Otter lifted her head.
Fawn. Not Willow. Fawn.
Kestrel looked at Thistle, at Otter and Cricket, back at Thistle. She went.
Kestrel had choked on her words earlier, when Otter had asked for her mother. Words broke out of Otter now: “What happened?”
“It can wait,” said Thistle.
“It can’t,” said Otter. Thistle’s staff was lifted, ready in her hand. What kind of woman did not rest the butt of her staff on the ground in such a moment? Otter was unreasonably irritated by that. “Willow —”
“Master Thistle,” said Cricket, soft and strong, behind her.
“Rangers’ business, Lord Story,” said Thistle, making it sound like a very minor title. “Binders’ business.”
Cricket said: “It is her mother.”
“And it is my daughter! Do you think that means nothing to —” Thistle stopped. Her voice dropped into a frightening softness. “Should I say this to my granddaughter with a wild ward between us, and no one to hold her? Should I send dark news into darkness?”
“I’ll hold her,” said Cricket.
But Thistle stepped sideways and vanished.
Otter could not hear Thistle move. She might be three steps away. She might be gone. The doorway, brighter now behind the dark slashes of the ward, stood empty.
Silence.
“Dead,” Otter whispered. “She’s dead.”
Cricket held her from behind, and didn’t answer.
And Otter realized: “Dead is the best of the things she could be.”
She felt Cricket breathe deep, his chest pushing against her back. “Yes,” he said.
Fawn came.
Otter and Cricket watched her come across snow, the ice of the river shining behind her. She looked so small, as if the weight of the buffalo coat might crush her. She looked, more than she ever had, like a child barely into her sunflower years, a girl not half a moon-count old. But she walked like an old woman. Like someone ready to fall.
She came closer and closer, and stopped almost in reach. Otter’s view of her face was streaked like shattered ice by the dark strands of the ward.
Fawn lifted a hand and spread her fingers.
Otter lifted her hand too, as if they might meet palm to palm, like to like. But an arrow’s length of charged air stood between them, and neither of them touched the wild ward.
“My mother?” said Otter. She braced her whole body against whatever Fawn would say next. She could hardly breathe, waiting to hear.
But Fawn only said: “I am … not sure.”
“Is she dead?” said Otter.
“No.”
“Touched?”
Otter felt Cricket’s body tighten behind her.
“She went out to it,” said Fawn. And for a moment, nothing more.
“To the White Hand,” said Cricket the storyteller, coaxing. “She went out to the White Hand….”
“She walked out down the ice,” said Fawn. “I went behind her, and Master Thistle, and two of the rangers — Kestrel and another. The others were too …”
“They were frightened,” said Cricket. “And you were frightened.”
“It was — it was made of something like ants boiling, ants swarming out of a nest. But it had human hands. White Hands.”
“She went out to it,” said Cricket.
“She called to it,” said Fawn. “She called it Hare — and then Tamarack. And then Mother.”
Hare was from the story; Hare, mother of Mad Spider.
“She had a cradle-star lifted,” said Fawn. “You have never seen such a casting, Otter — the thing, the dead thing, it was pushed back, just by the lifting of the strings. The strings were a staff-length from it, but they made lines in the stuff of it. Lines like a spoon through porridge. It shrank back and I thought — we all thought —”
“You thought you were saved. Saved by the power of Willow, the greatest binder of the age.” Cricket, drawing out the words, making it a story. Cricket the storyteller, who knew the next word was but.
Because Cricket was telling it, Otter knew that too. She whispered: “What happened?”
Fawn laughed, then, shrill like a blackbird scolding, an un-funny, hysterical noise. “She slipped!” The little binder swallowed. “She just slipped, Otter. It was icy and she slipped. She fell down and it helped her get up. It took her hand.”
For one drumbeat, Otter was not horrified. It was so normal. So human. It helped her get up. It took her hand.
It took her hand.
The White Hand had touched her mother.
“Where is she now?” said Cricket.
“With the Lady Boneset, and a brace of rangers.” Fawn looked over her shoulder. “She may lose the arm.”
Otter felt Cricket take a jerking breath. The memory of his own pain, she thought. But what he said was: “Would that help?”
Otter felt a jolt of horror and hope: The poison of the White Hand, that went to the mind — did it start in the body? Could its spread be stopped with something as simple as the blow of an axe?
“It is not so, in the stories,” said Cricket. “But perhaps it has never been tried.”