His shirt — his shirt was woven.
The people of Westmost wore leathers and skins. What yarns they had, they hoarded. There was enough yarn, just barely, to make the bracelets everyone wore, to knot the rangers’ staffs and spears and arrows. No one would dream of using yarn to make cloth. Kestrel and Otter had never seen anything that was woven.
“What is that?” said Kestrel, touching the cloth gingerly. They had seen his shirt once before, but it had been in darkness. They had noticed only its dried-blood color, and its little hem of shells.
Without the coat Orca looked younger, well-muscled and long-limbed. “Cedar,” he said, and his hand went to his throat, where once he had worn a string of beads. He let it fall. “Cedar bark, again. My people say the cedar is our mother, and she is kind.”
“… Kind?” Otter was caught in fascinated horror, like a rabbit before a snake. “How is it kind, to wear a skin of knots … ?” Her voice came hollow and whistling, and she reached her white hand for him.
Orca stepped backward — putting one boot into the lake. He stopped.
Otter drifted to him. “Why are you not strangling?” She touched his shirt, above his heart. The cloth was both rough and soft. Under her fingers the yarns of it stirred. And deeper than that …
Orca stifled a gasp. He did not step back again, but he was shaking.
“Otter,” said Kestrel. “Otter!”
Otter blinked.
“Let him go,” said Kestrel. “You’re hurting him.”
Otter let go.
Orca staggered backward, splashing into the lake. There was a hole like a scorch in his shirt. Under it was a blossoming bruise: the rootlings and branch tips of blood vessels had come untangled under his skin. Otter’s fingerprints were there: bloody blisters.
“Come out of the water,” said Kestrel mildly.
Orca didn’t look at Otter. He came out of the water and jerked his coat on.
Otter spread her hands against her face and pressed her fingertips hard against her cheekbones. “I’m — I’m —” She curled her nails into her skin, trying to feel something. Sharpness. Something —
Orca darted forward, catching her wrists. “Don’t!” He pulled her hands away from her face.
She looked at him.
“You’re bleeding,” he said softly.
She could feel hot blood trickling from the moons her nails had dug. It was running down her face. It was good to feel something.
Kestrel wiped the blood away.
Something. Anything.
Orca was silent after that, silent even through the splash and comedy of catching a goose. They built a fire outside the holdfast — a big one — and dug a roasting pit. Orca hauled driftwood and was still silent, though he hauled so hard and so carelessly that his hands were bruised and cut.
They sat on stones by the fire, Kestrel plucking feathers, with her staff leaning ready against one knee, and her new knife nowhere in sight.
Orca sat thinking. And Otter sat looking at her shadow. It seemed thick to her, in the bright light, thick and slimy, like wet-rot leather.
Orca’s voice came to her as she looked, and it too seemed thickened, changed. “What’s going to happen to Otter?” the storyteller asked. “More, like that moment by the lake edge?”
Otter could not even lift her head to answer.
“More,” said Kestrel. “Worse.”
Otter looked up. Orca was staring at her. He had slipped his fingers into the hole she’d unknotted in his shirt. She looked back down.
“Maybe there is a tale to make of it,” said Kestrel. “But the stone truth is: more, and worse.”
Otter’s heart twisted and clenched. “Not yet,” she said — and it sounded like begging.
Kestrel was silent for a beat too long.
“Not quite,” she said.
Otter shivered and her shadow seemed to bubble like porridge.
“What does it look like?” said Orca. Otter couldn’t bear to look at him. “How — how will we know?”
Again, a silence. So long that Otter’s shadow moved of its own power, as if the sun had shifted. She lifted a hand and the shadow lifted its hand.
“I will tell you when —” began Kestrel.
And Otter said: “It looks like this.”
She folded downward and picked her shadow up off the ground.
Otter put her hands into the shadow hands. Into the moss, it should have been — but the moss rose and met her. Fingers wrapped her fingers. She looked. Her white hands were holding darkness. A darkness too thick to see through. It looked sticky, clotted. But it felt — warm. She knew it. It was soft, but with hard places, like the calluses a binder’s hands got from long winters braiding the rawhide. Palms fitted in her palms. Long fingers folded around the back of her hands; thumbs stroked the curls of her fingers. Large hands holding her small hands. Her mother’s hands.
“Otter.” Kestrel’s whisper was horrified.