They sat Otter on a boulder beside the fire, and she let them do it. The stone under her was cold. The fire in her face was scorching. The sun was up now, but the light was still soft, and the great bowl of the caldera was full of shadows. Otter’s shadow jittered around her in the leaping light. It was as if her shadow were a second skin, mostly numb but catching here and there on a sharp stone, with a little prickle of awareness that was like pain. It was as if her whole body had fallen asleep: Her skin felt larger than it should have, and farther away.
She understood, though it was hard to understand, that the fire was a defense: a light against the ones who feared light, the ones whose skins were shadows. It was not the usual ranger kind of defense; nothing quiet and competent here. It was fear, pure fear. Kestrel’s fingers were tight around her staff. Orca stood with his drum in both hands.
And Otter sat. She wanted to put her face into her hands and weep. But her hands were white and not quite her own. She did not want them to touch her eyes.
She was dying. Worse than dying. The Hand would eat her from the inside out. It would take her mind and self. It would make her into a horror. It was better, it would be better, to die on the end of a knife than to face what was waiting for her.
“We do not need to do it today,” said Kestrel, watching her.
Otter felt her eyes fill with tears. She had three times three days.
“Not today,” said Kestrel, crouching in front of her. She made as if to take Otter’s hand, but hesitated over the fish-white palms. She lifted one finger instead, and brushed the beads of tears from Otter’s eyelashes. She whispered again: “We won’t do it today.”
Watching them, Orca’s eyes crinkled in puzzlement. “Do what?”
Kill me, Otter thought — even tried to say. But she was so frightened that her throat felt stiff and narrow as a bone flute. Air whistled when she breathed and words would not come out.
“How can you not know?” Kestrel twisted around to look at him, her voice tilting from puzzlement to anger. “You must know.”
“Uneh,” said Orca sharply. “Yes: I am lying to entertain you.” He shook his head, spraying the last drops of water from his loose hair. “Do you not see — this wrongness, this White Hand — it is new to me. These handprints on your friend’s face — I do not know them. What I know is that I owe you and Otter my life. So: Tell me what we must do.”
Otter was looking mostly at Kestrel, who was still kneeling in front of her. But she spoke to Orca, or to the air, her words heavy. “I am touched by a White Hand,” she said. “You will have to kill me.”
While I am willing, said her mother’s voice in her memory, said some ghost inside her. Promise me it will be you.
Kestrel stiffened at the words. “I …” she whispered. Otter could feel the knots of her friend’s body tightening and pulling. The body was knots — Willow had said that. The body was all knots. “My hunting — training —” Kestrel made an aborted gesture at Otter’s throat, her face green and sick. “I can do it quickly.”
Orca said something short and sharp that Otter could not understand.
“What?” said Kestrel.
“I said no.” Orca grabbed Kestrel’s shoulder and wrenched her up and around. “Mother Cedar, no! How can you think it!”
Kestrel spun in his grip, digging her thumb into his elbow and striking with her other arm at the nape of his neck. Orca stumbled, dropping his drum — one hand flew up to the place Kestrel had hit him. The other arm was wrenched out behind him by Kestrel’s hold on his elbow. She let him go and he fell onto the moss. “Don’t touch me,” she said, cold.
Orca lay sprawled for three heartbeats. Otter could see the bunched muscles across his shoulders. She watched as — slowly, deliberately — he let the tension go. He rolled over and sat up. “That I haven’t fought you, Kestrel, doesn’t mean that I can’t. Lift your hand against Otter and you will learn exactly what I can do.”
Otter heard the rhythm behind his voice, felt the power she knew he could call on. Inside her, the White Hand stirred and tightened, listening too.
Orca stood up, and snapped both wrists in the air as if shaking off water. The body is knots, thought Otter. He was still trying to loosen his. Trying to put off his anger. She could almost see it fly from his fingertips. The leather of his leggings was wet and clung to the long muscles in his legs. His loose, long shirt was almost black in its wetness: the black of dried blood. The bottom hem was fringed with tiny shells.
From nowhere she remembered the night Tamarack had died, how she’d leaned with Cricket into the flank of an earthlodge, the summer cheatgrass prickling her back. She had pressed into his warm body and wished they were younger. She did not wish for that now. Not to be younger. But she felt the same twist of wish and fear. She was not sure what it meant. It was not exactly hunger.
Changing — she was changing. She had nine days.