She found it eventually, and milk vetch too, the root of which is a chew for muscle pains, and soon Kestrel was moving — walking in that sunny, strange place.
Their days in the caldera were a sunflower girl of a time, an idyll between one thing and another. They taught each other. Before the Hunger Moon was dark, Kestrel could tie the simplest of binder’s knots, make a small, one-strand ward. Before the next moon opened, Otter could bait a fishhook, set a snare, gather rosehips without scratching her hands.
And the lake. They swam. Westmost’s drought pool was cold, even in midsummer. This lake was warm — nearly hot. The water had a metal tang, like blood, that made it strange to drink, but the minerals held them floating and the heat pulled the pain and fear from them. When they came out, their bare skins steamed and they were not cold.
Nor were they hungry. There were not many fish in the strange lake, and the rabbits Otter tried to snare seemed smarter than she was, but there were geese. The lake was thick with geese: brown-bodied, black-necked, fat as fall pumpkins. They had missed their migration and stayed the winter on the open water.
“Oh, for a bow,” said Kestrel one day, lounging and watching them. “A bow and a big roasting pit.”
Otter put down her digging stick: She’d been uprooting cattails, whose roots could be baked — a good food, though dull. “Could we snare them?”
“Maybe. I’ve never snared for a water beast.”
“Could we just catch them?”
Kestrel stood up. “Oh, let’s try.”
It wasn’t even hard.
The first few times Otter tried, it turned out badly, with splash and crash and honking. Kestrel laughed and laughed. “You do it, then, Lady Ranger,” Otter said, using a pinkie to scoop mud out of her ears. On the lake, the goose she’d been trying to catch reared up on beating wings, snaked out its black neck, and hissed at her. “Don’t argue with me,” Otter told it.
“Try it a ranger’s way,” said Kestrel. “Try it quietly.”
She crumbled the roast biscuit-root she’d been eating and tossed the crumbs toward the geese.
The hissing one stopped hissing. It looked at the crumbs.
Kestrel made a clucking, coaxing noise. Otter backed off. Kestrel threw more crumbs. More geese looked. They swam toward her. She threw crumbs. They waddled ashore. With a few more handfuls of biscuit-root, with a few easy steps, Kestrel was up to her waist in eddying, eating geese. She sorted through them with her eyes, picked a fat one, and fell sideways on it.
The little flock exploded into wings and indignation, but it was too late. Kestrel stood up with her arms full of struggling goose. A twist of the ranger’s capable hand — and a flinch from Otter — and it was over. It was, in fact, dinner.
Incredibly, it worked the next day too. And the next. They had, for the first time in their lives, more meat than they could eat.
“They are dumb as rocks,” said Otter, when it worked a fourth time.
Kestrel flicked her sore wrist — breaking a goose neck was near the limit of what she could do. “Well,” she said, “these are the ones that got lost.”
“Oh,” said Otter. “Oh, tell it!”
“‘The Geese that Got Lost Going South,’” said Kestrel.
It had been one of Cricket’s favorite stories.
“‘The Geese that Got Lost Going South,’” she said again.
And — finally, finally — Kestrel started to cry.
They cried until they couldn’t cry anymore. And then Otter told the story, and they laughed.
Cricket. They laughed over his memory, they cried over it. They were warm and fed, and nothing came at them in the darkness. They thought themselves as safe as they had ever been. They forgot, almost, what they had come to do: that they had come to find something, to find Eyrie, to find the living root of the stories about the dead. They did not notice that, apart from the holdfast itself, they had found nothing human at all. In that warm, sunlit place, the perfect place for humans to live — nothing human at all.
Then, one day, they swam out to the island.
They had not meant to go. Why would they? Where most of the caldera was a soft curve of soil, the island was rock: young and ragged. Where the meadow was moss and grasses, the island was trees. Its black pines shocked the eye. It was shadowed.