Otter, Kestrel, and Orca pelted across the field of stones. They did not dare look back. They could not even think about where to set their feet. They dashed like panicked deer, and stones rolled and clicked and shot backward from their feet. They should have fallen — especially Otter, whose arm muscles were locked, whose hands were still caught in a web of yarn. But they did not fall. Otter stumbled once, and Orca — he was taller than her, and for one dazzling instant she was surprised by that — grabbed her under the armpit and yanked her forward, bruisingly hard.
And then there was water.
They tumbled down the bank of the wash and staggered forward into the rush and toss of the running water. Orca fell in; Kestrel heaved him out; they all ran. Otter could feel the Hand close behind them. Power reached out of it. Loss and madness reached out of it. Wrongness radiated from it, like the cold that comes off a coat.
They hit the far bank of the wash and scrambled up and kept going, tearing through the ferns into the woods, until Otter gasped: “Stop, stop!” She staggered to a stop, folding forward, hands on her knees. “We have to —” she panted. “We have to see —”
They had to know if it had followed them. They had to know if they were safe, or if they needed more. There was no more, Otter thought. Let us not need more.
The three of them moved close together, their breath loud in one another’s ears, and looked back at the water rushing in its channel of stone. Beyond it was …
Nothing.
Of the Hand, there was no trace at all.
“It can’t cross that,” said Kestrel. Without confidence.
They looked again at the stream. Nothing. Nothing. A shivering, prickling nothing. But nothing.
“It could not,” said Kestrel. “Nothing dead could cross that.”
“What was it?” said Orca, even as Otter turned to him and asked: “Who are you?”
Kestrel made a sharp slash between them with her staff. “Not here.” She used the staff to point. “Look, there’s light.” The forest around them was dim. Rain fell with plinks and plops from the pine needles to the bowed backs of the ferns. But the forest did not get dimmer as it got deeper: The distance was bright. Otter had no forest craft, and did not know what this meant. But Orca said: “The trees end. Sunlight.”
Kestrel made the ranger’s sign Let’s go, which made Orca blink at her. Otter said it aloud: “Let’s go, then.” The Hand might not be the only dead thing, and the woods were thick with stirring ferns, stirring shadows. They ran.
The sun was just rising as Otter, Kestrel, and Orca stumbled out of ferns and forest, into the high and rocky meadow at the heart of the island. It was still raining — a cold, slow wintery rain; a miserable rain that had saved their lives — but the clouds were torn-edged and moving fast. The ragged sky was visible here and there. Orca collapsed against one of the hillocks that dotted the space. He sprawled there with his mouth open to catch the rain. Otter took a moment to arrange her bracelets and cords. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.
Kestrel simply stood. Otter knew why. Cricket was still dead — and he didn’t have to be.
Anger came off Kestrel the way wrongness had come off the White Hand. Even Otter was afraid to talk to her. Cricket could have — but that thought, Otter swallowed down. It stuck in her throat.
“Mother Cedar,” said Orca. His voice was not so ravaged as it had been, and they could hear now that he had an accent, flowing and strange. “Mother Cedar: What was that thing?”
“A White Hand,” said Otter.
Orca raked his fingers back through his hair — short and unbraided, it stood up into spikes, like a grouse’s crest. “Three days I stood there, telling it stories. It broke my voice and nearly my mind. Then you came and held it back with a bit of string. How did you do that?”
“I am a binder.”
“Binder?” he said. “What is a binder?”
How could he not know?
“What are you?” said Kestrel. “How did you keep back that Hand?”
Orca gave her a puzzled frown. “As I said. As you did. Cu tomtekan — I told it stories.” He had snatched up his drum to run, kept hold of it even as he dragged at Otter, crashed through the stream. Now he bent his head to it. Water was beaded on the face of the drum, and here and there droplets soaked in and made the skin mottled and dark. Orca wiped his hand dry on the inner surface of his coat and ran it in circles over the drumhead. It made a hish and hiss. “If it comes back, we will need more stories. Tell me your stories. That one you were beginning — tell me that.”