And again the White Hand advanced.
Otter spread her cords. Careful not to let a moment’s slack enter the pattern, she turned the cradle-star into the tree. A more powerful casting. Harder to hold. The Hand stopped. It was still a pole’s length away, but Otter felt its press against her cords. Her pattern was raising no answering pattern in it — no marks in its stuff. It was not falling back.
“I do not know …” she said, and swallowed. Her fingers were already cramping. “I do not know if I can hold it, without the sun.”
Three heartbeats of silence. Then Kestrel answered: “What, then?”
“You must …” the boy wheezed. “Tomteka, stories — tell it a story.”
From the corner of her eye, Otter saw Kestrel’s staff jerk, as if she’d turn and strike the stranger. “Stop talking about stories.”
“Cricket told a story to the White Hand,” said Otter. “And it listened.”
“Cricket died.”
But not of this, thought Otter. The Hand had listened.
But this White Hand … this one was different. The Hand that had once been Tamarack had helped Willow to her feet. That one was loss, was sadness. This one — this one was ravening and madness. Still: “Kestrel, it must work.” Otter pointed with her elbow at the strange boy. “It worked for him …”
“Orca,” he said in that smoke-dried voice — a voice that had been talking down death for three days. “My name: Orca.”
Another word neither of them knew.
“We don’t know what he did,” snapped Kestrel.
“What do you think, then?” said the boy, Orca. “That I gave it sweets and hoped?”
“It’s a White Hand,” said Kestrel. “It doesn’t listen.”
“I don’t know what it is,” said Orca. “It is every horror I ever heard of; it is something new. But I say: It listens.” His rasp broke then into a shattering, bloody cough. Otter thought of Cricket, coughing, drowning from the inside. Kestrel must have thought of Cricket too — she looked around at the boy.
The White Hand seeped forward, into the gap of her attention.
“Tsha!” Otter shouted it down, pulling her casting taut and putting all her power into it.
The thing stopped again.
The cords between Otter’s hands were as alive as lightning, shooting through her. She locked her arms, set her teeth, felt herself become rigid as the second day of death.
Orca coughed and coughed, folding up on himself, then sinking to his knees. He was still alert, though, still watching the Hand, still keeping his hand on his drum in the shrinking light. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t keep talking.”
“Kestrel,” said Otter, “it has to be you.” The shadow was at their feet again. Otter stepped backward. This time it was a moment before Kestrel stepped backward too. It would be their last step: They were out of light. “Kestrel,” said Otter, almost begging, “tell it ‘The Goose Who Got Lost’ — tell it anything.”
In answer, Kestrel took a deep, shuddering breath. Then two more, as Cricket had, dying. And she said: “One day, Red Fox was out hunting when along flew a raven as big as the moon. And the raven —”
And she stopped, startled, because the White Hand had — no, not backed off, but settled in. Its shape eased toward something human.
“Don’t stop,” gasped Orca, even as, in the silence, the Hand changed again, its forward edge sharpening like an axe. Kestrel started talking again, so quickly she tripped over the words: “And the — the raven swooped down and landed on one of the finger rocks, which are like mountains made of one stone. So big — so big was the raven that the stone looked like an egg.”
The Hand’s knife-edge softened again. It was listening. The rabid, liquid thing. Truly listening.
Kestrel lowered her staff, slowly, experimenting. “‘Well,’ said Red Fox. ‘This is something new.’”
“And Red Fox called up to the raven …”
Otter slid in close beside Kestrel as the ranger lowered her staff. Orca fell in behind them, and all at once Otter remembered the day that Tamarack had died, how she and Kestrel and Cricket had slid into an arrowhead of three, becoming one thing without a word between them.
Otter and Kestrel and Orca stood pressed close together. The White Hand stood still, as if looking at them.
Otter let a little slack into her casting, and shuddered. She’d been holding the cords too tightly: so tightly, giving them so much power out of her own body that she herself had no slack to breathe. She found herself gasping.
Kestrel shot her a glance, but kept talking: “‘What do the humans need to talk for?’ said the raven to Red Fox. ‘They are silly enough.’”