Cucuvea has long been a beacon of light in the darkness, but once too often she has been forced to stand alone. I am very pleased with your collaboration.
— Richard Sonnac, The Secret World
There was once an old castle in the midst of a large and thick forest, and in it an old woman, who was a Witch, dwelt all alone.
[Juniper] was what in our language was called a cailleach—it meant a single woman, but more than a single woman, one who had something uncanny about her. [...] The most important thing that separated Juniper from the rest of us was that she did magic. When we called her a cailleach, what we really meant was that she was a witch, a sorceress, probably in the pay of the Devil. Proof was that she did not come to Mass on Sundays, when the priest held aloft the bread and the wine. She came to the village when people were desperate and did not care anymore if Fillan Priest disapproved of them. When a man whose wife had labored for hours in vain could not stand it any longer, when someone was near to death after an accident, when a child was delirious with fever, when a woman had an evil spirit, they sent for Juniper, and whatever she did (and no two people ever agreed about what she did), as often as not the patient recovered. It did not seem to make us grateful; on the contrary, it only increased our feeling that she was a witch.
