That night, we slept on a blanket made of moss and leaves, curled around each other like infant mice, though it itched and gave Margaret hives.

Someone will come for us, we said. They'll find us sooner or later. They must.

In the morning, we set out to find our way home again and made a game out of it, keeping an eye out for any wildlife that could cross our path. Margaret wanted to see a red fox. I hoped we wouldn't run into anything with too many teeth, or quills, or that smelled horrid. In the days that came, we would wake to our own symphony of bird song and whatever else called the woodland home, and although it brought joy to my ears, terror stirred within me, deep within me. I knew Margaret felt it, too.

The ache for home, the familiar.

No one had come. No one.

There were things we hadn't accounted for. Rain and where we'd use the bathroom were big ones. On the fourth day, a storm brewed, forcing Margaret and I to take shelter underneath an old sycamore. It had a gaping hole in its trunk that went straight through to the other side. The tree did nothing to keep us dry. We huddled against each other, cold, wet, and shivering. The rain made the ground beneath us mucky, so along with being drenched our clothes would be caked in mud the next day.

Unlike its name suggested, Roving Woods was no paradise. It was a dark fortress of trees crippled and twisted by time, but I would have plucked an apple without lure from any tree with haste if there were any at all. My mother, Cosette, kept the best garden in Clearwater—and an apple tree she'd let me name Ophelia. How I missed my mother's apple tarts, already, so soon, with a restless appetite.

I held out my hand and let the rain pour onto it. We'd been drinking water from the bottles we'd packed, but I imagined bringing my hand up to my mouth to lick up what I could, like some mad dog. But I didn't. I let the rain slip down my arm.

"Will it ever stop?" Margaret asked.

Her lips trembled. She pushed wet strands of her hair away from her dark eyes. Somewhere, during our wandering, she'd lost her ribbon. Somewhere a mother bird was using it to build her nest. At the loud burst of thunder, she shut her eyes.

Over the thunder, rain, and bird song, I heard her take a deep breath. But instead of a frown, a smile played on her lips.

Nothing smelled as good as the woods during a rainstorm. While the woods were musky with the smell of vegetation, the rain washed it all away. But I didn't think it was what made Margaret smile. Whatever she thought about wasn't in these woods.

Her baby brother, Benny, had learned to talk and for some reason, instead of calling her Margaret, he called her by her middle name. Rose. But he pronounced it Ose. "Ose, Ose, Ose," he'd coo all day long. Margaret thought it was sweet.

I leaned my head against the tree and let water drip from its leaves onto my forehead and into my eyes, blurring my vision. The rain fell for ages. The clouds that hung overhead made it so dark there was no differentiating between afternoon and twilight.

At last the rain slowed to a trickle, and I forced myself to stand, to stretch my stiff limbs. Margaret had her head in her lap but was awake. When she no longer felt the warmth of me beside her, she lifted her head.

"Where are you going?" she asked, sniffling and wiping her nose. "It's still raining."

I started to answer, nowhere, but something to my right moved. Something red. I leaned forward and saw what looked like a flag fluttering in the breeze not too far ahead.

"Ivy," Margaret said as I moved towards it. The flag whipped around in the wind like a baby bird whose wings weren't used to flight, and I took several more steps towards it. "Ivy," Margaret said. "Would you come back? There's nothing there."

But there it was, whirling around, cutting at the air. It put up a good fight against the wind.

"You promised," she said. "You promised we'd stay put until someone comes for us."

I wished she hadn't shouted because the woods heard, the rain paused, as if on a brief intermission, not even the birds sang when Margaret shouted. What power could such a place have? When I turned to her, she had her hand over her mouth, like maybe she'd understood the mistake she'd made. I should have warned her then. I should have whispered to her what the wind had told me.

That we might not be alone in these woods after all. Margaret lowered her hand, a smile danced on her plump, red mouth. "I hadn't meant to yell."

I nodded. "Don't you see it?" I asked. "Right there." I pointed at the red flag, which had gone still, too.

Margaret scooted forward on her bottom. "Is that a..." She scrunched her nose. "A flag?"

"I think someone put it there," I said. "It wasn't there before."

She raised her eyebrows. "Oh."

"I'm going to check it out." I stared hard in its direction, as if the person who'd put it there would materialize out of the rain.

Margaret scrambled to her feet. She leaned forward on the balls of them. "But it's red," she said. "Why would someone leave a red flag tied to a tree?"

"Maybe they're declaring war."

"A war? What with the bunnies and the beavers?" She said it as a joke, and I feigned a laugh.

"Let's go see then. Let's see who wants to war with us."

I smiled, but let it fall as I followed her away from the sycamore. There was enough light to make the short distance without our flashlights. Margaret's steps never faltered. As we got closer, the flash of red became brighter. It wasn't a flag like we'd thought. Margaret untied her ribbon from the tree's branch. She held it in her hands, like a small, ailing pet. The rain had made the satin fabric darker, but there was no denying it was hers.

"I think a bear's left us a present," she said and smiled, but like mine had seconds before it fell as soon as it had appeared. She stuffed the wet fabric into her pocket.

The rain picked up again. It slipped underneath our clothing, down our chests and in-between our lips, until we tasted it, like some petulant lover. Yet, we didn't move because more than Margaret's ribbon had been left for us to find.

Someone had carved initials, our initials, into the tree's trunk.

"I F and M T," Margaret said, glancing at me. She shook. From the cold or fear, I couldn't tell.

"Ivy Farewell and Margaret Thompson," I said.

She traced the letters with her finger, along the V in Ivy which resembled a U and the T in Thompson which looked like an F. Around our initials was a lopsided heart and beneath that a short poem.

I've waited a long time,

but my patience has run low.

Soon we will meet sweet Ivy.

My darling Margaret.

No matter rain or snow.

Margaret made a gagging sound. "That is the worst poem I've ever read." Her voice boomed, scaring a small flock of sparrows out of the tree. "If you're trying to scare us you might as well be a little clever," she said to what seemed like only me, the trees, and the birds.

That poem meant that either someone was playing a cruel trick, or there were things more poisonous than death lily in the woods. Could it have been him, the one who called to me, the one who I ached for even as I was lost? He'd enchanted me somehow.

What else could have been this fevered yearning for someone I'd never met? My heart wouldn't be still thinking of this Phillip.

I hadn't even told Margaret about the boy who called to me at night, and now that I might have had his name, I wasn't sure what to make of it. We should have left then. We should have tried to find our way to the safety of our homes and our parents.

But I didn't think either one of us wanted to go any further, fearing that every step brought us farther from home and closer to our deaths.