Page 2 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
I drag my gaze away, back to Woodsmoke and all the life spread out there like constellations in the dark. And the hope, so long extinguished, unfurls inside me once more. I carry that hope all the way down the mountain. Back across the muddy field, tangledwith weeds and scrub. Back to the caravan I borrowed from my parents, with the chipped Formica table and stovetop kettle.
I create a makeshift dinner, the old saucepans and wooden spoons clattering in the eerie silence, then inhale an entire packet of rich tea biscuits with a cup of strong tea. I fold myself into fleece-lined pajamas, pile three blankets over my head, and get the letter out, smoothing down its edges. I should have gone to her first, I realize. She will know I’ve arrived and will wonder why I haven’t seen her. Cora Morgan, Ivy’s sister, is like that. After reading it through again, I tuck the letter under my pillow, turn out the light, and try to gather sleep to me. But sleep is just as elusive here as it has been everywhere else for the past ten years.
I worry all night that I strayed from the path without meaning to. That something followed me back, that the figure I glimpsed in the dark was real. I can hear scratching outside, and it follows me into my dreams. As though someone is tapping at the frost-laced window, bearing a warning to heed.
Or trying to get in.
I toss and turn, wishing I’d sprinkled salt and dried lavender around the caravan. It’s all too easy for a vengeful spirit, for something other and twisted, to slither in if a proper warding isn’t in place. And in the space between dreams and waking on this cold, dark night, it seems real.
Frost steals over everything in my dreams like a spell. Ivy’s forlorn garden. Her roses and their withered, thorny limbs. The creaking, narrow staircase. The bubbling wallpaper. Even Ivy, her mouth full of warnings as she stands in the lounge in her cottage, her hands all twisted together, voice too quiet for me to hear. I try stepping toward her, try catching a single word. But I’m stuck, stuck to the floorboards, stuck in this spider’s web of frost, just like her. It creeps down from the mountains, reachingfor my skin, snaring my legs, my chest, tangling in my hair. Still, Ivy bellows.
And I cannot hear.
When I wake, winter has come. I fight my way out of the blankets, drawing in lungfuls of soothing air. It’s stifling in the caravan, the walls too close, the ceiling too low. I drag a hand over my face, banishing the cobwebs of dreams, and shuffle around the small space, making coffee with the old whistling kettle, shrugging into my coat, pulling on my boots.
I clutch the rough ceramic sides of my favorite coffee mug in my hands, the one I found in a small pottery in Ireland many years ago. I let the steam curl around my face. Then I step out into the frost.
The field is a painting. All I see are droplets of glitter, the ground, the middle distance, the sky overhead, sparkling with dew. Frost is a scent you cannot bottle. It’s sweet and sharp all at once, laced with memories from childhood, from early morning breakfasts, from the moments my heart thumped with the knowing that it was here at last.
I hold out my hand, my fingertips already nipped by cold. The chill draping the air is early for this time of year, not yet November. I smile for the first time since I arrived and breathe it in, that scent of frost and cold. And I’m sure in that moment that despite my long absence, despite the way I left this place and how it’s haunted me ever since, this is my homecoming. This spell of early winter feels alive and wild with magic.
The mountains have welcomed me home after all.
Chapter 2
Cora
“She’s back,” Cora gasps at six that morning. She fumbles for the lamp, twisting the tiny switch until a glow bathes her bedroom. She smiles up at the ceiling, the one she has stared at for fifty-five years, ever since she moved into this house as a married woman. “She’s back.”
She cackles, forcing wakefulness into her limbs as she gets out of bed, smoothing her plait of hair over one shoulder. She knows she should cut it. That keeping it, this long rope of white and gray, is fanciful. But it’s how she’s worn her hair all her life, and she’ll be damned if she’ll change that now.
She pads out of her bedroom, leaving the indentations of two people on the crinkled sheets. She doesn’t like to make the bed this early. It’s not the first thing she wants to do each day, day in, day out, for time eternal. It’s not the way she wants to begin her morning. The hallway is dark, but she detests using the electric just for herself. So she fumbles her fingertips along the wallpaper, feeling the familiar grooves, the slight ridge where Howard didn’t hang it quite right. It used to annoy her, but like everything, time has smoothed that frustration away. She relents when she gets to the kitchen, flipping the switch to light the space where she has spent most of her hours, her days. She starts this day the way she likes to start them all—by making coffee.
She makes her coffee slowly, savoring each step. And as each moment passes, with every breath, she thinks of Carrie. How herarrival must have felt momentous, as it does to Cora. How Carrie will have stepped across the threshold of Ivy’s cottage, her eyes snagging on every detail, snapping to the light switch she knows won’t work. Standing in the kitchen at the back and staring up at the vast, all-consuming mountains. Cora hopes Carrie greeted them. She hopes they will welcome her grandniece home.
As she crosses her own kitchen, she wonders if Carrie will stay this time. If this cottage, Ivy’s cottage, will be the glue that holds her here. If it’s enough.
Cora reaches up, hooking her fingers around the handle of the four-cup French press in the cupboard, and pulls it toward her. She hums a tune that suddenly surfaces in her mind, a tune that conjures up scabbed knees and school dinners of lumpy mashed potato and conkers foraged in the woods, tied with string. She remembers how she and her sister would smash them together, enjoying epic battles that trailed across the autumns of her girlhood. Cora falters for a moment, picturing Ivy’s narrowed eyes, her nimble fingers, her gray cardigan with the patches on the elbows and the hole on the left sleeve, right near her wrist. She blinks down at the spoon in her hand and forgets where she is.
Then the scent plumes up from the coffee bag and she resumes her humming as the kettle boils, thoughts of conkers and Ivy swept somewhere back to the recesses of her mind. She swirls the hot water into the press, the grounds coloring it like dirt. She gets two mugs out of the dishwasher. Her favorite. Howard’s favorite. A smile tucks itself into the corners of her mouth as the back door opens, letting in a cloud of cold and dark.
“Carrie’s at Ivy’s,” she says without turning around, knowing he’ll be knocking off his boots, blowing on his fingers. She can taste the frost on the air that’s just rushed inside, an early sign that winter is coming. “She must have got in late yesterday.”
Howard shuffles to the sink, turns the tap on, and washes hishands with the soap Cora likes to make. It leaves the scent of lavender, which he hates, but he’s never told her. “I’m surprised you haven’t gone over there already.”
“Before the poor girl has time to wake up? Nonsense.” Cora tsks, grasping her own mug. Smiling again and staring out the window, she takes the first perfect sip. “These young people sleep in nowadays. And she’s had a long drive.” She nods to herself. “I’ll go over there at nine-thirty.”
“Of course you will.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Howard sighs, muttering about one of the chickens, Queenie, the layer he got last year. He doesn’t stop muttering as he wanders off into the lounge to find his slippers, the sign that he’s ready for Cora to make him his breakfast. Two boiled eggs. Soldiers. Another round of coffee to ward off the mountain chill.
But Cora is miles away. Years away. She’s drifting on the current of a conversation she had the day Carrie left. The day the world came unstitched, when she and Ivy stopped talking and everything changed. She drinks the rest of her coffee leaning against the old Belfast sink, remembering the days and months that followed.
She wants Carrie to feel the roots of Woodsmoke.Herroots that bind her to this place, that bind every Morgan woman. She’s not sure if Carrie has felt their tug while she’s been gone, but she imagines this place hasn’t quite let her go. The mountains don’t like letting people go. Not before their time, anyway. She knows that even Lillian, Carrie’s mother, feels that tug from miles away. She left Woodsmoke, and now she’s too afraid to return and face whatever the mountains throw at her in reprimand for leaving. Wild places can be vindictive like that.
She wonders if Carrie is haunted still by the day she left. Or whether she’s folded it away in her mind, let it slip all the way under until it’s lost somewhere far away.
