Winterwood

My pulse crackles in my ears—like little pops of warning. Someone is out there. I stop short and peer up the slope, through the pines, ready to run. Back toward the lake. To the boys’ camp if I have to.

But then I see.

Oliver.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

CEECEE WALKER was born during the winter of a pale alpine moon.

Maybe it was the soft layer of snowfall muting all sound; maybe it was that her mother never wailed or wept during delivery. Maybe it was that the midwife was deaf in one ear.

But when CeeCee opened her infant eyes for the first time, she never let out a single cry. Not a whimper or a coo.

Not once did CeeCee wail for a bottle or for a diaper to be changed. It would be seven years before she spoke her first word: abacus. Much to her mother’s confusion.

She never uttered another word of English again. When she was nine, she spoke only German, muttering things her mother and sisters could not decipher or understand. When she was eleven, she switched to French and then Russian. By twelve, she spoke Arabic and Spanish and Hindi. From age thirteen to the winter of her seventeenth birthday, she uttered only Portuguese.

Her mother once refused to hem a dress for CeeCee unless she asked for it in English. The girl would not, and she spent the remainder of that year in dresses that were too long, the skirts tearing wherever she walked.

CeeCee fell in love with a hero in a book instead of a real boy, and she dreamed of sailing the globe with him in his ship made of glass and pearls. Her nightshade allowed her to speak any language she liked, yet she remained in the forest, surrounded by those who spoke only one language. The one she disliked the most.

Later in life, she preferred the way Chinese vowels curled off her tongue, and she spoke it while walking through the autumn aspen trees reading from her favorite book.

But in her final moments, she stared up at the loft ceiling, her younger sister at her side, and whispered one last word: abacus. For reasons, still, no one understood.

How to Conjure a Language:

Cut a wild onion into thirds, then hold below the eyes until they water.

Shake tulip pollen onto a white cotton cloth, then place beneath your pillow on the last night of Lammas.

Before you sleep, speak three words in the language you wish to know while holding your tongue with your index finger and thumb.

Eat only oats and radishes for one week.

By the next quarter moon, the language will reside beneath your tongue.

OLIVER

You scared me,” Nora says, striding into the house, then turning on her heels to face me. Her hair is coming away from its braid, black strands trailing over her neck, and her skin is flushed from the cold—strawberry cheeks and bone-white eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She raises her eyebrows at me, like she needs more of an explanation, like the softness she felt for me the night she first found me is now gone. Replaced by something else: doubt. And maybe even fear.

Perhaps I am becoming the villain after all.

“What were you doing out there?” she asks.

My hands shiver, and I curl them into fists so she won’t see. “I saw Rhett and the others sneak away from camp,” I tell her. The truth. Only the truth. “I followed them.”

“Why?” she asks, the space between her eyes punctuated by tiny lines.

“I don’t trust them.” I repeat what I told her last night. A puddle of melted snow collects at my feet, but I don’t remove my boots. I don’t know if she’ll let me stay. If she wants me here at all. If she trusts me. “I saw the bonfire, and you, and I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I admit.

Her eyes narrow, and she looks stricken by something, a pain I can’t quite see. “You don’t need to follow me,” she says. “Or protect me.”

“I know.” And I do know. She’s not weak, she’s not frail or breakable or scared of much. She is the storm that tears away roofs and knocks over trees. Yet, I needed to be sure she was safe. I needed to be nearer to her. She is the only thing that dampens the feeling of the cold, the memory of the forest always at the nape of my neck. She mutes the darkness always looking for a way in.

Nora blows out a breath and crosses her arms. “Where did you go this morning?” she asks, eyebrows slanted down at the edges.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Her mouth comes together in the shape of a bow, like she doesn’t believe me. “I followed your footprints around the lake,” she confesses. The wolf lifts its head from the floor and sniffs the air, like he smells something unfamiliar, before resting his chin back on his paws. “Why did you go to the cemetery?”

I divert my eyes away from her for the first time, away from what she wants to know. I don’t know how to explain what I remember, what I felt. They are only shards of memory that slice and sting when I try to focus on them. “I think I was there that night,” I say—the only thing I can be sure of.

“And you stood over Willa Walker’s grave?”