“Then it is alone here,” said Orca. “That mad thing.”
“Mad …” said Otter. Because of course it was. The Hand that they’d faced down was the Hand that had been Mad Spider. It had been trapped by the perfect safety of the island, as the people of Eyrie had been trapped by the perfect safety of the ward.
The Hand that had been Mad Spider — death and time could not touch such a thing. Like the ward, it was still here.
It had been trapped here a long time. It had been alone.
It was mad, and it was hungry.
“We’re trapped,” said Otter.
She could feel the ward — the mad ward, the too-tight ward. It was as if the cords of it went into her, through her palms, through her heart. She could feel them sliding inside her, as if the ward were pulling them like a needle. An impossible thing.
This ward was an impossible thing. An inescapable thing.
“They were trapped,” said Otter. The skulls were looking at her and she was almost crying. “We are trapped.”
For a moment, there was only tight silence. Then Kestrel said: “The ward stands here. But it does not stand everywhere. We can still …” The ranger swallowed. “There must be a way out.”
“Why must?” said Orca.
For a moment, Kestrel found no answer. Then she said: “If the ward were whole, it would encircle the ruin. We would have seen the other side of it. We did not, so it is not whole. It stands only in hidden places. In —”
“Dead ends,” said Orca.
Kestrel’s voice oozed anger: “It’s no time for puns.”
“I cannot think of a better time for puns,” said Orca, mild as the Moon of Ease. Then Otter felt his hand wrap around her arm, not bruising this time but careful and steady. “Come, Kestrel. Your friend: This magic sickens her. I think we must help her pull away.”
So Kestrel took Otter’s other arm, and the three of them together backed away from Mad Spider’s ward, from the bones that were all that was left of the people of Eyrie.
They scrambled back over the boulder-step, back into the sunlit slot between the stones. It was a narrow way, and the wind made a noise in it. The howling — it seemed to Otter — was now both in front of them and behind. Trapped. She didn’t know if it was true, but it felt true. It felt true as a noose around the neck. She felt sure the White Hand would be standing at the opening of their little canyon. Impossibly across the wash, impossibly across the sunlight. It was impossible that it was real at all, so why should it not be. They came to the opening —
Right there.
But the mouth of the slot was empty.
It spit them out and they went scurrying sideways along the rocks. By unspoken agreement they were going back toward the side of the meadow where the wash ran. Water would know its way through those rocks. Water would cut a short path down to the shore.
Yet they knew the wash was all that separated them from the White Hand.
Otter could feel the Hand waiting. They were getting closer to it with every step.
At the bottom of the open space that had once been Eyrie, the wash divided the meadow from the forest as sharply as a knife wound. On the side where the three humans stood, there was grass and rock. Then the slash of the wash — it had cut itself a gully — and on the far side, a sudden rise of black pines, black ferns, shadows.
Standing in those shadows was the White Hand.
“Good,” said Orca, looking down into the stream bed, “the water still runs. Can we go alongside it? Or must we go in?”
“In,” said Kestrel, pointing with her staff at where the gully cut like a door tunnel into the wall of rock. She looked down into the wash and her nose wrinkled at the cold, tumbling water. “In, but perhaps not for long.”
“Through the rocks, and then …” said Orca.
Otter was not listening. She was looking at the White Hand. Kestrel and Orca had not seen it. But Otter could see nothing else.
The Hand was made of congealed shadow, and it blended into the dark space under the pine trees like a quail into fallen leaves. It was standing quite still. One of its hands was lifted and wrapped around a branch. Most of it could barely be seen, but those human fingers — that easy grip, that stillness — it looked like a mother leaning out of a door frame, watching her children leave.
Otter could see its fingernails.
She could hardly breathe.
Daughter, came the whisper into her mind. Here.
Otter reached sideways, fumbling, clumsy with fear as if with cold. She caught Kestrel’s sleeve. The ranger looked at her, falling carefully still, her eyebrows asking a question. But Otter could not even point. She looked back at the White Hand. Kestrel followed her eyes.
“Orca,” whispered Kestrel. She angled her staff a fraction, but her body was still as a rabbit’s when the wolves are passing.
Orca too followed the small tip of the staff, the girls’ locked gaze. “Oh,” he said.
Here, said the thing in Otter’s mind. Here.