Some recipes were innocuous enough: instructions for baking spiced prickly pear pie or a particularly tricky recipe for rutabaga-and-parsley stew. The best method for steeping juniper berry tea, and how to harvest yarrow root in the fall. But others were for conjuring up things that were more witchcraft than forest medicine. How to trick a bat into hunting a common house mouse. How to grow wild strawberries and sword ferns and wax myrtle for protection and divination. How to see the dead wandering among gravestones.
There was no index in the back of the book, no rhyme or reason to the order of recipes and spells. Things were merely written down in succession, from one Walker to another. The book is tea-stained and chocolate-smeared, and the first few pages are completely unreadable, the ink having faded to nothing with time. And every few pages, a brief history has been written down—the story of a Walker who once lived, and how she died—recorded like a family ledger, so each tale, each woman, would never be forgotten.
But after my grandmother passed away, only a week before my fifteenth birthday, my mother took the book and shoved it inside the wooden box beneath her bed. Like she didn’t trust me with it, like she was trying to blot out the memory of my grandmother and all the Walkers along with it. But she can’t erase our past, can’t scrub clean the moonlight in our veins. Mom only ever wanted to be normal. To leave the past where it belonged. To no longer be called witches or weird or be forced to avoid sidelong glances when we went into town, catching the last of a muttered word about how spiders lived in our hair and beetles under our toenails.
We are Walkers. And our ancestors have lived in these woods since long before the first miners set up camp along the Black River. We came from this forest. From the roots and brine and weather-worn stones.
We are the daughters of the wood.
One cannot survive without the other.
I sit cross-legged on the white bedspread. Snow floats into the room, catching in my hair, landing on Fin where he’s curled up on the floor, nose tucked beneath his tail.
I flip open the front cover of the book and am met with the musty scent of burnt amber and jasmine. Just like the nights with my grandmother. A thrumming begins in my chest—a peculiar sort of ache. The thrill and also the fear leaping through me. If Mom found out I took it from beneath her bed, she would be angry. She’d hide it where I wouldn’t be able to find it ever again. Maybe she’d even destroy it.
Still, I bend over the pages and my hair falls loose from its braid—fine and inky-black, just like my grandmother’s. Even the sturdy slope of my nose, the dark storm resting behind my eyes, the melancholy curve of my lips—it’s all her. The reminder of my grandma always hidden in my own face.
The weight of the moonstone slides the gold ring around my finger as I skim over recipes and drawings outlined in charcoal, until I find what I’m looking for. A simple concoction—a crease folded down the page where the book has been fanned open countless times. The recipe isn’t true witchery. But Grandma used to make it during the cold months of January, to warm chilled bones, to calm a cough, to bring circulation back into numb fingers and toes.
Silently, I descend the stairs to the kitchen.
The ingredients are easy to find. One whole cupboard is lined with glass jars filled with dried herbs and powdered roots and fragrant liquids with descriptions handwritten on the lids. There is even a jar labeled lake water, in case a recipe needed to be made in haste and there was no time to walk the few yards down to the lake itself.
Mom has kept the cupboard stocked, never throwing anything out, even though she doesn’t use the herbs—not like Grandma did.
I pour the few ingredients into the same copper bowl my grandmother once used: ground cloves and powdered cardamom, a dash of fawn lily and burdock root, and a pinch of a reddish-rose tincture labeled bero.
I sift the mixture into a small cotton pouch, then cross the living room to Oliver. His hair is now dry, dark and wavy, and he doesn’t stir when I slide the cotton pouch beneath the blankets beside his bare ribs. His chest rises, the slow measured weight of his lungs expanding. A shudder runs through him and his eyelids flicker, his body tensing briefly—spurred by some dream I can’t see. He reminds me of an animal near death. Fighting it, struggling. I could crawl beneath the blankets and wrap my arms over his chest, I could feel the beat of his heart against my palm, I could wait for the heat to return to his skin before I went back to my own bed.
But he is a boy I don’t know. A boy who smells of the forest now. Who reminds me of the winter trees, tall and lean with bark that is rough and raw and could tear open flesh. No soft edges.
I catch my own breath and turn away. He is a boy I don’t know, I repeat to myself again. He is a boy with his own secrets. A boy unlike all the others—in ways I don’t understand. I can’t pinpoint.
The recipe instructs that the herbs should be kept close to the body while you sleep for three nights in a row, and then the chill will be banished from the bones.
It’s all I can offer him, all I know how to do—I am a Walker without real magic. Without a nightshade. It will have to be enough.
Back in the loft, I close the book and bury myself beneath the sheets, trying not to think of the boy. A stranger asleep downstairs.
The sunrise is close, the light through my bedroom window turning a carmine shade of pink.
I pull the blankets up to my chin, begging sleep to find me. To draw me down and give me at least an hour’s rest. But my heart drums against my ribs, a nagging that won’t go away. It’s not just the boy downstairs. It’s something else.
The moth I saw in the woods. White shredded wings and black pebble eyes. The moth is a warning.
And I know what it means. I know what’s coming.
My eyes flick to the wall above my bed, where a collection of items gathered from the forest are tacked to the wood. Bits of moss and dried maple leaves, a raven feather and a broken magpie egg, Juneberry seeds and other things found along the forest floor. A dozen dried wildflowers hang with stems to the ceiling, dusty pollen drifting down to my pillow. It’s good luck to bring the forest indoors, to let it watch over you while you sleep. These things protect me. They bring me good dreams.
But not tonight.
Even with the open window, with the snow gathering on the floor in drifts, I sweat through the sheets, my cheek sticking to the pillow.
And in my fever dreams, I have the strange sense that by morning, Oliver will be gone. Melted into the floor like a boy made of snow.
A trick of the woods.
As if he were never here at all.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
FLORENCE WALKER was born in 1871 under a green Litha moon.
Crows gathered on the windowsill when she drew in her first infant breath, and they kept watch at her crib, wings folded, every night as she slept.