by Shea Ernshaw
“Let’s go up to the loft,” I say. “We can see farther into the woods—if anyone does come.” I don’t know why I want him to stay. But I do know. It’s the knocking around inside my rib cage, the soft ache I can’t trust. He’s familiar—not like the others. He’s the only one who makes me feel not so alone.
Oliver nods. But I can’t meet his eyes.
He saved me, that must mean something.
The loft is warm, the heat trapped by the ceiling, and Fin takes up a post at the top of the stairs. Like he senses there is danger out there somewhere.
I sit at the edge of the bed and look down at my hands. I want to trust Oliver, I want to believe him. He says he didn’t kill Max. But a thousand lies rest beneath the surface. A thousand little cuts filled with salt.
“Did you see the moth?” I ask. “At the window, before you found me?”
“No.” He shakes his head.
I exhale and press my hands together.
“It’s a bone moth,” I explain. If he won’t tell me his secrets, I’ll tell him mine. “It’s been following me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was there the day my grandmother died. And now it’s back.” Tears well against my eyelids, and they break down my cheeks before I can stop them—the weight of everything slamming through me. They fall to the floor and soak into the wood—becoming a part of the house. A sadness that will live in the grain of the wood forever.
Oliver moves across the room to only a foot from the bed, and the gravity of him so close makes it hard to breathe. But he doesn’t sit beside me, he doesn’t touch me—he doesn’t want to hurt me. To split me in two, to make me shudder away from him in fear. “A moth?” he asks.
“It’s a death omen,” I say, my voice on the verge of breaking. “It means death is close, it means it’s coming—” I wipe away the tears from my cheeks, and I wish he would reach out for me; I wish he would pull me into his arms and I could sink into his chest. I wish I could close my eyes and make everything dark and listen only to the sound of his breathing in my ears. But he doesn’t and my eyes dip to the floor, feeling like I might be sick. Like the room is tilting off axis and I don’t know how much longer I can keep from tipping over. From shattering completely. A glass girl made of glass shards. Who cries glass tears.
I stand up from the bed to feel the hard floor beneath my feet, to ground myself to something, and I walk to the window.
Oliver moves slowly, standing beside me, and I try to see what’s really there: I try to see all the things he’s buried deep, kept just out of reach. “Tell me the truth,” I say, I plead, each word a knife. “Tell me what happened at the cemetery, at the lake. Tell me if you killed him.”
The question is so sharp in the air that I can see the whites of his eyes expand and my heart wants to cave in. Little bursts of fear exploding in my mind.
He opens his mouth—about to speak—and suddenly I’m terrified of what he’s going to say. What he will admit. I shake my head and move closer to him. I want to take the words back. I want to stuff them down into my throat. I don’t want to know what he did. I don’t want the room to tip upside down when the truth leaves his lips—when his confession drops to the floor and shatters like too-thin glass.
“Wait,” I say, holding a hand up to stop him from speaking. I breathe and he breathes, the seconds swelling like a balloon about to pop. “Don’t say anything.”
He looks hurt, like he doesn’t understand.
“If you tell me,” I say, the words breathless on my lips, “I know it will change everything.” My teeth clamp down. “If you tell me, you can’t take it back.”
He steps toward me, his dangerous, perfect, awful green eyes melting in with the dark room.
“And I don’t want to be afraid of you,” I say. The worst kind of afraid. The kind that won’t let you sleep, that burrows in so deep that even bone moths steer clear of such things. Such memories. Such awful deeds. Max is dead and Oliver went into the woods and all the boys were at the lake that night. All of them were there and maybe it wasn’t an accident, maybe they all played some part, maybe they’re all to blame.
And there’s no way to make it right.
“You’re not afraid of me now?” he asks, inhaling deeply.
“No.”
He watches me in a way that makes my heart swim, loosened in my chest—my lungs caught mid-exhale. He looks like someone stuck in a place he doesn’t belong, a spike of fear running through his center—he looks as wild as the wilderness beyond the window.
Maybe it’s the look in his eyes: of desperation, of restlessness. Like every second is a clock counting down. Tick, tick, tick. Something stirs inside him, something neither of us can escape.
He shifts forward and presses his lips to mine.
His fingers find my collarbone, gentle like snowflakes caught in hair, and I kiss him back. I kiss him before my heart swells up into my throat. Before I crack open and become a puddle who used to be a girl. I kiss a boy who’s been to the farthest, deepest edge of the Wicker Woods and returned, who tastes like the violent winds that settle over the lake in winter. A boy who is more forest than flesh.
I press my fingers against his shoulder, his chest, searching for his heartbeat. Touching all the places I’ve wanted to a hundred times before. I need to know if he’s real. Or if the woods have made him something else, soil and stones. He kisses me softly at first, and then with an ache inside him, his hands against my ribs—pressing, pressing, as if he were leaving little bruises where his fingertips rest. Maybe for all the same reasons. To be certain I’m real. To see if I taste like memories, like winter, like the forest that nearly killed him.
We’re both looking for something to hold on to—gravity or fingertips or lips to make us real. To make us last. Before the truth wedges itself firmly between us.
His lips are warm on mine and his hands slip around my back, around my neck, around and up into my hair. His dark, sleepy eyes close and I sink into him, pressing my lips harder. His touch feels like moonlight beneath my skin.
Beating hearts and swollen rib cages.
He is familiar when he shouldn’t be. He is not mine to keep, but I found him and brought him back.
The walls bow outward away from us, the ceiling bends and drifts away, the snow outside the window and my small wooden bed are watercolor blurs at the edge of my vision. I feel my heart slow, as time stalls like a single drop at the tip of a leaf, waiting to fall, to shatter apart on the ground below. My room expands and I’m certain I’ve been here before, felt Oliver’s lips on mine, kissed him just like this.
I draw my mouth away from his.
My lungs burn.
I press my palms to his chest, for balance, to keep from sinking to the floor. To keep time from wheeling away from me.
Something is happening that I don’t understand.
His eyes shiver open—as if waking—emerald eyes and full lips and I know I could drown in him if I let myself. I could vanish. And it feels like a tale from a book. Rosy cheeks and forever kisses and sunsets that last and last and last. Where there is no heartache and no death. No tears making rivers at your feet.
But this is not that tale.
His throat shivers before he speaks, his fingers falling away from my hair, careful and slow. “It’s late,” he says gently. “You should sleep.” But he’s peering into me, his gaze refusing to let go.
Words bloom in my throat and press against my lips. But I don’t let them out because they are the wrong words. Dangerous words. Frail, breakable things that I won’t be able to take back. And sleep tugs at me, exhaustion like a black hole.
He looks just as weary—a darkness in him that needs rest. “So should you,” I say.
“I’ll stay awake,” he answers, eyes still soft and lidded. “I’ll keep watch.”
Little sparks rise across my skin—a feeling I can’t trust. But one I don’t know how to ignore. We see heartache coming from a mile away, Grandma would s
ay. But we don’t know how to step out of the way.
The snow softens outside, only a few flakes whirling against the glass, and I crawl into bed—sinking gratefully into my pillow. I’m still wearing all my clothes—just in case. In case I have to wake suddenly, kick back the blankets, and run from the house.
In case the boys come for me.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
HENRIETTA WALKER came into the world on a hot summer night during a strawberry moon. She was the youngest of four girls. And she was the loudest.
She stomped down the halls and down the stairs and down to the lake. She yelled into the trees to scare away the birds and splashed out into the water wearing all her clothes. She ate carrots and radishes straight from the garden and wore her muddy boots into the house. She slept with knots in her hair and dirt under her fingernails and some said she was more raccoon than girl.
But when she walked beneath the oak tree near the old cemetery, acorns fell at her feet, an offering from the tree. When she waded in the shallows of the lake, tadpoles swam around her legs and wriggled beneath her toes. She was a marvel—to her sisters and everything she met. She was also misunderstood.
On the eve of midwinter, when the snows came and the night was the longest, she would sing from the shore of the lake and the woods would go quiet. Even the birds stopped their chatter to listen. The men at the tavern across the lake, after a long day panning for gold in the Black River, would walk down to the lake’s edge to hear Henrietta’s song.
When her nightshade rose up within her, she could tame the wilds of the forest, silence any man.
She was noisy, so no one else had to be.
She died on the calmest night of the year, when not a breeze or a bird stirred against the walls of the house. She walked into the garden and lay down beside the rosemary and went to sleep.
Midwinter Night Blessing:
Frankincense for burning
Chestnuts for eating
Lavender for bathing
Bells to warn the night crows back into hiding
NORA
I stand at the edge of the lake.
The wind pulls my hair free from its braid, dark strands blowing about my face, the air green and dark—well after midnight.
I tried to sleep but couldn’t.
When Grandma was alive, she often slipped into my dreams then recounted them for me in the morning—deciphering their true meaning over pancakes with lavender honey and bits of sugar amethyst on top.
A raven in flight means misfortune.
A dream about castles means you should light a candle in your south-facing window to keep your enemies at bay.
A farewell or long goodbye in a dream means you should bury a lock of your hair under the front porch.
But tonight, in my dreams, I saw only the lake. A calm frozen eye—the center of everything. Deep and black and bottomless, where nothing good can live. So I left the loft and walked through the snow and came to see for myself. Is this where Max died? Where he drowned—out beneath that ice?
Is this the place where it all makes sense?
The lake remembers, my grandmother used to say. It’s been here as long as the forest. Longer maybe. Her words hiss through my ears, stirring the dust inside my skull, and I take a slow, deliberate step out onto the frozen lake.
Doubt skips through me. Hesitation.
I swallow and twirl my grandmother’s ring on my finger and think of how I’ve always compared myself to the women in my family, even the women I’ve never met. Who lived long before I was born. Women whose stories ink the pages of the spellbook—who stare out at me from the past, leering, bewitching, unafraid. But without a nightshade, I can’t help but wonder if I’m really like any of them at all. If my name deserves to be listed in the spellbook among them.
I take another step forward.
The lake remembers. Each word a drop of water against my skull.
The lake remembers. Each word a midnight spell.
The ice is solid along the shore, frozen down to the rocky bottom, but as I inch farther out onto the lake, the sound of the ice changes, little tiny cracks opening up beneath me—tension skipping out toward the center.
I know this is a bad idea—I know creeping out over the lake in the middle of the night is how people go missing, how they slip through the ice and are never seen again. Not even a trace. But my grandmother’s words make loops along my skin, they singsong and fill my ears until it’s the only thing I feel. The lake remembers.
And maybe Max was here that night, out on the ice. Oliver, too. They were here and something happened. Death and cries for help and breaking ice and water in lungs.
I shuffle forward, and the lake flexes beneath me—water bubbles rising up, looking for a way out. I glance over my shoulder. I’m only a third of the way from the shore, not anywhere near the center of the lake, but it feels like I’m fathoms away. Too far to turn back now. Or maybe I’m too far to keep going.
But I don’t want to be afraid—not of the lake. Not of anything. I want to be like the women who came before me, brave and clever with the shimmer of dark moonlight in their veins. I need to do this, to prove something—to know what happened that night. Because if I can’t see the truth, if I can’t see what’s right in front of me, then I’m not a Walker at all.
Keep moving, I tell myself. If I stop, I might break through the ice—the water flat and black beneath my feet.
Miners dropped things into the lake to appease the wilderness, Mr. Perkins said. A place to make offerings. To quell the forest. But I have not brought an offering. Only myself.
I’m nearly to the center when I see it: the change in the surface of the ice, the reflection of stars on water. A hole has been broken away in front of me.
A hole in the ice.
I inch closer to the edge of the jagged opening—spiderweb cracks fanning out around it, turning the black ice white along the veins. A hole in the ice. Large enough for a person to fall through.
Is this where Max broke through the ice and fell into the deep, hands pawing at the surface? His eyes wide while his limbs went numb—becoming useless—and the others only looked on? I try to imagine Oliver standing over him, watching as Max drew in his last breath—his chin, his eyes, dipping beneath the surface. Did Oliver stare in shock with the others? Or did they laugh side-splitting laughs? Did they want him to die?
Did Oliver want him to die?
They aren’t my friends, he said. So why was he here that night? Why was he with them?
And how did he end up in the forest?
I shuffle an inch closer, wanting to see the dark water, to imagine a person sinking, sinking, sinking, falling into a bottomless chasm, never to come back up. Never to return. Did he stare up at the pinhole of light through the broken ice, the last thing he saw before he was swallowed by the black? I shudder and take a quick step back. But my boot slides over something—something thin and shiny.
I bend down and pick it up, hold it in my hand. It’s a tiny thing, silver and glimmering. A chain. And it’s broken at one end, with a silver ring at the other.
I know what it is—and I wish I didn’t. I almost drop it, a shiver slicing up my spine, my pulse pounding against my throat.
It’s the missing chain from the pocket watch I found in Oliver’s coat.
The watch with Max’s name engraved on the back.
I close my hand around the chain, squeezing tight. The link broken and bent.
All this time, it has sat here in the center of the lake, where a boy fell into the dark water and sank.
And now I know for sure they were here. Max and the others. This is the place where he drowned. Where the chain broke and Oliver clutched the watch as if it were a prize. The one who survived.
I don’t need him to admit it, I’m already certain.
He killed Max.
My heart unspools in my chest and I tilt my head up to the sky, feeling like I might faint.
E
verything is wrong.
My knees start to buckle and I want to cry, but the air is too cold and the tears evaporate against my eyelids. I want to yell into the trees. I want to blame someone—anyone—other than Oliver. But my head clatters and my grandmother’s words keep repeating: The lake remembers. But I don’t want to know the truth. I want to go back to the loft, to earlier tonight with his lips on mine and his hands in my hair and my palms against his rising chest. I want to forget. I want to undo everything that’s been done. I want to go back to the night of the storm and tell Oliver to not go to the cemetery. To not go out onto the lake. To avoid this place and those boys. Because once death has wrapped its cool hooked claws around you, it cannot be undone. And only regret remains.
Sorrow and guilt and regret.
And now the lies cannot be put back together. Not when you hold the truth in your hand.
I slide the chain into my pocket, my breath flat and fettered. All this time. Maybe this is why he went into the Wicker Woods—to hide, to wait until the road thawed so he could flee. Escape the punishment he would face.
But he got lost, went too deep into the forest—a forest that is ancient and cruel and doesn’t so easily let people back out. I found him and brought him back, and now he is asleep in my room, in my house. And I am split in two.
I shuffle away from the icy hole, my whole body trembling, my mind wheeling forward and back, remembering my lips sinking against Oliver’s. Remembering his hands in my hair, the same hands that surely struggled with Max, that forced him into the icy water, that broke the chain of the watch. The same hands that refused to pull Max back up—to save his life. The hands that touched my skin, my collarbone, so close to my throat.
I blink down at the hole one last time, branding it to memory, when I hear the sound of hairline cracks spreading out beneath my feet.
I’ve stood here too long, the hole widening in front of me, pieces of ice bobbing at the surface, some sinking into the dark, dark water below. Shit. I waited too long.
Cold mountain air blows through my hair, and I take several slow, careful steps back—the ice a sheet of glass beneath my feet. Bending, breaking, giving way.
