Raven felt tricked by her spirit kin. She would get what she had asked of them with all her soul. She would go to school. But what she would lose might make her wish she had never asked.

“Raven, speak your promise aloud,” Mama said in an angry voice.

“I promise I won’t go to the boys’ house.”

“Not one foot on their land.”

“Not one foot.”

Mama stood. “The spirits will be watching you, Daughter of Raven. They will tell me if you break this promise.”

In that moment, Raven hated her father. If she went outside and saw a raven spying on her, she would want to throw a stone at it.

Just thinking that scared her more than anything ever had.

PART THREE

DAUGHTER OF THE WILD WOOD

1

Leaving the western mountains was like leaving home. For a year and a half, Ellis had stood on their peaks, drunk water straight from their rushing rivers, bathed in waterfalls, meditated in meadows aflame with alpine flowers, spent hours and hours watching the mountains’ marmots, pikas, moose, elk, bears, jays, dippers, and hummingbirds. The western mountains were like rooms in a familiar house.

But she didn’t want a home.

Allons! we must not stop here,

However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this

dwelling, we cannot remain here . . .

The words always brought her back to the night Caleb introduced her to the “Song of the Open Road.” He had read in her lamplit tent after they bathed in the mountain river, after they made love, at first numb and dripping ice water but soon streaming with sweat and in need of another rinse, washing in Whitman’s words instead.

She’d found a used paperback of Leaves of Grass in a Montana bookshop a month after the night with Caleb. It had the same cover as his copy. She often read the poems as she fell asleep in her tent. A better way to self-soothe than whiskey.

She turned onto a new highway. For two weeks, she’d been gradually moving eastward, camping along the way. She had to leave the west, at least for a while. She didn’t want to get too used to any one place. “Forever alive, forever forward,” as Caleb had quoted.

She was eager to see the woodlands of her childhood and college years. A conversation with hikers she’d met in Colorado had given her the idea to hike the Appalachian Mountains during spring bloom. Spring beauty, woodland phlox, trillium, lady’s slipper, bluebell. She hadn’t seen eastern wildflowers for a long time. For almost two years, since the day Viola was abducted.

But she wouldn’t think about that. She was about to cross the Mississippi River. She saw the bridge ahead.

She had her foot on the brake. She didn’t know why. She wanted to turn the car around. Go back west. All the ghosts were still there, waiting for her on the other side of the Mississippi.

She felt them coming closer as the bridge neared. The sweet smell of a baby cuddled in a towel after a bath. Jasper climbing into her lap to sleep. The softness of the boys’ hair. The weight of Viola’s body as she nursed. The two freckles next to River’s nose. “Heckle and Jeckle, my favorite freckles,” Ellis used to say, dabbing her finger on each.

No, she wouldn’t let a trajectory, the simple act of heading east, do this to her. She was better. So much better. She’d been sober for three months, the longest she’d ever maintained sobriety. She was strong from climbing mountains. She could go east if she wanted. Nothing would stop her.

“Check out this bridge,” she said to Gep. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?”

The blue pony had been riding on her dashboard since last summer. Ellis had worried she might lose him every time she packed camp. She’d stuck him to the dashboard with little pieces of duct tape under each hoof. Exposure to the sun was fading his blue plastic, but nothing could erase his tireless smile.

Ellis took a deep breath as she arrived on the eastern side of the river.

“These are your old stomping grounds,” she told the pony.

Gep’s smile suggested he felt better about that than she did.

She was talking to the pony too much. Like she used to before she got better. She needed rest. She’d been up at dawn, hiked for four hours, and been on the road longer than expected because of a traffic jam. She was heading for a campground in a nearby national forest. It had a stream where she could bathe.

She found it at twilight, relieved to see it was empty. Navigating the winding gravel roads to find it was difficult, and people rarely camped on weekdays in cold weather. She’d been worried turkey hunters might be there. She didn’t mistrust hunters per se, but she avoided men with weapons and alcohol when she was in an isolated campground. She’d gotten a bad feeling a few times in the past.

She put up the smaller of her two tents and went to bed with a book. Reading at night had replaced drinking. She couldn’t sleep unless she read at least a few pages. If she was too tired to get into a book, she read poetry.

She’d been asleep for several hours when she was awakened by the slams of car doors. A man swore about how cold it was. “Go get a room at the Hilton,” another man said.

She looked outside. The men, probably hunters, were only a few campsites down from hers.

The noise gradually abated, and she went back to sleep. She woke as the sun came up, ate, then put her bathing supplies in her backpack and headed to the trail.