“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?
His eyes slide back over me, but this time his mouth is turned down, a puzzled expression forming along his brow. “The Wicker Woods?” he asks.
“That’s where I found you.”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t know,” he answers first, and then, “I don’t remember what happened.”
The prick of something tiptoes up my spine—mistrust maybe.
“It’s dangerous in there,” I say. “You could have died. Or gotten lost and never found your way out again.”
“But you went into the Wicker Woods,” he points out.
His expression is calm. While my thoughts turn in circles, round and round without end.
“It was a full moon last night,” I say quickly. “And I’m a Walker.”Everything you’ve heard about me is true, I think but don’t say. All the stories. The rumors passed through the boys’ camp, the word whispered in a hush:witch.
If he had grown up here, he would know the lore of my family. All the tales told about Walkers: of Scarlett Walker, who found herpet pig in the Wicker Woods, where it had turned an ashen shade of white after eating a patch of rare white huckleberries. Of Oona Walker, who could boil water by tapping a spoon against a pan. Or Madeline Walker, who would catch toads in jars to silence people from telling her secrets.
But Oliver doesn’t know these tales: the legends I know to be true. He only knows what the boys have said—and most of their stories are lies. Born from fear and spite, not from history.
He doesn’t know that Walkers can enter the Wicker Woods because our family is as old as the trees. That we are made of the same fiber and dust, of roots and dandelion seeds.
Yet somehow, this boy entered the dark of the Wicker Woods and came out unharmed. He came out alive. As if some strange form of magic were at work.
“How did you survive in there?” I urge him again, watching his face for any flicker of a lie. For something he’s trying to hide.
He chews on the question, mashes it around in his skull, and when he shakes his head, I wonder if he truly doesn’t know. Perhaps his mind has scrubbed away what needs to be forgotten. The unpleasant things. Better to not remember the woods. Or how dark the dark can be.
I swallow hard: frustrated, tired. Something happened to him out there—but he won’t say. Or he honestly doesn’t remember. And my mind skips strangely back to the moth, its white wings in the dark air. The memory of itflit flit flittingthrough the trees, leading me to Oliver, where he lay slumped in the snow. I wince and cross my arms, willing the memory away.Maybe I was wrong.Maybe it wasn’t a bone moth but only a common forest moth, oversized and snowy white. A moth that wasn’t a warning at all.
Maybe.
Maybe.
“We should get you back to the camp,” I say, letting out a breath.
His shoulders sink and his jaw sets in place. I can tell he doesn’t want to go back there, to the camp, but I also can’t keep him.Finders keepers.He is a lost item that belongs at the Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys. Not mine to keep—to place on a windowsill, to dust and admire.
Even if I want to.
He nods—a solemn gesture.
“And we should go before this storm gets worse,” I add. The sky has turned the color of a broken bruise before it’s begun to heal, and the wind lashes through the trees, blowing snow up off the lake.
Oliver’s eyes lift, and there is a disquiet in them that betrays something else. Fear perhaps. Restlessness. Or just lack of sleep. “Okay,” he relents.
