Otter looked up. The hands she was holding were human. The face she was facing was not. It was made of holes.
Her shadow stood in the air as if it were a swarm of insects. It had a mouth and eyes and ears and they were all just holes.
Otter stood up slowly, face-to-face with the thing she was becoming.
Kestrel was standing too, the dead goose at her feet, her staff in her hands. She moved slowly, like a stalking cougar, and slid the staff into the shadow’s back.
Otter felt it. It slid through her spine and through her heart, and she jerked back screaming. The shadow thing jerked with her, slapped against her like a wet coat, went into her like … like … Otter went down, the world whirling and darkening. Not yet, not yet, not yet, she cried inside herself. Come back. Please not yet.
And then she did come back. She was on her hands and knees in the moss. Black and gray feathers were blowing around her. The ground was damp. Kestrel’s fallen staff was under her hand and all its knots were writhing and popping open.
“Tveh,” said Orca. His voice was almost in her ear. A string of words bounced off her, and none of them made sense: They hit her like hail. She felt his hands on her shoulders.
“Don’t touch me,” she warned, even as Orca jerked back as if burned. Otter sat up. “Don’t touch me. I can’t —” The bracelets on her wrists were twisting, moving on their own. They wanted to tighten against the thing inside her. The seam of her shirt was opening, stitch by stitch. That could be Orca’s skin, opening. Orca’s blood and muscle and nerve coming untangled under her fingers. “Don’t touch me,” she whispered.
Orca took a step backward.
Kestrel stood watching, her face green, the black knife in her hand. “Now?” she said. She was not shaking.
It was sunny, bright. A beautiful day.
And Otter, kneeling in the moss, knew she had to say yes. Had to say now. Her throat knotted. She swallowed. She said —
“— No,” said Orca. “By the Stone. If I had wanted to be a killer, I would have killed my father. I have come too far and I have left too much and I will not see the story end this way.”
“Oh,” said Otter: a word as hollow as a skull. She rose like smoke and twisted around. “A story.”
Whatever Orca saw in her face stunned him. His eyes went round. His face went blank as the drum face.
The White Hand spoke through Otter’s mouth, then a voice like a wind over a smokehole. “I thought you were emptied, storyteller. Tell me that story.”
Orca looked wildly at Kestrel, who said: “Ch’hhh. Tell it.”
He paused one more moment, his fingers fumbling at his drum bag as if they were very cold. Otter drifted toward him, and he raised his drum up like a shield — and spoke.
Orca, son of Three Oars, who spun his stories at the edge of the world.
It was cruel to wrench this story from him. But Otter, empty and wearing a shadow that was not hers, was past all cruelty. The drum played its too-fast heartbeat, and Orca’s voice flowed and caught.
Orca, son of Three Oars. A village by the edge of the Great Sea, whose walls were made of shells chosen for their shining — for the dead were shy of shining — whose walls were made of shells, and of stories. Any child in that place could tell a small tale that would make the dead stop and listen. A little riddle that might catch those lost hearts in puzzlement. Who knew why it worked? It worked. Orca had often wondered, and sometimes asked, but never been answered.
“I thought it was only the White Hands that listened,” said Kestrel.
“You thought there was only one magic in the world,” said Orca. “You thought nothing came from beyond the mountains. From the Great Sea. The world is bigger than you knew.”
Far away, on the true edge of the great world. By the bounty of the Great Sea. Under the cedar trees. A prosperous place. The oilfish running at the end of winter. The salmon, when they ran, thick enough to walk on. Seal meat; hunters in kayaks; the restless, dangerous peace of the sea. And the little dead, always the dead. Called the jellyfish kind, because they were nothing more than dark made substance, as jellyfish were a kind of congealing of the water. And because they stung — a burn of the nerves, a permanent numbness. The little dead that were everywhere and always, because the world is not perfect.
The storyteller kept them back, whispering his stories to the shells, so that they sounded not with the ocean but with drum echoes and whispering stories. Within the shining wall of stories and along the crash of the sea, Orca had been almost unafraid.
Almost.
Orca here struck the drum’s center, and it rang out with all its voices. His hands faltered, and resumed. A triple beat. Otter’s bracelets were spread across her white fingers — blue on the white, like the sky streaking through clouds. She cast the cradle-star, the tree, the scaffold. The sky.