Before they went, of course, they cooked the goose.
Even those caught in stories need to eat, and roasted meat can be carried better than raw. Kestrel sat with her staff on her knees, redoing the knots. Otter watched her, trying to remember a time when she herself had made those knots — when holding a ranger’s staff had seemed like a terrible risk. When a cord keeping its secrets had seemed like something right, something sacred.
She’d been wrong. All her life. About everything. Wrong.
It was a very big thing. She sat with it awhile. Her hands on her knees were quiet: one white, one brown.
With a thumb and two fingers, Orca was tapping something high and sweet as a lark’s song on the edge of the drum. Otter listened to the notes looping themselves higher and higher, like the geese lifting from the lake at dawn, that seemed to pull up the sun.
It was music to dream to.
Otter spun her bracelets around her dead wrist with her living hand.
“Why do you not pull it through?” said Kestrel.
Otter held out her hands and said: “Try.” She flipped off the bracelets and tied sorrow’s knot in one of them. She slipped her white hand into the noose. “Try.”
Kestrel pulled her eyebrows together. She set aside her staff and came over. Took hold of the tail of yarn. Pulled softly.
“Try,” said Otter, again.
Kestrel pulled harder. Harder still.
The noose bit into the white wrist. Into skin that did not dimple and fold, but crinkled and split.
“Try,” whispered Otter.
Something came out of those splits that was not blood.
“I —” said Kestrel.
And the yarn tail snapped.
Otter lifted her alien hand. Worked her living fingers into the broken noose, loosening it. The not-blood stained her, stuck to her like pine resin.
She remembered Cricket’s and Kestrel’s hands glued together with sap. Look, this is where light comes from.
“You knew that would not work.” Orca had set aside his drum.
“Look at me,” said Otter. She lifted her head. As if she stood outside herself, she knew what they saw. The white that washed across her face like funeral paint. Her bleached eyes. She stood and turned around, pulling off her shirt. “Look at me.”
The White Hand had held her in its arms. It had put handprints on her back. They had spread their ache and roots, they had become —
“You have wings,” said Orca. His voice was awed and close. All at once his fingers brushed her bare shoulder — her body shivered — she should not be bare —
And then Orca’s coat enfolded her. He wrapped it around her, covering her, warming her, softly. He turned her around. “They look like wings.”
Kestrel looked at her, her face pale. “I thought you were saved.”
“Where would you tie the noose, Kestrel? What would you pull it through?” My head and my heart, she did not say. My body itself. “The White Hand is still inside me. The body is knots. It is caught in those knots. And they — there is only one moment at which such knots come undone.”
“Death,” said Orca. A word like a fist against the heart of a drum.
They stood there for a moment, the three of them, with the good goose smell all around them and the feathers at their feet.
Otter looked down at her single living hand. Without the brownness of her eyes, the light seemed dazzling, full of lances.
“I was dead,” she said. “For one moment. I was myself and not myself. I was inside out and the light went through me. The knots went through me.”
“I thought you were saved,” said Kestrel again — and went down. Her knees went out from under her, and she sat hard in the moss, feathers puffing up around her like milkweed seeds.
Otter stared, then knelt to her. Put hands — one human, one not — one on each of her shoulders. They stayed there a moment. Orca was silent.
“We need to save them, Kestrel,” whispered Otter. “The bound-up dead. We need to set them free.”
Another silence. Finally, Kestrel closed her eyes, crossed her arms, and put her hands on Otter’s hands, and nodded.
Only then did Orca speak. And he asked: “How?”
How? Otter swallowed the word. It felt like swallowing an acorn with the cap still on. It stuck and scratched and made her shudder. “We must go to the scaffolds,” she said. And stopped.
The furrow between Orca’s eyes — it was quirked to one side, Otter noticed suddenly, and suddenly, absurdly, she loved that. The furrow between Orca’s eyes deepened. But he spoke very gently, like fingers barely brushing a drum. “How?”
He was coaxing her. We must go to the scaffolds …
Orca the storyteller, who knew the next words were and then.
Otter could smell the goose, feel the heat of the roast pit come up through the earth like the potter’s fires.
“It was a potter who made the earth, and a weaver who made the sky,” she told him.
Orca nodded. “By the Cedar and the Stone, we say. By the Cedar and the Stone and the Great Sea.”