Travel back to the 4th of December 1591. It is here, on the last night of her life, in a prison cell several floors below Edinburgh’s streets, that readers meet Geillis Duncan. The convicted witch has a visitor, Iris, who allegedly has come from a future where women are still persecuted for who they are and what they believe. Hex explores societies consumed by fear and superstition, and you can read an exclusive BooksfromScotland extract below.

Extract taken from Hex
By Jenni Fagan
Published by Birlinn

12.37 a.m. 

Open invitation pursued (via astral travel): 

1st August 2021 – to cell on High Street, 4th December 1591 Elements: Null + Air 

our cell is several floors below the city. It is far below footfall, or taverns, or flats; below beds, or kitchens, 

or hugs, or hope, or church, or prayer, or freedom, or laughter, or air; below shuttered windows, or dogs asleep in front of fires. It is so far below the seasons they might as well not exist. There is only one kind of weather in here 

– freezing cold and cloaked in darkness. The air is stagnant. I must wait a minute. Make sure the guard does not wake. The last thing I could take is him coming to you. You are down here somewhere, Geillis Duncan. I’m willing to go as far as I have to – so you are not alone on this, the last night of your life. I put a call out – to the ether – for you. 

I have never channelled directly like this before, was far too afraid to do so. 

Travelled time all my life. 

Have had spirits come to me, go through me, had them drag me out of my body and throw me across rooms or ceilings all night long. I have seen one half-naked, just out the bath, holding a big knife. I heard them and hosted them before I knew how to form words, or smile. For you, though, I have been out in the Null. I was waiting. Unsure what this will mean for my health or my life. Will I get to go back? Five hundred years between us, Geillis Duncan 

– it’s such a little leap really. 

A conversation between two witches across time. I am nervous. 

I miss you. 

Don’t ask me why I feel like this because I don’t know. Some people might think it is not possible to so desperately miss someone you do not yet know, or a home you have never had, but I do. I have done so my whole life. I miss people I have never met. Mourn them. Even more than those who have already, one by one, been taken 

from me. 

The hangman will be here by dawn. I reach for the guard’s keys. 

He has put a padlock through them, and they are locked into a metal hoop high up on the wall. There are no risks taken with witches. If only! The hangman might have found your cell door ajar. Dust spiralling through a wan sliver of light. On the floor, a single feather. His boots would pivot in the dirt. Pound back up the corridor. Onto the Close, up onto the High Street where people would already be walking by with their scrubbed morning faces, clean and ready – to watch Geillis Duncan die. 

– She took flight! 

– What? 

– The prisoner, the witch, she is gone! 

– Where? 

– The Devil took her, or a familiar. The last guard is in a spellbound stupor, the man is barely there! 

– Idiot . . . 

I’d love to hear the roar. Who would dare stop a good hanging? All the women I know would. Any one of us! We’d each come back and do this gladly. The murder of Geillis Duncan is to be performed for the State and the King and the bailiff who accused her; it is for the God-fearing, it is for ordinary people who like a good hanging. For those who need to hate. To elevate themselves on hatred. If you were not hanged in the morning, Geillis, how many people would go home feeling cheated? Disappointed not to see you die in front of them? They want to be able to say they were there when Geillis Duncan died. To dine out on the story for years. There was a witch we saw killed! I turn down the last tiny winding corridor – you have to be at the end somewhere along here. Your murder is a message for the masses. King James’s enemies will shudder. Will his wife? Anne: fourteen and wed to a man who likes men and is paranoid he’ll be caught out for it. Over three hundred tailors worked on Anne’s wedding dress. It is all spectacle. Weddings, births, hangings. There is a bloodlust in humans. Let’s watch a girl hang to death! The King is showing all his might! Who would fight a man who has taken down the Devil himself? King James didn’t start this particular witch-hunt, but he will certainly finish it. How does he fight the Devil? 

Well, now you ask! 

Via teenage girls! Doesn’t everyone? 

We go after the Devil via womb-bearers – they are weak for him! 

Widows! 

Did she inherit? 

A woman? 

On her own? 

Is she tall? 

Is she ugly? 

Does she twitch? 

Is she too smart? 

Did she look a man right in the eye?

Did she heal a pig? 

Did she birth a child who died? Did she speak – harshly? 

No! 

They won’t tolerate that. 

A woman’s voice is a hex. She must learn to exalt men always. If she doesn’t do that, then she is a threat. A demon whore, a witch – so says everyone and the law. So say the King and his guards. So say the witch-pricker and his sadistic friends. So say the husbands, the haters, the wives, the daughters, the God-fearing – demons are always trying to kill them, so they know. So says the hangman who sleeps with Bible in hand.

Hex by Jenni Fagan is published by Birlinn, priced £10.00.