Kestrel had pulled back, cradling her wrist with her other hand. “And I said, say his name and I’ll break you.”
“Yes,” said Orca. “I remember. On the island. I stood for three days. I was exhausted and nearly helpless, and you said you would break my leg and leave me to the monsters. Now things are different. We are in safety and your friend is in need. And so I ask: Who is Cricket?”
“Storyteller,” said Otter, trying to fight free of the red knots in her mind and keep her friends from hurting each other. “A …” she had no words for what Cricket had been.
“But who, to you?” pressed Orca.
Anger was coming up in Kestrel, like sap rising in the spring. It was oozing out of her as sap oozed out of a tree: through the wounds. She stood up, still holding her wrist, and said nothing. Thick, vital nothing.
Orca tilted his chin up and studied her face. Then he made his I-have-no-knife gesture again, holding his arms out toward her, palms up. “You think I would not understand. But I have also lost …” He swallowed, and finished: “People.”
“Should we trade our dead, then?” snapped Kestrel. “Like dried meat?”
“No,” said Orca.
“Then I will go get the axe stone,” said Kestrel. “You pick a leg for me to break.”
“We are caught in a story,” said Orca, “and the story may save us. I need to know it, and so you need to tell it. For Otter’s sake, trust a storyteller and begin it here: Who is Cricket?”
For a moment there was only silence: starlight and wind.
“Okishae,” said Kestrel. “My okishae.”
Orca, for once, was utterly wrong-footed. “I don’t know —”
“As an eagle loves another eagle,” said Kestrel. “As a wolf loves a wolf.”
Orca made the palms-up gesture again. “As a hand,” he said, bringing his left hand on top of his right. “To another hand.” He wove his fingers together. “Separate, but —”
“Coupled,” said Kestrel. Anger was melting away from her like spring ice. “Coupled, always.”
Orca lowered his hands into his lap. There was another moon-long pause. “He is dead, then?”
“Yes,” said Kestrel. Anger had changed her as a storm changes the sky. She looked washed clean, emptied. She turned toward the open night. “He is dead.”
“Don’t —” Otter stood up and caught Kestrel’s arm as she slipped toward the doorway. Holding on to Kestrel made the red knots loosen, made language come back into her ears. She knew it was only for a moment, but still, when she spoke her voice was entirely her own. “Don’t go — it’s dark.”
“The moon’s coming up,” said Kestrel. She put her hand over Otter’s hand. “Let me go, Otter. I won’t walk into the lake.”
“Not after, either — after you’ve killed me, you won’t …” Otter did not want Orca to hear — but the holdfast was so small.
“With stones in my pockets — no, I won’t,” said Kestrel. That she had thought about the methods of drowning herself enough to deny the thought was an uneasy thing. Otter gripped her arm tightly. “Cricket would murder me,” said Kestrel. “He’d hate anyone who harmed me. I will do nothing that would earn such hate.”
Otter caught her other arm, and they leaned their heads together, mingling breath. “I love you,” said Otter. “I know it is nothing.”
Kestrel touched her face. “It’s not.” She pulled back, reached for her staff. “Tell Orca I know it’s not his fault.”
Orca could, of course, hear for himself. But Otter said: “I will.”
And Kestrel went out.
Otter watched her out of sight: the dark figure disappearing into the darkness. The world turning silver under the rising moon. It was a while before she sat down again, across the fire from the storyteller who was not Cricket.
“What is the word?” said Orca. “Kestrel’s eagle-hearted word?”
“Okishae,” said Otter.
“Mullen. I am sorry that I did not know it.”
“It’s a rare word,” said Otter.
And Orca, looking into the fire, answered: “It’s a rare thing.” He looked at her then, and his strangely angled, strangely sad face softened into a beautiful smile. No one had ever smiled at her quite like that, though what the difference was in his smile, she could not name. “Cedar knows: It is more than I deserve.”
He dropped his gaze.
Five days.
The fifth day after she was touched by the White Hand, Otter hurt someone for the first time.
That morning was the first morning when spring seemed something more than a fragile visitor. The sun was warm as a blessing, and high clouds blew fast across the blue sky. They walked along the lakeshore, looking for more of the deeply stupid geese that had fed Kestrel and Otter when they first tumbled, stunned by grief, into the deceptive safety of the caldera. The geese had grown more wily as they considered matings and nestings, and so the trio walked some way.
As the sun came high, Orca shrugged off his coat.
Otter stopped in her tracks.