My pulse crackles in my ears—like little pops of warning. Someone is out there. I stop short and peer up the slope, through the pines, ready to run. Back toward the lake. To the boys’ camp if I have to.

But then I see.

Oliver.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

CEECEE WALKER was born during the winter of a pale alpine moon.

Maybe it was the soft layer of snowfall muting all sound; maybe it was that her mother never wailed or wept during delivery. Maybe it was that the midwife was deaf in one ear.

But when CeeCee opened her infant eyes for the first time, she never let out a single cry. Not a whimper or a coo.

Not once did CeeCee wail for a bottle or for a diaper to be changed. It would be seven years before she spoke her first word: abacus. Much to her mother’s confusion.

She never uttered another word of English again. When she was nine, she spoke only German, muttering things her mother and sisters could not decipher or understand. When she was eleven, she switched to French and then Russian. By twelve, she spoke Arabic and Spanish and Hindi. From age thirteen to the winter of her seventeenth birthday, she uttered only Portuguese.

Her mother once refused to hem a dress for CeeCee unless she asked for it in English. The girl would not, and she spent the remainder of that year in dresses that were too long, the skirts tearing wherever she walked.

CeeCee fell in love with a hero in a book instead of a real boy, and she dreamed of sailing the globe with him in his ship made of glass and pearls. Her nightshade allowed her to speak any language she liked, yet she remained in the forest, surrounded by those who spoke only one language. The one she disliked the most.

Later in life, she preferred the way Chinese vowels curled off her tongue, and she spoke it while walking through the autumn aspen trees reading from her favorite book.

But in her final moments, she stared up at the loft ceiling, her younger sister at her side, and whispered one last word: abacus. For reasons, still, no one understood.

How to Conjure a Language:

• Cut a wild onion into thirds, then hold below the eyes until they water.
• Shake tulip pollen onto a white cotton cloth, then place beneath your pillow on the last night of Lammas.
• Before you sleep, speak three words in the language you wish to know while holding your tongue with your index finger and thumb.
• Eat only oats and radishes for one week.
• By the next quarter moon, the language will reside beneath your tongue.

OLIVER