Page 44 of A Spell for Midwinter’s Heart
Memories returned.
A memory of a boy popping out from behind a stall to tackle her.
It was a game they’d played dozens of times over the years while their mothers worked the festival, but this time it was different.
Her body had been changing, and so, it seemed, had the game.
Her cheeks flushed. She pushed him off and ran.
A memory of a late-night study session. His hand getting close as he moved to erase something, and her body leaping in response to his touch.
A memory of a ride on a Ferris wheel. A look on his face like he had something to say but could not figure out how to say it.
A memory of writing his name and drawing frustrated X’s across it, frantically, over and over, until the X’s gave way to hearts, and she cursed herself for being as hopeless as all the other girls fooled by quiet boys with soulful eyes.
A memory of working the wassail table. Gavin had come by, asking if they ever had orange sugar cookies. She’d gone straight home that night and worked on the recipe until she’d mastered it.
A memory of a long drive she wished would never end, because in the car, he was hers, and hers alone. As she wished it, the car turned off the road so they could stop and look at a waterfall.
A memory of kisses stolen in hidden corners, on long walks in the woods, behind bleachers.
They were Romeo and Juliet. Their families would never approve, and so it was a secret—their secret.
He’d slid his class ring onto her ring finger, but it had been too dangerous to wear it, so she’d kept it in her pocket at all times.
A memory of more than a kiss. They were in his Subaru, old even then, the most ignoble of all places for one’s first time, but it didn’t matter, because it was with him.
A memory of a confession. Magic was real, and she wielded it. When he expressed doubts, she sat up and kissed him, sending rippling waves of pleasure through his body. “Do you believe me now?” she’d teased, and all he’d been able to do was stare, open-mouthed.
A memory of a plan. A plan to save her grandmother’s house. She waited for him outside, alone in the cold, as he did his part—talking to his father, which he insisted would work, but if he failed, he promised he would bring back something they could use in a spell.
When he appeared at the rise outside the McCreery house with a photo in his hand, her heart fell. He’d held the picture tight to his chest as she assembled the altar.
“Is this real?” he’d asked. “Are you really going to cast a spell on my father?”
“This is real, Gavin. I told you I have magic. I showed you I have magic.”
He shook away her words. “You kissed me. I felt something. I feel things every time you kiss me. I feel things every time I think about you kissing me. That isn’t magic, it’s just…love.”
The confession had floored her. Love? Her throat dry, she said, “Love is magic.”
“You can’t keep saying normal things are magic,” said Gavin, his voice beginning to rise. “Like that makes this all okay!”
“This is okay, and if you need me to show you something you can’t explain, away—here!”
She raised her hands to her sides, calling up a wind to surround them, howling in a gale to match her pain and frustration that he didn’t believe her.
It blew with such a fury that it snapped a branch off a nearby tree, startling them both.
Her hands dropped, and the wind ceased. His eyes were wide as he stared at her, silent.
Finally, she held out her hand. “Can I please have the picture? The spell won’t work without it.
I need a link to him.” But Gavin was still silent, and he took a step back.
“Please,” she said, her voice quivering.
“Can I have the picture?” He took another step back. “Gavin, please don’t go. Please.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, turning to flee into the night.
The realization that he would never stand up to his father. Not for this. Not for her.
A memory of lying in a bed in her grandmother’s house—her heart in pieces. Grandmother Madeleine stroked her hair. It would be the last night she spent in that house before McCreery demolished it.
“He looked at me like I was going to do something evil,” she said with a choking sob. “He knows me. He knows I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“He only knows the half he wants to see,” muttered her grandmother. “The other half scares him, because it’s so much more than he’ll ever be capable of. I’m sorry you had to learn that lesson this way. What were you trying to cast?”
Rowan unclenched the paper in her hand, revealing the name of the spell. A Spell to Feel My Pain. “I thought if Dennis realized what he was putting us through, he wouldn’t go through with it.”
“Oh, my girl,” said her grandmother with a tired sigh. “He knows exactly what he is doing. He simply doesn’t care, and there’s no magic to fix that.”
“Then what the hell good is magic?” Rowan shouted, wrenching the sheets of the bed in her fist.
“There’s other magic,” her grandmother had said, her voice low and purposeful. “Magic that might fix this yet…”
Her grimoire had looked giant in her hands, already paper thin and almost translucent—blue veins running along liver-spotted skin.
“Something the world will teach you a million times over, my love: Appealing to people’s empathy will only get you so far.
Sometimes you have to force them to do the right thing.
” The spells inside the book were already well beyond the old woman’s remaining magical capabilities, and so she set it beside her granddaughter, as well as the hedgewitch pendant.
“Don’t be afraid of your power,” her grandmother urged before leaving.
Rowan had stared at the grimoire for a long time, but finally she’d snatched it up, along with the pendant, stealing out to return to the McCreery house.
She settled on the ground where she had assembled her altar earlier and opened the book. The moon was full overhead, so she read its pages by moonlight. It opened straight to the first marked page— A Spell to Do as I Say. She flipped to the second— A Spell for the Uninvited Guest.
The suggestion was obvious. Coerce him into letting her inside. Assume control. Make him give up the house. Force him to leave their family alone.
But if Gavin caught her, if he figured out what she’d done, he’d never forgive her.
The book had slipped from her hands, opening to a new page. A Spell to Forget.
An alternative path opened up before her. She could cast what she needed, and then wipe their minds with the forgetting spell. It would be as if the entire night had never happened. No spells, no fight, no fear. A fresh start.
Rowan had scrambled to assemble the materials, heaping them all on the altar, and grounded, raised power, and shouted the desperate words. But just as she had been about to say So mote it be, she had stopped.
Her grandmother’s face had flashed in her mind—birdlike, hollowed out and hiding in her nest, high above the world that neither she trusted nor trusted her back.
Was that who Rowan would become? Was that what she wanted?
She had screamed—a guttural, primal scream—and swept everything from the altar. She couldn’t do it. They were going to lose the house because she couldn’t do it. She’d driven Gavin away and abandoned her family, just to end up here, alone, with nothing.
That wasn’t true. She didn’t have to lose Gavin. The answer was right at her feet.
She picked out the components for A Spell to Forget from where they had scattered in the wet grass with the others.
Yes. She would erase that night from both of their memories. Gavin would forget her magic. They could go back, start again, and this time she would not make the mistake of showing him her whole self.
She had cast it, but it had been big magic, well out of the control of a young, solitary witch, and it had taken so much more than she had intended. What Gavin lost, she lost threefold, so that only a skeleton of their entire history had remained.
She had been too young to realize that our bodies hold our experiences in more than memory alone. Without the brain’s guidance to make sense of what happened, she was left with a heartache she couldn’t name and a fear of her magic that refused to be kept in check.
All because she couldn’t let him see her for who she was.