Kestrel leaned forward and put her hand on Cricket’s knee. Cricket flinched, flushed, turned. “We will keep your trust,” Kestrel said.
“For you …” He looked up into her eyes. There was a cupped, still moment — and then Cricket gathered Otter in too, with a touch of hand on hand. “For you — for the two of you — I would break any rule in the world.”
“Tell us — tell me,” said Otter. “Tell me the rest.”
Cricket turned his head in the direction of the ward. The grass blew in billows around them while the storyteller gathered his strength. “In the moonlight Little Spider saw it: the One with White Hands.” He swallowed, and the story broke. “In truth I need a drum for this, a rattle — some stories are too big for one voice. And mine isn’t much.” He turned the yucca pod. “I can only try.”
He began again, and this time his voice was faint, like someone barely brushing a drum. It was soft, but there was no doubting its power. Otter leaned forward to hear him above the whispering grass, the buzz of the cicadas. “In the moonlight Little Spider saw the white hands, and she thought: ‘It is only bone; my mother’s hands have gone to bone, and that is as it should be. That is the way of things.’ And then in the moonlight she saw the white hands move. Bound high above, they opened and closed. They begged and they beckoned.”
The summer world around Otter seemed to fall away. She could feel only the points of warmth on her knees, one against Kestrel’s knee, one against Cricket’s, and the shivery brush of the story over her whole body. Her hair was rising on end.
“Now, this was long ago, in the great pinch of Eyrie, before the moons were named. Always there have been the dead, always the shadows have been hungry.” Cricket touched his own heart, where the gast had scarred him. “The little dead are the crack in the pot, the tear in the curtain. They are here because the world is not perfect, and they mean nothing more than that. Little Spider had seen many little dead. She had knotted them away from her home; she had knotted them out of the world. But never before had one beckoned to her. One that once had a name, though the name was done with the world. One that had once been her mother.
“Never before had she seen One with White Hands. No one had seen a Hand — because that was the moment in which they entered the world.”
“What?” said Otter, even as Kestrel said: “Cricket!”
It was impossible. It was like hearing that yesterday there had been no such thing as the sun. They both stared at Cricket — who closed his eyes, a fine shiver running over his whole body. But he said nothing to their shock, and kept speaking.
“Little Spider called to it,” he said. “She sent her voice up into the trees. She said: ‘Mother.’ The thing had no voice — or at least, it did not answer. She saw the hand still and cup itself into an ear to listen to her. ‘Mother,’ said Little Spider, ‘come down from there. Why are you up a tree in the moonlight? Why are you in the living world?’
“Still the thing did not answer. Little Spider stood in the moonlight. She moved her toes through the snow and the bones. A long time she waited, and still nothing answered.
“She could have climbed into the tree, but she did not. She could have summoned her rangers, but she did not. She called up to the scaffold: ‘I will see you when the rope rots.’ And she went back to the pinch, and she began to cast a ward.
“It was the first ward, and it was a great ward. All that spring she worked, while the sap rose and the grass unfurled. And the people of Eyrie said: ‘Little Spider, what are you weaving?’
“And she said: ‘I am weaving a web to keep back the dead.’
“And they said: ‘But the dead are everywhere: They are both in and out.’
“And she said: ‘There is one who is out.’
“All that summer she worked, while the corn grew tall and the pumpkins fattened. All that fall she worked, while the deer grew plump and the geese grew restless. And by the time the snow came they called her Mad Spider, and they always would, but the ward was ready.
“And then the White Hand came.”
Cricket fell silent. Otter had to blink three times before she could see him — she had been caught in his story, and seeing only that. In front of her now, Cricket was trembling and sweating as if he was holding up a great weight, putting forth the whole effort of his body. “And that,” he said, in a voice that was more like his, and less like a whispering drum, “that is another story.”
Otter swallowed what felt like a mouthful of spider silk, dry and sticky. She saw Cricket’s throat work too. How Mad Spider, greatest of the binders, had learned to make a ward, had held back the White Hand when no one else knew what to do — that story, that story she had heard before. But this story was new. This story was strange and secret. It seemed to turn her upside down.