Page 45 of A Spell for Midwinter’s Heart

Rowan opened her eyes with a start. The cruel tableau knocked her breathless.

An entire love story—lost. The memories of what had happened with Hayleigh returned as well.

It left her sick to her stomach when she realized she’d walked straight into the lion’s den because she’d lost the memory of its teeth.

She couldn’t sort through it all—she didn’t have time. Gavin’s class ring shone on the altar. The spell had erased their memories together, and if hers were back, that meant that his…

Rowan jumped to her feet, shouting, “Gavin!”

“Rowan!” called her mother as she blazed on by. “What’s going on?”

He was still in the living room when she hit the stairs. Her father sat nearby, snapping his fingers in the younger man’s face. Gavin was standing stock-still, looking dazed—overcome with the revelations.

“Gavin,” called Rowan, taking the stairs two at a time as she sprinted in his direction.

“I need to explain.”

He looked at her, dark eyes filled with a mix of emotion—anger, pain, confusion. “I…I need to go.” Then he turned and pushed open the front door.

Rowan chased after him, shoeless and coatless, into the night. She found him pacing in front of the Midwinter house, like an animal in too small a cage, footsteps crunching in the snow.

“ What is going on?” he said. “One second, I was talking with your father and the next I was picturing myself in that room with you. The two of us were watching a movie, and you leaned over and kissed me…” He shook his head in confusion.

“I kept thinking of more and more…moments. With us. Things that didn’t happen. ”

She took a deep breath. “I know this is going to be hard to understand, but they happened. You were remembering.”

His mouth fell open. “Remembering?”

“I…I cast a spell. Upstairs. To undo…another spell I cast eight years ago.”

“Spells,” said Gavin, voice disbelieving.

“Yes. Spells. Like the one I know you felt me cast back at your dad’s house. I really, truly cast spells, Gavin. So do my mom, and my brother, and Zaide, the LeGrands…Magic is real. It’s not an act, and it’s not ‘harmless self-actualization.’ It’s real.”

He stared at her, mouth agape, as she continued, “Hayleigh doesn’t have amnesia. I cast a spell on her, a truth spell, and she caught me. So I panicked and accidentally cast another on her. It wiped her memory of me. And my memory of her. It wasn’t the first time I’d cast it.”

Her voice caught in her throat. He took a step closer, arms open, trying to offer comfort, but she couldn’t bear to let him. Not now. Not after what she’d done. She held a hand out to ward him off.

“I’ve spent the last eight years knowing I erased my own memories, but I thought it was just one night. And that it was just me. But it turns out I erased a lot more.”

He was quiet before finally asking, “What are you saying?”

Her voice hitched as she spoke. “I didn’t want you to be afraid of me. Afraid of my magic.”

He took a deep breath as it all finally came together. “So…you erased us?” His expression was terrible—like she’d sprouted three gnashing heads in front of his eyes.

“I didn’t mean to! It wasn’t what I was trying to do, but it was big magic. Bigger than I should have been trying alone. It was stupid. I was hurting, I was afraid, and I did something stupid.”

After a moment of terrible silence, he finally said, “Did you cast any other spells on me?” The emotion in his voice was gone.

It was flat, neutral, restrained. Like the way he interacted with most of the world—behind a shield, so he didn’t risk giving away too much of himself to those who didn’t deserve it.

Rowan looked at the ground and nodded. “Your hair. I made it go gray.” She passed a hand over her own head, pulling away the dye and gathering it in a shimmering orb.

It spun in slow circles above her palm before releasing.

It landed in the snow like a splatter of dark blood, and she was left with a head of silvery white curls.

His eyes widened, and she nodded. “You weren’t seeing things that night you dropped me off. My hair changed after I did it to you. It’s the rule of three. Anything we put out returns to us threefold. Not always literal, but in this case…very.”

His voice was hollow. “Is that it? Forgetting anything?”

She recoiled as if struck. “No! That was all. I swear.” But he had no reason to trust that. He had no reason to trust her ever again.

“Why did you do it?” he asked, his eyes searching her face.

She struggled to explain, “I was so hurt…”

In that moment, she remembered his part in what happened that night, and her own anger arrived, rising as a buttress against the pain.

“You abandoned me,” she said. “I needed you, and you left. You couldn’t stand up to him back then, and, goddess, you can’t stand up to him now.

You refuse to say no—not for Elk Ridge, not for yourself, not for me.

You made me believe in him. That if he could understand, if we could show him, that he would do the right thing.

But that was bullshit, wasn’t it? He was never going to do the right thing. Not back then, and not now.”

“That’s not true,” he said, persisting in that infuriatingly even tone.

She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake all the emotions free from the places where he’d stuffed them away.

“What happened back at the house…He was trying to save face in front of the reps. He has a hard time admitting when he’s wrong, but he’s not callous. ”

Her mouth opened wide in disbelief. “Even after everything that’s happened, you’re still taking his side.”

“I’m not ‘taking his side.’ I’m the one person looking at this objectively here. To negotiate the best solution for as many as possible.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Which is easy when whatever way this ends, you walk away a winner. Zaide was right—you have nothing on the line here.”

His dark eyes widened, and he went terribly still. The look on his face hollowed her out completely.

“I guess not.”

She turned away, racing toward the house. She couldn’t look at him anymore.

“Rowan.” His voice stopped her in her tracks. “For what it’s worth, I was going to do everything I could to make it up to you that night, but I couldn’t do what you were asking me to do…” He took a deep breath. “I was a kid. He was my world.”

The words worked their way into her head. She wanted them to be enough to make her stop, to stay, to figure out how to go back to that delicious feeling of presence in her body, mind, and spirit that she felt when they were together.

But they weren’t.

“I understand,” she said, “and I’d like to say that I’d never ask you to risk your relationship, but…I need you to be able to stand up to him. If you can’t…” She shook her head. “This isn’t going to work.”

He said nothing more as she opened the door and stepped inside.

Her parents were waiting in the living room. They stood up when she entered. Their eyes flicked to the storm of white curls on her head, but they knew better than to ask about it at that moment.

Rising to his feet, her father asked in a gentle voice, “Is Gavin coming back in?”

“No,” said Rowan, and then, as all the strength she’d mustered to walk away vanished, the tears it had been holding back arrived in a dam break flood.

“No, I don’t think he’s coming back. Ever.

” She walked straight into her mother’s open arms. “Go on, tell me how foolish it was to fall for a McCreery.”

Her mother pressed her forehead against the crown of Rowan’s head, murmuring, “I could never fault loving recklessly.”

Reckless it had been. Now Rowan lay prone on the shore, her body pierced with ten swords.