If they had made a dead thing, a horror thing, of beloved Cricket, then they had to unmake it. They did not know how to unmake it. But they had to try.
Otter tried to think like Kestrel, since Kestrel clearly could not think. She tried to be calm, practical. So: They could not confront any kind of dead thing, naked. Nor in wet clothes, not during the last turn of winter. “Those diving stones,” she said. “They make a path.” As she said it, she realized it was true. And what if they were a path: not a thrust of the land, but something human-built? Or if not human, at least built. An island, surrounded by stirring water, surrounded by sunshine. It should be the safest place in the world. And yet humans had lived there — and they had left.
Otter’s breath was coming fast and faster. But she managed: “Give me your bracelets. Any cord you have. Go and fetch our gear.” It should be possible to carry their clothes and coats, her cords and Kestrel’s staff, in a bundle above the head, above the water, dry. Otter could have done it, but she wanted to stay between Kestrel and the voice that might, at any moment, whisper her name.
Okishae. That was a word that would carry: a word you could blow through a flute made of bone.
Kestrel’s eyes were round and wet. But she nodded. She handed over her bracelets silently. And she went.
Otter wrapped the extra cord up her arms. If something came at her, out of the forest, the cord would give her a chance: She might be able to cast a loop around it. Sorrow’s knot: Pull it closed. Meanwhile, she cast her own bracelets into the cradle-star. She waded out a little way into the water, for warmth, for safety, to be back in the place where she’d just felt herself strong. Then she turned to watch the dark, ragged forest. It loomed over her. And faintly, faintly, came the drum.
The water lapped ceaselessly around Otter’s waist, and her shadow shifted slowly across the dark-bright surface as she waited for Kestrel to come back. Sometimes she could hear the drum, and sometimes she could not. The voice did not return. Her shoulders began to ache from holding up her cradle-star against the blank face of the island. She let the strings lower. Nothing happened, and nothing happened.
The sun shifted one fist across the sky.
And Kestrel came back.
Together, silently, they pulled on leggings, shrugged into coats, laced up boots.
Together, silently, Kestrel with her staff and Otter with her strings, they went toward the wood.
The island shore rose sharply at first, not high but steep: almost a little cliff. The stones had strange colors, rimed by the mineral breath of the lake. They had a strange smell. They had strange shapes.
Otter and Kestrel found a huge rock that had feathered out from the cliff face and scrambled up the tight, scree-choked gap behind it. They went on all fours through the clicky, stony space. It was not a long climb — Kestrel with her damaged wrist could not have managed a long climb — but it was like climbing into another world.
They reached the top. The ground leveled and the forest began. Boulders of obsidian lay like gleaming eggs under the dark trees. Ferns grew everywhere, green as summer, though away from the lake it was colder. They stopped in that green space, breathing fog, and listened.
When Otter had been waiting in the water, the drum had seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Now it was — that way. She glanced at Kestrel, who pointed in the same direction with her staff, silently.
The voice came back to them, wavering.
Otter made the ranger’s sign: Let’s go.
Hurry, Kestrel signed back. And they ran.
Otter thought that Kestrel ran like a wolf — like something fearless and forest-born. Almost silent through the thick fern. Leaping from stone to ground to stone, leaping over branches, quick as dreaming. Otter was no forest thing. The ferns tore at her leggings. Hidden branches tripped her. The drum and the voice rose like dread to block her throat.
Otter did not want to find out what they had made of Cricket, if it was Cricket. But she thought if she were not with Kestrel then the ranger might simply throw herself into dead arms. No, thought Otter. They had to find him. But let it not be him. Let it not be.
Closer. The drum grew louder, the voice clearer. They could have made out words in it, if they had not been running, if they had stopped to listen.
And then —
Otter almost crashed into Kestrel as the ranger came to a stop.
They were on the edge of a small open space, like a dry pool made of stones. It would have been full of sunlight at midday, but it was not big enough to keep such sunlight long. There was only a crescent rim of light now. The light lay a quarter turn around the meadow from them, perhaps a tree’s height away.
In that fragile, shrinking light stood — someone. A living someone, it seemed to be. Huddled up in a coat that was like folds of shadow, with a drum in one hand, a human woman — no. A boy, a man.
And just in front of him, making the edge of the shadow bulge like a hand lifting wet leather, was —