He stood silent for a while, then offered: “Kestrel said if you were crying she would murder me. I thought: best to go check.”
She could only see him as a shape against the darkness. He must not have been able to see her expression either, because he came forward. In one step, she could see his face. In the next, his thumbs brushed her cheeks. “You are,” he said. “That’s a pity, because I —” But whatever joke he’d been about to make he dashed aside, with a sudden snap of his other wrist. “Cu mullen, Otter. I’m sorry. Cu mullen. Don’t cry.”
“I killed her,” said Otter. “We killed her. Oh, Orca — I don’t want to die.”
There was a drumbeat of silence, and then Orca said: “Then don’t.”
“I can’t — you don’t —” She drew deep for air. “Are there no horrors where you are from?”
He turned away. She could see the line of his nose and lips against the starlight.
“Horrors enough,” he said.
She waited, but he said nothing more.
The restless lake murmured and shushed. At last, Orca held out a hand to her: “Come and have stew, before Kestrel hunts me down.”
So she put her hand in his. It was bigger than hers, bony, warm. They went in and had stew. Otter lay down and drifted above the surface of sleep, listening to Kestrel murmur to Orca about how they had murdered Willow. She lay very still, as if lying in snow, which was said to be a gentle death. Eight days.
Seven days.
The madness rose in Otter like a bog welling into a footprint. Anger: Willow had been angry. Silence: Willow had been silent. Otter understood that now. It was like having water in the ears: There was thickness and pressure between her and the world.
In that thickness, Orca asked question after question. What had happened to Willow? How? When? In what order? Had they ever seen another of the touched? What had they tried? He asked and asked until Otter wanted to smash his head with a rock. “Stop,” she begged him. “Please, please stop.”
And he would stop and play his drum softly, or do some useful thing — hauling in driftwood for the fire, catching fish — but soon enough he would start again.
When night came, Otter could not sleep. She could feel the prints the Hand had left in embracing her, the prints hidden on her back. They were numb, but they were like lying on stones. She tossed on her bed of ferns until Kestrel came and sat beside her, holding her hand. In the dimness, the ranger looked weary as a wounded deer. She was holding still. She was watching the wolves come.
Kestrel sat and Otter clung to her. But it was not enough.
“Orca,” Otter whispered. The name was strange. It wanted to break into its two sounds, drop free from meaning like beads from a string. She put her hand to her throat as if to catch them, and felt the word move there again. “Orca,” she said to the boy whose silence she’d begged for. “Orca, tell me a story.” And Orca did, a lullaby of a story, with a murmuring drum. But it did not catch her attention; it did not comfort her. The White Hand inside her had heard it before.
She reached sideways and wrapped her hand around one of the birch poles. One by one, in the darkness, the yarns there unwove themselves and came to wrap around her hand.
Six days. Otter woke late and the holdfast was empty as a cup of bones.
Of course there was foraging to do: Even the dying must eat. They must be foraging, her friends — for a moment she could not remember their names. She was losing herself.
From somewhere nearby came a tick and tap, like a bird breaking a snail against a stone. But louder, sharper. She got up and followed the sound toward the lake. The ground had a give as if half-thawed. The speedwell was blooming, blue as if scraps of the woven sky had fallen. Otter walked and felt so strange that she could have been upside down. Walking in the broken sky.
Kestrel was sitting on stone. Her coat was off in the fine morning. Her back was to Otter, bent, moving. She was making a knife.
She had a chunk of obsidian already shaped into a blade like a willow leaf, and she was knapping it sharper. A round stone in one hand. A bit of leather across her knee to work against. She struck the stone. Shook the new fragments off the leather. They fell, and jingled as they fell, like black teeth.
Kestrel was no flint worker, but the black glass of obsidian was easy to work. The knife on Kestrel’s knee was sharp already. So sharp that it would be fragile. The kind of blade that could be used only once.
Sharp. Once.
And Otter knew exactly what the knife was for. She could feel it against her throat already.
The delicate rasp and tap of the strike-stone against the blade. The jerk of Kestrel’s shoulders.
The body is knots. Otter had power over knots. She could undo them all at a touch, as Willow had undone the ward — as Willow had undone Thistle’s hand. Otter could unmake Kestrel with one touch.
She took one step. Her hand out.
Kestrel turned around.