Excerpt from As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Once the light had faded, once Cybil slept and the candles had burned out, he proclaimed the curse cured. It did not matter that he had no proof, that the shadows had swarmed around the edges of the circle and pressed against it, eager and hungry. There was only one thing Christopher Harding feared more than his daughter, and it was the prospect of his own failure. It was the possibility that he was not a saint. It was the realization that God did not favor him, that the Hardings were witches and their souls damned.

Cybil sometimes wished he had accepted the inevitable and left her to the wolves, after all.


Cybil grew. Cybil learned to walk, to speak, to fear the darkness that waited for her in the shadowed corners of Harding Hall.

She knew from an early age that her father did not love her. How could he? To acknowledge her, to accept her, would be to accept responsibility for whatever disaster she might cause. He would much rather pretend she did not exist.

Cybil did not seem to have magic, not in the manner he did, but there was something unearthly about her, something alienating. Sometimes, she had more shadows than she should; sometimes, she had none at all. The flames of candles bowed to her. Once, at church, the water in the font began to boil without reason. They stopped going after that. Once she had the words to do so, Cybil told her parents that she saw visions of violence, that she felt phantom pains as if pieces of her were being carved away. Her father told her she was mad. Her father told her not to speak of it, or else she would make her visions reality.

Cybil's only real parent, then, was her mother. Bess Harding loved her daughter. She combed her hair out every night, called her "my dove," taught Cybil her letters, and read her Aesop's Fables. Together they explored every nook and cranny of the Hall, which had so many rooms and corridors, Cybil felt she could never see them all. With its vaulted ceilings, its pale brick, its sprawling gardens—the Hall was a monument, not a home. It exposed its innards to the surrounding countryside through windows so wide and tall that if Cybil stood before them she would get vertigo, feeling herself falling, tumbling over the edge of the glass to impale herself on the rosebushes below. Bess tried to make it feel friendly, feel familiar: she sang little songs as she carried Cybil from room to room. "Harding Hall, more glass than wall. Harding Hall, wonders all."

But meanwhile, outside the safety of the walls, whispers of the cursed girl began to spread through the village.

The Hardings employed only a dozen servants, not quite enough to keep the entire place clean. Solitude was Christopher's preference, and as many rooms in the building were shut up as were used. His father had built the Hall to entertain, as a home magnificent enough for a Royal Progress. But Christopher Harding was not a man who wished to entertain. He had a holy calling, and he would not be distracted from it.

Only a dozen servants, then, but enough to notice the child's strangeness. Cybil was too intelligent for a girl, too brazen for a lady, and there were further oddities about her, too: she would sometimes whisper words to people who were not there, pluck and swipe at the air as if fighting something off. When she was only four, one nursemaid claimed she had seen little Cybil leaking light in her sleep, a glowing substance running down her cheeks like tears. But then she had been dismissed, and the servants spoke of it no more.

By the age of nine, Cybil was fluent in four languages and had yet to make a single friend; at twelve, she had read all of Machiavelli and had found him to be very reasonable; and at thirteen, she was interrupted by her mother in the midst of a virginal recital—performed to an audience of empty chairs—to be told that she ought to be betrothed. When she heard this, all the chairs began to tremble, as if fearing her reaction. Bess smiled tightly and said, "No fear, my dove. All will be well."

From the book AS MANY SOULS AS STARS. Copyright © 2025 by Natasha Siegel. To be published on November 25, 2025 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.