The Blood of Winter — S.C. Kincaid

In the winter of 1590, the North Berwick witch trials produce a name that does not belong to any woman in Scotland. It belongs to a song. And the song belongs to a world that has been waiting for someone to finish it. The Blood of Winter is a book about what survives the fire — and what was waiting on the other side of it all along.

An Excerpt

The court did not record what she said before they took her. They recorded only that she said something — that a sound had left her, shaped like a word, and that the word had made the candles bend toward her rather than away. That was the detail the recorder noted twice, as if he could not quite trust the first writing of it.

Afterward, in the silence between the testimony and the sentencing, there was a moment when even the judges did not speak. Not from mercy. From something older. The cold had come into the room — not the cold of the Scottish December, which they all knew well enough — but the other kind. The kind with memory in it.

She did not look afraid. That, too, was recorded. In the margin, in a different hand: she knew the name.

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