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 say. 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?