We’d been hiking for three hours when I first saw him. A stag, up on the hillside, looking out across the dales. Big and beautiful. Antlers like branches, half-concealed by the aspen.

The rest of my group didn’t see him. They were busy discussing more important matters.

“Zach, definitely,” Tasha said.

Zoe scoffed. “Out of all the boys?”

“Well, who do you think’s fitter?”

“I don’t know. Jamie?”

“As if!”

“He’s fitter than Zach.”

“You’re both wrong,” Faye said. “Peter’s the fittest.”

“Peter?” Zoe asked. “As in the Leader?”

Faye nodded. “I like men, not boys.”

Their laughter hurt my ears. I closed my eyes and pressed them with my fingertips. Swirls of colour spilled onto my eyelids.

“Peter’s old,” Tasha said. “Like, old old.”

Faye shrugged. “He’s only twice our age. I’ve caught him looking at me.”

“Maybe you should try getting off with him tonight?”

Faye winked. “Maybe I will.”

That was the only reason they’d come on the expedition, to get off with boys. Not for the certificate or to be out in nature. Not even to be with each other. I guess I wasn’t like them anymore. The cards I’d drawn before we set off—the Tower, the Ten of Swords, the Lovers—had foretold that this was the end. After the expedition, we’d go our separate ways. I wasn’t sad about it.

A breeze blew as I looked back up at the hillside, hoping their laughter hadn’t scared the stag away.

My heart fluttered.

He was looking at me, mostly man now, standing amongst the aspen. Antlered still, and beautiful. Eyes like ink.

“Lilly?”

The girls were looking at me, smirking. I glanced up at the hillside; he’d gone.

“Well?” Faye said.

“Well, what?” I said, adjusting the strap of my rucksack.

“Have you ever got off with a boy?”

#

I didn’t see him again until we reached the campsite. He was watching me from the edge of the wood, the light fading, for a slice of an instant.

I put up our tent by myself. Not that the rest of my group planned on sleeping in it.

“Come on, Lilly,” Zoe said.

I shook my head. “I don’t want to.”

“It’ll be fun!”

The boys were over in their tent. I could hear them laughing. They called for us to hurry up.

“One second!” Zoe called back. She tapped my shoulder. “What are you going to do? Sit in here all night making daisy chains?”

I slit the stem of one daisy with my thumbnail, then pushed the stem of another through the slit. The dales were covered in them.

“Danny’s over there,” she teased. “He likes you, you know.”

“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “None of the boys like me.”

“Leave her, Zoe!” Faye called from the boys’ tent. “She’s frigid, anyway!”

They were back before eleven. Peter had caught them in the boys’ tent sharing a bottle of vodka. He’d confiscated it and warned us we’d all be sent home if we broke any more rules. The boys had each been given a torch and told to move their tent to the other side of the campsite. The girls blamed me. They said I should’ve warned them the Leaders were checking tents.

“Lucky I hid this when I did,” Tasha said, pulling another bottle of vodka from her sleeping bag.

Later, when they were asleep, I heard him calling my name. He made me promises from out on the dales, asked me to join him amongst the aspen—but only once I’d done something for him first.

#

I decided during the next day’s hike that despite how much his promises excited me, what he’d asked of me was too difficult to accomplish alone. I couldn’t do it, not without help or a guiding hand. I could feel in the air that he was disappointed in me.

“Forgive me,” I whispered. I imagined his obsidian eyes gazing into mine, his warm breath against my face. The back of my neck prickled.

“They’re not coming,” Zoe said. “Zach told me they’re not this morning.”

We were walking through a field we weren’t meant to be in. I knew the turn we’d taken to get here was wrong, but they hadn’t listened to me.

“Why not?” Tasha asked.

“They don’t want to get sent home.”

“So, what are they going to do? Just stay in their tent the whole night?”

Faye shook her head. “We’ll make them come to us.”

“How?” Zoe said.

“Lilly can make us a love potion, can’t you, Lilly?”

They looked at me hopefully, but I knew they were mocking me.

“Okay,” I said, as we approached a stile in the hedgerow.

“We’ll sneak it into their thermoses at dinner,” Faye said, climbing the stone steps.

Zoe pointed at the flowers growing in the hedgerow. “You can use these daises, Lilly.” She followed Faye over the stile.

They weren’t daises growing in the hedgerow. They were bryonies—English mandrake, ladies’ seal.

#

I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay awake in our tent, thinking of his promises. He hadn’t yet called me to him despite my doing as he’d asked, and I began to think that I’d been too late in acting, that I’d never see him again.

The others lay silent and still beside me, between them the empty bottle of ladies’ seal vodka. The blood and vomit around their mouths had long crusted.

“Forgive me,” I whispered into the dark.

Then I heard him. Out in the night. Calling me. Burning.

I pulsed.

I pushed my sleeping bag from me and found my crown of daisies.

“Lilly?”

It was Zoe. She was barely conscious, hardly breathing. She would soon drift away.

“Where are you…? Lilly? Lilith?”

I ignored her and she didn’t follow me.

My feet and legs were wet with dew by the time I entered the wood. Above me, moonlight glinted through windows in the aspen.

He was waiting for me inside, a stag, in a clearing of broken twigs and fallen leaves.

“I’m here,” I said, meeting his eyes. I reached for him, felt his nose, his hot breath on my fingers. I ran my hands up his snout, along his antlers. They were hard and smooth.

Then a wind blew and he was before me, standing over me, antlered and beautiful and bare. I ran my fingertip along his shoulder, onto his chest, pale and marked. He removed my crown, then everything else.

Then I was in his arms, arms older than the wood itself, stronger, too, than the dales, and the wind blew and the wood shook and I gasped and trembled like the aspen.

The wind stopped. The wood stilled. I staggered and felt the thorny ground beneath me. The arms holding me were gone. I was cold and bare and alone in the clearing. There were glowworms at my feet.