The Scent of Hemlock

The scent came first. Sharp. Green. Like pine needles crushed between fingertips but bitterer, like something not meant to be touched, let alone consumed. Hemlock.

Aislin knew it instantly. It was in her blood—like grief, like warning. The hemlock bloomed in the hollows behind their croft, but no one had dared harvest it since the last frost. Not since Father disappeared with the sound of hooves behind him and a rope in a magistrate’s hand.

She pushed open the warped wooden door of the croft, wind lashing her curls into her face, and the scent hit harder—fresher now. Not imagined. Not memory.

Someone was using it.

Someone was preparing death.

Her boots crunched over packed earth and early spring leaves as she moved toward the old root cellar, the one her aunt Brighid used for brewing potions when the nights were safe and full of stars. A flicker of movement—red hair, a soft curse—and the door creaked open.

“Màiri,” Aislin hissed, stepping down into the dark.

Her sister turned, face pale in the flickering light of a tallow candle. “I didn’t think you’d be back till moonrise.”

“You thought wrong. And what in the name of all that burns are you doing with that?” Aislin pointed to the sprigs on the worktable. Hemlock, yarrow, poppy.

“Making a choice.”

“Poison’s not a choice,” Aislin snapped, closing the door behind her. “It’s an end.”

Màiri didn’t flinch. She picked up a stone pestle and crushed the leaves into the mortar like it was bread dough and not death she was kneading. “Better an end by my hand than theirs.”

Aislin’s voice dropped. “We’re not there yet. Not unless you’ve done something—”

“They’ve taken Brighid.”

The words struck like thunder over the moors. For a moment, Aislin couldn’t speak. Her chest rose and fell with silent fury.

“When?” she finally managed.

“This morning. At the well. Agnes Maclean reported her to the bailiff for ‘tempting the waters with herbs.’ Said she watched her mutter Latin and pour wormwood into the village spring.”

“Wormwood?” Aislin barked a bitter laugh. “She was treating her own cough!”

“That doesn’t matter, does it?” Màiri’s voice trembled. “They want a witch. They’ll make one.”

§

The house on the hill had gone cold since Brighid’s capture.

Their mother, Iona, hadn’t spoken much. She sat before the hearth with her spindle, spinning the same patch of wool over and over until it frayed and broke beneath her fingers. A woman with three daughters could ill afford silence, but grief had emptied her.

“We have three days,” Màiri said, standing in the firelight, her shadow stretching tall across the wall. “The trial’s set for the new moon.”

Aislin gripped the iron kettle’s handle. “We’ll stop it.”

“How?” Màiri demanded. “By pleading? By praying? They’ve stacked the wood already.”

“By remembering what we are,” Aislin said. “By becoming what they fear.”

§

They left that night, wrapped in oilskins and night-colored cloaks, walking swift-footed through the forested glen toward the sanctuary their grandmother once spoke of—Caer na Teine, the Fortress of Flame. Only spoken of in whispers. Only found by blood.

The path was lined with stones carved in spiral sigils, old even before Christ walked the earth. The heather bent before them, the wind parting like a memory remembered.

Their cousin Sorcha met them at the edge of the standing stones, a red braid looped over one shoulder and a hound at her side.

“I heard,” she said simply. “They came for my mother last spring. She fled north.”

“Is she safe?” Iona asked.

“No one’s safe,” Sorcha said, and opened the circle for them.

§

Inside the circle, power hummed. The earth itself seemed to breathe.

The coven was smaller now. Witches burned from Stirling to Inverness, hung from trees in the Lowlands, drowned in the northern lochs. But those who remained had gathered. Cousins. Grandmothers. Aunts. Some men too—keepers of lore, of bone, of fire.

Aislin spoke first.

“They’ve taken Brighid. She’ll be tried in two nights, condemned by dawn.”

“And the people will cheer,” someone muttered.

“Then we cannot be people,” Aislin said. “We must be more.”

They formed the circle, thirteen strong. Blood was offered—just a prick of each thumb—and dropped into the ash bowl passed from hand to hand.

“We ask the blessing of the First Flame,” Sorcha intoned. “We ask the breath of wind, the whisper of stone. We ask the right to fight.”

The wind rose. The candle flames leapt. Something unseen moved through the circle, as if listening.

“We do not seek vengeance,” Iona said at last, rising to her feet with the steady voice of the mother line. “We seek to stop a death.”

The bowl flared.

The spell began.

§

The next day, Aislin entered the town disguised as a washerwoman. Her cloak stank of lye and goat’s milk. No one looked twice. Màiri posed as a farmer’s niece, carrying eggs in a straw basket. Sorcha rode in under the guise of a healer’s apprentice, jars of valerian root clinking in her satchel.

The three of them met behind the churchyard, where the smell of soot and fat from previous executions still lingered on the stones.

“Brighid’s held in the cellar beneath the old granary,” Sorcha said. “I bribed the jailor’s wife for word.”

“We have till dusk tomorrow,” Aislin murmured. “Then she hangs.”

“Unless we break her out.”

“Unless we burn the town,” Màiri whispered. “Let the witch flames burn the other way for once.”

“No,” Aislin said. “We don’t hurt the innocent.”

“They’d cheer as she dies. What innocence is that?”

“Enough.” Iona’s voice snapped like frost.

They hadn’t seen her step from the shadows. She wore black now—no cloak, no embroidery, no charm around her neck. Only her hair, long and silver, wild as the river.

“I’ve made a plan,” she said. “And it requires all of us.”

§

They struck at moonrise.

The town bell rang once for the evening hour.

Brighid, chained in the granary, sang under her breath—not for comfort, but to weave a protection chant old as peat. Her voice was hoarse, lips cracked, but still she sang.

The guards outside her cell fell asleep without knowing why, heads lolled back, eyes rolled white. One by one.

Aislin entered first, unlocking the door with a twist of her charm ring. Màiri followed, arms full of stolen keys and smoke bombs brewed from foxglove and rotting apples.

“Brighid,” Aislin whispered.

Her aunt turned her head slowly. One eye was blackened. Her wrists bled.

“About time,” she rasped.

§

They got her out by cart, hidden beneath baskets of fish and onion. Sorcha drove, her jaw tight.

Behind them, the bells rang again—but not for curfew.

For fire.

The town square was aflame. Not by witches, but by angry wives who’d lost sisters. By midwives and herb-sellers, accused and condemned, who finally struck back. Not murder. Not revenge. A cleansing.

The magistrate’s house burned first.

A page from his Book of Condemnation floated into the night sky, catching fire as it rose.

§

Brighid healed slowly.

She sat in the circle of standing stones, eyes closed, letting the wind clean her wounds. Iona knelt beside her, weaving a poultice from nettle and lavender.

“We’ll be hunted for this,” Brighid said. Her voice was stronger now, bitter with truth.

“We were hunted already,” Iona replied. “Now we hunt back.”

Aislin stared into the fire. “They’ll say the witches have turned.”

“No,” Sorcha said, her voice rising like a prayer. “They’ll say the witches remembered.”

§

By winter, more came.

From the coasts. From the highland glens. From across the sea.

The sisters, once hunted, became a signal fire.

They etched their sigil on the stones outside every safehouse: a flame within a spiral. Blood remembered. Names restored.

And in the valleys where once the screaming echoed, silence now reigned.

The burning had ended.

But the fire remained.

§

Author’s Note:

The year 1652 marked one of the most violent decades in European witch trial history. This story is fictional but draws on the cultural memory of women persecuted not for crimes, but for knowledge—of plants, of healing, of the sacred unseen. The scent of hemlock in the opening is symbolic: dangerous, yes, but also known, wielded with intent. Not all poison kills. Some poisons set us free.