Burning the Raven Tree by Janyre Tromp

Chapter 1

April 6, 1965
Leelanau Peninsula, Michigan

There are good reasons Mama used to call the wee hours of the morning the witching hour. There are wraiths who wake when the clock strikes two. They tiptoe into your sleep, taunting until you wake with real screams scraping out your throat, chased by the desperate prayer that the navniki ghosts aren’t real and the past won’t come crawling into bed with you.

They are the reasons I’m standing at the edge of the cherry orchard again, panting, breath puffing into vapor trails as I try to shake off the memory singed into my closed eyelids. The frigid sting of Michigan’s April air burns my lungs, trying to anchor me in the present. But the smell of distant smoke tinges my nostrils and drags me under the dark spell.

It’s just the neighbor’s wood stove. Just a wood stove.

Unfortunately the mantra has never worked well.

One hand clutches the Polar Star necklace Mama painted for me, and the other presses against the jagged bark of the oak tree, my confidant. My palm hungers for the strength, the sharpness of the only other memory keeper on the edgelands. With her crown soaring above the field, the tree has seen everything and cradles the memories of generations.

I heave in a breath and hold it, slowing my heart rate. I breathe out. The rush is a cold mimic of billowing smoke. Above me, the spreading branches groan in witness and solidarity with her familiar nightwalker. I clutch the wool blanket to my chest and touch the sole of a trailing shoe bound in her arms.

“We would change things if we could,” I whisper to the oak. But we are powerless…or at least I am.

The tips of the tree stretch, narrow, and there, at the first breath of nothing, is the potential, the thing each branch is becoming. I wonder what is at the end of myself. What is on the other side? How many times have I stood here wishing for a different ending?

A hundred nights?

A thousand?

How many times have I seen the ghosts of the lost children drift between the moonlit trees and through the discarded scrap of Dad’s old mechanic’s garage and smithy?

Being responsible for their murder is a heavy burden to bear.

I breathe in the crisp air, purposefully long and slow, waiting for the panic to die. With my stores perilously low, I have to be up again in a few brief hours to plant seeds under the cold frame. Though I’m loath to admit it, I won’t be able to make do much longer.

Not that many will notice if I disappear.

I glance toward town, hidden behind the trees. A few weeks ago, my childhood guardian, Sebastian, suggested I apply for a job. Like I can just materialize on Main Street as if nothing ever happened. No, the Cueny family has lived on this ground, pouring in our blood and tears, for generations. For better or worse, I will not step across the boundary, will not find out what is beyond the edge.

Above me, my ravens grumble from their perch, and I smile at the scant welcome of my friends, reminding me that they too saw, and they too hold the truth behind their onyx eyes.

Ravens are smarter than most people realize, with a complicated system of communication and loyalties. Grip, the male, and by extension, his partner, are loyal to me.

I twist my long dark hair into a knotted bun, then wrap my hands around the lowest oak branch and heave myself into her wooden embrace. When I was younger, Mama, my sister, and I built a small platform high in the crook of the oak’s arms where we watched the electric lights twinkle along Main Street, petering into darkness on either side. Sisi and I dreamed of getting out. Back then, my dad was the one holding us captive. Back then, I laughed at Mama’s stories of a many-headed dragon with an insatiable appetite and the Baba Yaga, the wintery forest witch who decides who is worthy of help and who will not survive. I’d once hoped to be the girl, lost in the woods, who found mercy from the forest witch. But I no longer wish for the Baba Yaga’s fire. She didn’t just save, she destroyed.

A chilly breeze from Lake Michigan whispers across the land, clunking together the shoes clutched in the oak’s fingers. Bumps shiver up my arms—the trail of a navniki’s nail across my neck. I gather the blanket tight around me, wishing I could tuck the forest around me too. Why did I not bring the shotgun with me?

In the distance, quiet laughter dances with the rapid-fire crunch of someone…no, multiple someones running. I mold myself against the trunk. Grip utters a guttural warning in clicks and murmurs, his black feathers fanning. My blood warms in warning. It isn’t just kids.

I should shut my eyes. If I don’t see the wraith, he can’t be real. My lids refuse to close, fear betraying me again as I study the darkness.

He is coming. I can smell his burnt edges.

Red shadows flicker in the woods by the creek, answered by others, louder from the opposite direction toward town.

The shadow by the creek, my ghost, flickers and disappears just as the others coalesce into solid forms. Six of them. Much more dangerous and much more real than any imagined restless spirit. I shrink deeper into the shadows.

I hadn’t expected them.

Of course teenagers come to the farm occasionally. Armed with rolls of toilet paper, gruesome tales, and irreverent ignorance. Over the years, they’ve even added shoes to the branches as if their pathetic accusations might shame me into admitting I am a murderer.

They’ve never come together before—the ghost and the teens. Why did he lead them here? I rub the prickling hairs on my neck. I will simply wait them out as usual.

“Over here.” A quiet voice crackles against the darkness. How is he already under my safe haven?

“I dare you to touch it.” Another voice, deeper still than the first.

“The raven tree?” A girl’s voice giggles. A flash of lantern light reveals a girl, sixteen or seventeen, her skirt scandalously short even by 1965 standards. Her straight hair is captured in a high, swinging ponytail. Even though she is scared, she’s grinning.

“Of course the raven tree.” The deeper voice. “They say it’s haunted.” The boy steps into the ring of light cast by his lantern, the yellow and blue of his letterman’s jacket muted by the night. “My dad says Colwyn Cueny’s a raven witch who sucked out the souls of a hundred kids, then burned the repair shop down around them. He says the tree calls up the navniki demons to hunt the innocent.”

I bristle, white-knuckle ramming down the anger. He’s only repeating things I already know—I am the stuff of legends, the crazy witch at the edge of town with dead children walking the fields at night. But the tree? The guardian does not deserve this.

Frustration and anger burst from my tight hold, climbing my throat, acrid and burning, building with the fuel of my nightmares.

“Dad says she tortured them before she killed her brother-in-law and his kids, and that’s why the fog comes up so thick out here. It’s their ghosts trying to smoke out the devil witch like she did them. If the wind’s right, you can still smell the fire.”

A dog bays in the distance, calling for the dead. My ravens grumble against the sound. It isn’t time.

“My mom says she’s the Baba Yaga,” another girl says.

“That’s not true.” The girl’s giggle is less sure now.

The boy shrugs, elegant in his lies from the pit of hell. “Both her mom and her sister were crazy, even one of the runts is crazy. One day she just snapped and instead of killing herself—”

“Lies! Those are all lies!” I burst to my feet, arms spread wide, transforming into their Baba Yaga, the witch of the woods, come to life. Grip and his mate startle, shrieking metallic sounds, unearthly prophecies, from the harbingers of death, even as the oak draws from the underworld and groans under me. We will give them a real story to tell.

The girl screams, her voice climbing as she runs. Grip and Merlina take flight, black wings wide, covering the moon, diving wolf birds from the sky. Still the boys pick up stones and hurl them at us, laughing as I cower.

Die. Their voices join my ghost’s.

If they only knew how I wish for the same.

Die.

A stone strikes the branch, my feet twisting with the impact. Then I am falling.

Falling.

Falling.

The desperate fingers of my oak reach out, try to slow my descent, cracking with the effort until the ground reaches up and plucks me from the sky.

* * *

I wake to Sebastian clucking over me…again.

Though the crooked smile is the same as it was the last time I was in the hospital, this time he’s older, solidly gray, and more wrinkled.

But the lights above me are exactly as I remember—impossibly bright white as he restrains me…. Screams pierce my ears. My own terror echoes back to a decade ago. The past folding into the present. My entire body courses with pain, and I give in, slipping beneath.

Help me. Help me.

A woman in a white nurse’s hat pierces my arm with a needle, and all goes blessedly dark.

I am splintering against the witching hour, the darkness welcome.

***

Excerpt from Burning the Raven Tree by Janyre Tromp. Copyright 2026 by Janyre Tromp . Reproduced with permission from Janyre Tromp . All rights reserved.