We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel, out from William Morrow on November 25.
1592. Cybil Harding is a First Daughter. Cursed to carry catastrophe to these round her, she is trapped in a home with a mom paralyzed by grief and a father prepared to sacrifice all the pieces in pursuit of magic.
Miriam Richter is a creature of shadow. Solid by the darkish arts a few years in the past, she is doomed to exist for eternity and destined to be alone—killing mortals and consuming their souls for sustenance. All the pieces modifications when she meets Cybil, whose soul shines with a lightweight so vivid, she should declare it for herself. She affords a cut price: she’s going to grant Cybil reincarnation in change for her soul.
Thus begins a dance throughout centuries as Miriam seeks Cybil in each lifetime to assert her prize. Cybil isn’t inclined to play by the foundations, however when it turns into clear that Miriam holds the important thing to breaking her household curse, Cybil finds that—for the primary time in her many lives—she may need the higher hand. As they circle one another, drawn collectively inescapably as gentle and darkish, the bond cast between them grows stronger. Of their battle for dominance, solely one in all them can win—however maybe they’ll’t survive with out one another.
Cybil Harding was born on Christmas Eve, 1576, below inauspicious stars. Her father had drawn the chart himself; it informed him that his daughter was destined for an early dying, that she would carry calamity to these she liked and people who liked her. However that was hardly stunning, in spite of everything. She was a First Daughter, and a First Daughter was at all times cursed.
It was clearly specified by the household grimoire, handed down between generations of Harding witches and written in ink that was not blood however may as soon as have been: the firstborn little one of every Harding era can be a witch. But when that witch was a lady, then the grimoire was very clear. No lady may bear the burden of such energy. She can be tainted, her magic uncontrollable, bringing catastrophe to all these round her.
Some would name the Harding inheritance evil, even Satanic. The grimoire spoke of dealings with shadows, a darkish cut price made in years forgotten that had traded items of every inheritor’s soul for energy. However Cybil’s father, a witch himself, refused to consider his ancestors would have made such a pact. Christopher Harding, a person of the Renaissance, noticed his uncommon inheritance as an angelic blessing. What else may such magic be however a heavenly reward?
The Hardings had been an historical household—a line that will have as soon as been really venerable, earlier than the rumors started that they handled the darkish. They’d owned their land since time immemorial, had constructed their nice homes on the identical Suffolk hill, again and again, via myriad cycles of destruction: partitions of daub and lumber and stone falling to struggle, flood, and flame; the tenants of their village dying from invasion, plague, and famine; and but, nonetheless, they persevered. Now their partitions had been brick, that they had the favor of Queen Elizabeth, and the village prospered as soon as extra after many years of failed harvests.
Christopher Harding had been raised throughout the fervor of the Reformation. He knew the false idols of stained glass home windows and golden statues; he knew that God’s plan, inevitable, ineffable, would by no means afford such energy and prosperity to a household that handled the satan. Mayhap his misinformed ancestors had believed in any other case, however now he would lead the Hardings down a path of sanctity. With a contact, a chant, he may make lead into gold, sing a storm silent, trigger the celebs themselves to fade. All “magic” was an change, paying with the sunshine of a soul to command the darkish—was this not a type of conversion? The spreading of miracles?
To him, the Hardings had been nothing lower than a line of saints. But when their blessings had been biblical, it made sense that—simply as Eve herself was tempted—so may little Cybil, squalling red-faced in his arms, sometime squander the angels’ blessing and tumble into sin. There was just one factor to do with a First Daughter, the act all Harding witches earlier than him had carried out when confronted with the identical drawback. He would depart her within the woods for the wolves to take.
Cybil had typically questioned why he had not finished it. It could have been Christopher’s first and ultimate second of fatherly affection, cradling his little one in his arms. It could have been the tearstained and pleading face of her mom, begging him to spare her. It could have been the energy of his religion, that nice commandment prohibiting homicide. However in truth—and Cybil knew this effectively, she spent her entire life understanding it—the one factor that saved the little girl-child was Christopher Harding’s hubris. He had heard the wails of his child and thought, Right here is the ultimate puzzle, the ultimate failing of our blood-line; I shall be the one to unravel it.
Christopher Harding didn’t go away his First Daughter within the forest. He took her to the ritual desk as an alternative, laying a salt circle round her. He lit candles and chanted an incantation, calling upon the Holy Ghost to launch her from her sins innate, to rebirth her pure. And—as he did so—Cybil started to glow with a lightweight that Christopher couldn’t contemplate something lower than holy. Her cries ceased, and she or he checked out him with eyes lucid and burning.
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As soon as the sunshine had pale, as soon as Cybil slept and the candles had burned out, he proclaimed the curse cured. It didn’t matter that he had no proof, that the shadows had swarmed across the edges of the circle and pressed in opposition to it, keen and hungry. There was just one factor Christopher Harding feared greater than his daughter, and it was the prospect of his personal failure. It was the chance that he was not a saint. It was the belief that God didn’t favor him, that the Hardings had been witches and their souls damned.
Cybil generally wished he had accepted the inevitable and left her to the wolves, in spite of everything.
Cybil grew. Cybil discovered to stroll, to talk, to worry the darkness that waited for her within the shadowed corners of Harding Corridor.
She knew from an early age that her father didn’t love her. How may he? To acknowledge her, to just accept her, can be to just accept accountability for no matter catastrophe she may trigger. He would a lot somewhat faux she didn’t exist.
Cybil didn’t appear to have magic, not within the method he did, however there was one thing unearthly about her, one thing alienating. Typically, she had extra shadows than she ought to; generally, she had none in any respect. The flames of candles bowed to her. As soon as, at church, the water within the font started to boil with out motive. They stopped going after that. As soon as she had the phrases to take action, Cybil informed her mother and father that she noticed visions of violence, that she felt phantom pains as if items of her had been being carved away. Her father informed her she was mad. Her father informed her to not communicate of it, or else she would make her visions actuality.
Cybil’s solely actual mother or father, then, was her mom. Bess Harding liked her daughter. She combed her hair out each evening, referred to as her “my dove,” taught Cybil her letters, and skim her Aesop’s Fables. Collectively they explored each nook and cranny of the Corridor, which had so many rooms and corridors, Cybil felt she may by no means see all of them. With its vaulted ceilings, its pale brick, its sprawling gardens—the Corridor was a monument, not a house. It uncovered its innards to the encircling countryside via home windows so broad and tall that if Cybil stood earlier than them she would get vertigo, feeling herself falling, tumbling over the sting of the glass to impale herself on the rosebushes under. Bess tried to make it really feel pleasant, really feel acquainted: she sang little songs as she carried Cybil from room to room. “Harding Corridor, extra glass than wall. Harding Corridor, wonders all.”
However in the meantime, exterior the protection of the partitions, whispers of the cursed woman started to unfold via the village.
The Hardings employed solely a dozen servants, not fairly sufficient to maintain all the place clear. Solitude was Christopher’s desire, and as many rooms within the constructing had been shut up as had been used. His father had constructed the Corridor to entertain, as a house magnificent sufficient for a Royal Progress. However Christopher Harding was not a person who wished to entertain. He had a holy calling, and he wouldn’t be distracted from it.
Solely a dozen servants, then, however sufficient to note the kid’s strangeness. Cybil was too clever for a lady, too brazen for a girl, and there have been additional oddities about her, too: she would generally whisper phrases to individuals who weren’t there, pluck and swipe on the air as if combating one thing off. When she was solely 4, one nursemaid claimed she had seen little Cybil leaking gentle in her sleep, a glowing substance working down her cheeks like tears. However then she had been dismissed, and the servants spoke of it no extra.
By the age of 9, Cybil was fluent in 4 languages and had but to make a single buddy; at twelve, she had learn all of Machiavelli and had discovered him to be very affordable; and at 13, she was interrupted by her mom within the midst of a virginal recital—carried out to an viewers of empty chairs—to be informed that she should be betrothed. When she heard this, all of the chairs started to tremble, as if fearing her response. Bess smiled tightly and mentioned, “No worry, my dove. All can be effectively.”
The following week, Cybil was launched to the son of an area lord, sixteen and pimpled, with one tooth already rotted from a weight-reduction plan of sweetmeats. The boy’s father had come too, and he had taken a lock of Cybil’s hair in his hand and grunted in approval, for Cybil had the queen’s hair, flaming crimson, and this was thought-about lovely sufficient to make up for her low brow and squarish jaw.
The boy spent everything of his go to bullying her and making an attempt to peek down her bodice. Because the solar set that day, he had shoved her into the backyard pond. Cybil, silent and sodden and livid, had stared and stared at him as he laughed and wished that he would die. A bough from the oak tree above them cracked and fell on high of him, breaking his neck. Shocked, Cybil stood within the water, skirts pooled round her, palms balled into fists. She didn’t know whether or not to snort or to cry.
“A horrible accident,” Bess had mentioned. “Oh, how horrible, my dove. Hassle your self not over it.”
However Cybil’s father didn’t consider it was an accident. He believed it was magic. Not the wild, uncontrolled energy of a curse—in fact not; to confess as a lot can be admitting defeat—however perchance one thing extra helpful. Perchance Cybil did have the powers he and his forefathers laid declare to: not doomed and uncontrollable, however the kind that might be honed and utilized—the stuff of miracles, the blessings of a saint. So, for one extraordinary 12 months, Christopher Harding had cared for his daughter. He had permitted her to learn from the grimoire. He supplied her incantations and elixirs, and confirmed her unusual dances to do round ritual circles, educating her an alphabet of angel letters that squirmed upon the web page like leeches. Then he had taken her to the gardens, standing her earlier than the apple bushes within the orchard. “Break the bough, Cybil,” he would say, watching her with wads of parchment notes crumpled in his fists. “Break the bough.”
However nothing ever occurred. When Cybil noticed the darkness start to surge beneath her ft like floodwaters swelling throughout a plain, when she felt the livid, hungry tug of these shadows reaching inside her, desirous to swallow her entire—Cybil had feared the facility an excessive amount of to permit it buy. She felt the burning of magic inside her, and she or he made herself douse it. The ache was an excessive amount of, as if a wound deep inside her had been being opened anew—and much more so, the chance was an excessive amount of, the sense that if she gave the darkness what it wished, she would set the world itself aflame. She closed her eyes and pulled her gentle inside her till it was smothered. She was not a saint—she was a First Daughter. Cybil had seen the grimoire, and she or he knew the legacy she carried.
Cybil felt the starvation of the shadows; she heard the voices in the dead of night.
Her father might have believed the curse was gone, however Cybil knew that he was fallacious.
As soon as it was clear his daughter had no expertise for magic—or, no less than, none that she may management—Christopher ignored her as soon as extra.
No extra native lords despatched their sons for courting. Cybil informed herself she didn’t thoughts. She had by no means preferred the style through which younger males noticed her, as if she had been ripe fruit on the flip, as in the event that they wished to each eat her and throw her away to rot. Higher for her to be alone, surrounded by her books and her mom’s love, with none distractions throughout the partitions of Harding Corridor.
That winter, the winter of her fourteenth 12 months, Cybil’s mom purchased her a marchpane-and-jam dollhouse for her birthday. It was a replica of the Corridor: an ideal confection of quince-paste brick, blown-sugar home windows, oozing black-red raspberries from its foundations and almond-studded roof. There was even the orchard in miniature, the marchpane bushes rising comfits for leaves and fruit: sugar-glazed seeds of fennel and caraway, stained crimson and orange with beet and turmeric.
Cybil didn’t like candy issues; she by no means had. Bess continued to hope she would, for loving sugar was that the majority primary of childhood traits, a final hope of Cybil’s normalcy. So, she pretended to love it, pretended she would eat it later, however then she introduced all the factor right down to the servants within the hopes it would make them like her higher.
It turned out the jam was tainted. Many fell sick, and one man died—Cybil would always remember his limp face, the style through which his physique had spasmed. “Horrible,” Bess had mentioned, pale and weeping. Christopher Harding examined the corpse earlier than returning to his examine, silent.
The servants had been cautious earlier than, however now they had been frightened. Though Cybil had by no means been shut with them—she was a girl, it might not have been proper—these had been among the many few faces who had been acquainted: Mrs. Verney, the ruddy three-toothed laundress with a cloud of grey hair, who every now and then had taken pity on her, and listened to her play the virginal; Mr. Stapleton, the gardener, who hummed tunes as he trimmed the hedges; even Jane Lennard, a younger housemaid the identical age as Cybil, who had as soon as smiled at her and complimented her hair. All of them now blanched to see her, turning away after stuttered bows to busy themselves with chores. Jane didn’t smile at her anymore. As soon as, she dropped a glass in the identical room as Cybil, and apologized so profusely, so fearfully, that she started to cry and needed to flee to a different room.
Afterward, Cybil went to her mom.
“She despises me,” Cybil mentioned to her. “Mom, Jane despises me. What ought to I do?”
Bess’s face collapsed in sympathy and remorse.
“My dove,” she replied, “there’s nothing to be finished. There’s a Nice Chain of Being that determines how every of us is born and lives and dies. Jane stands under us on the chain; your father stands increased. We should not fear ourselves with those that dwell on a distinct hyperlink than ours.”
“What if I want to not be chained?” Cybil requested.
“You have to be,” Bess mentioned.
And Cybil imagined this chain, the Nice Chain of Being, wrapping tighter and tighter round her, till her flesh was bruised and she or he couldn’t breathe.
From the e book As Many Souls as Stars. Copyright © 2025 by Natasha Siegel. To be revealed on November 25, 2025 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
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