My forearm burned where Great-Grandma Dorothy had gripped it.
The haze cleared from the room, revealing once again the disconcertingly bright sky outside Mildred’s front window. I rubbed my eyes, dazed, blinking at Great-Grandma Dorothy’s chair and the mirror there once again. As the room came slowly back into focus, Mary gasped. My forearm burned white hot as Cousin Mildred began to jabber on around us.
“Well! Wasn’t that something? I haven’t seen Cousin Dorothy since, well, since she passed, of course …”
An angry pink welt rose across my forearm, Dorothy’s handprint marking me. Tiny white lines grew out of the scalded pink flesh and arranged themselves into shapes and letters, small, cramped handwriting, spreading across the flat underside of my forearm toward my wrist and Mary’s hand gripping my own.
“Lisbett, the words,” Mary whispered, awestruck.
Mom dropped my hand and leaned across the table to inspect it closer. “How efficient. I remember the ceremony, but the words, those I had from Magda … You see, Mother destroyed any scrap of variance in the spell after I bound my heart to you, Mary.” She started to turn to Mary, but I stopped her.
“Wait, but you remember the ritual?” I asked.
“You needed to understand, Lisbett, before we go down this road. You needed to know why it has fallen to you. Why Mary …” Mom’s eyes watered again as she turned back to Mary.
I realized Mary had yet to say a word since our communication with Dorothy had ended. She was unnaturally pale.
At that, Mom tapped both hands lightly on the table. “Girls, let’s leave Mildred to it. We have some things to think over ourselves. Cousin, thank you for lending us your power today. You helped us reach Dorothy. You helped us get back this inkling of light from the other side. And thank you, Dorothy”—she raised her voice and her eyes to the ceiling—“for your constant guidance, for giving us a path forward.”
Mom hustled us from the room. I thought Mary might be sick when we made it out the front door into the beautiful afternoon sunshine, but she stayed upright and shuffled steadily toward home.
I studied my arm as we walked. It throbbed less already, the words becoming part of me, already subsiding to the faint white of scar tissue. The words, a shadow of the words Magda had chanted over me in the cedar chest as a child, looked similar to the Alemannic I was familiar with but were yet unfamiliar.
“Südbadisch,” Mom said flatly, seeing what was written there when I held my arm out to her. “It predates our Alemannic grandmothers. Mother didn’t teach me much.”
“Why didn’t Magda teach it to me?” I asked, puzzling over the script.
My mother’s look was deadpan. “I assumed she wanted to wait until now, until she finished your binding this fall. She would’ve taught you then, when it was too late to back out. But she …”
“She ran out of time,” Mary finished. A bit of color was coming back into her face.
“This is what you want?” Mom asked me.
I thought of the overwhelming, itchy feeling in my hands when I had tried to suppress my magic, and the desperate way the our neighbors looked at me during Magda’s funeral. The farms were turning to dust. They needed us. They would look the other way about Harry’s when their livelihood was on the line.
I nodded dumbly. “I have to do this,” I managed through the shock settling over me. “It’s my birthright, and it’s time for me to accept it.”
I felt a zing from Dorothy again. What? I asked her silently, before realizing that I could feel her again.
“Wait!” I cried. “Dorothy, can you hear me?”
Yes, Liebling. I’m here.
I grinned. “Mare, we’re back,” I said, gripping Mary’s arm in joy.
She smiled weakly. “Thank God,” Mary said. She held out a hand to levitate the bag of spoons and half-burnt candles over my shoulder. It rose a few inches, then slumped back against my side.
I groaned and tried it for myself, but the bag wouldn’t go higher than a few inches.
“Ugh,” Mary groaned. “I guess we’re still at half strength.”
“What now?” I asked Mom.
“I guess it’s time for the binding,” she replied.
“Won’t we need to wait for the equinox?” Mary asked.
“Girls, did Magda ever teach you about the Lion’s Gate?”
Mary shook her head.
“On August eighth every year, Sirius, a sister star to our sun, begins to rise,” Mom continued. “It’s not the equinox, but it could be another powerful portal for us to try, if we can’t wait that long.”
I contemplated the unfamiliar words across my arm. “I think we have to try. Our magic is in peril every day that we remain at half strength like this.”
“A sister star, huh?” Mary asked.
I felt her eyes on me but kept my gaze on the sidewalk beneath my feet. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to do but wait for August to come.
Back home, I climbed the back stairs wordlessly to our room, where, despite the early evening daylight outside my window, I crawled under the covers, fully dressed, to sleep away the pressure of the day.
I fell into a deep dreamless sleep, but I awoke to darkness later when I heard Mary come in.
“Dad was asking about you,” Mary said, flipping on the light callously.
I groaned. I had barely spoken to my father since returning home.
“I guess I’ll catch up with him tomorrow …,” I said as I sat up in bed blinking, unsure of the day and hour. It came back to me slowly. Still Sunday, the day after we put Magda in the ground, I thought.
“He’s worried about you,” Mary continued. She undressed with her back to me. “So am I.”
“You are? What about you?” I asked. Magda tried to … get rid of you … I couldn’t make myself say it out loud.
“Mm,” Mary mumbled. She surprised me. All the ire she’d spat at me before seemed to have evaporated with Great-Grandma Dorothy’s spirit. Or Mary has bigger things on her mind, I thought.
“Mare,” I said, daring her to look at me. “Do you think I killed Magda?”
That stopped her short. Mary turned and met my eyes before looking away.
“Oh,” she said. Mary sat down on her bed, distracted. “No. No, I didn’t mean that. I was just … But no, I didn’t mean it. It was her time.”
“I didn’t wear her out?” I asked anxiously, voicing the fear that had been in my heart since I’d walked in the door.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said finally as she turned off the light. “I know she cast on you first. I know what she put you through.”
I squeezed my eyes shut against the dark, making myself take a beat before responding. “So you wanted to make me feel bad, then? You knew, and you were just guilting me?”
She climbed into her bed beside me. “It was so hard without you,” Mary said quietly. “The town was eerily quiet for a week after Solstice. I didn’t know if anyone would ever trust us again. If Tim would talk to me. Magda was so mad, raving, practically. But then people started to trickle in. Magda was too distracted, so I took care of some of them, and it felt good. But I wish you had been here.”
“Listen,” I said, cutting her off as much for my sake as hers. “I’m home now, and I promise I’ll take care of everything. We need to get through the binding, then everything will be back to normal. It will go on like it always has and always will, and nothing will ever change in this house or town ever again.”
I almost believed myself as I said it.
Mary’s sigh cut through the dark as she adjusted her covers. “That’s what I’m worried about,” she said, exasperated. “You don’t want that. And you don’t need to do it alone.”
I brushed her off. “After what Mom showed us? I’m surprised you want anything to do with Magda and this place anymore. Why should I let you throw your heart away for this stupid family?” I asked. The words turned to acid in my mouth. “Seriously, I don’t want you to give up your future too. I meant what I said. Two Watry-Ridder women giving up their hearts is more than enough.”
I thought of my mother, her heart bound to her unborn child, giving up her birthright for her daughters. I thought of John—You’re not going anywhere, Elisabeth—and knew he’d never be satisfied with what I had left to offer him. The idea of subjecting Mary to that same fate, a fate that Magda had tried to extinguish her from, was too much.
“Didn’t you hear a single word Great-Grandma Dorothy said?” Mary asked in frustration. “It used to be shared. Between sisters. Who each had their own families and their own loves, and it worked. How on God’s green earth do you think it’s been working shared between you and Magda?”
“That’s different,” I said reflexively. “That was out of necessity. Magda didn’t want it shared anyway; she did it to spite Mom.”
“Why do you keep defending her?” Mary snapped.
“I’m sure Magda had her reasons,” I said reflexively. I was dizzy with trying to reconcile the damning portrait of my grandmother that had emerged in death with the one I had known in life.
Mary sighed, pulled her quilt up to her chin, and turned on her side away from me. “Fine,” she mumbled to the wall. “Be like her, be like Clara. See where that gets you. But let me tell you right now. They were wrong. You are wrong.”
I listened to Mary’s furious breathing deepen into the evenness of sleep, leaving me to contemplate an unflattering version of myself: Am I just like them? Am I like every other power-hungry, stubborn person in this family?
I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself, but the idea of sharing the guardianship annoyed me. I’d grown up the expected heiress, the special one, and Mary was just my little sister—who Magda hadn’t wanted to exist. I couldn’t admit that I liked it that way, being the shiny Watry-Ridder girl. It was all I had ever known, and after straying for a while, I had missed it.
By the time I came downstairs in the morning, Dad was long gone to the mill offices, business as usual. I found it unfair that the men went about their business while we Watry-Ridder women were scrambling to hold ours together by the seams. Mary sat fuming at the kitchen table behind a box of Life cereal for cover. I blew past her and out to the lake without a word.
The water, already warm in the late morning, drew the fire from me. My arms, loose and weak after weeks of not swimming, cut through the water sluggishly as I thought to myself, We are at an impasse. Mary wanted to help, and I wanted to protect her from it, and keep my special status. But as I pushed myself up onto the wooden dock, I thought, Why does Mary want to help me anyway, after I left her with my mess? Even as I asked myself that question, I already knew the answer: because we were sisters, and Mary would forgive me my sins. Maybe she already had.
Mom threw a wild rice hot dish from a well-wisher in the oven that evening, and the familiar nutty aroma piqued my appetite in a way that I hadn’t felt in days. Dad got home, his timing impeccable as ever, as Mom pulled the casserole from the oven. It felt strange, but also nice, to gather around the table the four of us, and tuck into generous heaps of steaming hot dish. But Magda’s empty chair was a stark reminder of her absence.
“Mr. Pedersen was asking after you girls in town today,” Dad enunciated slowly, his tone overly casual. He didn’t look at any of us in particular as he focused on assembling the next perfect bite.
“He wondered when you might be ready to see clients, after the respectable amount of time, of course. It’s none of my business, and I didn’t say one way or another, but if there’s any timeline you want me to spread around town, I’d be happy to do it,” Dad said to his plate.
“Tell folks that we’ll be ready after the Lion’s Gate,” I said impulsively.
“And when’s that again?” he asked.
“August eighth,” Mary and I said together.
“All right then,” Dad said, then changed the subject. “Mary, how’s Tim? I had a nice chat with his parents at Magda’s. They seem like nice folks.”
After supper, I followed Dad to the living room as Mary and Mom tackled the dishes by hand, a task that went faster with the assistance of a few charms, but our connection to the ice floe was so tenuous. We didn’t dare use magic on anything without real consequence—like attempting to straighten the house.
Dad settled into his favorite armchair and opened the newspaper. I didn’t know what I was going to say until it came out of my mouth.
“Dad?”
My father looked up, and seeing me hovering in the middle of the room expectantly, he refolded the paper and let it fall. As he did, I sat on the edge of the upholstered chair nearest him.
“Elisabeth?” Dad said, matching my tone. He eyed me curiously.
“I need to ask you something. What is it like being married to Mom? For you, I mean? What is it like for you?”
Dad’s face was impassive as he gathered his thoughts. If I’d surprised him with the question, he showed no sign of it.
“Well,” my father said slowly. “I love your mother. I always have, since grade school. You know that.”
I nodded, waiting for him to get to the good stuff.
“But it hasn’t been easy,” he said. “I grew up in awe of Helene like everybody else in town. She barely acknowledged me until well into our teens, but I always knew she was special. But I also grew up in awe of Magda, and I knew they were a package deal.”
I nodded, grateful for this response. I was painfully aware that I had never dared to speak to my stoic Dutch father about anything so emotional before, and I was surprised that he opened up so easily.
“Has …” I had trouble forming the question. “Has Mom loved you enough?” I asked quietly. “Is this life enough for you?”
My father hesitated, chewing on my words. I didn’t know what he knew about Mom’s heart, about her bond to Mary, but I had to think he knew more about what went on in the Watry house than he let on. I needed to know what it felt like on the receiving end. I perversely needed to know what I was doing to John, if I got what was coming to me.
“I have always loved your mother,” Dad repeated. “And I love you girls. The rest doesn’t matter much.”
I sighed, thinking that nonanswer was as much as I was going to get from my stoic Dutch father.
But my father surprised me. “Is this about John?” he asked.
I could have sworn our abilities had rubbed off on my father. Or that he had seen as much in town as I feared he had.
I nodded, my cheeks flushing hot with shame.
“It’s your choice, Lisbett,” my father said, choosing his words carefully. “And I won’t say much on it—but I will say, it’s not easy being the man of this house. I have long thought that John could handle it, but now I’m not so sure. It’s harder than it looks to swallow your pride for decades on end. So it’s up to you. But know this: if John ever lays another hand on you, I’ll kill him.”