Orca looked at Otter’s white — no longer white — hand. It twitched. Her fingers unfurled.
Orca forgot his fear, forgot how Otter’s pain had kept him from touching her platform. He dropped his drum — it went tumbling down through the branches like the moon falling — and swung out onto the frame beside her.
The platform swayed like a whale-bumped boat. He clung to it, shouting: “Kestrel! Kestrel! Get us down!”
The ravens that had been gathering croaked and complained. Wings flapped heavily.
Otter raised her swollen hand. The fingers — they were almost the color of blueberries, a blue with blood in it — twitched. Orca heard something falling around them. It wasn’t until much later that he knew it was bones. The cedar weavings of his shirt stirred, moving over his skin. The point of numbness on his ankle, where once he’d been bitten by a spiny-haired spider, flared into painful life.
“Otter,” he said, touching her face. “Otter. Don’t die. Please don’t die.” The frame shook and creaked under them. Otter moaned.
He was from a people who knew cold, Orca. He had grown up on mist-shrouded, storm-wracked islands that rose humpbacked from the cold sea. He knew, therefore, how to save her. He inched his body over until it lay against hers on the wild, swinging scaffold. He took her in his arms. And he kissed her.
To Otter, it was another kind of drum.
The warmth went into her. The cold went out. The breath came into her like warmth, like tears and milk, like love itself. And the cold went out.
“Otter. Otter.”
The warmth went in. The cold went out.
Her hands. Her feet. Pulse, numb. Pulse, numb.
Orca’s kiss. The warmth going in. His tears, the taste of the sea. Pulse, numb. Pulse, numb. The warmth went into her, and the cold went out.
The lamps of my people. The great light of day.
The light and the lamps — the light and the lamps …
And finally, Otter, wanting to see them, opened her eyes.
All around her, the world rocked. She was lost, like a kayak in the fog; things rose around her like the world being made new. It was nearing sunset. There were shouts and voices — later she learned it was the rangers. Kestrel, half expecting the freed dead to come climbing facefirst down the trees like bats, had lit a smudge fire, and rangers had come. The women were casting lines up to Otter’s scaffold, working to get what should have been her dead body lowered to the ground.
But Otter did not understand this. The first thing she saw that she understood was Orca, who had one arm wrapped tight around her. The other hand was clinging grimly to the point where once her wrist had been knotted.
“Otter!” he gasped, seeing her open eyes. “Hang on. Hang on. We’ll be down in a moment.” His body was hot against hers, and hers was awake and shivering. “Otter,” he said. “Otter, I have you. Stay.”
The platform lurched and dropped an arrow’s length. Orca’s hand dug into her back.
“It is beyond foolish,” he said, breathless, “after all this. But — I am afraid of heights.” The platform lurched again. Orca pressed Otter’s body closer to his.
“By the Cedar,” he said. “And the Stone. And the Great Sea.”
Rescued from her scaffold, Otter lay pinned under her body’s cold and pain.
Orca and Kestrel took turns holding her head, holding her hand. And the rangers warmed her. They built a fire right there in the scaffolding grounds. They warmed stones in it, then wrapped them in hides, tucking them against her.
All that night the company sat with her, murmuring and awake, with the firelight leaping over the new-fallen bones. There was something new in the scaffolding grounds: a deep, still peace.
Thistle, captain of the rangers, was not a woman of great imagination. But she had seen the skulls fall, and she had seen something rise, something more than ravens, something both darker and more shining.
She sat and listened. The rangers had questions and Orca had stories. Kestrel kept silent. Finally, at dawn — out of the pale, clear sky at dawn — a snow began to fall, small flakes wandering down, like a condensation of brightness.
Thistle stood up and — with her one good hand — gestured like a queen. “We must take her back to Westmost.”
So the rangers took the burial frame and piled it high with pine boughs, and laid a deer hide over that. And they carried Otter back.