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 her pet 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.