“But there was another thing, not a White Hand, but a different horror. Horror enough,” said Orca, and laughed a little, low and bitter.
A madness that came out of the forest, that made men eat other men. Even their friends. Even their children. A mad hunger that made them grow taller, leaner. Nalisque, they were called. The bottomless. They were holes into which you could pour the sea.
Rarely, yet too often, the nalisque came. Rarely — and yet too often — one of those that traded the fish oil overland would come back across the wall wild-eyed and drum-skinned, tall and hungry. The storytellers wrapped them with stories and weighed them with stones and helped them walk into the sea. Learning, little Orca had done that. At his father’s side.
Learning the stories of before the world was made; the stories of after. All the stories: thousands. The bone needles dipped in black ashes: the tattoo, the pain. Taking a name. Making a drum. Dancing on the stones by the edge of the sea.
Orca’s left hand added a brush and tap to the triple beat, and suddenly the drum was playing the sea. Slip and hish and crash. Stones rolling. Breakers.
A two-man kayak. Orca and Three Oars, who was his father. They had gone to gather listening shells from one of the unhumaned islands. And something came from the red shadows of the cedars, out onto the beach, something very tall, thin as lightning. Something past listening. Even to Three Oars, greatest teller of the age.
Three Oars, my — Three Oars, his father.
They fought it and they lived. But his father was torn across one ear. Bitten. Bleeding. All the way Orca rowed them home while his father slumped, bleeding. Salt into salt.
He unfolded from the kayak taller.
And soon enough he was hungry.
Otter, leaning her whole heart into the story, made the casts again and again. The tree, the scaffold. There was something wrong with them. There was a horror in the knots: Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly.
Orca, son of Three Oars, too young, but the teller of stories. The weights he’d been meant to tie around his father’s ankles. The story he’d tried to tell, about the man who became a whale and went deep.
But I —
But he couldn’t.
I couldn’t. I had to, and I couldn’t, and I ran.
“Any story. Any story can have more than one ending.” Orca’s voice was passionate, low and rough. His hands trembled on his drum, making the heartbeat rhythm flutter. “And I don’t know how my father’s ended. If he walked into the sea or into the forest. If something taller and hollowed walked back. There was a horror tale that followed me. I heard it on the trade trails, before I left my country behind. But I don’t know.”
He lifted his eyes.
Sitting there, listening: something that was both a binder and a thing to be bound. White hands wrapped in blue thread. The body seemed human but the face — slashed and shadowed by Otter’s hanging hair — did not bear looking at. The silence of the thing was a hole into which the drumbeat was pouring like the sea.
“That is my last story,” Orca said to that silence. “I do not know how it ends. But it is all I can tell you.” He struck the drum, center, edge, center, edge. Slower. Softer. Center. Edge. His voice, when it came, could hardly be heard. “I don’t want to die. Not like this.”
Center.
Silence.
The White Hand that was Otter stood up. She felt herself do it, felt herself unfold, felt her too-soft body stiffen like an insect after molting.
“Please,” whispered Orca. “Please come back, Otter. I don’t want to die. Please come back.” But he did not step away from her. And he did not strike the drum.
“Otter,” said Kestrel sharply, “what is in your hands?”
Otter looked down. Around her birch-bark fingers the blue yarn made a familiar pattern. The tree, the scaffold. The sky …
As if from far above, she watched as the pattern moved backward. The sky, the scaffold, the tree, the cradle — and forward again. The white, alien fingers worked restlessly, like a child with a question, like a wolf with a skull. Mad Spider bound the dead too tightly.
What if they could be unbound?
Otter blinked. Looked up. Her face grew softer. Became human again.
What if the dead could be unbound?
Orca was still standing there, only a step away. He was trembling with fear as if with fever. His chin was tilted up as it had been when she’d broken the beads from his throat. But as he had not then, he did not now back away.
Brave, she thought. He is brave.
“It was not wrong,” she heard herself say. It was a soft voice, a human voice. “To let your father go. It was not wrong.”
She stepped close to him.
“I’m afraid to touch you,” Orca whispered. He knuckled tears off his cheekbones, leaving a smear of damp that made the black tattoos shine. “Do we really have to kill you?”
“Yes,” she said.