“Tsha!” shouted Kestrel. “Leave him alone!”
The dead thing spun. Its focus snapped toward Kestrel, its stuff twisting like a snarl. It was coming at them before Otter was even sure what it was.
It came over the ground, fast, fast. It came flattened out like a badger. The substance of it was like the black powder mold that grew on corn. An arm shot out: elbow bent backward from human. But the hand. The hand was perfectly human, and bone white.
Otter had already had her cords in her hands, but she’d had nothing cast. You couldn’t run with something cast: It would be like running with your hands tied. Her breath tore up her throat and her body shook as she moved her fingers: turn, flip, under, loop, under — all in four heartbeats as the thing came at them. Its arm hooked forward and the dead thing rushed at them face-first, hook and side.
Otter was shouting with horror, wordlessly, hardly even knowing she was shouting. She could feel her power burning from her heart to her hands, her heartbeat trying to pound its way out of her ears. Turn and under — and she had her star. She thrust it out at the thing.
It reared up, towered over her, so close she braced herself to feel its breath — but it had no breath. It had nothing at all.
The thing was stopped against her cradle-star like a bear stopped on the end of a spear. But it was big. It kept flowing around the edges of her protection, trying to reach over it, around it. She saw the white hand slash toward her eyes.
Kestrel was pressed close behind her. The ranger blocked the blow with her staff and the thing bubbled away on that side, bulging upward. Kestrel reached past Otter and swatted at its edges: up, left, right, right, up — driving it back. Otter could see the cords breaking free from Kestrel’s staff as if fire were eating through them. The dead thing flowed backward a single step.
“To the light!” said the ranger.
They edged sideways. Otter did not dare look away from the dead thing. It bulked large against the sky, pouching and squeezing. One of the white hands was still reaching toward her.
Otter was shaking, begging herself not to stumble. The loose stones rolled underfoot. The stones clicked. The dead thing was silent.
Otter and Kestrel went crabwise, step by step. The thing, though it had no face, swung its blunt side as if watching them. Otter felt the sunlight touch her temple. Then it hit her eyes. Then they were full in sunlight, beside the cowering, shivering drummer.
The stranger tucked his face away from them, lifting his hand as if against a blow, curving his body protectively around the drum in his other hand. “Once —” he said. His fingers skittered against the drum, and he choked out a few words. His voice was ragged, hoarse, wild with fear. He swallowed and spoke again: “Once, when the world was new …”
Then he looked up. A young face, a stranger’s face. A boy their own age. Black eyes wide. Darkness whirling strangely across jaw and cheekbones.
Not Cricket.
No one they knew.
“Who —” said Kestrel.
Otter kept her cords lifted, her eyes fixed on the dead thing. It had not followed them, or at least not with its terrifying, snake-strike speed. It was leaning toward her, like slimy waterweed streaming in a current.
Three of the stretching strands seemed to thicken together, and the white hand appeared at the end of them. An arm. A finger. It was pointing at them.
No, not at them: at her. At Otter.
Binder, curled the whisper in her brain.
Her own heartbeat sounded like a drum in her ears. She was not sure the whisper was real.
“Tell it,” said the boy. “I have told it — everything. All my tales. Tell it. Tell it a story.”
“Tell it a story,” the boy rasped. “I can’t, I —” His voice cracked, then broke. He asked: “Do you have water?”
“At my hip,” said Kestrel. She had both her hands on her lifted staff, and she did not spare the stranger so much as a glance. “Take it.”
“Xashi,” he murmured, a word they didn’t know. The tone of it was gratitude — desperate, broken gratitude. Otter heard his fumbling to pull Kestrel’s waterskin free, and then she heard him swallow. It was very quiet in that bowl of stone. The White Hand made no sound at all — it was like a hole in sound. It was a hole in the world: a rotten softness hidden inside wood.
“Cu xashi,” said the boy. He shook, then coughed. His voice was rough as if he’d been caught in smoke. “Thank. I mean, thanks. Thanks to you. I have been spinning tales — I don’t know. Two days. This is the third, and almost over.”
“That …” began Otter, and did not know what else to say. No one could have stood against a White Hand for days — and least of all someone powerless, someone male. But there was no time to sort it out. The sun was slipping, the shadow lapping at their toes. The White Hand oozed forward, and Otter and Kestrel, moving together like dancers, each took a step back.
“We are losing this light,” said Kestrel.