The prints went slower. They were no longer deeper at the toe. They were unevenly spaced. The wind picked up, swirling the snow across the river. If it covered the prints then how would they …
Otter put her mittens back on. Kestrel put hers on too, and slung her staff down her back. It was reckless to put away their defense, but their hands were freezing. They needed speed more than safety. They went faster — as much as they could — knowing the day was short, and that they had only the day. They nibbled balls of sunflower meal to keep their strength. They chewed juniper berries against the fear that dried their mouths.
And all the while, the wind scoured away the footprints they were following, and the ones they’d left behind.
Otter would never have found Cricket. But Kestrel was a ranger. A hunter, among other things. She could track a deer, spot a rabbit run, and tell the best place to set a snare. She could follow a wild sheep up a rock face.
She found the place where the footprints left the river. The river wore a skirt of snow-covered grass, hemmed with aspens. Under the trees, raspberry cane stuck up through the snow in half hoops. Kestrel spotted a place where the tops of the raspberry wore no snow. Where one of the hoops had been wrenched free of the ground and now wandered half-upright in the air, like one of Willow’s yarns.
“Here,” she said.
The sun was low by then: pink where it shone down the river, catching the breaking, jumbled sheets of ice with gold. Under the trees, it was blue and purple, thick as if coming through smoke. Slanting in here and there in yellow beams, solid-looking as the trunks of birch.
“He would have …” said Kestrel, and then: “He needs a fire.”
Otter peered past the smooth gray trunks of the aspen. Under the pine trees, little grew. Indeed, there was very little snow. The slopes were covered in pine needles, smooth where the ground was smooth, drifted next to boulders: long fallen needles the color of a dead woman’s skin. There was nothing in those shadowy woods: nothing at all. Nothing looked at her. She could feel its eyes.
To go into the woods — Cricket must have had some urgent need. For instance, fire. He could only have been driven in by the coming darkness. The same darkness in which they now stood. “It cannot have been long ago,” she said.
“Quickly,” said Kestrel, pulling her staff into her hands. “Let’s go.”
It was louder under the trees: The branches rustled and murmured above as if talking to one another. Otter had lived all her life in sight of this forest, but she had not stood in it before, not in a trackless place, not alone, not like this. The thick light shifted and coiled as the high branches moved. The trees spoke. And the dead: Otter’s bracelets stirred and twisted.
Otter pulled the yarns free and cast a cradle-star between her fingers: a knot to detect and repel. The loops burrowed like leeches toward the soft places between her fingers. The crossed strings pulsed and tugged. But there was no direction to that tug. It was as if something was … everywhere.
She lifted the cradle-star as if it were a torch.
There was nothing near enough to see.
But the pulsing strings, her prickling skin, told her differently. If the cradle had been a torch, it would have cast a circle of light. And right outside that circle, the cords told her, there would be something watching.
Kestrel had stooped. There were footprints again: places where the needles had slipped under a foot, making little curls of bare earth. Kestrel’s eyes were on the ground, but her staff was lifted. They crept forward. The needles gave way under their feet too. The darkness rose up out of the earth and began to swallow them.
But before it did, before it quite did, they found him.
First it was a stick, and then two. And then, as the track cut upward toward a huge nest of boulders, each twice a woman’s height, Otter found a bundle of fallen sticks. Fallen pine branches, all aligned, but sliding over one another. Firewood. Dropped firewood. She met Kestrel’s eyes. Raised her cradle-star, so that the ranger could see how the strings were pulsing.
Kestrel ran her hand down the knots of her staff, making the little silver charms wink in the last of the light. She nodded. They edged forward.
The trees surged and roared in a gust of wind, and then suddenly dropped into utter quiet.
And in that quiet, something drifted to them from behind the gray stones. A voice. Warm and weak, beloved and afraid. “Now,” it was saying, “even Red Fox had to sleep sometime.”
Kestrel hefted her staff and sprang around the flank of the standing stone, and Otter lifted her casting and charged after.
Cricket was sitting on the slope above them, his back to a boulder, his head in a streak of twilight, his legs so deep in shadow they could hardly be seen.