pressure that surrounded her.

And then there was release, like a fist plunging into risen dough. The pressure all around her altered, quite suddenly, and Hazel staggered. Then Ishabel was no longer there, and Hazel started to run up the track back to the site, watching the white fulmar far ahead of her. It was flying high and fast into the cloud.

When Hazel reached the top of the rise and could see the perimeter tape, and the tools and boxes and the tarpaulins in their accustomed places, nobody was there, and nothing looked right. The light was all wrong, and when Hazel turned to look back at the sea, she saw why. A sky full of ice was falling towards her.

Every weather warning she knew had screamed, and she dived for the nearest edge of blue tarpaulin on the ground. When the hailstones crashed out of the heavy grey sky, Hazel was almost under cover, tugging the tarp over herself and wriggling to get as much of her body underneath the tough blue plastic as she could. The violent noise in her ears was the crash of ice thudding against rock. Her hand stung sharply, and she twitched it further under the tarp, but there was barely room for all of her body: the boxes must be weighing the tarp down. She concentrated on keeping her skin and face protected, but involuntary grunts of pain escaped her as balls of ice drove into her legs and her back at high velocity. The noise was too loud for her to hear herself counting the seconds aloud. She was terrified and clamped down on a scream.

 And then the rain of ice stopped. 

Hazel waited, and then pushed nervously at the tarp. When she crawled out she dislodged a crust of white ice that had mounded up over her body. She looked around in a panic. Where were the others? Frail Ishabel, caught in that terrible storm, and Atropos too, not used to Arctic temperatures … She looked up.

Two large birds were being blown about in the sky, a gull and a hawk. The cloud was turning from grey to blue, and the storm edge above her head was rolling back. The sea was surging in response. Hazel could see a tiny red tanker, far away on the horizon, shining in sunlight.

The plastic perimeter tape on the cliff edge was suddenly ripped from its fastenings, and it sheared across the sky like a whip. The birds dodged it, and then the falcon vanished. A gull landed close to Hazel, heavily but sturdily, and Maggie yelled silently at her. 

<Get back! Get awa fae the ston!>

The mound was beating heat out at them like an oven in an ice-box, and Hazel stumbled away from it, chilled by the impossible cold that beat out from the hailstones littering the yellow grass.

Thunder cracked overhead, a shocking thunderous boom that rolled about the sky, echoing off the cliffs in the neighbouring bays.

When the lightning bolt hit the mound, Hazel was nearly at the far side of the excavation site. She was thrown forwards, and landed heavily on her shoulder on the grass. The air was fizzing and she could smell burning plastic. When she rolled over, wincing at the wet ice under her back and legs, she had the most peculiar feeling that the open oven door had had a vast wet cloth thrown across it. The air temperature was stabilising to something like normal and she felt a soothing dampness in the air. Her cold fingers ached as they began to warm up, and her face was stinging. Looking down, Hazel saw that the back of her hand was bleeding, and the right leg of her jeans was soaked in a mixture of blood and icy water.

Maggie was standing between Hazel and the mound, staring out to sea, where a pulsating grey cloud was being wrestled in an internal turmoil of roiling movement. The cloud expanded and shrank as if it were a video on fast forward, all the time shrinking until it fizzled out into shreds. It dropped a feeble splatter of rain over the sea. There was a very distant roll of thunder. 

Atropos appeared, looking ruffled and wet, but grinning. Then Ishabel was standing beside Hazel, breathing hard but also smiling. Her white curls were spangled in raindrops like a crown of diamonds and water dripped down her face.

The dig site was covered in wind-blown crusts of ice, as if hailstones had been blown horizontally across the top of the hill for hours. Now the sky was as blue as if it were already summer.

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