“I’ll hold it.” She would never have asked a storyteller for his drum, but this storyteller held his in hands that were bone-thin and shaking. “Only to keep it safe,” she told him. “I can tell a story without it. If you fall over, you will break the tale. So sit.”
In the moonlight, she could the see whites rims of his widened, desperate eyes. At last he nodded, and passed over his drum. He sat. And Kestrel told a story. Then Otter told two. Then Kestrel. It was more than either one of them could have done alone, facing down the White Hand. Though, Otter thought, Orca did it. If he was to be believed. He’d done it, and it had broken him. Asleep — or passed out — he lay curled up on the stones like a dead coyote.
When it was her turn to rest, she sat beside him. Her legs were trembling, her throat was dry. She was not going to fall over, but it was no wisdom to stand until that point came close. So she sat, carefully near Kestrel, where she could be kicked awake when the ranger’s voice weakened. Orca lay at her right hand, as still as if his body had been abandoned.
The moon was high now, and Otter had light and time to notice that he was thin — more than thin, starve-haunted. What she’d first glimpsed as a whirl of darkness across his face was actually a pattern of ink set into the skin. Creatures swam on each of his jawbones. They were arch-backed like trout leaping, rising from the swirl of waves that crested along his jaw from chin to ear. Their backs strengthened his high cheekbones, their dorsal fins pointed toward the corner in his eyes, from which tears sprung. Tears: He had been crying. His face was dirty enough to show the tear streaks, even in the moonlight. His hair was knife-hacked, short as a child’s. But his coat was a very fine thing: silvered gray, mottled with black and pale, the fur short and soft.
Otter touched Orca’s coat shyly. It was sleek as a baby’s hair. An animal she didn’t know had given its pelt for this coat. An animal she didn’t know.
A White Hand, listening.
The world was bigger than she’d thought.
Kestrel was telling, at last, “The Goose Who Got Lost.” Otter suspected that the ranger did not know many more stories, or she would not tell that one. She shivered, watching the stillness of the pale hands floating so near she could have reached out for them. But still: It was a comfortable sound, a comfortable thing, falling asleep to the pulse and ebb of that story.
That long, silly story.
The horror of the White Hand, breathed in and out.
And Orca sleeping, his hands curled loosely on the river stones.
River stones.
A river …
It began to rain, softly. A cold drop that fell here, fell there. Clouds were coming up, thickening around them, covering the moon and stars. Darkness was taking their view of the Hand away. A drop here. A drop there.
Otter drowsed, tucking her chin against the rain, bending her body protectively over Orca’s drum. The story touched her here, touched her there. She drowsed, not knowing if she would ever wake.
It was near dawn when Kestrel nudged Otter awake with the side of her foot. The light was gray and murky. Otter had never been more than half asleep; now she struggled to come more than half awake. She squeezed her eyes closed and then stretched them wide. A story — she needed a story. She was not sure how many more she knew. Kestrel’s voice, coming from above, was growing hoarse and flat.
They could not keep doing this.
The light was coming up. The Hand was visible in it, even through the slow rain. It made the half-darkness clump the way blood clumps.
Kestrel’s voice was hoarse, her story coming to its final twist.
Otter got to her feet.
They had to think of something else.
But first, she had to think of a story.
All the stories in her mind were told in Cricket’s voice. Her coat was wet through and hung heavy on her. It was still raining.
Kestrel’s story was coming to its end. Otter, without thinking, struck the drum in her hand three times, as storytellers did in her country to close a tale, or a life. At her feet, Orca shifted in his uneasy sleep, stones rattling.
She struck the drum again, lum, dum to begin, and said: “A long time ago, before the moons were named, there was a binder named Birch. And she had a daughter, a binder named Silver. And she had a daughter, a binder named Hare. And she had a daughter, a binder named Spider, who later was Mad Spi — Oh!”
Because in front of her, the Hand did not stand as it had all night. It was not soft and listening. It was tightening itself, twisting itself like cords being twisted into rope.
Otter caught herself before she was silent more than a heartbeat. “And that is as far as the memory goes. Now, it was said of Mad Spider that she could tie a knot in living bone. Kestrel, take the drum; I want my cords. Mad Spider had that much power. What she bound stayed bound.”
Kestrel took the drum. Otter felt her move, heard her say: “Wake up, boy! Wake up!”