And it’s my fault.
I was wrong about so many things. I was wrong when I thought Oliver had killed Max. I was wrong when I thought my death was near. Or maybe I wasn’t—maybe death will still find me. Out here on this lake. In this burning forest.
Is it better to burn alive or to drown? Which will hurt less? The ice shifts beneath me, bending away from my weight. An inch of water now at the surface. I squeeze my eyes shut and push away the cold, pushing away the sound of trees cracking and falling to the ground in the distance. The sound of flames roaring along the edge of the lake. Ash in my hair, embers falling at my feet, melting the ice.
I waited too long, I think again. I should have left with Suzy and Mr. Perkins.
Eventually the ice will crack and give out beneath me. Eventually I will sink into the lake and drown just like Oliver.
Another offering to the lake.
A wilderness covered in snow shouldn’t burn. But fury can fuel strange things—tonight, it fueled a forest fire. If my grandmother was here, she could fix it, she would wave her finger in the air and the trees would listen. She would make this right.
Through the smoke, I glimpse the boys’ camp across the lake and see several boys running from their cabins. They haven’t all fledyet. Some of them are still there. “The forest wants to burn,” I think, I say aloud to no one. And it wants us all to burn with it. Maybe the forest deserves it. Maybe it’s lived too long. I squeeze the spellbook against my chest and think about all the Walkers who sprouted up from these woods. All the stories that live in the soil, live inside these pages. And now it will all burn.
My head begins to buzz, and a familiar sensation skims through me: I’ve been here before. I’ve stood on this ice and thought all these thoughts and felt the ash in my lungs. The feeling of déjà vu rattles over me again so quickly that my head tilts back to the red-stained sky.
Tick, tick, tick, tick,thud.
I blink and refocus. I squeeze the spellbook tighter.
The ice shifts beneath me, so thin I can see the deep black below my feet. I hear Oliver somewhere in the smoke, calling my name. He’s close now.
I grew up in these woods, I think. Every Walker has.It belongs to me, and I to it.
The forest heaves and whines and screams along the shore, flames spurred on by spite and revenge. The ice snaps below me. Fear claws up into my throat.
Oliver shouts again from the smoke, but I don’t listen. I don’t shout back and tell him where I am. Instead, I peer up at the awful sky, at the tips of trees I can just see above the smoke. And I sense the forest watching, listening.It knows who I am.
“I am Nora Walker,” I say softly, just as I have each time I’ve entered the Wicker Woods, but now my words seem tiny. No magic in them at all. No meaning. I think of my grandmother—how sturdyshe was. An anchor that could not be moved against her will. Many feared her, the strong tenor of her voice, her wild dark hair—I never saw her take a brush to it and it often caught in the wind and tangled into knots, but moments later it was silk down her back. She was a marvel. And I wish I was her right now, I wish I knew what she knew. How to command the trees around her.
I grip the spellbook tighter, knowing the power inside its pages, the weight of so many words handwritten by all the Walkers before me. I know the meaning in them. That they once commanded these trees, these dark skies. The woods and Walkers are bound to one another. We cannot be divided, stripped clean of the other.
I swallow and say, “My mother is Tala Walker.” An invocation, a reminder to the trees of the blood that courses through me. “My grandmother was Ida Walker.” I breathe her name, let it linger on my tongue. “I am a Walker.” Magic once poured through our veins,real magic. We breathed and the forest listened. We shed tears and the forest wept sap down its bark. Many of the old ways have been forgotten, slipped through cracks, but our blood is still the same. Still a fire inside us.
I feel Oliver is close now, nearly to me, but I don’t look back. “I belong to this forest,” I say aloud, willing the trees to listen. To calm their fury. To stop the flames from burning, from devouring whatever is left. “I am a Walker,” I say again. “You know my name. You know who I am.” It sounds like a spell, like a remnant of real magic rising up inside me, burning my fingertips.
I breathe and lift my chin. Certainty pulsing through me. “I am a Walker!” I scream, commanding my voice to grow louder than the raging fire pummeling around the lake.
I am not afraid.
I hear Oliver only a few yards away. “Nora!” he shouts, more urgent this time. And then there is another sound. A change in the air. A crack and awhoosh.
That’s when I see it: the falling embers, the mammoth pine tree completely engulfed in flames. It must be two hundred feet tall, and its trunk has been uprooted from the soft ground along the shore, fire burning from roots to tip. And now the tree is tipping, leaning, falling. Careening toward the lake, toward me. I stare at it like it’s fireworks erupting in the night sky.In awe.Everything is happening in slow motion—knowing I need to run, but somehow caught by the dazzling sight of such a massive tree, upending, pitching forward.
A second later, the tree crashes across the lake, breaking through the surface of ice in one violent blow. The sound is tremendous and terrifying. Like a thousand glass chandeliers shattering at once. The lake shudders beneath me.
Only a couple yards away, the tree sinks into the black water, into a gaping hole. Ice fracturing out around it.Run!my head screams. But my heart has stalled in my chest, my legs afraid to move. The ice makes an eerie sound beneath me, like metal bending to the point of breaking. Like a long, pent-up howl. I suck in a breath just before it happens.
My eyelids blink.
Time slows.
And then the ice snaps—a quick giving way—and I drop into the water.
The air is pushed straight from my lungs. My head dips all the way under and the spellbook slips free from my grasp—sinking intothe deep, just like my grandmother’s ring—and I scramble to the surface, fighting for air. I try to scream, to call Oliver’s name, but no words come out. My throat is too dry, the air too thick with smoke. My hands slap against the surface of the water as I try to swim to the edge of the ice, but there is no edge. The lake has shattered, broken apart, and now only chunks of ice bob at the surface—just like me.
The shore is too far, not even visible through the smoke.
