Kestrel and Otter looked at each other. The story Otter had begun, of the first White Hand — she was not supposed to know it. The gift of that story had cost Cricket his life. To be asked to hand it over, like a spare pair of mittens …
The drum was as dry as Orca could make it. He slipped it carefully into a padded bag at his hip. They watched him, silent, and he frowned at them, baffled. “Well, names then. Kestrel and …”
“Otter,” said Otter.
“You are angry, Kestrel?” he said. “Here, I’ll make you a trade — a gift. I am Orca, son of Three Oars, of the Salmon Running People. Tomteka-xi: a storyteller.”
Kestrel looked at him, tight and silent. Otter was afraid that when that silence broke it would lash out like a cut cord. To forestall the moment, she asked: “What’s an orca?”
“This.” Orca lifted a hand, sweeping fingertips from jaw to cheekbone, over the twisting tattoo of wave and eye and fin. “Like a fish, but bigger than a man, and a breather of air. Great hunters of the western sea.” He opened his arm toward the wall of black pine — toward the West.
“There are mountains to the west,” Otter said slowly.
“And beyond them, a sea.”
“Nothing!” Kestrel snapped. “Nothing comes from over the mountains.”
Orca put up an eyebrow. “Strange news. That would be strange news to the people of the abalone, the people of the cinnabar, to the Great Sea itself. Help me off this terrible island, and I will make you a map.”
“Why should we?” Kestrel had grown dangerously quiet. “Why should we help you?”
“Kestrel!” said Otter, shocked.
“I am human,” said Orca, with great dignity. “That thing is not.”
Kestrel struck out, hitting the storyteller in the chest with the heel of her hand, her arm stiff behind the blow. Orca cried out and fell over, sprawling against the strange little hillock, and Kestrel spun her staff after him, pressing the butt against his breastbone. “If I have to pin you to the ground and put a knife to your throat to get truth out of you, I will do it.”
Orca didn’t fight. He lay flat under the push of the staff, his long arms and legs splayed. He looked fragile as a daddy longlegs, though his face was fierce. “Kestrel …” Otter began.
The ranger shot her a flinty look. “Think, Otter! What manner of thing comes from over the mountains? Nothing helpless! Nothing harmless! No” — in fury, she fumbled for a word — “No storyteller!”
“Storytellers —” Orca snapped. And then he dropped his voice: It hissed and thrummed like his hand rubbing across a drum. “A storyteller can spin a web that will hold the dead listening until they dry up like stranded eels. A storyteller can change men’s minds. Tell their futures. Compel their help. Create their love. With a little work and time, Kestrel, this storyteller could drive you quite mad.”
His voice had become stronger and faster as he spoke, picking up like a drumbeat. Otter found herself breathing in time to it. Kestrel let her staff drift out of line: She stood holding it as if halfway into a dream.
Then Orca stopped and gave himself a little shake. “I can do those things,” he said plainly, the power gone from his voice. “My father could do them, and he taught me.” He dropped his gaze away from them, and for a moment he looked haunted and strange. Then he turned back. “I am not helpless, and I am not harmless,” he said. “But then, I did not claim to be.”
Otter swallowed. For a moment, there, he had held her — held the rhythm of her breath, her heartbeat, her thoughts themselves — held her as tightly as if his words were a binder’s cords. Power. A boy, and yet he had power.
Orca stood and swung up his pack. “It does not matter what you think of me. The rain will stop soon. We must go. I will help you, and you will help me, because we are human. We will leave this island, and then I will leave you, if you want that.”
Kestrel looked at him, fiery — and finally nodded. Just once. Sharp like an axe swinging.
“Do you know this place?” asked Orca. “Which way?”
“We don’t know it,” said Otter. They had not come far inland, so the nearest shore was probably the way they’d come, across the wash. Only a fool would go that way, back past the White Hand. She looked around. The meadow was not narrow — it was nearly as wide as the whole pinch of Westmost — but still, it was longer than it was wide, and it sloped strongly. There were black trees at the top of the slope, to the west, and birch and jumbled stone at the bottom, to the east.
“Water runs downhill,” said Kestrel, pointing eastward with her staff, toward the stones.
“Then so will we,” said Orca.
He straightened up and put his hand on the bag that hung on his hip. Otter recognized the meaning of the motion, though not the motion itself. He was checking his drum in the same way she checked her cords.
“We should fill our waterskins,” said Kestrel. “But it would mean going back to the wash.”
“Oh,” said Otter, channeling Cricket. “Let’s not.”
Orca laughed. “Uneh: Let’s not indeed. There will be other streams.”