Everything felt different in the light of day. I awoke early the next morning, easily reverting to old patterns after aimless weeks of sleeping late, and lay under my covers listening for the regular sounds of the house. But everything was changed: I didn’t hear Mom down in the kitchen or footsteps from upstairs. It made me deeply uncomfortable that all the Watry-Ridder women were hiding in bed as morning broke over the lake.
I was completely drained of emotion after the funeral, but some primal instinct drove me to the lake to ground myself before unraveling Magda’s web of secrets, before I figured out what exactly to do about the ice floe and the binding. The water was a shock to my system. All the strange energy and resentment I had picked up since Solstice came pouring out the minute I dove into the chilly morning waves.
Mom and Mary were still dallying upstairs when I returned in my towel. I felt stronger, calmer, for the exertion. Alone in the kitchen, I made coffee—which itself was surreal, as I was never the first one up to make coffee. That had always been Magda’s or my mother’s job.
With a comfortingly familiar mug secured in my hands, I found myself drawn to Magda’s room, pulled by some gravitational force. I was surprised that it looked so normal, untouched in the days since she had passed. Someone, my mother probably, had made the bed with tight corners, and everything was put away in its proper place, as if Magda might rush back into the room at any moment from bridge at Harry’s or Cousin Mildred’s to claim some forgotten artifact.
I was unsure what I was looking for exactly—what didn’t she tell me? What did Magda Watry take with her to the grave? I opened her closet and pressed my nose to a sweater, feeling at the same time like an interloper and like I was the only person in the world who deserved to touch her things. It smelled like sage and fire and something subtler, earthier. It smelled like Magda. I dropped the sleeve, then rifled through for the black silk robe with the intricate beadwork. I slipped it over my shoulders, feeling immediately protected and at home, and slid the closet door closed.
I turned slowly, and there it was, taunting me from the foot of Magda’s bed—the cedar chest. Magda’s stupid magic box, the source of my power and my pain. I had been delaying the inevitable until after the funeral. It was time to face my destiny, the mystery of our family’s cedar chest. I had tried to outrun it, but I had to accept my fate as the head of the family now that Magda was gone. She was gone too soon, and that would be my burden to bear.
But before I could open the chest and tear it apart, Mary’s voice stopped me cold.
“What are you doing?” she asked in open accusation.
“I … I need a charm,” I stuttered lamely, turning to meet her eyes as she leaned casually against the doorframe.
I subconsciously mirrored her body language, leaning back against the edge of Magda’s high sleigh bed. Mary eyed me skeptically from the doorway, one eyebrow raised.
“Fine,” I said. “I need the binding spell.”
Mary’s face remained unchanged, showing not an ounce of surprise or curiosity. What does Mary know about the binding spell anyway?
“Couldn’t you use a summoning charm?” she said.
I sighed, failing to suppress an eye roll. “Come on, think about it. If we can’t use a charm to fix the house right now, how am I supposed to use a summoning charm? How are we supposed to do anything when nothing’s working?”
“Okay, okay. There has to be another way,” Mary said firmly. Her stare was so fierce that I had to look away.
“It has to be here,” I said, ignoring her. I waved a hand vaguely toward the cedar chest. “Magda was going to finish binding my heart this equinox. How would she do it without the words?” I asked aloud, even as I knew the answer. The guardian didn’t need instructions. But if I was cut off from the ice floe, I couldn’t access the cedar chest’s power to provide me the words. The anxiety that had been building inside started to pour out, the words coming faster and faster. “We can’t need magic to protect the magic; that doesn’t make any sense. We need to reconnect to the ice floe. Nothing will work until we’re back at full strength.”
Mary stormed across the room, and for a minute I thought she might hit me. “Listen to me. Do you even want this?” she said, grabbing me by the shoulders.
My breathing was fast and shallow in my chest, unbearably loud to my own ears. Do I even want this?
I threw up my hands, defeated. “There’s no other option. I won’t be responsible for this family losing anything else. Generations of magic won’t end with me. Besides, I don’t know who I am without magic. I tried that.”
And Magda will get what she wanted after all.
Mary cut her eyes at me. “You can’t do this alone, you know. Aren’t you going to ask me what I know, Lisbett?” An edge had crept into her voice.
I hesitated, taken aback by the new tone in Mary’s voice. She sounded like me. When I didn’t respond right away, she rolled her eyes to the ceiling and turned hard on her heel. I followed her to the kitchen and waited as Mary poured herself a cup of coffee. She faced me, shoulders raised protectively around her ears.
“Mare,” I said, filling the silence. I took a deep breath. “Magda bound my heart before I could even talk. She gave my heart away for this family. I am stuck with this. You don’t have to be.”
“Great-Grandma Dorothy told me,” Mary said, clearly relishing watching me flounder in surprise.
“When?” I asked.
“I’ve known for a while,” Mary said with a sharp look. “Dorothy has talked to me for a long time, and she drops these little nuggets over time. But I think she talks to Mom more. I think she’s here for Mom. I’ve seen her aura following you too. She hasn’t been around here much lately, though.”
When Dorothy was silent in Minneapolis, she must have been watching Mom or Mary. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she guided all of us, but she had felt so special to me in particular.
“Mare,” I tried again. “Then you know what Magda did. You know why I had to leave.”
Mary’s lip quivered. “Not like that. You hurt people and endangered the town. And you left me alone with Magda to clean up after you.”
I started to open my mouth but couldn’t find the words. She was right, and I was ashamed.
Mary looked around the kitchen thoughtfully. “It wasn’t always this way,” she said, echoing Dorothy. “It could be shared. Heck, you shared it with Magda for seventeen years!”
“No, no way,” I said instantly, waving my hand to cut her off. “You see how terrible this has been for me? I didn’t even know I could do … what I did on Solstice. It was so out of control. And one of us giving up our heart is enough. This doesn’t need to involve you too.”
Mary narrowed her eyes at me. “Dorothy said you’d be stubborn.”
“Stubborn about what?” Mom said, suddenly in the doorway between the living room and kitchen.
It was jarring to hear so many complete sentences out of my mother’s mouth in the same week.
“I need the ice floe to receive the binding spell,” I said, watching her, “and I need the binding spell to reconnect to the ice floe.”
Mom looked thoughtful. “Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe?” I asked, incredulous.
She poured herself a cup of coffee and joined us at the table. “Your grandmother should’ve done this,” she said with a sigh, gripping her mug with both hands. “There’s a lot of things Mother should’ve done differently.” She grimaced.
“Mary, you may not want to hear it all,” Mom continued before either of us could interrupt. “But we will need you, and it’s your right to hear this too.” She spoke slowly, holding Mary’s gaze.
“I’m staying,” Mary said firmly. “I’m as in this as you are,” she said with a pointed look to me.
Mom pressed her lips together in a tight line. “You both know by now that my mother was a complicated woman. She made the choices she thought were best for her family because of choices that were made before her time.”
Mom had that familiar, far-off look in her eyes that I’d seen my entire childhood. I worried that she would retreat back into herself; that it was too much for her, that we would lose her again.
But then she kept talking. “We need to call Dorothy,” Mom said. “It’s best you hear it from her. And without the ice floe, we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way, with a séance and a witch in each of the compass points, which means we’ll need Cousin Mildred.”
Astonishment broke through Mary’s defiant pout. She leaned forward across the table, jaw agape, as did I, both of us hanging on our mother’s every word.
“Girls, come now,” she said with a pointed look at each of us. “I know you know this. Fire feeds on earth and wind. Wind feeds water, and so on. It’s not just a silly saying. It’s a formula. With a little pressure and a proper coven …”
“Now?” Mary asked.
Mom shrugged. “Mother has been gone for almost a week now. The house is falling apart. And here we are. If we’re going to act, now is as good a time as ever.” She glanced at the clock above the sink. “If we hurry, we can catch Mildred before she heads off to Sunday supper at the lodge.”
“So I was right,” Mary said, turning to me, triumphant. “You can’t do this alone. You will need me.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
Mom straightened up and her gaze swept over me, her eyes lighting on my swimsuit underneath Magda’s beaded robe. “Elisabeth, go put some real clothes on. Mary, fetch eight of Dorothy’s silver spoons from the china hutch.”
Mary went without another word. I climbed the back stairs slowly, taking my time to gather my thoughts. I dressed in denim and a plain blouse but slipped Magda’s black silk robe over my shoulders again. I couldn’t explain it, but I wanted Magda close to me.
When I returned to the kitchen, Mom was counting candles. Armed with thirteen new red tapers, eight silver spoons, a lemon peel, a scrap of cloth, and a box of salt, we headed for Cousin Mildred’s.