“We must leave the water,” said Otter, realizing it as she said it, and fearing that she might have realized it too late. “We must go into the forest and make a fire. Now.”
What would come over those skin-colored needles — her heart lurched at the memory of Cricket fallen into the sludge of shadows. But what would come would come. Like Cricket, they did not have a choice.
But Kestrel mumbled: “… No … We’re almost … It opens …” She got up, took three staggering steps forward, and fell again. Otter clambered to her, splashing on her hands and feet through the water. The teeth and knives of the water.
But, quite suddenly, the stream was gone. It had become a marshy slope — and at the top of the slope was clear sunlight and sky. Otter heaved Kestrel up and together they went stumbling toward the light. They topped the rise. In front of them, the land slanted down. The sun lay on the west-facing slope like a warm hand.
They went a few more steps out of mad habit, and then Kestrel stumbled and knelt, and Otter knelt down with her and held on to her, shaking. The forest was a bow-shot behind them. The slope was part of the rim of a crater, a caldera. It was huge — two days’ walk across, maybe more — and nearly as round as a dish. No trees grew in it, and there was no snow: It was a bowl of sunlight and grass, and in the center was a great black lake — a lake four times bigger than the whole pinch of Westmost. Open water — no ice — steamed and stirred. In the center of the lake, like a stone in a cupped hand, was a rocky, wooded island. There was warmth coming from somewhere, and a smell Otter did not know. She huddled into Kestrel.
They slept then, on the western slope of their world, their strength used up and their hopes forgotten. They slept shivering all afternoon, as the kind sun dried them, and they woke only as the light began to swing down toward evening. It was a wind that woke them, picking up as the day changed, sending its fingers through the last damp spots of their coats. Otter got up and helped Kestrel up, both of them stiff and still tired, but alive in the evening light.
And that is how they came to Mad Spider’s place, to the ruin of Eyrie, the city of dreams.
The day was ending in a sunset of orange feathers. At the edge of the sky was a line of mountains. They were taller and younger than the mountains that were the home of the Shadowed People, and their rocky peaks were white with snow.
Kestrel and Otter paused to watch the distant mountains become a hem of flame. They were huge and beautiful. So, thought Otter, this is the greater world. “Does nothing come from there?” she asked. “From the West?”
Kestrel was leaning on her ranger’s staff, weary, unbalanced by her bound-up arm. “Nothing human. Deer. Elk. Mountain sheep. Bears, when the blueberries are ripe. But the streams run a different way from here. And there’s no river deep enough to make a road.”
A gust blew across Otter’s ears; it filled them with a sound like wings beating, and for a moment she could hear nothing else. The wind was cold, but the air, when still, was not. “Where is the warmth coming from?” said Otter. It was a strange place, the caldera. It seemed held in a different season, as if winter could not quite reach it.
“From the potter’s fires,” said Kestrel. “From under the earth.”
Otter knew that it was a potter who made the earth and a weaver who made the sky. But she’d never expected to feel the heat of the pot-firing coals, however faintly. Eyrie, place of stories. Eyrie, where things began.
“Come,” said Kestrel, setting off down the slope toward the lake. “We’re losing the light.” As evening came, the shadows would spread like spilled water, would cover the whole of the world. Otter put her hand on Kestrel’s arm, and the cords in the injured ranger’s sling edged toward her fingers. The knots were awake. Otter’s power was awake.
There might be anything in the shadows.
They went down the slope as quickly as they could.
Despite their hurry, it was fully dark by the time they reached the shore of the lake. The stars came out, thicker and thicker, and the band of small stars and fainter things that they called the Weaver’s Tears spilled itself across the sky.