She looked at Otter. Her eyes darted to the blade. Then she looked back into Otter’s face. Her eyes were strong and clear, behind their sudden tears.
“Thank you,” said Otter. The knife. It was practical. It was kind. It was Kestrel. “I need it to be you,” she whispered.
“Not yet,” said Kestrel.
Six days.
The whiteness spread across the back of Otter’s hands, pushed up her arms in roots and streaks of infection. It opened up her back. It bled out from her temples. One of her eyes turned blue.
Five days.
Orca and Kestrel fought until Otter wondered if Kestrel might test her new knife against that foreign skin. Orca did not understand the White Hands; he did not understand that Otter needed — wanted, she told herself, wanted — to die. That it would be better if she died.
But Orca did not think so. He questioned and argued until his voice became like a rope around Otter’s neck.
“But it is not a monster, or not merely,” he insisted, as they built up the fire against the chill evening. “On the island, the White Hand listened to stories. And it spoke to you, Otter: You said.”
There was a long pause. Otter was watching Kestrel’s face: She was struggling to accept this impossible news. At last she asked: “What did it say?”
Otter tried to find an answer, but before she could, the word whistled out of her as if she were hollow. “Binder,” she said. “Daughter. Binder.” The voice had not been hers. It was a moan and a hiss. It was a cold draft under a door curtain.
Both Orca and Kestrel looked at her, their eyes wide.
Orca murmured something in his own language, then said: “Is that a curse? Binder?”
“No,” said Kestrel. “It is — it is what we call the women of power, the women who tie the knots.”
Orca mimed holding up a cradle-star. “This?”
“That, but more than that.”
“The bones in the string,” said Orca. “On the island. That?”
The image flashed before Otter like something lit by lightning: the ancient ward fragment, thick with shadows. A human skull with a binder’s cord moving, impossibly, through its eyes. Is it still standing? Willow had once asked, and Cricket had said she was right to ask.
“It’s called a ward,” said Kestrel. “It’s meant to keep out the dead, not trap the living. But — yes, that.”
“And?” said Orca. There was a deep crease between his eyes: puzzlement, concentration. Perhaps disgust.
“We bind the dead,” said Otter — and again the voice moved out of her, coiling and knotting, tightening and chilling.
Orca looked at her carefully. “What does that mean?”
“We bind the dead,” said Kestrel. “We — when we die, our bodies are tied to a scaffold. Up in a tree.”
She looked at Otter as she said it. Between them pulsed the memory: Cricket. Don’t bind me.
“Merely the body?” said Orca.
And the White Hand inside Otter answered: “More.”
“Otter,” said Kestrel. Otter felt a touch at her elbow, distant — and then one on her hand. Kestrel’s hand wrapped around her dead white one. “Otter. Come back.” Fingers squeezed hers. Living heat burned against her cold palm. “Not yet, Otter,” said Kestrel. “Come back.”
“Perhaps you should let it speak.” Orca had his drum out. It sat silently in his lap, but it drew Otter’s eye as if he were holding the moon. “Perhaps we need to know.”
“Not yet. I won’t let her be a Hand. Not yet.”
“More,” said Otter again. She closed her eyes, but behind them was only pulse: red cords pulsing. Her mother’s wrist, her dead hand moving. Was this madness? Was this hand — this Hand — the thing that would claw out of her? She could feel it moving inside her, moving in the pit of her body. “Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly,” she said. “There is something wrong with the knots.”
And Cricket said — No, it was Orca, he was Orca. He said: “Tell me the story.”
Behind Otter’s eyes the red pulsed. She could see fingernails. The swelling of death around the nail beds. Her mother’s wrist bloating around the cords. She opened her eyes, but the red pulse was still there. Knotting around the faces of her friends.
And all at once, something came rising in her with a rush of horror. “Don’t bind me,” she said. “After you kill me, Kestrel, don’t bind me. I’ve been trapped. It’s terrible. The cords.” The cord growing through the sockets of the skull. She could feel it moving inside the softness of her eyes.
Kestrel’s fingers twitched around hers. “That’s what Cricket said,” she whispered.
There was a pause as long as a moonrise. And then Orca said: “Who is Cricket?”
Kestrel rounded on him, her arm thrusting out to strike — the heel of the hand, against the throat, against the nose — but this time Orca moved to meet her. He swept his arm in half a circle, catching Kestrel’s wrist with the strongest part of his forearm, knocking her blow aside. “I said, who is Cricket?”