When the sun began to sink and turn golden, they stopped in a meadow at the foot of a waterfall. Ahead of them, the Spearfish came tumbling over boulders. The spires of the finger rocks rose, bare granite, showing like black hands against the brightness of the western sky.
At the edge of the waterfall pool was a single, huge willow, its roots undercut and arching toward the water. Between two of the leg-thick roots Otter cast a small ward — not much bigger around than a pair of beds.
This time, Otter did not sleep easily. Past the scanty cords of her ward she could see the twilight shadows thickening, and tried to guess which of those shadows would clump and stir: which was not a shadow at all, but a little piece of the hunger.
“There will be fewer,” said Kestrel, rolling over on her side and tugging her coat around her. She watched Otter watching. “As we go away from Westmost, we should see less of the little dead.”
“They are not — everywhere?” It was a startling thought.
“They are everywhere. They are always. But they are drawn to the human, and to power, and to fear. There will be less.”
Otter looked again. The waterfall meadow must have flooded in the last spring: The little birches and dogwood scrabble were undercut, standing tiptoe on their own roots. Under those roots were balls of shadow. She could see them, curled up like rabbits asleep. Stirring. Breathing.
Like the thing in the corn, the thing that had first hurt Cricket, first exposed her own power.
Drawn to the human, or power, or fear …
Otter reached out from her bed and put her hand on the cord of the ward. Her fourth ward. Already it was not a wild thing, like the ward that had killed Fawn. It was more dog than wolf. The knots on either side slid toward her, until her hand was like a bead among smaller beads. She closed her eyes and eventually fell asleep.
The little dead were all around them. But Otter’s ward held them all night, and Kestrel’s staff undid them in the morning, and the girls walked on.
The third day was hard going.
Past the waterfall, the way cut into the hill. It was rocky, steep, and narrow. Snowy in the shadows. Icy in places. They needed their hands to grab onto the rough bark of digger pines and pull themselves along. They went up slowly, panting.
All the time the river grew smaller. They met its tributaries: little creeks and less than creeks, shooting out of slots in the rock to join the main stream, or spilling over the lip of a boulder in waterfalls small enough to catch in one hand.
Otter thought they were like squirrels going out to the end of a branch. Eventually the stream would grow too thin to protect them. It would be two strides across, it would be one. It would be the sort of stream that ran dry now and again, or iced over, and the dead would cross it in one slide. This was why there was nothing west of Westmost: The rivers gave out.
They stumbled on and the Spearfish grew smaller. The land kept sloping up and the stream, small as it now was, kept carving down, until they were in a canyon, shoulder high, rocky, overhung with dark pines. They had to walk in the water and it was cold enough to make their feet shoot with pain, cold enough to make a woman clumsy. The current was fast, and in places it had carved hollows. In the hollows, the water was deep, and it pushed at them. Otter fell once, but Kestrel — who had not been sleeping, whose eyes were hollow with grief — fell over and over again.
The third time Kestrel fell, she fell badly, catching herself on one hand, with a snap that pulled a cry from her.
“Let me look,” said Otter, as Kestrel tucked her hand against her belly and folded up. “Kestrel, let me look.”
Kestrel held out her hand, her teeth set.
There was little enough to see: a scrape that was bleeding sluggishly, the mottling that came with deep cold. Otter took the hand carefully, and tried to rotate Kestrel’s wrist.
The ranger cried out and pulled her hand away.
“Broken, do you think?” said Otter.
Kestrel answered through her teeth: “Does it matter?”
They were standing in cold water. They could not stop there.
Otter made a sling from some of her cords, tied Kestrel’s arm against her body. They went on.
Where she could, Otter walked beside her friend, and steadied her. But often the canyon was too narrow, and the way too steep: It was less a walk now than a scramble, a clamber over boulders and a creep along thin sloping margins of scree. So Kestrel fell and scraped her other hand to bleeding, fell and had her breath knocked out. And at last she fell into the river and did not get up again.
Otter knelt beside her, lifting her from the water. The canyon was now only a stride across; its wall brushed her shoulder. The cold of the water was of the kind called bitter, because it was a flavor, a poison. Otter was shivering convulsively. Kestrel was no longer shivering at all.