Oliver tilts his head up at the sky, but his mouth turns down, like he doesn’t see what I see. Like he sees only shadows. Only the grim, spiny outline of trees. “I was worried you might never wake up,” he says, his voice thinner than I’ve ever heard it. Like he can still see the image of me in the lake, hair like seaweed, my body limp as he drew me up from the water—and the memory haunts him still.

Perhaps I am now his found thing. The girl he hauled up from the lake and brought home.

“Walkers are hard to kill,” I answer, laughing a little, then instantly regret it—a strange thing to say. The wrong thing to say. I dig a toe into the snow, kicking some off the edge of the roof onto the ground below. “Why are you out here?” I ask, to divert my thoughts away from death. From drowning. So easily I could have sunk and never been found. If Oliver hadn’t woken when he did and pulled me from the lake, the bone moth’s omen would have come true. And I would be just another tale inside the Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine—a brief notation. Another Walker who met her end in these mountains. Died too young, it might say. Died before she ever fell in love. Or just as she was starting to.

Oliver’s gaze lifts, eye level with the branches—with the tangled nests made by birds who have flown south for the winter. Abandoned their homes. And when they return in spring, they will construct new nests, new lives—the old ones not worth hanging on to. “To watch for the others,” he says. “I’ve come up here every night.”

He seems distracted, his shoulders rigid, his eyes straining out into the distance, watching for figures marching up through the pines, coming to take the witch and hang her from a tree, make sure she never talks. Just like locals once did to my ancestors. He’s up here to protect me.

I draw my hands into the sleeves of my sweater to keep out the cold. I count the thuds of my heart. One, two, ten… I lose track. Time is not a measure of seconds, but of breaths in the lungs. “I dropped my grandmother’s ring in the lake when I fell in,” I finally say, my voice small. A thing that doesn’t belong to me anymore—the cold stripped it away.

“I know,” he says, and he looks at me for the first time. “You were talking about it in your sleep.”

What else did I say? What other feverish murmurings that I didn’t want him to hear?

I clear my throat. “How long was I asleep?”