Spells for Forgetting(31)

“Sun above and roots below. Wake from sleep, bloom and grow.”

I stared at the rosebud, my breath held in my chest.

“Good. Now, again.” My grandmother nodded.

Lily repeated the words and this time I joined her, stumbling over them until my voice found its cadence. “Sun above and roots below. Wake from sleep, bloom and grow.”

The hum of heat under my skin began slowly and the rise of gooseflesh crept from my wrists up to my shoulders. The feeling was one that I recognized now—this whisper of magic.

It was the fifth time that did it. The buzz in my fingertips turned sharp and almost painful before the center of the rosebud suddenly unwound, the petals loosening their grip until they were falling open.

Lily’s eyes went wide, her mouth dropping open. “It worked!”

“Well, of course it worked,” my grandmother said as she laughed, reaching out for me. Her fingers felt around the bloom before she took it and brought it to her nose, sniffing. “Not bad.”

She took hold of the apple on the plate, turning it on its side, and cut it right through the middle with her wood-handled knife. When she pulled the two halves apart, the seeds were tucked into the crisp white flesh in a perfect, five-pointed star. The sign of the witch.

“The first apple trees grown on the west side of the island were planted from the five seeds of the same fruit,” she began.

I traced the apple’s star with the tip of my finger as my grandmother told the story again. I’d heard it a thousand times, but I’d never tired of the tale.

“By Greta Morgan,” Lily said proudly.

“That’s right.” Albertine nodded. “Your great-great-great-grandmother grew the trees from sapling to grove.”

“Until it was stolen,” Lily muttered.

A frown wrinkled Albertine’s brow, but Lily didn’t seem to notice the shift in the air.

The Morgan family had tended the beginnings of the orchard until Greta’s granddaughter married a Salt and its ownership changed hands. Now, it was passed from one Salt to the next. But almost two hundred years after the first trees were planted, the women of Saoirse were still the wielders of its magic.

“Can we do another?” Lily whined, dropping the opened bloom into the bowl.

Oma set the two apple halves on the floor between us, rocking forward to get to her feet. Her long white braid fell over her shoulder, nearly touching her waist. “All right. We’ll try a daisy this time.” She touched a hand to the wall, following it through the kitchen, and the screen door slammed as she disappeared.

Lily spread her hands over the open pages of the book of spells, her eyes sparkling. I watched as her gaze lifted to the kitchen, and I knew that look. Carefully, she fit a finger into one of the pages at the back of the book and opened it.

I sat up straighter, reaching for it. “We’re not supposed to—”

“Shhh.” Lily swatted my hand away. “I’m only looking.”

I bit the inside of my cheek, watching the back door. Oma would be angry if she caught us snooping through the book, and she didn’t need sight to know what we were up to.

The spine crackled as Lily let the page fall open and my eyes narrowed when I saw what looked like the skeleton of a snake drawn across the page in faded black ink. Beside it, a list was written out.

One raven’s heart

Root of cronewort

Skull of a snake

Six hawthorn berries, crushed



The hinges on the back door screeched and Lily let the pages fall closed again, her eyes snapping up. Oma had a fistful of daisies from the garden in one hand and a pair of shears in the other.

“Are we ready?” She settled back down between us.

Lily looked at me, a mischievous smile on her lips. “Ready, Miss Albertine.”





Seventeen


    EMERY


I don’t know why I kept them.

I stood before the chest of drawers in my bedroom with a glass of wine clutched in my hand and a quilt wrapped tightly around me. The bottom drawer hadn’t been opened in years, but its contents had been like a body buried beneath the floorboards that never finished rotting.

When my mother died and Dad moved to the fishing cabin, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to take their room. It still sat unchanged across the hallway, and my own room hadn’t changed much in those years, either. It was still home, but it didn’t wholly feel like mine.

I sank down, crossing my legs in front of me, instantly feeling like I was back there on those dark nights after the fire. The quilt fell from my shoulders down to my waist, and I took another drink before I set the wineglass beside me. A steadying breath escaped my lips before I hooked my fingers into the knobs and the drawer scraped as it opened. Beneath a stack of folded wool sweaters, I found them.

The ferry tickets.

June 7. That was the day that everything was supposed to change. And it did, but not the way we thought it would.

I’d almost thrown them away a hundred times. First, because I was afraid of how it would look if anyone found them. People were already suspicious of August and knowing that he and I were planning to leave Saoirse the day after Lily died would only make things worse. But after he did go, the tickets had been like a last thread. One of the only things left from before.

I never told anyone about our plan to leave the island, not even Dutch. There was some part of me that thought for a long time that if August and I still had this one last secret, we still had each other, somehow. It was the pitiful hope of a heartbroken girl, and even though I knew those tickets were like a slow poison creeping through my veins, I’d kept them.