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Read an Excerpt From Portrait of a Witch Undone by K.S. Shay
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Contemporary Fantasy
Read an Excerpt From Portrait of a Witch Undone by K.S. Shay
Thirteen stolen works of art. One haunted marsh. And a Boston witch willing to risk everything for the friend she’s already failed.
By K.S. Shay
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Published on July 7, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Portrait of a Witch Undone by K.S. Shay, an atmospheric, eerie contemporary fantasy debut publishing with Erewhon Books on August 25th.
Once, Maeve Ryan was the strongest witch of her generation. But Maeve messed up a spell to contact the Lady of the Fens, an eerie Revenant who lures the unwary to their deaths in the brackish marshlands of the North Shore. Maeve destroyed her reputation, hurt her best friend Ash, and tainted herself with unbound, wild magic that transforms witches into insane Revenants.With unbound power eating away at Maeve’s mind, all she wants is to get rid of her magic. Forever. But Ash’s research into how the spell went awry leads in an unexpected direction: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and a link between the Lady and a decades-old art theft worth $500 million. When Ash disappears through a stolen painting’s empty frame, Maeve has to follow.Inside is the Other Marsh, a haunting, deadly realm where only the Lady’s rules apply. Within this half-world lie secrets about North Shore’s history, Maeve’s failure, and the fate of the masterpieces that disappeared over three decades ago. But as Maeve fights toward the truth, she risks her friendship, her coven, and her life against enemies hiding in plain sight.
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Portrait of a Witch Undone
K.S. Shay
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Portrait of a Witch Undone
K.S. Shay
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1
Birds call from dying limbs, a harvest moon rises, and I take the commuter rail home to rob my grandmother. Well, two technicalities. First, I am not heading home voluntarily; I am respond-ing to a Ritual Summons I have no choice but to obey. Second, the Marsh House, my coven house, is not home in the childhood-bedroom kind of way, but in the old-water-and-older-magic kind of way. When I die, no place will be gladder to absorb my magic back into the unbound than the marshes of northeastern Massachusetts.
Regardless, I return to the Marsh House for the Equinox Ritual with thievery on my mind.
I press my nose against the train window and watch trees pass in the dusk, trying to psych myself up for what’s coming. Not the theft; that’ll be easy. The thing that makes my stomach twist is the thought of the ritual.
The kid behind me kicks my seat, and my head smacks into the window with a very un-witch-like thwack. I jerk backwards, and the small slip of paper I’d been rolling between my fingers falls to the floor. I curse—not magically, I don’t do that kind of thing anymore—and dive into the footwell for it.
When I climb back into my seat, the skitter of tree branches against the window sounds like laughter. I glare at the night and unroll the paper, upon which I have written the title of a book: Malevolent Maladies: Hexionary of Spells Thrice Forbidden.
I refuse to think of it as stealing. I refuse to feel bad about it. After all, in another life, another dimension somewhere, the matriarch’s for-bidden books would have belonged to me. But I do not live in that universe. I live in this one, where the only thing standing between me and the solution to my problem is a stolen book of curses and one final spell.
The train stops. When I file onto the Rowley station, the night air kisses my face with a sharp, bright chill. It’s one of those fall nights in New England that tastes like winter, like deep frost and long stretches of darkness. A breeze shrieks by me, and I can almost hear it snicker that I should enjoy the remnants of warmth while it lasts, darling. You haven’t seen how big these teeth can get.
No one is waiting for me at the station. My parents are doubtlessly hoping that I’ll Port to the ritual and appear before them in a puff of silver-white smoke, just like I used to. Back when nothing thrilled me more than casting, back when no distance was too small to cross by cre-ating a tunnel through the unbound magic that governs all wild things, including the space between spaces. Back when I was an idiot.
I take a taxi out into the marsh. Mill buildings give way to the woods—I can hear the windswept laughter clearer, now—and then to the marsh. To the whispering grasses and brackish water below.
We drive until I see the silhouette of a heron taking wing and know that I am close enough. I tell the driver to let me out. He raises an eyebrow at me, clearly debating if it’s worth asking why a scraggly twenty-something is getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere, with no visible houses nearby. He doesn’t.
When the taillights have faded from view, I push into the grasses. They part for me, leading me down a twisted, narrow pathway. A grackle calls across the marsh, and it is only when the sound dissipates that I realize how quiet the night is, how small I feel.
The Marsh House rises out of the fens. It’s one of those New England colonials that shows its age in the tiny, wavy-glassed windowpanes, in the old stone chimneys, in the circumference of the trees that lean over the front porch.
It’s not my house, but it might as well be; I spent my entire child-hood training to be matriarch inside those walls. Spell jars and candles line the windowsills. A single candle flickers in the turret room where I used to crash after nights of training and study. The room that I would have Ported into if things were different. If I were different.
My covenmates are already assembling. Cars litter the driveway, broomsticks lean against the porch railings. Tendrils of smoke arc through the air, clearly the result of a Port cast by some amateur with no finesse.
I approach the porch. For a split second, I wonder if the house will reject me, if the marsh underneath my feet will open up and swallow me whole.
Before I can find out, a car growls past, engulfing me in a cloud of dust as it pulls into its parking spot. A cobalt-blue Oldsmobile that I would know anywhere. Doors snap open; laughter spills out. I lock eyes with Imani Davis. She’s a Black girl, my age, with deep brown skin and a gaze that dares me to try her. After one uncomfortable second, she turns back to her posse, tossing an array of box braids over her shoulder as she cuts the engine. I make for the house, trying to ignore the whispers that tumble out of the car.
“Did she walk here?” A giggle. “I heard she has a day job at some bookstore—”
I step onto the porch; it does not give way. As I cross the threshold, a woosh of air signals the arrival of the one witch that I am actually happy to see.
Ash slides off of her gnarled broomstick and crushes me in a hug. “Maeve! You’re here!”
“I saw you, like, two days ago,” I say into her shoulder, hugging her back all the same. Ash is large and soft. She’s Italian American, with olive skin that glows in the summertime and enviable waves of dark hair that always frame her glasses perfectly. We’ve been best friends so long that she’s practically my sister, family in all the ways that matter. I already know that I’m going to spend tonight clinging to her, as if she is the eye of this hellish magical hurricane.
“Two days too long! I would have picked you up at the station, but my aunt’s in town for the ritual, and you know what that means: If I have to put up with one more comment about my weight, I’m finally going to finish that banishing charm we started in high school.” She leans in, pulling me closer. “Listen, Maeve, I’ve been working on some-thing new, something big—”
“You’re always working on something big,” I say, but my smile is strained.
“Go big and go home, Maeve, you know that,” she says, opening the door.
I give her a strained smile. It’s our take on the saying—why go big or go home when we were good enough to do both? It was something we’d say before attempting stupid, dangerous spellwork, a reminder to swing hard, but stay safe. But now, instead of excitement, all I feel is dread.
Before I can grill Ash about what she’s working on, my mother ap-pears in the doorway like the world’s worst jump scare.
She’s tall, pale—typical white American, really; a half-dozen European countries caught in a blender, which she then passed on to me—with my same blunt jaw and blonde hair going grey swept into a French twist. Her mouth is pressed together in a thin line of disap-proval; it’s such a frequent gesture these days that I’m amazed she still has lips at all. Her voice is cold wind on the marsh. “They’re saying that you took the commuter rail.”
Imani and her Oldsmobile girls pass us in a cloud of whispers. Inside, someone calls a greeting. The top candidate for matriarch of the North Shore Coven has just made an appearance. Imani is a big deal.
Just like I used to be.
I turn back to my mother. “And then a taxi,” I say. I step forwards, but she blocks me.
“Maeve. The strongest witch in her generation can’t arrive by taxi. When your grandmother hears about this—” she starts, yell-whispering in that way that all the women of the Ryan family seem to have per-fected. “It’s like you’re not even trying.”
“This wasn’t my idea,” I say, fighting to keep my voice low. “You made me come here.”
My mother’s voice quiets, but doesn’t drop in intensity. “We gave you time. You know how important it is that you succeed her—think past yourself for a single moment. Covens are falling to the north. We cannot afford to look weak right now. Whatever this is, I know that if you just put in the effort, you would—”
I tune out, letting the rest of her words wash over me in a wave of incoherent syllables. Ash insists that having civil, adult conversations with my mother is better than getting into shouting matches like I’m a teenager—but if that’s true, how come this feels so much worse? At least when I’m shouting at her I am directing my energy somewhere, fighting back against the deluge of get it together and get back in the running for matriarch so you can uphold the legacy of this family and this coven—
I run a finger over the piece of paper in my pocket. I was foolish to think that I could ever escape to Boston.
“Your father—” she starts, but I’m gone again. My father will just back her up, present that flawless united front. I fight the urge to pour kerosene on the conversation by making a comment about my mother becoming matriarch herself, if she wants to continue the family legacy so badly. We’re both well aware that the power required to channel the spell that binds the North Shore witches in covenhood skipped my mother and went straight from my grandmother to me; poking that bruise is the nuclear option. And tonight isn’t about going nuclear. It’s about stealing a book.
So instead, I cut my mother off mid-sentence, pushing past her and into the coven house. “Good to see you too, Mom,” I say. As I do, I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time: powerful.
Ash catches up halfway down the hallway. “All of a sudden, my aunt doesn’t seem so bad,” she mutters. “But I guess it’s better than being un-covened, huh?”
I roll my eyes. “Barely.”
The gathering room is filled with every witch from North Shore, the coven of woods and wetlands that give way to brackish marsh and stormy sea. Our territory snakes up the northern coast of Massachusetts and into New Hampshire before yielding to the Northern Acadian covens. Boston, like most cities, is a magical no-man’s-land, unclaimed by any coven. When I fled there a year ago, it didn’t go over well.
As I enter, conversation quiets just long enough to confirm that I’m a topic of equinox gossip. Though the coven has been getting more diverse over the last several decades, most of the faces before me are white, like me. I spot my dad—pale thanks to his Irish ancestry, sandy-haired, with broad shoulders that I inherited, much to my moth-er’s horror—across the room and give him a half wave. Next to him, Grandmother—Matriarch—Elizabeth gives her head an almost imper-ceptible shake. Both mad and disappointed. Her eyes bore into mine. They’re blue, hard like ice. Time has whittled away her height, drawn her eyes into deep bags, and made her white skin near translucent, but I still get the distinct impression that she’s looking down at me. I wish I could learn it, the way she manages to look both poised and dangerous at once; a heron standing stock-still, waiting to lunge.
Without breaking our eye contact, Matriarch Elizabeth speaks. “It’s time.”
Her voice is quiet, but power laces every syllable. The ties of coven-hood are simple and brutal: The matriarch says, “Come,” and we follow.
We file out of the Marsh House, stepping from the back porch to the wetlands below. I join Ash at the end of the line, trying to tamp down an anxiety that feels like grackles pecking at the lining of my stomach. I just have to get through the ritual. I just have to get through the ritual, and then this will all be over.
We part black grass and juncus as we stride towards the edge of the highland marsh. Far off by the sea, cordgrass waves in the wind. The birds are quiet. A young witchling hands candles to each coven member. When she reaches me, she hesitates, as if she doesn’t know if I’m going to be in the ritual or not.
It’s not her fault; she was barely a member of the coven when I fell a year ago. She offers me a candle. I take it.
We form a circle, the front of our line snaking back to meet the end. And I am cursing myself, because who was first in line behind the matri-arch and her council of advisors but Imani. Of course.
Ash snaps her fingers over her candlewick, and a small spark ignites at the base of her bracelet. It darts over the bangle and up the chain connecting it to a ring on her fingertip, which she touches to the wick. It lights. I glare at our age-mates, daring them to comment on Ash’s use of an enchantment for what should have been an easy instantaneous cast. I don’t realize that I’m the only one who hasn’t magically lit their candle until Ash is pressing her wick to mine. Imani’s eyes flick to the flame, then away. Noted.
We place the candles at our feet. The matriarch steps into the center of the circle and reveals a book. Power radiates from the coven grimoire like salt air from the sea. The grimoire is more than just a spell book; it is a collection of story and memory, it is North Shore. It is steeped in both the bound magic of the witches in this coven and the wild, un-bound magic of the marsh itself. Few rituals are cast using a helix as powerful as this.
On this autumn equinox, as on all equinoxes, we are called to the marsh to reaffirm our covening. To refresh the spell that makes us us, that binds us together. It’s a symbiotic working; we sing to the marsh, bolstering it for a season of deep snow and dead limbs, and the marsh sings back to us, providing a space for covening, shelter, and safety.
As one, we clasp hands; the marsh echoes with the contact. One of my hands is immediately claimed by Ash, even though she of all people should know better. Imani takes the other, not out of covenhood, but as if preventing me from messing up this ritual, too, is just another part of her duties as future matriarch.
I suppose it will be. When Imani becomes matriarch, she will become the vessel for the spell that binds the coven. That protects us, unites us, makes us so much stronger together than we ever could be apart. She’ll become steward of the marsh, responsible for ensuring that the bound magic of the coven and the unbound magic of the wilderness remain harmonious but separate, like night and day.
It will be part of her job description to deal with witches that threaten the coven’s stability. Witches like me.
In the center of the circle, the matriarch releases the grimoire. It re-mains in midair, suspended at eye level before us. She draws helix after helix from her ceremonial robes and places them on the tome. Objects of power, infused with memory, emotion, intent. First, of the marsh: a cattail husk, a red-winged blackbird feather. Then of the coven: a knucklebone from a matriarch long dead, the pen that last added a spell to our grimoire. Objects that matter, and matter to us. Our magic latches onto the meaning and builds.
The ritual ignites, rushing through me like an electrical current: the memories of the grimoire, the hands and inks and eyes that have touched it. The flight of the red-winged blackbird, the push and pull of the marsh, the turning of seasons from harvest to dark winter.
As the coven’s bound magic builds around me, I feel something perk up. The unbound, wild magic of the marsh and all spaces like it. It comes alive, responding to the energy of our ritual, filling my nose with the smell of peat and salt.
All I feel is dread. My covenmates channel their power into the spell, and I feel my own magic surge to join theirs. I grit my teeth and shove it down, back, away.
I am gripping Ash’s hand way too hard. My thoughts stutter; I feel myself buckle under the weight of I am going to slip and let it in. I am going to slip and let it in and I am going to mess up again, I am going to mess it up again and I am going to kill all of them by accident—
I try to focus on my breathing, count to ten, but all the tricks to stem my rising panic are useless here, surrounded by so much magic. I can’t be thinking about messing this up. I can’t be thinking about mess-ing this up because the coven will feel my fear through the spell and I will mess it up. And above all I can’t think about that night—
I bite my tongue, trying to focus on the taste of my blood and not think about Ash’s blood leaking onto the marsh, mixing with brackish water.
The unbound magic of the marsh rises around us, joyful and terri-ble and wild. It circles me with predatory delight, urging me to give in, whispering that this magic is just a shadow of the power I could possess if I just turned around and took it. Pain claws through my head, as if someone is trying to gouge my eyes out and replace them with their own. The wind no longer feels like a kiss, but rather the slow trailing of lips just a hair’s breadth away from skin, close enough that every cell in my body is fixated on the possibility of touch.
You’ve done it before. You can do it again.
But I’m better than that. I feel the urge to lend my magic to the ritual, and I tamp. It. Down.
Outside of me and my panic, the coven sends its hopes for the season skyward. Our energy swells like a wave, breaking over the marsh. As one, the candles go out.
There is a moment of absolute quiet.
Then every bird on the marsh answers us in unison, cawing into the night from all along Plum Island Sound. The marsh comes alive with night noises, with out-of-season spring peepers and the howl of a far-off coyote pack, as they all feel the power thrumming through the earth. I swear the trees stand taller, the reeds wave faster, the reflective eyes of night creatures shine brighter.
The coven exhales. It is done.
I detach myself from Ash and Imani, shoving my hands into my pockets, where at least they can shake unseen. I did it; I got through without messing up.
“See? I told you it would be fine.” If Ash picked up on my panic during the ritual, she doesn’t show it.
I give her a wobbly smile, pretending not to notice the slightly grey pallor to her face. I feel a spike of regret, that a ritual that I could have cast easily takes so much out of her. “Yeah,” I say. “You did.”
“And what am I?”
“Always right,” I grumble, but I’m smiling.
“You’re staying for the afterparty, right?” Ash asks. The coven is al-ready halfway back to the Marsh House, buzzing with chatter. They’ll be up until the early hours of the morning, celebrating our reaffirmed bond with stories and spiked cinnamon tea.
“Only for a while,” I say, because that sounds better than only as long as it takes for me to steal a book.
Ash misreads my hesitation. “Your parents are worried about you. We all are. It might not look like it, but I think the coven would like to see you get back—” She freezes, eyes on something behind me. I turn.
Far out on the marsh, something shines. Flickers. The light of a single lantern.
Terror prickles up my spine. We’re the last ones on the marsh; most of the coven is already inside. Yet someone shoves past us, towards the light. A white girl with a face full of freckles named Rosemary, barely twelve. She strides into the marsh, eyes fixated on the lantern light.
I grab her arm and yank her back with a sharp “Don’t!”
Rosemary blinks, as if waking from a dream. My shout drew atten-tion; her mother sprints from the porch, grabbing her with a fearful “Do you not listen to any of the stories—”
Some rush out of the Marsh House to confirm that the lantern light is there; others give soft orders to keep kids under watch and get inside, now.
“Trying again, Maeve?” I turn to find Rory, current covenmate, ex-friend, shooting me one of his trademark smirks. He’s white, with floppy hair and, at present, what can only be described as a very punch-able face. “Be sure to wish real hard this time.”
I ignore him and attempt to stalk inside, trying to refocus on my purpose: stealing the Hexionary.
I don’t get far. Imani is standing on the porch with a crowd of witch-lings, surrounded by out-of-season fireflies that form a shape in the air around her: a crude drawing of a skull with a feather on each side. Their flickering light sets her dark skin aglow as she speaks.
“Now, what do we do if we see this symbol on the marsh?” she asks the witchlings with schooled patience.
“Run and tell the matriarch.”
“Exactly,” Imani says, somehow both serious and comforting at once. Good with kids in a way that I am absolutely not. “Don’t go any closer. If you see the Lady’s symbol, get to safety as soon as you can.”
“Is it true that the unbound ate her face?” Connor, a small white boy with bright orange hair, cuts in with glee. Imani’s eyes flick to a stern white woman in the audience, almost imperceptibly. Mrs. Miller, council member and Connor’s mother, is watching the exchange as if grading Imani on her ability to handle difficult questions about coven lore. Connor barrels on: “I’ve heard that she’s not even human under the veil, that her face is pocked with holes—”
“I’ve heard Rowena’s covered in feathers, like a bird—”
“Ssh! You know it’s bad luck to say her name—”
“Did she really raise herself from the dead?” The voice is small. A shaken Rosemary.
“That part is true,” Imani says, effortlessly regaining their attention. “Our Lady of the Fens was a witch long ago. Uncovened, and you know what that means.” The kids give each other understanding nods. “She was all alone, no friends or family. She wandered. And she found our marsh. Who wouldn’t love our marsh?” she asks. “She loved it so much she never wanted to leave. So on her dying breath, she spoke to the wild magic of the marsh and asked it if she could stay forever. Live forever. And it answered.”
“It granted her wish?”
“Yes. But it took something, too,” Imani says softly. “When she wove the spell on herself, she used unbound magic. It consumed her, twisted her. An immortal life, but a hungry half-life.”
“Which is why, if you follow the lights, she’ll suck out your magic and eat you,” one of the girls chimes in with an exaggerated slurping sound. The kids titter with fear-tinged laughter. I keep moving, almost through the crowd.
“Which is why we don’t wander the marsh alone at night,” Imani replies. “We stay inside the wards, where we’re safe. And she’s not all evil—the Lady lives on the marsh, too, and she cares for it just like we do. Sometimes, she even helps. Remember the outsiders who found that the marsh would not hold their feet? The mill girls whose foreman she possessed and bent to her will? How all the birds on Plum Island sing to her?
“She hasn’t hurt anyone from the coven in a very long time,” Imani says. “It’s been decades since she was last seen; even spotting her lan-tern light is rare. She’s off roaming the marsh somewhere that only the Weaver knows.” Ash shoots me a weighted look that I make a point to avoid. “We rarely see her, but she’s still dangerous,” Imani continues. “Like a bear. And we know not to go around poking bears. Right, Maeve?”
Suddenly, the eyes of all the coven kids are on me. I can’t decide if I feel so humiliated that I want to melt into the floor and never be seen again, or so angry that I want to jump up and challenge Imani to fight me for dominance, the way she so desperately seems to want.
Out on the marsh, the lantern light taunts. I swear I hear a whisper on the freshly magic-saturated wind: Come find me. I’ll grant your wish this time, I promise.
I breathe in. Out. “Right,” I say.
I shove through the crowd and into the coven house. Before anyone—Ash—can follow me, I duck down the hall and climb the stairs. There is only one way out of this.
I clutch the scrap of paper in my pocket and mouth the name of the book that is going to fix everything.
After all, you can’t go unbound if you don’t have any magic at all.
I emerge onto the second floor and stand before the matriarch’s office. The click of the door opening echoes down the hallway, and ex-hilaration soars through me. It sounds just like the beginning of the end.
Excerpted from Portrait of a Witch Undone, copyright © 2026 by K.S. Shay.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Portrait of a Witch Undone</i> by K.S. Shay appeared first on Reactor.
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