Page 41 of A Spell for Midwinter’s Heart

The Ninth Day of Yule

The morning kitchen was quiet, but not empty. Her mother was bent over the kettle, pouring a cup of tea—her eyes swathed in shadows from the late night. Rowan took tentative steps down the stairs, remembering she had another apology due.

“Morning,” she called. Liliana glanced up briefly and then looked back down at her tea. “About the ritual—”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” said her mother, voice flat. “We had someone else there to fill in the empty spot. It’s fine.”

“No, it’s not fine. I want to apologize, so let me apologize.”

“Okay, apologize,” said her mother with a shrug. Liliana had shut herself down tight. Nothing Rowan could say was going to get through. A strange energy built between them—a fetid, throbbing thing.

“I’m sorry,” Rowan began.

Her mother nodded impassively.

“Oh, come on! Look at me, listen to me. It was one spell, Mom! Just one damn spell!”

Liliana finally reacted, slamming her teacup down so hard that a surge of hot water and dried flowers flowed up, spilling onto the counter. Energy erupted, like pus from a festering wound.

“It isn’t about one spell,” said her mother. “It’s about showing up for your family when we need you.”

“I have been showing up constantly since I got here!”

“For the first time in years. ”

Rowan threw her hands up. “Sorry if I was busy fighting for the future of the planet.”

Liliana pressed her hands into the counter and leaned in. “And? Did you do it? Did ya save the planet, Rowan?”

Rowan’s breath stalled. “That’s not fair, it’s a complex issue, I—”

“ Of course it is, but you have deluded yourself into thinking that locking yourself up in a room and trying to think up grand solutions is as good as actually doing something about it. You avoid the real work, the hard work. The work that requires persistence, showing up day after day because people are relying on you.”

“I know!” Rowan shouted, fingers winding in her hair, wrenching at it. “I know. But it’s not that I’m not willing. I just…get there and I fail. Again and again. Over and over. I don’t understand how to be the person you want me to be and also do something worthwhile. Anything, really.”

Rowan pulled her hands free, clasping them together to keep herself from ravaging her hair any further.

“I have spent my whole life hearing that my way of doing things is wrong. You want me to do magic, but not my magic. You want me to contribute, but not in the ways I’m good at.

Doing that—doing things in a box meant for someone else—it’s fucking exhausting, and it means I’m always going to fall short.

I have spent the last eight years fighting my magic, fighting my instincts. I’m so tired.”

By the time she finished, her breath had gone ragged. Her stomach churned.

Her mother stared, open-mouthed, and then after a moment pulled her in close.

They stayed that way for a long time, until finally Rowan pulled back.

“Why were you so afraid of Grandma teaching me, Mom?” She had her suspicions, but she wanted to hear it from her mother’s lips.

Liliana looked down. Her face was creased and haggard in the cold morning light.

“Your grandmother, she…I loved her, but she was a hard woman to love. She was so wounded, she simply could not cede an inch, ever…She was always on the offensive. And she had her reasons—I can acknowledge that. There were times she needed to protect herself, to protect us, and when she used her power against people with power of their own who deserved it, it was righteous. But she stopped being able to see clearly who did and did not deserve it, trusting only in herself to judge, and used it in ways, on people, she shouldn’t have.

” Her mother looked away briefly before looking back.

“And it drove her further and further away from everyone.”

Liliana was studying her hands, and Rowan reached out to hold them. She looked up, smiled faintly. “I didn’t want that for you.”

“I don’t either,” said Rowan, and a familiar fear coiled in her belly, readying to strike.

“But listen to me—you aren’t her, and it wasn’t fair of me to project what she did onto you. You can and will make the right choices about how to use your magic. You already are.”

“Thank you.” Rowan hesitated a moment and inhaled power from the earth below before saying what came next.

“But the thing is, I am her. There are ways that I am her, just like there are ways that I’m you, because I’m not one person, and neither was she, and she used her magic to hurt you, really badly.

She hurt me too, but she also helped me.

Just like you have helped me and hurt me.

And I’m going to hurt people too. No matter how hard I try—I’m going to hurt people too. ”

Liliana inhaled sharply but didn’t protest, only listened.

Rowan took a deep shaking breath, pushing down the swell of anxiety.

“Something…something I’ve been trying to come to peace with, and I think I’m just understanding now, is that none of us are just one person.

We’re someone different to everyone in our lives, and even different people on different days.

Which is one of the reasons it hurts so much to lose someone.

We not only lose them—we lose who we were to them.

All those people, though, they are the same person, they’re all us, and they coexist inside us.

The only way I know how to make peace with that in myself is to make peace with it in others too. ”

Her eyes searched her mother’s face, desperate for understanding. “Does that make sense?”

Liliana Midwinter’s eyes, which had been cloudy, cleared and shone. “Yes,” she said, “yes it does.” Then she touched her hand to Rowan’s cheek. “My wise and wonderful girl. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I ever gave you reason to doubt yourself.”

Something in Rowan released then. She was lighter. The conversation hadn’t healed everything—no conversation could—but it had softened the ground.

“There’s one more thing we need to talk about,” said her mother with an inhale.

“You need to stop blaming yourself for the house. Many people were at fault, but no one more than your grandmother herself. If she’d told someone sooner, maybe we could have helped, but she wanted to fix it all herself.

Even though she was barely capable of magic by then.

If I hadn’t found those statements hidden in the china cabinet… ”

Rowan inhaled deeply. “There’s something else you need to know about that night.”

Her mother waved a hand. “I told you. Whatever you did, we can put it behind us, I—”

“No, it’s important. The reason I’ve never told you what happened is because I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

Her mother looked stricken. “Was it Mom, did she—?”

“ No. I did it to myself. I erased my memories. The components are still in my spell chest. Whatever it was, whatever I did that night…I didn’t want to remember.

And I can’t help but feel like…” Rowan looked out the window.

“Like part of why I’ve been…so stuck is because I’m missing that piece of me. ”

There was a long, quiet moment before her mother said in a low voice, “Do you want to undo it?”

Rowan glanced her way, startled. “Do you know how?”

“No,” admitted her mother, and then she looked thoughtful and crossed to a photo of Grandmother Madeleine hanging on the wall.

“I can try to figure it out, but…I wish we still had our expert. You know, for all I used to think we were opposites—we’re more alike than I like to admit.

Especially lately. I’ve been channeling her fierce streak. ”

“It’s not the worst thing. You’ve been fighting for us.”

“I’ve been trying.” She looked from Rowan back to the photo, touching the glass with her fingertips. “Even after everything, I miss her so much.”

“Me too,” said Rowan, a pang in her chest.

Her mother looked toward the kitchen, blinking back tears. “I went looking in the tin for her fudge this morning, forgetting it wouldn’t be there.”

“I did that yesterday! Do you, um, have the recipe anywhere?”

Her mother brightened. “Oh! Um. Probably somewhere…”

“Well, why don’t we try making it? I know it won’t be the same, but—”

“Let’s try it.” Liliana passed to the kitchen to root around in a card box. “The one thing I can never really get right is the cooking time. I always overcook it.”

“Well, you see, there’s these wonderful inventions called timers…”

Her mother laughed and scowled simultaneously as she pulled the dry goods out of the cabinets. “Who raised you to be so snarky?”

“I don’t think you want me to answer that,” said Rowan as she traveled to the fridge for the perishables.

“It was your dad.”

“Dad barely talks.”

Together they combined all the old familiar ingredients—sugar and butter coming together with chocolate and vanilla in a strong boil over the licking flames of the stove.

They chopped up walnuts in a steady rhythm of knife against block, leaving a fine nutty dust in the air, and sprinkled them across the surface of the fudge after it had been transferred to a pan for cooling.

Liliana raised power as she moved, and so Rowan did the same, bringing into the recipe all the best things she could remember about her grandmother—her cunning, her tenacity, her wit—and the hard parts too.

The unnecessary harm that she had done, in particular to those she had loved, and how the myriad of spells she’d cast to keep her safe had isolated her in the end.

It was not a future Rowan wanted for herself, but it was clear that her old solution, to deny herself and cut herself off, had brought about similar enough consequences.

There had to be a middle ground, and she would find it.

When Rowan and Liliana sat down to sample the finished product, a wind whistled through the house, and a door shut in the far hall. It was the door to her grandmother’s room.

“Hi, Mom,” whispered Liliana. She reached out for Rowan’s hand, and they sat and stared in the direction of the room, remembering and grieving not only the loss of Madeleine Midwinter but of who they had been to Madeleine Midwinter.

Until Rowan glanced at the clock and, noticing the time, scrambled out of her seat with an “Oh, shit!”

“Hmm?” Liliana hummed around a mouthful of fudge.

“I’m supposed to go to this party at Gavin’s house tonight. It’s a swanky dinner, and I have no idea what I’m going to wear. I guess I’ve got the dress from the fundraiser? But it’s dirty and dry clean only.”

“I think,” Liliana offered, raising a finger, “I might have something that’ll work.”

Her mother’s solution was the red dress of Midwinter lore.

Rowan was certain there was no chance of it fitting, given that her grandmother had been thin as a whip in the way of all women who lived off cigarettes and spite, but Liliana shook it free and held it up high for inspection, and the shape of it slowly expanded in her hands, so that when Rowan slipped it on, the fit was perfect.

More hearth magic at work.

“I don’t have to be back by midnight or anything?” she had asked, admiring the way the vintage A-line shape flattered her curves.

Her mother scoffed. “Did you hear ‘bibbidi-bobbidi-boo’? Go—enjoy the party.”