“Okishae,” said Kestrel, and started to weep. “Half my heart, my other half.”
The sun — in that season rolling close to the southern rim of the world — was as high as it would get. The light under the pine trees was pollen thick, full of slant and dapple. The wind had fallen away. They could hear the little creaks of the individual trees, the wings of the chickadees that darted around them, watching them with cocks of their bright-dark heads. They could hear a woodpecker nearby, its resonating thk-thk-thk.
Cricket, though, was silent.
Otter got up. By herself she pulled the fallen pine branches she’d gathered. The bare ones she used to build up the fire, to keep Cricket company in his first time alone. The ones still soft with green needles she piled over him. They would keep him warm. Keep him safe, for a little while, from those things she was supposed to call: from the ravens, from the wind.
Midday, the day after the night when Cricket had died, Otter and Kestrel paused side by side by the river. Behind them, the raspberry canes, which had been pulled loose by a terrified boy, were waving aimlessly in the winter breeze. Otter looked back toward Westmost. Their tracks were gone now: The snow curled and eddied as if no one had ever come this way at all.
“I am going to —” said Otter. “I am going to kill Thistle. I am going to push her into the ward. I am going to put an arrow through her open mouth.”
Kestrel paused. Swiped tears away with the back of her mittens, and said: “Hmmmm. It seems a waste to do both.”
It was exactly what Cricket would have said, and just Cricket’s manner too: the soft thoughtfulness that was itself the joke. The recognition brought a scorching ache to Otter’s throat.
She turned and saw Kestrel with her face uptilted into the light — looking west. “I am not going back,” said the ranger.
“What?” said Otter.
Kestrel was looking upstream. Upstream, where the rivers ran smaller, and then ran out. There was no path to safety, and no safety to reach. Upstream, not far, was the backbone of the continent, which was impossible for the living to cross.
But Kestrel kept looking: “I am not going back.”
“Kestrel … there’s nothing —”
“Mad Spider’s place,” said Kestrel. “Eyrie. The place where Cricket was going … It is two days west.”
Otter’s heart spun. She felt caught in a hoop of stories and histories and memories — and the hoop was turning. Mad Spider’s place. Was it really a place that could be walked to? It seemed to her that such a place should be past the edge of the world.
She shook her head, bewildered. “How do you know?”
“The rangers go there sometimes,” said Kestrel. “There’s a holdfast — a lodge and a ward in one thing, that is: a stick frame bound in yarn.” She pointed upstream. The finger rocks rose nearby — slants of bare granite, like the fingers of the potter who made the earth, reaching up to the weaver who made the sky. Beyond the finger rocks there rose the black bulk of the first of the true mountains. “Up there,” Kestrel said. “Two days, or perhaps three: Our start is late. And the snow.”
She turned then, and grasped Otter by both her upper arms. The girls leaned their foreheads together, their breath warm on each other’s faces, steaming in the cold day. “Oh, Otter,” Kestrel whispered.
Otter squeezed Kestrel’s strong arms. “I have hold of you, Kestrel.” Too late she realized it was what Kestrel had said to Cricket. Still, it was what needed saying. “I have hold of you.”
“Don’t kill Thistle. It would hurt your heart.”
“As if I could kill her.” Grandmother she might be, but Thistle was strong as flint, and fast as a striking hawk. And the rangers would protect her. Otter remembered how Cress had spun Kestrel around, had her helpless in a heartbeat, with a twist of the arm.
“From a distance, maybe,” said Kestrel. “With an arrow.”
“I cannot shoot,” said Otter. “And anyway, I’m going with you.”
Kestrel pulled away, still clinging to Otter’s arms but staring now. “Otter.”
“Are you going there to die?” said Otter.
Kestrel did not answer. Her face was tight. Otter could hear the water running under the ice, and the ice creaking and crackling.
“Are you going up there to die?” said Otter. “As if Cricket —”
“Do not tell me what he wants!” Kestrel let go of Otter’s arms and took a deep breath — a shuddering breath, like Cricket had taken, dying. She took three of them, and paused. Three more.
The roof of Otter’s mouth ached: fear, grief, the work of not shedding tears. She had to save Kestrel — she had not saved Fawn, she had not saved Willow, she had not saved Cricket, but she was going to save Kestrel. She would save Kestrel, before she cried again.