A Spell for Drowning is a historical fantasy novel, which takes the gothic spell-craft of Practical Magic and blends it with the fey-like energy of The Labyrinth, while setting it in Poldark’s Cornwall.
Intrigued? Read on to discover an excerpt from A Spell For Drowning by Rebecca Ferrier, which is out now! But first, here’s the author herself to introduce you to the book!
AUTHOR NOTE
The novel opens when a young girl, Kensa, finds a dying sea monster on a beach under a full moon. An outsider from birth due to her father’s smuggling exploits, Kensa agrees to become the local wise woman’s apprentice. Perhaps this way she’ll finally find acceptance from her community. Isolde—witch, harlot, druid—shows her the Old Ways and explains the careful Pact between Land and Sea. Yet before Kensa’s training is complete, Isolde sickens, and Kensa goes to the Bucka for help. Although this vengeful god has been chained to the ocean due to his terrible crimes, he could be the solution to saving Isolde—and staving off heart-wrenching grief.
Together, they make a bargain, which endangers everything Kensa has sworn to protect.
I set A Spell for Drowning in Cornwall due to my family’s roots there. Because my ancestors worked the land for low pay, I wished to explore a working class narrative about real people who toiled monstrously hard. We have many stories set in the late 1700s about the wealthy elite, their grand estates and gossip-heavy balls. Rather than write a novel on inheritances and high class scandal, I went the earthen route. It seemed appropriate for the novel’s setting. After all, Cornwall, on England’s south west coast, is a county whose pagan roots cling thickly to its cliffs and moors.
Due to its rugged and wild landscape, Cornwall has its own traditions, myths and legends, many with variants across the world. When writing A Spell for Drowning, I plucked on several story strands and wove them into a complete narrative, with the aim to capture an element of nature-writing in the telling.
A common folk story in Europe—and one which appears in Cornish oral tellings—is The Specter Bridegroom. In this tale, a couple deep in love are separated. One night, the man appears to lure his would-be bride away—with a promise they can finally be together—only for her to discover (or not!) that he died prior to their meeting. She has been stolen away by a ghost, a dead creature, who wishes her to join him in death. Although this story has many variations, it inspired elements of the Bucka in my debut novel.
Would you be fooled by an otherworldly being?
What terrible event would make you trust such a creature?
In A Spell for Drowning, the Bucka takes on a trickster role, at times Pan-ish, leading a young woman astray. This character—the trickster—features in many cultures. In North America, the trickster often appears as an animal. This is the case in the Pacific Northwest with the raven or—as with the Sioux of the Great Plains—the coyote. In Greek myth we have Hermes, while in Norse mythology we meet the shapeshifter Loki.
Tricksters invite chaos and challenge the order we’ve come to rely upon.
In World Mythology: A Very Short Introduction, David A. Leeming (2022) writes: “The trickster represents the reality of the contradictions in our lives, between what we call good and evil, life and death, social convention and individual appetites. The trickster embodies the tension that permeates art, relationships, the seasons—life itself.”
A Spell for Drowning is a book about grief and how we respond to it. The Bucka—or as he’s also known, the Father of Storms—is a disruption to death, with terrible consequences. And at the same time, one cannot help but find him engaging. He is a trickster, even though his evil actions are justifiable to himself.
A Spell for Drowning takes many cues from Cornish folklore and superstition. From the Morgawr, a sea creature reported to lurk around the Fal River and Helford Passage, to the briefly mentioned Owlman, who is rumored to be hoax cooked up in the 1970s. The novel borrows from legends both old and new, to reflect an ever-changing region which feels both ancient and timeless.
Landscape—from the cliffs to the moors to the shady oak woods—features heavily in A Spell for Drowning. It acts as a character within the work, with one or two key locations and their plant-life taking on symbolic meaning. Hawthorn, a scraggly tree with spiny branches and pale flowers, has a prominent place in the novel. In British folklore, a hawthorn tree could represent a fairy’s abode or a marker between our world and the otherworldly realm behind it. Tales speak on witches riding on hawthorn-wood brooms or flying along hedgerows, using them as enchanted pathways. A hawthorn tree’s name comes from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘hagedorn’, meaning ‘hedge thorn’. Further to this, the word ‘hag’—meaning ‘witch’—has the same origins.
In A Spell for Drowning, hawthorn reappears at multiple instances to suggest a liminal space, making a strong appearance in the early chapter below. In the book’s latter stages, Kensa and the Bucka are forced to reckon with their actions, while caged in hawthorn to signify their separation from the material realm where the novel’s main events take place. This suggests their decisions extend beyond or outside of the small village where A Spell for Drowning is set, with far-reaching ramifications.
The novel excerpt below is from Chapter Three of A Spell for Drowning, titled Tide in Turn, where Kensa and the Bucka first meet:
EXCERPT
Night had folded its blanket from the sky. The emerging sun was as ill- mannered and sulky as Kensa, refusing to leave the clouds around it. She did not return to the village, not straight away. Mrs. Lowes was a slow walker and she had no desire for that woman’s company. Only, it was quiet, when it had not been quiet a moment ago. The trees were empty frames, leafless and clattering together in near-silent laughter. No birds chattered and no mammals scurried in the underbrush. Even the clouds’ scudding progress slowed, everything holding its breath.
Kensa stepped back from the creek.
Her breath thickened to vapor, the moisture catching on her lashes. It was time to go. The damp air had her shiver. And something else. A different chill that did not abate, even when she quickened her pace. A single grouse shrieked its presence and Kensa understood the warning with a second-sense not yet developed: I am being watched.
There was movement behind her. Firm steps timed to hers. Too loud to be her own. When she paused, the steps paused too. And when she ran, he was right behind her. Yes, she knew, as a woman knows, that it was a man who followed her.
In the half-light, where all that is and seems and could be possible, a thief appeared. This was not a common pickpocket or a chancing wanderer who had spied an easy mark. No, this was a different creature. He had a sickle smile and skin as sallow as chalk. Whatever he planned to steal from her, she had yet to learn and would wait years till she found out.
“Mrs. Lowes?” Her voice did not reach far. “Mrs. Lowes!” No answer came, at least, not from the fisherman’s wife.
Hawthorn pricked her spine, her retreat cut off. Water sloshed around her shoes, rising and growing colder. It crept along the path, higher than high tide, hooking her ankles. Kensa could not have fled, even if she wished to.
He stood as shadows stand. He barred the escape ahead.
“You wished to see me, witchling?”
He was tall, which was novel to Kensa, who herself was tall for her age. She had surpassed her mother and several of the hunched octogenarians in the village. Last year she had even forced Jack, the mine overseer’s son, to stand beside her, then crowed in triumph when she found herself half an inch higher than he. Jack had avoided her ever since. This man on the path, however, seemed to contain a mass she could not measure. He waited a small distance away, though that distance seemed to shrink and the hawthorn around them grew in size.
Kensa swallowed thickly. “How tall are you, sir?”
When he spoke, it was with a tongue of silk and samphire. “As high as the cliffs and as low as the seas.”
“I cannot measure that in inches.”
His coat was long and splendid, spliced together from eel skins and glittering in the not-quite-morning. Across a high forehead ran splintered hair, as silver as sea fog and almost as translucent. His gaze, however, was human. A stark summer-day blue or the teal in a cormorant’s eyes. Their mortal tilt made his otherness all the more striking.
“You are the Bucka,” said Kensa at last.
In her eagerness to flee her pursuer, she had run further along the creek’s marshy bank. And when she stepped back, it was into its water, skirts billowing around her.
The eel-clad man, if he could be called a man, assessed her. “Where is Isolde?”
She had been warned about the Bucka. Legend claimed he was a lost sailor, an evil fairy or a cursed prince whose intent was rarely, if ever, good. In fervent prayers he was named the Father of Storms, to be worshipped when summer heat parched the wheat fields or the fishermen’s nets ran dry. Kensa had assumed he was a tale used to scare children. Yet, here he was, made flesh or flesh-like, and she a child and frightened.
“Isolde’s in Bodmin.”
The Bucka’s slim eyebrows rose.
“She’s—she’s due back within the hour.”
“Do not lie to me.”
Clack. Kensa’s teeth snapped together. “I should go.”
“You had a request, did you not?”
“I—”
It was not the force in which he spoke that had Kensa edge away. Truly, his voice was measured. Soft, even. Yet behind it was a pull that compelled her to set distance between them. And so she did, her foot plunging into the creek and sliding, taking her under. The last thing she saw was the Bucka’s smile, as though he’d planned this. Kensa’s head fell below the murky waterline. Shock prised her mouth open and brown tidal water poured in. Thick reeds tangled her legs, while her lungs went for air and found none. She clawed outward and met nothing. Only her blooming skirts, which pressed into her face and caught her hands. At last, her knees hit mud and slipped further down and downward.
Until the water receded. It fell away to allow her air— heaving, retching. Beneath her was silty ground. It sucked at her limbs as she steadily clambered back on to the dry bank. A hand reached out to steady her: the Bucka’s hand. She did not take it. Worse than that, she pushed back. At the hand. At the body it belonged to. At the Bucka.
She may as well have pushed an oak, for all he shifted. She pushed him again, palms flat against his chest. Less in ferocity, more as an experiment. In the near-light, it looked like his feet were rooted to the soil, toes tilted downward. And he was icy as the sea in winter, enough to freeze the air in her lungs. Kensa’s hands were raw from where she touched him. She began to tremble, hair flat against her scalp, clothes sodden and dripping on to the path beside the creek.
“You are who the Morgawr chose?” he asked.
Kensa raised her chin. Levelled her eyes to his. She did not speak.
He had told her not to lie.
The Bucka smiled again. “You called for me?”
“Mrs. Lowes’s husband—”
“Is drunk at The Wodehouse Arms in Falmouth. He is not lost at sea, though he will tell his wife some grand tale about a windless sky or a great wave and she will swallow it and more, though she knows better.”
Kensa spoke through chattering teeth. “Then why did she ask me to come here?”
He looked down his long nose at her and she felt her youthful ignorance, heat rising to her cheeks. It did little to dry her clothes.
“When do you begin your work?”
“I don’t know.” He was quiet, waiting, and Kensa floundered for a better answer. “I am to see Isolde when her bone-handled knife returns to me. That will be when I am ready.” Again, silence, hers to fill. “I lost it to the sea monster, to the sea itself, mayhap you’ve—”
“I have not seen it.”
He was close enough that she could smell the night on him. Salt and time and cloud-washed starlight. And something else, incense, perhaps. “You are frightened,” said the Bucka. “About what will be asked of you, about whether you have the power to do it. You will have power and, in time, it will be others who are frightened of you.”
He referred to the Old Ways, on what the ill- informed called magic. On what she would do, on how she would do it.
Kensa’s mouth was stiff and gummy. “I—I do not want to make people afraid.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I wish to help my—”
“Do not lie.” The Bucka’s voice was in her mouth, in her throat, in her chest, in her head, as he commanded, “Tell me.” And she did.
Spoke on her intentions, frustrations and hopes. Revealed in a babbling stream everything she feared and hated. What she ran from and hoped to run to. Embarrassment flushed her face as she continued to talk, mouth clicking with dryness, tongue harsh against her teeth. She admitted the worries she harbored, about living alone and dying as such, unwanted and ridiculed, exactly as Isolde was. There was a tentative wish in among her words, like a prayer, concerning the experiences—once taken for granted— that now seemed unattainable.
She told him everything.
It was a violation and the Bucka revelled in it.
Kensa gasped when at last her lips ceased their talking. She put her muddy fingers to her jaw, as though to stop its working. Too late, it was done. Her answers satisfied the Bucka, at least, though it left her carved and hollow.
He knew it, too.
Kensa blinked up at him as though to ask or beg or demand he return what he had taken, but it could not be given back.
Without a word, the Father of Storms dismissed her. He slid past her, to the creek’s edge, then further. Upon stepping into the water, darkness fanned around him. He sank down until his legs were legs no longer: a cloud with its own writhing intent. Soon enough, his middle was below the water and his eel-skin coat seemed no coat at all, pressed as it was to his angular form, tentacled and coiling. He never once looked back. Even when she willed him to.
Kensa watched his shape, blurred and brackish, until it vanished. Even then, she was not rid of him. Her boots squelched on the way home, as though the Bucka followed her, sitting inside her dampened form, waiting to prise her in two once again. Only when her dress and hair were completely dry did she consider herself truly alone. And later, when she returned to the straw pallet beside her sister, she thought she heard the sea laugh.
