Winterwood

We trudge higher up into the mountains, until we reach the two steep slopes, the ravine, the cairn of rocks standing guard. The entrance.

The boys fall silent for the first time, each staring into the dark, opening through the trees—the boundary of the Wicker Woods.

“I don’t like it,” Lin says, standing back, away from the border. “It’s fucking creepy. Doesn’t feel right.”

A cold wind slides out from the entrance, smelling like the darkest dark, like wet rocks and soil that have never felt sunlight, like the place where monsters sleep. Not imaginary ones, but ones that hunt and slink and creep. Ones that stare out at us, hoping we’ll step inside. Hoping we’re dumb enough. “That’s because we shouldn’t be here,” I say, a shudder sliding along my voice. “This is the only way in,” I tell them, “and it’s the only way out.”

Suzy swallows, an audible gulp. “Maybe we should wait until it’s light,” she suggests. “When we can see.” The fear is evident in her voice. Gone is the girl I remember from school, who buzzed down the halls of Fir Haven High laughing loudly so everyone could hear, kissing as many boys as she could on Valentine’s Day. Keeping count. Now she looks deflated, a girl who’s lost all her air.

Rhett ignores her. “You go in first,” he says to me, pushing a hand against my shoulder. I bite back the urge to turn around and shove him in the chest, to scratch and claw at his face, to make him bleed. But I still feel weak, my muscles tensing against the cold, and so far they haven’t hurt me—I’m not going to give them a reason to.

“It’s not a full moon,” I repeat. “We can’t go in there.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Rhett replies. He shoves me again and I stagger forward, one foot at the very edge of the entrance into the woods. I glance back at Suzy, who is biting her lower lip, watching me like I’m about to be swallowed up by the trees. Like she has never felt more terrified in her life. And in her eyes, I think I see her urging me to run—to turn and dart back down the mountain. But she doesn’t know how weak I am, that I’m having a hard time even standing.

“You don’t have to hurt her,” Suzy pleads, but Rhett has stopped listening to her.

Knots bind together inside my stomach, and I crane my head up to the night sky—clouds sailing away, the moon a deflated half circle. Not full. Not safe to venture into these dark, vengeful woods.

I blow out a breath and whisper the words I’ve said so many times before, hoping they will protect me, hoping the woods will remember me and let me pass unharmed. “I am Nora Walker,” I say softly so the boys won’t hear. And then I repeat it twice more, for good measure, for luck.

But I sense it might be too late for that.

Walker or not, perhaps none us will survive the night.

So I stiffen my arms at my sides and take a step past the threshold, into the Wicker Woods.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

IONA WALKER was born under a black harvest moon—the darkest night of the year.

Even as a baby, she cast no shadow across the ground. Even on the brightest afternoon, even when the sun burned at her neck.

But a girl without a shadow can see in the dark. A rather useful nightshade for sneaking and spying.

Iona often wandered through the house while her mother slept, never flicking on a single light, never stubbing her toe on a rocking chair she couldn’t see. Her vision was even better than that of her cat, Oyster, who learned to follow Iona through the dark.

When she was twenty-three, she met a boy who gathered night phlox and coal berries and ninebark leaves after the sun had set. On a cool October night, she kissed him under a full moon, and he swore he’d never leave her side.

Until the night Iona lost sight of him somewhere among the shadowed trees. He wandered too near the Wicker Woods, slipped beyond the forest boundary, where no one but a Walker should enter, and he was never seen again.

Iona banished the dark after that, and never again went into the woods once the sun had dipped below the treeline. She died on a late August morning, sitting on the front porch of the old house overlooking the lake. And as her eyes slipped closed, her shadow stretched out long in front of her.

It had been there all along, coiled up inside her, too afraid to step into the light.

How to Find Your Shadow:

Hang foxglove from the back door by a black, knotted rope.

Only step outside during moonlight (no direct sun) for five nights in a row. Your shadow will reveal itself on the sixth.

NORA

I feel the weight of the trees as soon as I enter, the bony edges of the forest lunging out at strange angles.

We shouldn’t be here.

“Keep going,” Rhett urges from behind me, and I wave a hand out in front of me, feeling my way. My senses dulled, cotton in my ears. Usually I can traverse these woods with some sense of direction. But now the forest is too dark and colorless.