Little Spider, before she was Mad.
Otter found herself looking into Orca’s eyes. She had not noticed before — it had been hidden by the more obvious strangeness of his tattoos — but his eyes were a different shape than any eyes she had ever seen before. They were wide and tight with fear, but there was something deep in them — something for her. A softness. A smile.
She pulled the cord free from his pinkie, and turned.
The spider leg that was the White Hand unfolded. The joints straightened until it was standing narrow as a lodgepole, tall as the cliff. Its white, perfect hands were at eye level, a spear’s length away. The edge that faced Otter was sharp, like a flint knife. It did not have eyes, but she could feel the tightness of its watching as Kestrel took one end of the cord from her hand. It leaned toward them, over them. Otter remembered the other Hand, in the place where Cricket had died. It had reared up like a scorpion’s sting. Orca did not step back; he struck the drum faster, deeper.
The drum seemed to pull words out of Otter. “Little Spider,” she said, “what are you weaving?”
Kestrel, the cord end in one hand, edged forward — and like a snake the White Hand snapped around, turning its blade edge toward her. Kestrel froze. The drum faltered.
Orca struck the drum harder: a hard, sure sound, and caught again the heartbeat rhythm, faster than before. It swung up through Otter. A story. A story.
Orca’s drum. The pattern of his voice, that was like Cricket’s voice. All at once the words came back to her, the secret story that Cricket had told her. The story Cricket had died to tell her.
She told it.
“The first Hand was made in Eyrie, in the days before the moons were named,” said Otter, and her cadence was pure Cricket. “Always there have been the dead, and always the shadows have been hungry, but this was new. Little Spider knew the little dead. She had knotted them away from her home; she had knotted them out of the world. But never before had one beckoned to her. Never before had she seen One with White Hands. One that once had a name, though the name was done with the world. One that had once been her mother.”
The impossibly tall, impossibly thin form of the White Hand seemed to shrink, gather itself into something smaller and rounder. It was caught between the twin pulses of Otter’s voice and Orca’s drum. It was held and poured into a shape that was almost human: a human shadow with no human to cast it. When Otter stopped telling, the edges of that shadow wavered, spreading toward them like a puddle. Kestrel turned side-on to the thing, the cord ready in her hand, her weight coming onto her back foot. She was ready to spring, to rush past the Hand and around it and wrap it in the cord, though surely she would never do it without being touched. She was ready. As Kestrel shifted her weight, Orca lifted his drum. He struck the heart of it with stiffened fingers, and the many voices of the drum rang out at once. He tapped loose the edge voice, and started the heartbeat rhythm, coaxing something dark and fast from the moon-bright skin.
They were ready, Otter realized. Kestrel and Orca. She had asked them to unmake the thing and they would. But the space was too small. The White Hand was going to touch them. They were going to die.
She’d been silent too long. The Hand was stirring, tightening, oozing upward. Otter could hear Orca’s ragged breathing grow harsher as he tried to find his own voice, tried to speak. But he did not know this story. Cricket’s story. The secret story.
The story of where the White Hands come from. “And she called to it,” said Otter. “She said: ‘Mother.’” At that word, Otter’s own voice cracked. “She said, ‘Mother! Why are you up a tree in the moonlight? Why are you in the living world?’”
The Hand was reaching for her. It looked — lost. Like a child who wanted someone to hold her hand.
“She was there because you bound her,” said Otter. “You did this. I did this. I bound my mother.”
Orca’s drum swelled up under her. Kestrel’s heat was steady at her side. They made her strong. Strong enough to make a plan. A way to save Kestrel and Orca. A way to find the truth.