Not just sitting, Otter thought: He looked as if he’d been thrown there, like a jointed doll. His head was leaning back, his braids splayed over the stone, glossy hair catching on the rough places.
He heaved a huge breath when he saw them, and his voice jerked. “Hello,” he said, and swallowed once, twice, three times, “I was just telling it a story.”
The strings on Otter’s fingers jerked sideways. She whipped around. Standing beside her was the White Hand.
Otter raised her cradle against the White Hand. It flowed backward — not far. Mostly as if it wanted a better look at her. A handful of strings suddenly seemed like a flimsy thing against the rising darkness, and the strongest of the dead.
“It hasn’t touched me,” said Cricket, uneven — almost laughing with fear. He did not get up. “I don’t want it — can you stop it? I don’t want it to touch me.”
Otter took a step backward, to get away from the Hand, to be closer to him — and Cricket said: “Stop.” A gulp of a word. “Stop, Otter.”
She spread the cradle taut, and risked a look backward.
Cricket — the stuff around his legs wasn’t shadow. It was slip.
They had gathered around him like leaves, drifting into the corner where he lay. He was up to his waist in them. He had one hand in them. The other was held up, straight out from the shoulder, the elbow bent, the arm shaking. He turned his head against the stone to look at Otter, but didn’t lift it. “Mind your step,” he said, and tried to smile.
The stuff around him eddied sluggishly, like boiling soup.
Kestrel was there, using her staff — prying at the edges of the stuff, pulling off fists and clots of shadow, unmaking each. But Otter could do nothing. She couldn’t even watch, not with the Hand right there. She felt the yarns shift against her fingers, and she turned back around.
The White Hand. She could hardly see it in the purpling light. It did not hold its shape, but drifted and billowed, swarmed and bulged. Only its hands were clear: white as peeled roots, five-fingered human but twig skinny, bone skinny. You could have taken them for a birch twig, if you were just glancing — but then your hair would rise in warning and you would turn slowly back and look again.
It was just — what? Watching. Waiting. “Tamarack?” whispered Otter.
It jerked at the name. Stretched taller, thinner. Its top stretched out and then bent down toward her like a wasp flexing to sting. Otter shouted with pure fear and swung the cradle-star upward.
The sting stopped. It hovered over her head, and horror seemed to drip off it like venom.
And Cricket, behind her, said, in a strange, wet voice: “Now, even Red Fox had to sleep sometime.” The flexed shape in the darkness seemed to soften. “But he knew that as soon as he closed his eyes, Old Mother Wolf would drop from the tree like a bolt of lightning. Snap! So much for clever foxes!”
An old tale, a children’s tale, a trickster’s tale. But the White Hand softened into itself as if listening.
“Otter,” whispered Kestrel, “can you cast us a ward?”
Again, Otter glanced around. The slip were gone now. Cricket was still leaning into the stone, his hand that had been lifted was curled into a fist in his lap; the other fell at his side, limp as if frost-blasted. He did not get up. His eyes were closed. But he was still telling the story.
Otter looked at the White Hand.
It was still listening. Otter lowered her cradle-star slowly. The Hand did not move.
“I’ll get the firewood,” Kestrel whispered.
The place where Cricket had fallen was sheltered by two trees. A digger pine grew from a crag on top of the boulder to his side. Those three points could hold up a ward — no longer than a lodge, and much narrower, but enough, perhaps. Especially if they had light: a fire. Enough.
So as Kestrel drew out her tinder bundle and coaxed up a fire, and Cricket told a trickster’s tale in a voice that kept wandering off into weakness, Otter cast her second ward. She knew more this time: to fix each section with a knot that Fawn had called the navel and Willow had called the child. To twist the cords in twos to make the knot called mother. To bind each cord to the tree with a constricting noose, the too-known knot that made her heart shake: sorrow’s knot. It looked thin, the ward: a handful of cords cast up against the huge and muttering darkness. But she could feel the wind making it sing. The song hummed in her blood and she knew the ward would hold.
“And if she hasn’t come down,” said Cricket, “Old Mother Wolf is up there still. And that is why …” He sighed, then pulled hard for air, pulling his voice back up from the strange place it was sinking to. “That is … That is why the trees will sometimes howl.”
Overhead, the trees howled.
Cricket slumped sideways.