Winterwood

The ingredients are easy to find. One whole cupboard is lined with glass jars filled with dried herbs and powdered roots and fragrant liquids with descriptions handwritten on the lids. There is even a jar labeled lake water, in case a recipe needed to be made in haste and there was no time to walk the few yards down to the lake itself.

Mom has kept the cupboard stocked, never throwing anything out, even though she doesn’t use the herbs—not like Grandma did.

I pour the few ingredients into the same copper bowl my grandmother once used: ground cloves and powdered cardamom, a dash of fawn lily and burdock root, and a pinch of a reddish-rose tincture labeled bero.

I sift the mixture into a small cotton pouch, then cross the living room to Oliver. His hair is now dry, dark and wavy, and he doesn’t stir when I slide the cotton pouch beneath the blankets beside his bare ribs. His chest rises, the slow measured weight of his lungs expanding. A shudder runs through him and his eyelids flicker, his body tensing briefly—spurred by some dream I can’t see. He reminds me of an animal near death. Fighting it, struggling. I could crawl beneath the blankets and wrap my arms over his chest, I could feel the beat of his heart against my palm, I could wait for the heat to return to his skin before I went back to my own bed.

But he is a boy I don’t know. A boy who smells of the forest now. Who reminds me of the winter trees, tall and lean with bark that is rough and raw and could tear open flesh. No soft edges.

I catch my own breath and turn away. He is a boy I don’t know, I repeat to myself again. He is a boy with his own secrets. A boy unlike all the others—in ways I don’t understand. I can’t pinpoint.

The recipe instructs that the herbs should be kept close to the body while you sleep for three nights in a row, and then the chill will be banished from the bones.

It’s all I can offer him, all I know how to do—I am a Walker without real magic. Without a nightshade. It will have to be enough.

Back in the loft, I close the book and bury myself beneath the sheets, trying not to think of the boy. A stranger asleep downstairs.

The sunrise is close, the light through my bedroom window turning a carmine shade of pink.

I pull the blankets up to my chin, begging sleep to find me. To draw me down and give me at least an hour’s rest. But my heart drums against my ribs, a nagging that won’t go away. It’s not just the boy downstairs. It’s something else.

The moth I saw in the woods. White shredded wings and black pebble eyes. The moth is a warning.

And I know what it means. I know what’s coming.

My eyes flick to the wall above my bed, where a collection of items gathered from the forest are tacked to the wood. Bits of moss and dried maple leaves, a raven feather and a broken magpie egg, Juneberry seeds and other things found along the forest floor. A dozen dried wildflowers hang with stems to the ceiling, dusty pollen drifting down to my pillow. It’s good luck to bring the forest indoors, to let it watch over you while you sleep. These things protect me. They bring me good dreams.

But not tonight.

Even with the open window, with the snow gathering on the floor in drifts, I sweat through the sheets, my cheek sticking to the pillow.

And in my fever dreams, I have the strange sense that by morning, Oliver will be gone. Melted into the floor like a boy made of snow.

A trick of the woods.

As if he were never here at all.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

FLORENCE WALKER was born in 1871 under a green Litha moon.

Crows gathered on the windowsill when she drew in her first infant breath, and they kept watch at her crib, wings folded, every night as she slept.

On Florence’s wedding day, a white-crowned sparrow in a nearby birch tree sang a tune that sent chills down the spines of those in attendance. She’s a bird witch, they said. They do her bidding.

But it was merely her nightshade that drew the birds to her.

She kept sunflower seeds in her pockets, and she left piles of them on rocks and along the shore of the lake. And when she wore her yellow-apricot dress, seeds spilled out through the hole in her pocket and made little trails wherever she went. She whispered omens to the birds, and in return, they told her the secrets of her enemies.

Later in Florence’s life, the Walker home built in the trees was always filled with the chitter-chatter of house finches and spotted towhees. They flew among the rafters and slept crowded around the bathroom sink.

Florence died at age eighty-seven. A nasty bout of tuberculosis. An owl cried from the footboard of her bed frame all night, until Florence finally let out a little chirp and went still.

In the garden, a crow can still be seen hopping between rows of garlic and geraniums, searching for earthworms. Its eyes are that of a girl.

How to Lure the Crow from the Garden: