“Grace,” sighed Cricket, shaking his head, “and power.”
There was a clot the size of a snowball right by Otter’s hand. She threw it. It splatted against Cricket’s heart and slid goopily down the already-mud-slicked deerskin of his shirt. “Tsha!” he said. “My hand was out to help you!”
“Grace and power, you say,” she said, rising to her knees among the clots.
Cricket’s eyes widened and he dodged backward, tripping and landing on his tailbone in the sticky mud. Otter was laughing even as she stood up, armed.
“Otter!” Kestrel’s voice was stretched between delight and caution. “Oh, Otter, don’t….”
Cricket was a pole’s length away, and the low spot gave him shelter. He stretched a hand behind him, seeking a clump of dirt.
Otter was laughing so hard it was bending her up like grief. She was hiccupping. Cricket fumbled, reaching — and in the place he was reaching toward, Otter saw something.
Something was resting in the nest of shadows under a cornstalk, something stirring as Cricket’s hand came near. Something gawk-stretched and ugly as a new-hatched bird with no feathers and skin over its eyes. Something that moved subtly, like the earth moving above something buried. Something struggling and starving.
Cricket reached backward, fumbling toward the shadow-cage, and the dark thing opened its dark mouth like a baby bird, like a snake. It opened so wide that if it had had a jaw, its jaw would have broken. Suddenly it was all mouth, and it was reaching —
There was one heartbeat in which Otter couldn’t move. She was still hiccupping, though her heart had nearly stopped with horror. Kestrel shouted: “Cricket!”
Cricket grinned up at Kestrel, groping unknowing toward the shadow — and Otter dove to save him.
Anyone in the pinch would have counted her as a child. But it never occurred to her that most people would have dived the other way.
“Ware!” shouted Kestrel.
Cricket’s smile froze, his head whipped toward the warning. He was halfway to his feet by the time Otter hit him. She’d meant to knock him sideways, but because he was twisting she hit him wrong. He fell full backward, into the corn.
Onto the dead thing.
It vanished under him for a moment, and in the next heartbeat it was coming out of the muddy trail over his breastbone, where Otter’s latest mudball had hit him. It had pushed up through him like a shoot breaking free of a seed.
“Ware!” shouted Kestrel, her voice cracking then ringing out: “Ware the dead!”
Otter, meanwhile, had thrown herself backward, out of range of the uncoiling darkness. She fell into the cold, sticky mud — and Cricket gave a single raw scream.
A shadow fell across Otter and her heart lurched — but it was Kestrel, yanking her to her feet.
Cricket was thrashing. He managed to roll over onto his stomach, but the dead thing only moved with him, rolling him as a wolf rolls a deer, breaking now out of his back. Kestrel’s fingers dug savagely into Otter’s arm.
Otter yanked free, pulling at the yarn that wound her wrists. In three drumbeats, she had the long loop hooked around her spread fingers and was making a pattern of crossed strings in the air.
Cricket pushed himself up on his hands for just a moment — and then fell, his face in the mud. By then, Kestrel had her bracelets free too. “Not the cradle,” said Otter, looking at the pattern Kestrel was casting. It was a cradle-star, the simplest of casts; done well, with intention and power, it could both detect and repel the dead. “Not the cradle — we have to pull it out.” If they repelled the thing, it might only seep back down into Cricket’s body.
The fallen boy was gulping in panic, swallowing earth.
“I can’t cast anything else,” said Kestrel.
Very few could.
There was an instant when they simply stared at each other. Kestrel shot a look at the ring of earthlodges. From the ring, and from the river and from the ward gates, there came shouting and movement. Ware the dead, Kestrel had called. It would bring help running. But the garden was big and they were on the far side of it, just a pine’s length from the ward itself. Even Thistle had long since left them. It would be a hundred heartbeats before they had help.
And Cricket did not have that many heartbeats left.
“Is there only one?” said Kestrel.
“I only saw one.”
That meant nothing. The dead were drawn together like raindrops into greater drops. There was never only one.