Excerpt from Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by Victoria E. Schwab, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I need no wings," she says with a smirk. "I am a witch."

It was only a joke. He called her one last week, when he came in and saw her sitting by the hearth, her red hair wild and loose, her attention lost inside the flame.

But now, as the word leaves her lips, his hand lashes out, striking her across the cheek.

The pain is sudden, hot, but the tears that brim are those of shock, and rage, and for an instant she imagines lunging at her brother, raking her short, sharp nails across his cheek, the look on his face, marred by bloody crescents.

But it is a feral kind of an anger, and María knows that it would only get her whipped, so instead she decides she'll fill his good boots with manure. She grins at the thought and the sight of her smile seems to unnerve her brother even more.

Rafa shakes his head. "Go home to Mother," he says, flicking his hand as if she's a stray cat, something to be shooed. He sets off down the path, and Felipe trails silently behind, a shadow in his wake, the two boys heading into town to greet the caravan.

María rubs her cheek and watches them go. Counts to ten, then shifts the cherry pit between her teeth and bites down so hard it splits.

She spits the broken shards into the dirt, and follows.

* * *

Santo Domingo is a blessed town.

It sits on the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrims' road. María has always been fascinated by the people who come down it. Her father told her that they made the trip to cleanse themselves of sins, and when she was small, she thought of those sins as boulders, heavy burdens like theft and murder and abuse, each enough to weigh a body down, bend a spirit low. María would marvel at the constant train of criminals, advertising their guilt even as they attempted to atone.

Only later did her mother say that not all sins were boulders, that most in fact were more like pebbles. An unkind thought. A hungry heart. Small weights like greed and envy and want (things that didn't seem to her like sins at all, but apparently they added up). More disappointing still was when María discovered that some who walk the pilgrims' road are not guilty of a sin at all. That they make the trip not to atone for their past, but to secure their future. To ask for miracles, or intercessions, or simply pave the way into God's grace.

That struck María as horribly dull, so to amuse herself, she's taken to concocting sins to assign to each and every traveler.

As the caravan unloads in the town square, she decides that the man at the front stole a cow from a family who then could not survive the winter.

The woman behind him drowned an unwanted baby in the bath, and then could not get with child herself.

The man with the red cross emblazoned on his cloak is a knight of the Order, there to shepherd the flock, but María decides that he has wives dotted like seeds along the road, a breadcrumb trail of sins.

The old man behind him prayed for his wife's death, and then it came to pass.

The young one slayed a man in a duel.

And the woman in gray …

The woman in gray …

María falters.

It's not that her imagination fails her, but it is hard to come up with a story when she cannot make out the woman's features. She is draped in fabric, all one shade, like a pillar cut from a block of stone, or a drawing made in mud. A ghost wrapped in a dark gray frock, a gray hat with a gray veil pinned around its rim, hands gloved in matching cloth despite the heat of the cloud-strewn day. She is a statue, cold and colorless, among the bright brigade.

María skirts the square till she finds Felipe. His gaze flicks toward her, and he gives a world-weary sigh. "Rafa will cane you."

"I'll bite him if he tries," she counters, flashing teeth.

Felipe rolls his eyes, seems intent on ignoring her, but she elbows him in the side.

Excerpted from Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by Victoria E. Schwab. Copyright © 2025 by Victoria E. Schwab. Excerpted by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.