Everyone in Briar Hollow knew that Isobel Leach wore gloves. She wore them in summer, when the heat made the roads shimmer and everyone else rolled their sleeves above their elbows. She wore them while buying bread, while gathering herbs beside the river, and even while standing alone beneath the rain. What no one knew... Continue Reading →
The Apothecary Beneath the City
In a city that never slept, there was one woman who had been awake longer than almost everyone in it. Her name was Lenora Vale, although it had not always been. Over the centuries she had answered to Lenora, Leonora, Eleanor, Nora, and once, during a particularly inconvenient decade in France, Madame Valois. Names changed.... Continue Reading →
The Witch Who Thought Her Familiar Would Never Come
Elara had been a witch for twenty-seven years before she finally accepted that she probably wasn't getting a familiar. It wasn't that every witch had one. Plenty didn't. Familiars were not magical accessories handed out alongside cauldrons and suspiciously large collections of jars. They came when they came, if they came at all, and supposedly... Continue Reading →
The Salt-Marsh Coven – The Bones Were Never From Whales
The sea had always given something back. Sometimes it was driftwood, bleached white and smooth after years beneath the waves. Sometimes it was sea glass, cloudy green fragments polished until their sharp edges disappeared. After storms, the women of Blackwater Island walked the shoreline collecting whatever the ocean had surrendered during the night - shells,... Continue Reading →
The Witch Who Bloomed After Midnight
For most of her life, Mara Vale believed magic belonged to other women. It belonged to the women in her grandmother’s stories. The ones who could coax fever from a child with a bowl of water, who knew which herbs to hang above a doorway, who dreamed of visitors before they arrived and could tell... Continue Reading →
The Witch Who Walked Through Centuries
The first thing Aveline learned about immortality was that everyone who dreamed of it imagined the wrong things. They imagined centuries stretching endlessly before them. They imagined watching kingdoms rise and fall, witnessing inventions that would have once been called sorcery, reading books that had not yet been written and walking through cities that did... Continue Reading →
Moll Dyer: The Woman the Woods Never Forgot
Long before the roads and buildings of modern Leonardtown, Maryland, there were thick forests, scattered farms and small settlements where life could be difficult and uncertainty was often frightening. It was in this landscape, sometime around the late seventeenth century, that legend places a mysterious woman named Moll Dyer. She is remembered today as the... Continue Reading →
Bessie Dunlop and the Fairy Man
In the rolling countryside of sixteenth-century Ayrshire, Scotland, lived a woman named Bessie Dunlop. She wasn't wealthy or powerful, and there was nothing about her position in society that should have ensured anyone remembered her nearly 450 years later. She was the wife of a farmer or herdsman, living an ordinary rural life in a... Continue Reading →
The Legend of Bloody Mary
There are many different origin stories for Bloody Mary. This is one. She lived deep in the forest in a tiny cottage and sold herbal remedies for a living. Folks living in the town nearby called her Bloody Mary, and said she was a witch. None dared cross the old crone for fear that their... Continue Reading →