Winterwood

“The air feels good,” I say, my eyes blinking closed, then open again. But he shakes his head. “Just for a little while,” I tell him. “I just want to stand outside.” I need to feel my legs beneath me, the air in my lungs. Alive.

He folds my hand through his arm and helps me to the edge of the roof, where the view of the lake is the clearest, where a few stars even prick out from the dark, clouded skyline.

“I used to come out here when I was little,” I say, my voice still shaky. “My mom hated it, said I would slip off the edge and break my neck. But I did it anyway.” I smile in spite of the cold. “It’s quiet up here,” I add. “The sky feels closer.”

Oliver tilts his head up at the sky, but his mouth turns down, like he doesn’t see what I see. Like he sees only shadows. Only the grim, spiny outline of trees. “I was worried you might never wake up,” he says, his voice thinner than I’ve ever heard it. Like he can still see the image of me in the lake, hair like seaweed, my body limp as he drew me up from the water—and the memory haunts him still.

Perhaps I am now his found thing. The girl he hauled up from the lake and brought home.

“Walkers are hard to kill,” I answer, laughing a little, then instantly regret it—a strange thing to say. The wrong thing to say. I dig a toe into the snow, kicking some off the edge of the roof onto the ground below. “Why are you out here?” I ask, to divert my thoughts away from death. From drowning. So easily I could have sunk and never been found. If Oliver hadn’t woken when he did and pulled me from the lake, the bone moth’s omen would have come true. And I would be just another tale inside the Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine—a brief notation. Another Walker who met her end in these mountains. Died too young, it might say. Died before she ever fell in love. Or just as she was starting to.

Oliver’s gaze lifts, eye level with the branches—with the tangled nests made by birds who have flown south for the winter. Abandoned their homes. And when they return in spring, they will construct new nests, new lives—the old ones not worth hanging on to. “To watch for the others,” he says. “I’ve come up here every night.”

He seems distracted, his shoulders rigid, his eyes straining out into the distance, watching for figures marching up through the pines, coming to take the witch and hang her from a tree, make sure she never talks. Just like locals once did to my ancestors. He’s up here to protect me.

I draw my hands into the sleeves of my sweater to keep out the cold. I count the thuds of my heart. One, two, ten… I lose track. Time is not a measure of seconds, but of breaths in the lungs. “I dropped my grandmother’s ring in the lake when I fell in,” I finally say, my voice small. A thing that doesn’t belong to me anymore—the cold stripped it away.

“I know,” he says, and he looks at me for the first time. “You were talking about it in your sleep.”

What else did I say? What other feverish murmurings that I didn’t want him to hear?

I clear my throat. “How long was I asleep?”

“Three days.” He exhales deeply, as if recalling the hours, the nights that passed when he sat beside me, waiting for me to stir. “You woke up a few times, but you were pretty out of it.”

“I was probably hypothermic,” I say, then chew on the corner of my lip, imagining him feeding me soup while I mumbled nonsensically. When I found him in the woods, he was near death, chilled to the bone, and I made him strip out of his clothes and sit beside the fire. Now we’re even. “Thank you,” I say. “For pulling me from the lake. For taking care of me.”

His sleepy eyes settle on me, and his jaw contracts. “You could have died in that water.” I understand now why he looks at me like this, why the muscles in his arm tense when I speak.

“I know,” I say flatly, feeling my heart rise and then fall, recalling the cold depth of the lake trying to swallow me up. “I’m sorry.”

“Why did you go out there?” he asks pointedly, swiveling to face me, but still keeping my arm looped in his. So I won’t collapse.

I shake my head because I don’t know what to say. Because my grandmother slipped into my dreams and whispered about the lake, about remembering. Because I thought I was brave. Because I thought the lake would give up its secrets to me. Because I’m a Walker. “I found a broken chain on the ice,” I say at last, as explanation. “The chain from the watch I found in your coat.”

Oliver’s expression goes cold, as if his heart darkens in his chest, turns as black as magpie wings. “You still think I killed him?”