Otter lowered her cords. They had no lifted ranger’s staff now, no lifted casting. Still the White Hand did not move. Behind her she felt Orca shift, and then came the sound of the drum. It rose under Kestrel’s story, wove through it, gave it steadiness and strength. Otter found her breath falling into the rhythm of the drumbeat.
As Kestrel told “How Red Fox Stole the Words,” the sunlight slipped away from the bowl of stones. The ferns beyond, under the trees, faded to black as shadows gathered. Soon they could not be seen at all: only the mass of them, the movement. Thickness and stir. Like Cricket up to his waist in the little dead.
Otter tried to stop shaking, tried to think. What were they going to do? They could not tell stories forever. But they could not run. The forest was nothing but shadows, and in those shadows might be anything. Even if they found nothing more than a tree branch to trip over, it would be too much. The Hand — it had been so fast, so fast.
The light was purple now, thickening. Twilight. In darkness — would they even be able to see the Hand, in darkness? The stuff of it was nothing more than darkness clotted up. If they could not see it … might it not creep closer, if they could not see it? Might it not slip around?
Might its hand not fall on her skin from the side? From behind? From anywhere?
Kestrel told “How Red Fox Stole the Words” as the Hand faded from view. By the time she’d given the trickster fox his last word it was — gone? Otter was sure it was not. Its nearness crawled like ants over her skin. Kestrel’s breath snagged at the end of the story, broke for an instant into — was it grief? — and silence.
Orca’s drum, which had flourished up under the ending, was silent for a beat too. And in that beat of silence …
Otter had almost no warning. She felt the yarns jerk on her fingers; she saw something pale hurtle toward her face. She yelled and brought her hands up, casting, cowering. And the Hand stopped. She could see it now, because it was so close. In easy reach. The darkness in front of her was knotting and working like a mouth.
“Keep talking,” gasped Otter. “Keep talking, keep talking —”
Kestrel said: “Once —” and “Now —” Otter heard her muffle a sob. Kestrel was crying. Swallowing it down, trying for control, but crying. She could get no words out. Behind them Orca’s drum hesitated, looking for the beat. Otter pushed her casting out and spread her hands wide. The web of yarn between them bulged inward, toward Otter’s face: once, twice, three times. The Hand. Right there. Pushing.
And then, suddenly, Orca found his beat. He struck the rim of the drum with a crack, and then the center, and suddenly he was playing something fast and four-fold, like the knots of a pounding heart. Lum dum, dum lum — fast. “Now,” Otter heard herself say, “in the days before the sky was finished, the Weaver worked at her loom. She was happy with her silver bracelet flashing in the blue cords, and she was lonely as one stone, and she worked singing….”
Orca’s drum shifted under her story. The pressure on Otter’s fingers eased. She told “How the Moon Began,” and as she did, the real moon — Sap-Running, waning half — rose up. Silvered light flooded over the round stones. The light made another moon of Orca’s mottled drum. The light caught on the still, human hands of the thing that stood listening. It was an arrow’s length away, less.
Near the end of her story, a thought smashed into Otter, sudden as a thundercrack. The reason for Kestrel’s sobbing: Cricket. If this worked; if a story could hold back the dead … If this worked, then Cricket could have been safe.
Should have been safe.
Should have been cherished. Honored.
Should have lived.
He should have lived.
Her voice skipped with the grief and waste of it — and in the skip, the White Hand tightened. Otter felt it tighten and shot forward in the story: “And then the Weaver’s bracelet fell, and went tumbling into the sky,” she said. So Otter created the moon while the White Hand listened. And Cricket stayed dead.
Otter would not have believed it was possible, with the Hand standing there, to sleep. But the strange boy, Orca, had been standing for three days, and as the moon swung up the sky, his drumming faltered. She remembered how she’d heard it from the water: coming in bursts and silences.
Kestrel was telling the story just then, and Orca and Otter were behind her, pressed shoulder to shoulder. Otter felt Orca lean against her, heavier and heavier, and his head nodded down then jerked up.
“Sit,” said Otter gently. “Stay behind me.”
“My …” he said. “My drum?”