The fire needed her. Otter leaned in and blew softly on the orange spark, feeding it splinters of bark, one by one.
“What if —” said Kestrel. And then suddenly, her voice cracked. “No, he’s not coming back. He died and he’s gone.” Otter, tending the fire, could not even touch Kestrel as her shoulders shook and her grief sounds fell into the leather.
Otter fed the infant fire twigs, then small branches. And she finally found something to say: “He was Cricket.”
Kestrel looked up. There was silence for a long moment. Otter could see her eyes shining in the darkness — turning to the stars. Otter looked up too, picking out the band of light the Shadowed People called Weaver’s Tears, and in them, the seven faint stars called the Cricket.
“There it is,” she said.
“Little stars,” Kestrel said, “for a storyteller. They are not much honored.”
“I would name the moon after him,” said Otter.
“The moon and the sun,” said Kestrel.
“The moon and the sun,” said Otter.
And then Kestrel made dinner.
The little holdfast boasted a cooking pot, small sacks of sage and serviceberry for flavor, dried milkweed blossom for thickening stews, forage foods — biscuit-root, wild onion, dried mushrooms — and even dried meat in a stone-lined cache hole.
Otter and Kestrel had only been three days walking, struggling to cook with a walker’s pot — a tough pouch made from the heart-sac of a buffalo. Still, they had been long days, numb days. The two of them had, in their different ways, lost everything. The stew Kestrel made, with the last of their cornmeal, seemed like a feast, and after the feast, a kindly tiredness fell on them. They sat by the fire, talking little. Otter was sleepy, but the name of the place hung unseen all around them. Eyrie: Mad Spider’s place. Eyrie: where Mad Spider had bound her mother too tightly.
They had seen nothing of the city. Nothing human. But even so, Mad Spider’s story hung close. Her story, and the what if of not binding Cricket.
And somewhere in the darkness, the White Hand.
The one who had been Tamarack, beloved grandmother, sneaker of sweets.
Kestrel and Otter lay close together in the dry ferns. Warm and fed, exhausted and terrified, they slept.
That night, Otter dreamed of a cord tied around a birch tree — a ward fragment, but not one yearly renewed: It was ancient. The tree had grown around it. The woody flesh bulged. The crackling white bark closed over it like dead lips. Then suddenly, she saw that some of the birch branches were bones.
Otter rolled over, the fronds around her crackling. And she dreamed that bound tree was not a birch, but a willow. And then she saw that it was not a tree, but her mother’s wrist — the swollen skin lipping over the cord. The hand — the hand she had tied shut — was uncoiling like a fern. Even in the dream she reeled back, and thought: Her hand is only falling slack. Then she saw the gray fingers fist and flex.
Otter slept badly and woke stiff. Kestrel slept like the dead, and woke pinned under her stiffness as if under a rockfall. She could hardly rise. Her eyes were hollow and her wrist was swollen.
But here, at last, the world was kind to them. As Kestrel lay resting, the day dawned bright and grew warm, then warmer. In Westmost, it would have been the ragged end of winter, the end of the Hunger Moon, coming toward the Moon of Sap-Running. The sun might have been warm once in a while, but the wind would have been raw. In the high caldera, by the steaming lake, the wind was as playful as a butterfly. It plucked at their hair.
And then, day after day, that weather held. It thawed their fear; it softened their hearts.
Their third day in the holdfast, Kestrel sat on a stone in the mild sun and tried to help Otter find the dried feather-flowers of prairie smoke, whose root could be crushed and used as a liniment for pain.
“This?” called Otter.
“That’s a thistle,” said Kestrel.
Otter brought a pod of something over in one hand to show the ranger. “This?”
“That’s milkweed. Binder’s daughter, you’ve led a sheltered life if you don’t know milkweed.”
“Oh, but I do,” said Otter, and brought the other hand from behind her back, releasing milkweed seeds in a puff into Kestrel’s face.
“Tsha! Otter!” The ranger batted the downy, floating, clinging things away.
“Make wishes,” said Otter. “Make a skyful of wishes.”
“But there is only one thing I want.” Dressed in Cricket’s yellow shirt, Kestrel looked little as Fawn, little as a child.
Otter stiffened. “I’m sorry.”
“Ch’hhh. You didn’t remind me, because I hadn’t forgotten. I’ll just wish for him a skyful of times.”
Otter was silent a moment, putting her hand on Kestrel’s shoulder.
“Prairie-smoke root?” Kestrel prompted.
Otter turned, searched. After a while, called: “This?”
“There are squirrels who are better at this than you.”