Winterwood

by Shea Ernshaw

  “Maybe you should sit down,” I say, touching her shoulder.

  She flinches away and swivels herself toward the couch, plops onto the cushions, and pulls the blankets up to her throat in one swift motion. She closes her eyes and mutters, “Sing me a song, Nora.” Like she’s a little kid who wants a bedtime story. Tea and cookies and a kiss to the forehead.

  “Suzy?” I ask softly, but a soft snore escapes her mouth. She’s already asleep.

  Her hair lies draped across her cheekbone, her mouth slack, and I wonder if she’ll remember any of this by morning. If she’ll remember what the boys said.

  “I’m sorry,” Oliver says behind me. He moves closer, and just his proximity makes my stomach ache. Deep and strange. Sailor’s knots inside my belly.

  “For what?”

  His voice is low when he speaks, like he doesn’t want to wake Suzy—but I doubt she’ll be stirring anytime soon. “For what those guys said.”

  “I’m used to people talking about me,” I tell him, shaking my head and letting the side of my mouth tug into a smirk. I want him to see that it doesn’t bother me, that I’m stronger than he might think. But still, I touch my grandmother’s ring and let my mind click over everything the boys said at the bonfire, how they talked about voices in their cabin, how they weren’t sure who to blame: Oliver or Max.

  They’re just paranoid, I think.

  They’re hearing things that aren’t really there.

  “I don’t need to stay here,” Oliver says, his voice cautious, as if he doesn’t really mean the words he says. His eyes stray to Suzy, now occupying the couch—the place where he’s slept the last two nights. “I can find somewhere else.”

  It’s odd how easily you can fool yourself into believing there is nothing to fear. How easily you can look at a boy you hardly know and trust every word that leaves his lips. Maybe I am a fool. Or maybe the buzzing, tenuous feeling in the center of my chest, the fragile stutter of my heartbeat, means something. Maybe there is truth in that feeling.

  A feeling I shouldn’t ignore.

  A feeling I don’t want to.

  “No,” I say at last, his gaze on me a moment too long, making it hard to breathe. “You can sleep in the loft.”

  His eyes soften and the room starts to quiver, walls melting from the edge of my vision, the clock in the kitchen clicking too loud. Oliver blurs out of focus, and I think about him standing in the trees, watching me at the bonfire. He followed the boys from camp because he was worried about me. And I’m not sure how to feel or what to say, but my heart is spurring against my ribs, causing little fits of pain.

  I look away from him, afraid the house is going to splinter around us, afraid the clock on the wall will cease to tick.

  “You all right?” he asks, touching my arm, my hand.

  But when his eyes meet mine, all the words dissolve on my tongue, catch inside my teeth, so I only nod. Fine, fine, fine. Everything is fine. My head doesn’t feel like it’s going to cleave in half and let all my thoughts spill out onto the floor. The house doesn’t feel like it’s going to cave in. Time doesn’t feel like it’s going to shatter.

  I’m fine.

  He releases my hand and I walk to the front door to lock it—sensing a storm building outside. Not from the mountains, but from something else.

  A storm made of fury and spite woven inside reckless boys’ hearts.

  I light a candle—a ritual now—and walk to the stairs. The house no longer swaying. The clock no longer a drum against my ears.

  Without a word, Oliver follows.

  Maybe he belongs here now, with me, inside this house.

  No one has ever belonged to me before—not really.

  In the loft, my bed is still unmade, pillows slumped and wrinkled from the previous night. And Oliver stands at the top of the stairs, scanning my room, the stacks of books on the floor, while Fin plods past him—making a low huff sound as he settles onto the rug at the foot of the bed. “I’ll sleep on the floor,” Oliver says, eyeing the place where Fin has curled into a ball, nose tucked under his tail.

  “No, there’s plenty of room,” I say, hastily straightening the quilt and pillows. But Oliver still doesn’t move any farther into my bedroom, like he might turn and retreat down the stairs. “It doesn’t have to be weird,” I say, lifting an eyebrow. “It’s a bed, that’s all. A place to sleep.”

  He smiles a little, then walks across the room and looks out the window at the snow-covered lake while I shed out of my coat and sweater. I wonder what Mom would say if she knew a boy was in my room. I’ve never even come close to having a boyfriend, or even a friend who slept over. She would likely smile—pleased that she was raising a normal daughter after all, and not the girl my grandmother wanted me to be.

  “Why do they call you a witch?” he asks, still facing away.

  I sit on the edge of the bed, a little caught off guard by the question, and begin plaiting my hair into a braid—a woven pattern my grandmother would teach me each night, until I got it right. “Because they don’t know what else to call me.”

  The dull glow of the moonlight barely touches his skin, his silhouette draped in shadow. “Are you?” he asks, looking back at me. “A witch?”

  I release my hair and touch the edge of the bedspread, playing with the hem. No one has ever asked me this—not to my face. But there is no malice in his tone, not even curiosity, it’s something else. A calmness, like he is only asking me my favorite color. My middle name. My favorite book.

  “My family is older than witches,” I tell him, crossing my hands in my lap, knowing I’m revealing more than I’ve ever said to anyone. “Older than the word itself.”

  “But you can do things,” he says, his voice slightly strained, like this is the root of what he’s asking—what he’s been trying to get at all along. “You made that bag of herbs for me.”

  “That wasn’t real magic,” I say, shifting my eyes away, feeling strange talking about this—about magic, about what I really am. Things I’ve never talked about with anyone who wasn’t a Walker. “That was only medicine.”

  Grandma often talked about the old way. How our ancestors spoke to the moon and slept under the trees and didn’t fear anything. How they used magic from their fingertips as if it were as common as whipping butter for toast.

  But the old way was lost. Spells forgotten—the ones not written down in the book. The heartiest kind of magic slipped away. Not for any single reason, merely because time dilutes what once had been strong. Only our nightshades remain now, that glimpse of magic inside each of us that recalls what we are. The parts of us that are still witches.

  Walkers began using herbs and small blessings, instead of conjuring dark spells to hex those who had done us wrong. We merely will the moon to bend in our favor, Grandma would say. We no longer command it.

  Oliver steps out of the moonlight and moves closer to the bed. “So you can’t undo something that’s already been done?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like someone who’s dead.”

  I swallow and my fingers grip the edge of the bed, nails digging into fabric. I know what he’s asking. “Like Max?” I ask. And I wait for him to answer, but the words are lodged like little thorns in his throat. “I can’t bring anyone back from the dead,” I tell him. “No one can.”

  That kind of magic was used by a different kind of witch, an old form of witchery that’s been lost almost entirely. And for good reason.

  The dead should never return from where they’ve been.

  What they’ve seen.

  Oliver walks across the room, his footsteps stirring up lavender-scented dust, and he sits at the end of the bed, pressing his hands against the bones around his eyes, and my heart sinks in a way I didn’t expect it to. He thought maybe I could fix this, bring back the boy who died. And I suddenly feel worthless that I can’t—that I can’t undo what’s been done. That I’m not that kind of witch. The kind he wants me to be.

  A familia
r feeling of dread rises up inside me, the feeling that I’m hardly a Walker at all. Only in name. But lacking any true magic—lacking a nightshade.

  “How did he die?” I ask, I try. Maybe he knows, maybe he remembers. Maybe he will finally say. And maybe I don’t want to hear the answer.

  “I don’t know,” he says. And when his chin lifts and his eyes sink into mine, I see the forest reflected back in them. I see the dark, clouded sky and the slow slippage of time. “I want to remember,” he says, a hint of unease running through him. “But it’s like the memories have been replaced by something cold, like I’m back in the forest and I can’t see a thing.” Emotion catches in his voice, and I know he’s telling the truth. He might be lying about other things, but not about this.

  “Sometimes our minds want us to forget,” I say, my own voice sounding raw, like gravel along the banks of the lake. And there is a hurt growing inside me, expanding. My own things I’d like to forget. Like the day my grandma died and left me alone. Left me with a mom who doesn’t want me to be what I am. “It’s less painful that way.”

  He stares at me, and there is sorrow in him—a feeling I understand. I know. I want to reach out and touch him, place my hand on his. On his cheek, on his chest. I want to tell him it’s going to be okay. But the moment slips past. Gone.

  “My grandmother used to say that our dreams washed away the day,” I tell him, words that often soothed me. “That sleep was the best remedy for most things.”

  I pull back the blankets and slip into bed. Oliver walks around to the other side, then hesitates before lying down beside me, and I wonder what he’s thinking, his breath rising heavy in his lungs, his eyes lidded like he’s trying not to look directly at me. As if I were a distraction—one he couldn’t trust.

  I blow out the single candle on the bedside table, and in a blink, the room feels impossibly dark. Even the moonlight fades beyond thick clouds. The mattress shifts when Oliver lowers his head onto the pillow, and he stares up at the ceiling, at the odd assortment of things—ferns and bits of tree bark and green, tacked and draped above my bed. I feel embarrassed: They are childish things. Things collected by a little girl who believes in luck and mossy dreams.

  It occurs to me that my house is filled with strangers: with a boy who I found in the forest and a girl who up until a few days ago would have probably laughed at me if I’d asked to borrow a pencil in history class. And I like the feeling: a house brimming, bursting. Filled with so many beating hearts.

  For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel alone.

  The loft fills with the rise and fall of our breathing, and the stillness in between. And I feel wholly at ease, like Oliver belongs in my bed, like he’s slept here a hundred times before and it’s just how it’s always been.

  But then the silence starts to itch at me, my mind unable to sleep, and I feel Oliver shift beside me—still awake.

  “Why did you get sent to the camp?” I ask, a question I’ve wondered about since I first found him in the woods. But I’ve been too afraid to ask. Too afraid to hear the answer.

  His breathing changes, turns shallow, and I can just barely make out the line of tension along his jaw. “My uncle sent me here, didn’t want to deal with me anymore.…”

  There is a pause at the end of his statement—the hollow place where more words should be. Where his thoughts broke in half.

  “You’ve always lived with your uncle?” I ask carefully, afraid maybe I’m asking things he won’t want to answer.

  He waits so long before he speaks I’m afraid he never will. But then he clears his throat. “No. My parents died a year ago—” His voice catches, then re-forms. “It was a car accident. Two miles from our house.”

  A sharp pain pings through my chest. I never should have asked. “I’m so sorry,” I say, but my words sound useless—itty-bitty things that slide right off the skin like oil on water. Never being absorbed.

  “I hardly knew my uncle; he never wanted me to live with him,” he continues. “So he sent me here.” He scrubs a hand through his hair, then drops his hand to his side. “Even if I escape this place, I have nowhere to go.”

  I almost say sorry again but catch myself. He doesn’t want to hear sorry. I hated the way it sounded when people said it to me after Grandma died, the pity dripping off their tongues. The awful, mournful look in their eyes. The sorrys didn’t change anything.

  Oliver wants to hear that wrongs can be made right. That moments in our past can be undone. That I am a Walker and I can bring back the dead.

  But I can’t fix anything. The past is already decided.

  I close my eyes, and I feel painfully hollow. My own emptiness engulfed by his, becoming the same. We are both alone. Both on our own. I squeeze my eyes tighter and pretend everything is different. I pretend Oliver never went missing the night of the storm. I pretend I never found him inside the Wicker Woods. I pretend he belongs at Jackjaw Lake, just like me, that his parents never died and he grew up a few houses down the shore and we’ve known each other our whole lives. I pretend we used to wade out into the shallow water in summer, me in my yellow ruffle swimsuit, he with his long boyish arms tanned by the sun, and he’d try to pull me under the water, laughing until our lungs ached. Refusing to go inside even once the watermelon-tinted sun had set. I pretend he was my first kiss.

  I pretend I can keep him forever, my found thing.

  I reach out and touch Oliver’s hand, winding my fingers through his. And his hand flexes softly against mine—he doesn’t pull away.

  Don’t let go, I think. Or we both might drift away. We both might forget what’s real. We’ll forget how slippery time can be—how ruthless and mean. If you blink, you might miss everything.

  His breathing grows heavy, sleep drawing him under, and my wretched, traitorous heart burns a hole in my chest. I close my eyes and see only the moth—wings against the window, searching for a way in. I close my eyes and see Oliver lying in the trees, snow falling over him, burying him alive.

  I slide across the floral-printed sheets, only inches away from him, our fingers still woven together. And I wish I could slip into his dreams—just like my grandmother could. I wish I could see what he sees.

  Then I’d know for sure, the secrets he keeps.

  Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

  IDA WALKER was born at the last hour, on the last night of the wolf moon, with chalky-blue eyes and a ribbon of blond hair that later turned black.

  She sucked her thumb until she was nine and she often fell asleep in unusual places: the crook of a dogtooth elm tree, a patch of stinging nettle, between the paws of a mother wolf, on the roof of the old house during a rainstorm. Ida could sleep anywhere, even while floating on her back in Jackjaw Lake.

  When she was eleven, she saw her first dream that was not her own.

  She never intended to spy, but every dream she saw from then on didn’t belong to her. When Ida closed her eyes, she fell headfirst into the dreams of others while they slept. She learned to decipher those dreams with startling accuracy, but she knew that most people would not understand, or grasp, the true meaning of their dreams, so she told them fanciful fairytales instead.

  Every full moon she brewed crowberry tea with spinster lemon, and she wove stories together as tightly as the braid down her back. She fell in love only once—to the man who gave her a moonstone ring that reflected the slate-blue color of her eyes, the same man who gave her a daughter who could charm wild honeybees.

  Ida Walker died on a warm autumn night, the bone moth at her window.

  And no regrets in her heart.

  To Brew Crowberry Tea:

  One handful crowberries—picked during the coldest night

  One pinch poppy flowers, star anise, licorice, clover

  Steep all night during a full moon. Drink before sunrise in a teacup held away from the nearest clock.

  NORA

  I want to trust him.

  I don’t want to do what I’m abou
t to do.

  But there are things—at least one thing—he’s not telling me.

  I watch the swell of his chest, the shiver of his skin while he sleeps as if he were recalling the forest, the snow, the night I found him inside the Wicker Woods. It haunts him still.

  And when I’m certain he’s really asleep, I slip from bed, pressing my feet silently to the wood floor. I creep across the loft, through shadows and long patches of moonlight, avoiding the places where I know the floorboards give way an inch or two and would let out a soft shudder. Fin breathes softly from the floor. The whole house is sunken into dreams—except me.

  I kneel down by the small chair beside the window, where Oliver stripped out of his coat, and feel along the thick fabric until I find a pocket. I slip my hand inside. And find nothing. My fingers trail along the collar, finding the other pocket filled with a few small twigs and broken bits of pinecone—not uncommon after tromping through the wilderness. I settle back on my heels. Maybe there is nothing to find.

  Maybe I shouldn’t look through his things. I would be furious if I found him snooping through my closet, my bedside table. A soft prick of guilt nags at me. But I touch the coat again, the heavy canvas, finding the main zipper and then sliding my hand along the interior of the coat. Sure enough, there is a hidden pocket, smaller than the others, but tucked high along the chest. I feel for the opening and reach inside. Something small and soft meets my fingertips. I pull it out and hold it in my palm: the pouch of herbs I gave him. I squeeze it in my hand, the scent of cloves and cardamom and lily now long gone.

  He’s kept it all this time—inside his coat, close to his chest.

  I hear him breathing in the bed, and I sink back onto my heels, feeling stupid for looking. For thinking I would find some clue, some small thing to prove him guilty or not. A liar or not. Instead, all I’ve found is the pouch of herbs I gave him—as if he couldn’t part with it, even when its potency wore off.