Winterwood

One handful birdseed

A wisp of sapphire smoke

Two clovers picked beside the garden gate

Click your tongue andspeak Florence Walker’s name three times. Wear a sun hat.

NORA

Sweat beads from my forehead and I kick back the blankets. Hot and disoriented.

The morning sun is a diffused orb of light through my bedroom window, and Fin is panting beside the stairs, tongue lolling in the heat of the loft. A tiny pulsing spurs at my temples from not enough sleep, and then I remember the boy. Full lips and too-deep eyes.

I climb free from the bed, light-headed, on edge, and Fin follows me down the stairs—both of us needing the cool relief of fresh air. Something to wipe away the fevered dreams still clacking through me. The ones I can’t shake.

But when I reach the bottom step, I stop short.

In the living room, the fire burns low, barely a flicker from inside the stove.

On the couch is a heap of blankets, a pillow rumpled and wrinkled and slept on.

But no Oliver Huntsman.

I yank open the front door and hurry out into the snow—the cold air pouring into my lungs, stinging the tips of my ears. A thin edge of panic worms itself between my shoulder blades. Not because I’m worried about him—but because I can’t be certain he was ever here at all. That I didn’t imagine him: a boy made of snow and dark stars. And once the sun rose in the sky, he turned back into dust and disappeared.

I stand on the deck and scan the trees, looking for footprints in the snow, for some hint that he snuck away in the night. Returned to the Wicker Woods.

And then I see.

An outline appears among the trees, between the house and the frozen lake, and the breath catches in my lungs—a defiant itch crawling up the back of my neck.

It’s him.

He’s wearing his clothes from yesterday, now dry, and perhaps it’s just the morning light—all swimmy and strange and beautiful—but he looks oddly valiant, like a boy about to set off on a journey. Some perilous adventure he surely won’t return from.

Snow skitters down frm the charcoal sky, and he spins around, sensing me watching him. His lean emerald eyes stare back at me—a starkness in them I can’t decipher. And in his hand I see the cotton sack of herbs I placed beside him while he slept.

“Are you okay?” I ask, moving to the edge of the deck, but the words feel useless, sucked dry by the cold air as soon as they leave my lips.

“I needed the fresh air,” he says, shifting his weight in the snow. “I was hoping the sun might be out.” His gaze skips up to the sky, where the dark clouds have snuffed out the blue beyond. And I wonder if he thought the sunlight would warm him, heal him—a balm on his weary mind. That it might return his memories to him in one swift inhale.

His knuckles close around the pouch of herbs and he glances down at it, eyebrows drawn together, like he doesn’t remember holding it.

“I made it for you last night,” I explain, a twinge of embarrassment slicing through me. Witchy herbs gathered by a witchy girl. I am a Walker who has never wanted to be anything else, but I also don’t want him to look at me like the kids at school do, like the other boys at the camp do. Like I am a monster, strange and eerie with wickedness in my heart. I want him to see only a girl. “It will help to warm you,” I add, as if this makes it less odd. As if a sack of herbs were as common as a spoonful of strawberry cold syrup before bed.

But his eyes soften, unafraid, unfettered.

“You need to sleep with it for the next two nights,” I say, although I don’t expect him to really keep it—a strange bag of sharp-smelling herbs.

He nods, and when he speaks, his voice is raw and shredded by the cold. “Thank you.”

Fin plods down the steps and pushes his nose into the snow, trailing some scent through the low morning fog, past Oliver’s legs. “Another storm is coming,” I say just as an icy wind churns up off the lake, nasty and mean. It blows through the trees, stinging my face, and a feeling of déjà vu ripples through me so quickly I almost miss it. As if I’ve been here before, looking out at Oliver standing in the trees, his mouth pinched flat. Or maybe I will again—time slipping just barely forward and then back. I count the seconds, I blink, and when I open my eyes, the feeling is gone.

Oliver lowers his gaze, and I wish I could pull words from his throat—I wish I knew what he was thinking. But he’s as mute as the jackrabbits who sit on the porch in autumn, peering in through the windows, thinking their docile, unknowable thoughts.

When he still doesn’t reply, I clear my throat, preparing myself for the question I need to ask. The one that has simmered inside me all night, burning holes of doubt through my skin. “How did you end up in the Wicker Woods?”

How did you survive in that dark, awful forest for two weeks?

In the cold?