The three of them rushed down the meadow, loping like wolves, like humans who must hurry but do not know how far. The rain fell on them, and stopped. Fell on them, and stopped. By the time they’d reached the rocks and birches at the meadow’s foot, the sun was breaking free.
The rocks were big, bigger than earthlodges, some nearly as big as trees. There were gaps between them. Some of the gaps were wide as buffalo runs, grassy and easy. Some of them were narrower, twisting with stone on either side, scree and saxifrage underfoot. Some of them held pockets of birch wood. Some of them ended in walls of stone.
It was a maze.
Otter, Kestrel, and Orca went more slowly now, trying to pick their way. They tried to keep heading downhill. The island, seen from the shore, had looked like one hump. If that was so, then heading downhill would lead them to the shore. If it was not so …
They had no way to know.
Something came behind them that was howling and hollow and wrong. It was not wind.
They went down a slot between two stones and found their way blocked. They had to backtrack. Sun hit their eyes as they turned west, back toward Eyrie. They turned back to the east at the next gap they found.
It was one of the wide gaps, a little river of grass between the gray walls of the stones. They hurried down it, the howling at their backs. The rain had been gone for some time now.
“If it dead-ends again, we may have to climb,” said Orca.
Otter glanced at Kestrel. The last time they had climbed, up the mountain and into the caldera, the ranger had fallen hard enough to make something inside her arm snap. It was less than a moon since then.
“My wrist is weak,” said Kestrel to Orca, reluctantly. “I doubt I can.”
He looked at her in turn, and they met each other’s eyes sidelong, both hurrying, side by side. “Then we won’t,” Orca said.
The river of grass went tumbling over some boulders in front of them. They scrambled down, went around a sharp corner, and there —
Otter’s hair rose and her skin tightened.
“What is that?” said Orca.
“Don’t touch it!” Kestrel hissed.
A pole’s length in front of them stood a ward.
Otter had dreamed it, and there it stood. An ancient ward.
It forced itself into her eyes as if she were still dreaming. There was a cord tied around a birch tree — the woody fleshy bulging around the cord. The tree was dead. Long dead, by the look of it. But ancient beyond the life of trees, the ward still stood.
There was another cord, and another. The trees that held them had grown around them and then died and then kept standing, in that sheltered place.
“How can this be here?” said Kestrel. “The gardens are gone, the wind poles, the clay palm — the lodges themselves are nearly gone. How can this be here?”
But Otter understood it. She found herself saying, almost with Cricket’s voice: “Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly.”
Too tightly. The power of that ward. She could feel it, as surely as Fawn once had. As surely as if it were wrapped around her throat. The first ward. Mad Spider’s ward.
In other places, it must have blown down, washed away. Wind could touch it. Rain could touch it. But time alone? Death? No, this ward was too tight for that. It was standing.
“This is why there are no little dead,” said Orca. “Like a smudge, a mosquito smudge. This thing keeps them back.”
Kestrel nodded, reflecting. “I have seen neither slip nor gast on this island — few enough on the shore.”
Orca was flexing and unflexing his fingers, as if trying to limber them against cold. “This is … wrong. This is dangerous.”
Otter felt the ward reaching, wrapping itself around her. Pulling her in. And then she saw it. She took one step forward, and then — because it was the only way to stop herself — sat down. She went into the grass as if someone had struck her.
“Otter!” Kestrel lunged to catch her, too late. Otter sat there, panting, with Kestrel crouched beside her. Orca shifted to guard their backs.
“Look.” The word clicked out of Otter; she pointed to the ward. “Look.”
The ward was full of bones.
They were human.
They were nearly hidden by the grass and bramble at the ward’s base, by the shadows that seemed to climb out of the earth and wind up the ward like creeping vines. But they were, once seen, unmistakably human. Femurs. Ribs. The empty eyes of skulls. They were white with age, yellow with age. They should not have been there at all — time should have taken them.
“May the wind take them.” Words poured themselves out of Otter before she could stop herself. “May the rain take them.” She started to shake. “They ran,” she said, understanding — shaking and sick with understanding. “When the White Hand clawed its way out of Mad Spider’s place — they ran. But it was inside. It was inside the ward. They ran and they were trapped. They ran and the ward caught them.”
The people of Eryie had been caught in their own protection. Right here it had happened. Right here was the true end of Eyrie.