Page 29 of A Spell for Midwinter's Heart
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 goodoffense,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 wasquiet, 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 sayI’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.
