Page 14 of A Spell for Midwinter’s Heart

Rowan drummed her fingers against the bedpost, staring at the dusty bronze-banded cedar chest under the bed.

It had been a gift for her tenth birthday. Her father had made the chest while her mother had inscribed it with spells of protection, and Rowan had stowed all the artifacts of her spellcasting inside.

A small iron key slid out of its hiding place in a loose board in the bedframe, and she pulled the chest out from under the bed.

Her palms prickled with an unnatural coldness as her fingertips touched either side of the lid, but then it warmed as the magic recognized its proper owner.

The padlock opened with a satisfying click.

Sitting on top was an embossed metal plate holding a few items—a chunk of pure crystal, coiled golden string, the remains of a black candle, an ash twig, and an Elk Ridge High class ring.

The items tugged at something in the back of her brain, but it was as though she were trying to catch the wind when she reached for the memories.

Were these from the forgetting spell itself, or the spell I was trying to forget?

Beneath the plate was her personal grimoire, a spiral-bound notebook covered with clipped images from teenage Rowan’s favorite occult magazines. Longing and worry competed for top billing as she tentatively swept the components aside and picked up the book of spells.

Her personal history spilled across pages stiff with ink and dried watercolor. She pored over each spell, remembering pranks pulled and problems handled, anxieties quelled, and wonders brought to being. The spells were more than instructions; they were stories—her stories.

A Spell to Leave Me Be.

While she’d learned most of her spells from the coven, this had been the first one she’d figured out on her own: a series of experiments leading to a moment of alarming success.

Instead of remembering the times she’d cast it, though, her thoughts traveled back to the moment when she’d conceived of it.

She had been sitting with her grandmother, high in the turret in the old Midwinter house, looking down on Elk Ridge’s main street.

“Why doesn’t Mom want you teaching me your spells?” she’d asked.

Grandmother Madeleine had looked at her with a studying expression.

“Your mother believes the best offense is a good defense, and she believes the best defense is to be loved. But she conveniently ignores that their love”—Madeleine swept her hand out the window, indicating the people walking by below—“is contingent on her keeping herself small, and if they ever learned the truth?” Her grandmother snapped her fingers as she finished with “All that goodwill would vanish in an instant.”

Then the old woman had placed a chunk of clear crystal in Rowan’s palm and closed her fingers over it, giving them a pat.

“The best offense is a good offense, my dear. And the very best offense is one they never even realize was you.”

Back in the present, Rowan picked up the piece of quartz from the plate and stared at it before placing it in her pocket and returning to her book of spells. The last entry was loose and not sized to the rest of the pages.

A Spell to Forget.

“Chunk of crystal,” she murmured. “Golden cord, a maple stave, a black candle.”

So the components had been a part of the forgetting spell. Any hope that the spell components might give her a hint as to the other spell she’d tried quickly vanished. Whatever she’d done, she’d been thorough in erasing it.

Rowan picked up the class ring and turned it around. It wasn’t hers. She’d never bought one. It was much too large for any of her fingers, and there was no name engraved inside.

“Rowan! You almost ready?”

At the sound of her mother’s voice, she tossed the ring back into the chest, as if she was about to be caught doing something wrong. It reminded her to get down to business. Everyone was waiting for her to don her robe and gather her things so that they could make for the ritual site.

She took a deep, steadying breath to control the racing in her veins.

Here we go.

The walk to the ritual site was blessedly short. Bare feet crunched on hard coils of frigid earth. Going shoeless would deepen their connection to the earth, but it was a chilly ask in the middle of winter.

A waxing moon hung in a crescent overhead.

The forest was quiet, most of the life tucked away in burrows and tunnels and bulbs until spring.

Their footsteps, and the lone hooting of an owl, were all they heard until they reached the clearing, at which point the low babbling of a creek joined the soundscape.

At the clearing’s center was a perfect circle of mossy stones, a natural formation that had been the reason the coven claimed this patch of land.

Generations of witches had covered the boulders with runes, and a variety of half-burned candles sat amid puddles of pooled and hardened wax.

At their center was an altar covered in evergreen boughs, holly, rosemary, and poinsettia.

A silver bowl of water sat in the middle, surrounded by a few statues—Freyr, Perkunas, and more, all weather gods, from the look of it. Incense burned the entwining smells of frankincense and pine.

The coven moved into position. Liliana stood to the north, Birdie to the west, and Zaide to the south, and the others filled in the ordinals. Rowan floundered, and Uncle Drew paused at her side.

“You want a hit of something?” he said. “Got an indica that’ll quiet that head down.”

“I’m cool,” said Rowan, waving it off, while wincing at the knowledge that everyone must have been thinking about whether she was going to go through with this. Stephan reached his hand her way with a nod as if to say I’ve got you.

She stepped into the eastern spot, removing her ritual dagger from her satchel. Standing in the east meant it was her job to hold the athame. She placed it on the altar and then took her position, linking hands with Stephan and Drew.

“Ground,” said her mother. Her voice always took on a distinct quality during a ritual—high and clear—and it was impossible to ignore.

Like the one who had blazed at the head of the Solstice parade, this Liliana, the one who had stood at the head of their circle since her own grandmother had passed, was impossible to deny.

Rowan closed her eyes. This first part would be the easiest. In her mind’s eye, her spine appeared as a glowing root, and she urged the energy to travel down into the ground, where it sprouted tendrils to link with the many networks beneath her feet—twining roots, fragile hibernating insects, subterranean lichen colonies, strings of fungus binding it all together.

There was a sensation almost like a snap, and she connected.

Connected to every centuries-old tree, every bush, every blade of grass holding strong against the winter chill, and the members of her coven were there as well, their own tendrils already below, waiting to entangle with hers.

The more witches involved, the easier it became to raise power, as everyone pooled their vital energies for a common purpose.

And they would need it. A spell to affect the weather was big magic.

Magic didn’t make things out of nothing.

It shifted the world’s weave in the direction the caster asked.

This spell would mean changing entire weather systems, shifting barometric pressures, drawing precipitation bound somewhere else to their mountains instead.

She wove into the spell a specific intention: that the water would come to them from somewhere that didn’t need it. Better yet, wasn’t even prepared for it, instead of coming from a landscape as thirsty as Elk Ridge.

“With that done,” said Liliana, “let’s form a protective circle.”

This was where things would get sketchier, and anxiety clawed at the back of her mind. As they got closer to actual spellwork, the intrusive thoughts poured in.

You’re going to mess this up. You’re going to let everyone down and become something terrible.

She drove off the thoughts with deep breaths, pushing down with them the rising sense of nausea, the shake of panic.

When her head cleared, she visualized a ball of light in her center, nestled in the same spot from where the roots had emerged.

With each inhale, she pulled energy up from beneath her feet, and with each exhale, she formed that energy into the ball.

It slowly grew in size, expanding to fill her hands.

When it was large enough, she pushed it out into a ring shape. It expanded to join the glowing circle the others had already been forming.

Rowan was almost ready to let it merge when she hit that too-familiar wall, and the physical symptoms of her panic reaction intensified. Her chest closed, and it became difficult to be sure she was still breathing.

Her protective circle dissipated in an instant. More than that, her roots disappeared too. Everyone else would have felt it as well. It took all she had not to tear her hands from Drew and Stephan and retreat into the forest.

A flush of hot, comforting energy passed through her body.

She peeked at Zaide, whose eyes were closed, lips upturned in a knowing way.

The energy was chased by another, which came on like a cleansing spring rain sprinkling on her skin, and then it was as if the ground rose around her feet protectively.

All the coven’s magic came to her aid, reminding her they were there beside her.

We’re doing this together. It’s not me—it’s us.

She settled back into place, focusing on the touch of hands, the smell of burning incense, the lingering taste of cardamom, and the sight of the clearing full of witches.

Birdie hummed in a rumbling contralto, and the rest of the coven joined in.

Rowan lent them her voice, and in doing so remembered her place here.

Her family had been using this spot for more than a century to practice magic.

Dozens of them had walked this ground, had let their energy bleed into it, had left parts of themselves as threads in a tapestry to which her spirit was inextricably woven.

Countless plants and animals had lived and died there, exchanging energy with every meal, every death, every exhale.

The coven believes I’m capable of this. If I can’t trust myself, I can at least trust them.

Something in her body gave way in a great snap of release, painful at first but then clear. Her head emptied, her shaking subsided, and her stomach settled.

Roots of golden light shot down through her back, plunging deep into the ground.

A new ball of protective magic formed so fast that it outpaced her breathing, and it flowed out to join the others.

In channeling air, her magic was bright and intellectual, providing clarity to the passion of fire, the resolve of the earth, the insights of water.

With Drew and Stephan on the assist, her magic gave the ritual shape, a shape in which the others could soar.

She retrieved her athame from the altar and raised it to the sky as her mother’s voice began the chant of the ritual.

“Goddess, hear our voices. Please, the land is parched, and the people need you.”

Her voice traveled into the night, the spell carrying all of their energy with it, and Rowan focused on the image of water condensing overhead, cold and heavy, leaving the clearing blanketed in feet of heavy snow. Then she imagined the whole of Elk Ridge covered with a layer of glittering white.

As they finished the spell, Rowan was left breathless and charged. Her eyes scanned the inky night.

Nothing had changed.

Worry must have shown on her face, because Stephan squeezed her hand and said, “Won’t know anything until at least tomorrow.”

“But we did what we needed to, right? Everything was all right on our end?”

While she might have said we, it must have been obvious she meant I, because Zaide looked her in the eye with a gentle smirk and said, “You did the thing, Rowan.”

She exhaled. “I did, didn’t I?”

And then the anxiety was back but not quite the same, and she remembered something she’d once read—that the chronically anxious have a hard time distinguishing anxiety from excitement.

So she let herself feel the tender excitement that this just might make the difference for Elk Ridge.

Goddess, please let this work.

A gentle presence in the back of her mind whispered.

It will.