Page 99 of A Spell for Midwinter's Heart
“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. Itwould 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 saySo 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 forA Spell to Forgetfrom 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.
38
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.
