I sat quietly at the dinner table, still tingling from the startling white light of the cedar chest. It had felt so natural to me—why? Dad rambled on about the record low water levels and the “damn county dam regulations, even after Sunday’s rain.” I usually liked exchanging town gossip with him; sometimes I’d have a tidbit that he hadn’t heard at the mill yet from our clients. But that night I felt like I was floating above myself watching the whole scene. I pushed mushrooms around my plate in their stroganoff cream and kept my mouth shut—even though I had seen the county regulator from St. Agnes himself just days prior.
Magda, on the other hand, was unrestrained. She loved to complain about the dam and milfoil with the best of the old-timers, and that night she was on the blitz. It was as if she were filling every possible silence lest I dare ask her anything in front of the family.
“Can you believe those idiots up at Medayto won’t open the lock today? We’re going to dry up down here,” she said, waving her fork for emphasis.
“And George Klaperich isn’t doing a dad-gum thing,” Dad added.
“He hasn’t been up to Medayto himself in weeks. What’s the point of a regulator who doesn’t regulate?” Magda said.
She was putting on the show for me. I did my best to tune her out and ate in silence, feeling the sting of tears threatening to fall if I opened my mouth.
When the plates were cleared, the remnants of my mushroom cream handed over to the cats—waste not, want not—Magda disappeared immediately into her room. I wondered if it was as obvious to everyone else that she was avoiding me.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear what Magda had to say as Mom’s warning rang in my ears—you won’t like what you find. But I knew I couldn’t leave it alone for another day. Lucky for me, Mom had made a rhubarb pie that afternoon—Magda’s favorite. I cut two generous slices, doused both with fresh cream—presumably from Mr. Dellson’s farm, where Mom must have been that morning—and carefully levitated everything to Magda’s room.
I didn’t knock on Magda’s door but pushed it open with my hip, kicking my energy ahead of me to announce my visit, like how Dad had taught us to shuffle our feet through brush in the woods to scare away snakes and other undesirables. Magda was lying on top of the covers with one hand draped over her eyes. A frisson of déjà vu ran through me. The curtains were drawn, but the bright summer evening peeked around the edges, lighting the room dimly.
I set my hopeful offering on the bedside table next to Magda, then crawled in next to her. It almost felt cozy despite the tension.
“Rhubarb,” I said.
“You were in my room today, Elisabeth,” she said, pushing herself up.
Should’ve known she wouldn’t accept a bribe.
Deep down, I had known she would know. Maybe I had wanted to get caught to force the conversation we had been avoiding for days.
We ate our pie in silence. But when the sweet, vegetal filling hit the rich stroganoff in my stomach, I felt suddenly ill and set my plate aside. The sound of Magda chewing and swallowing was deafening.
“I feel about a thousand years old,” she said suddenly, setting her fork down.
I felt her energy shifting. Sheer exhaustion radiated from Magda, and I felt her guard dropping. The wall between us began to fall away, and my brewing anger was replaced with pity. My indomitable grandmother was an old woman, choosing to show me her vulnerability for some reason.
It was now or never.
Magda closed her eyes, sitting ramrod straight against the headboard, ankles crossed beneath her chiffon skirt. I thought of the black silk robe hastily shoved back on a hanger in her closet.
“Why didn’t Mom want to do this?” I asked.
Magda blinked measuredly. “Why were you in my room today?” she asked, matching my tone.
Oh no. She’s not going to tell me, I feared.
Magda stared straight ahead, avoiding eye contact. We sat staring into the space above the cedar chest at the foot of Magda’s bed, until—miracle of miracles—she started talking.
“Lisbett,” she said, pausing. “All the Watry women, from me and your Great-Grandma Dorothy to all of our grandmothers before us, have been sworn to protect our abilities. Our magic. The ice floe energy. My mother Dorothy passed the safekeeping of the cedar chest to me, along with its secrets, the words, the charms within. There has to be a guardian of the cedar chest, and in return, the guardian is gifted with all the secrets of the grandmothers. Someone many generations ago cast the first bonding spell over the cedar tree the chest was carved from, so it became part of the chest itself. That is how our grandmothers made sure their legacy will survive.”
She glanced at me, gauging my understanding. I remembered that faint glow around the edges of the cedar chest. I innately knew it was powerful magic. I felt it flowing within me.
“What do you mean the guardian is gifted?” I asked when I found my voice.
Magda sighed. “Whoever is bonded to the cedar chest receives all the knowledge, all the spells, that came before.”
I nodded, half numb, and Magda continued.
“So while we spend hours copying the notes for our daughters like your mother to memorize, the guardian doesn’t need those. She knows the words, the charms, already in her heart and in her fingers from the moment she is bonded to the chest. The grimoires are there to help us, to teach our daughters, but our clever grandmothers ensured that our secrets will never be lost.”
I thought of all the times I had seen Magda whisper words out of nowhere, pulling a spell out of thin air. And I remembered all the times the words had materialized for me brand new, like when I was a little girl attempting plagues of frogs, and the way the words didn’t come to Mary like that even as she was growing in her abilities. I knew that my mother certainly didn’t do that. She followed the rules and read the recipes and cast her rare, albeit adequate, charms to the letter of the book.
“Tell me why I can do it and Mom can’t,” I said.
“All magic comes with a price, my darling. You know that,” Magda said simply, watching for my reaction. “I had to protect our legacy. When Helene made her choice, when she wasn’t willing to sacrifice for this family, I had to make a choice too. I had to make sure the cedar chest would have a guardian.”
“What did you do?” I whispered, already knowing the answer. I felt the ghost of Magda’s hands dropping me into the darkness of the cedar chest.
Magda sighed and looked away. “Even the purest of magic requires sacrifice. When a guardian is bonded to the cedar chest, it requires the whole heart.”
Magda sat up a little straighter against the headboard, as if to bolster her self-righteousness. “I was born into this life, like my mother before her and hers before her. It is our birthright and our burden, one we all inherit.”
Not Mary, I thought. Not Mom.
“When Helene defied me and our grandmothers, I knew then that she would never be the guardian. And she had to face the consequences. I had to do what was best for this family.”
Two versions of my grandmother were emerging—the Magda I knew, the strict but loving teacher I had admired and emulated my entire life, and this new version who had punished my poor, silent mother for whatever she had done that was so terrible. The two versions of Magda fought in my mind, like a staticky, double television image refusing to come together. There was so much that Magda wasn’t telling me, so much she had kept from me. I had known I belonged to Magda, but my mother’s voice haunted me: Take her.
I struggled to keep my face neutral.
“What did you do?” I asked again, my voice stony. I felt surprisingly calm.
“I was beginning to worry that after countless generations,” Magda said, “I would be the end of the guardians, with no daughter responsible enough to inherit its secrets. But then you showed up in a burst of brilliant green energy under a moonless sky on the darkest day of the year. You started levitating so early, and when I looked into your little heart and saw your enormous energy, I knew. I knew you would be the one. And by the time Mary came along, you were ready.”
She openly winced at Mary’s name. I didn’t know what to make of it. My trust in Magda was quickly waning.
“I started the binding process the night of the autumnal equinox, an auspicious day. I needed to ensure that the fiasco of what I went through with Helene never happened again. It was my sworn duty to the grandmothers. I bound half of your heart to the cedar chest that night, alongside my own. The other half has been yours to grow and nourish—until now. Until the binding spell is complete, which we will do on the equinox this autumn. It’s time for me to retire and for you to be bonded to our magic for good, to ensure our abilities are always protected, forever.”
Everything that I thought made me special, that made what I did worth it, was a lie. It wasn’t innate talent coursing through me but words unearned from a stupid magic box.
“You gave my heart away,” I said quietly. “And now you’re taking the rest.”
All magic requires a sacrifice. Mine would cost me my heart, my chance at true love, and my freedom—and it wasn’t my choice to make.
“Why can’t Mary—”
Magda held a finger up to stop me. “We have already talked about this. Your sister is like your mother. She doesn’t have the gifts that you have. And when the magic is so divided, we are at risk. We are exposed, vulnerable to dividing it so far as to peter out.”
“But—” I tried.
“No,” Magda snapped. “This is just for you and you alone, like I carried this alone for the thirty years before you came along.”
I felt defeated. There was no use in arguing with Magda. The cold realization dawned on me, though it didn’t shock me an ounce: Magda, who had been making decisions for me my entire life, had already given away half my heart and planned to chain me irreversibly to the cedar chest and its secrets, all when I was too young to have a say for myself. And my mother hadn’t stopped her. Magda had just confirmed what the nightmares had already told me—but I hadn’t realized it was Magda’s own hands that had put me there.
I had always felt like I didn’t love John as much as he loved me—and there it was: I couldn’t love John. I couldn’t love anyone. My heart was not my own to give. My heart, my life, my future—all belonged to Magda. As much as I teased Annie about getting stuck in Friedrich, I was even more trapped than she was. Magda had made sure of that.
I was halfway out of the room before I registered what I was doing. Since I had no choice in the matter, or anything in my life apparently, there was no point in talking about it further.
“One day, you’ll see,” Magda called after me, her voice rising. “This was the only way!”
I shot straight up the front stairs, avoiding Mom and Dad and Mary watching TV in the living room, feeling like I was floating in a cold fog. I looked down at my feet—are they even mine? Or do they belong to Magda too?