The lake creaked and snapped along the shore as the ice settled. And Mr. Perkins asked, “You lose power last night?” He glanced behind me up into the trees, where my home sat hidden in the pines.

I nodded. “You?”

“Yep,” he answered, then cleared his throat. “It’s going to be a while before that road clears. Before the power’s back on again.” He looked back at me, and the soft squint of his eyes and the wrinkles lining his brow made me think of my grandmother. “We’re on our own,” he said finally.

The only road down the mountain was blocked. And the nearest town of Fir Haven—a forty-five-minute drive—was too far away to walk. We were stuck.

Mr. Perkins tipped his head at me, a grave gesture, a certainty that this was going to be another tough winter, before continuing up the edge of the lake toward the marina. Toward the boathouse and his home.

I stood listening to the shouts of boys fanning out into the trees, the sky growing dark again, another storm settling over the lake. I knew how ruthless the forest could be, how unforgiving.

If a boy was lost out there, he likely wouldn’t survive the night.

It’s still dark—the deepest kind of dark. Winter dark.

The boy, Oliver Huntsman, follows me through the trees, stumbling over roots, coughing—gasping for air. He might not make it out of the Wicker Woods; he might drop dead in the snow behind me. He stops to lean against a tree, his body trembling, and I walk back to his side and wrap an arm around him. He is taller than I am and broad in the shoulders, but together we continue through the dark. He smells like the forest, like green. And when we reach the border of the Wicker Woods, we step over the threshold and back out into the open.

I release my hold on him, and he bends forward, gripping his knees and gasping for air. His lungs make a strange rasp sound with each breath. He’s spent too many nights alone out here, in the forest, in the cold. Where the creeping, crawling sounds of unknowable things rest just out of sight, and fear becomes a voice in the back of his mind—nagging and threading along sleepless thoughts. A person can go mad in these trees. Hatter mad.

Beside us, the sound of rushing water beneath the frozen surface of the Black River is both palliative and eerie. Oliver glances up at the night sky, his expression slack, in awe, as if he hasn’t seen the stars in weeks.

“We need to keep moving,” I say.

His body shakes, skin pale and muted. I need to get him inside, out of this snow and wind. Or the cold could still kill him.