Kestrel looked down at Cricket, at the shadows he was lying in, the little pockets and knots of shadow cast by the jumbled earth. Any one of them might have contained something hungry and nearly invisible, something deadly. And yet Kestrel dropped her bracelets, which were her only defense, went to her knees in those shadows. She lifted Cricket by the shoulders, jerking his head into her lap so he wouldn’t drown in mud. She took both his hands. She looked up at Otter. And she said: “Pull it out.”
So Otter stood over her two friends, with help coming, but not quickly enough, and the dead thing close enough to taste in the air. The world seemed to narrow. Wind beat wings in her ears: the only sound. The strings dug into the roots of her fingers. They crossed and opened: the only movement.
Kestrel’s fingers were laced around Cricket’s fingers, two tangles of knuckles, white with panic. Her hands were still. His hands jerked open and closed even as she held them. Otter could hear him gulping, see his back arch like a torn deer trying to rise.
But he could not rise. The dead thing rose out of him. It was an arrow tall now. It had thickened until it almost had form — twisty like smoke, gelatinous like frogs’ eggs, rising up from Cricket’s spine. It was so close to Kestrel that her breath seemed to stir it. It wove in front of her frozen eyes like a snake rearing. But still she did not let Cricket go.
Otter’s pattern had come together. The tree: roots in one hand, branches in the other. She braced herself and lowered the hand that held the roots into the sticky-looking shadow.
The dead thing flowed up into the strings.
It was the first time Otter had held the dead. She’d made the loops dance around her fingers before; she could cast patterns fast and fearlessly, but she’d never before used them. Until that instant, she hadn’t known what it meant to use them. Whether she could use them.
But she could. The cords between her fingers felt to her, suddenly, as real as her fingers themselves. As real as if her blood vessels had been pulled outside of her skin and held stretched open. The touch of the dead thing on those cords was like plunging the hand into winter water. A shock, and then a slow-building pain. That was power: the ability to feel that cold. And beyond that: the ability to feel that cold, and stand still.
Otter lifted her hands. She held them high, and as far from her own body as she could. She pulled the dead thing up, stretching it thin — and then it came free of Cricket’s back. The boy made a wet and broken sound.
It was all in Otter’s hands now. She started to shiver, and then shake as if taken by a seizure. How long could one stand in such cold? The tree she’d cast made the dead thing climb — it could no longer reach down for Kestrel and Cricket. Good, she thought, but her hands shook as she moved the pattern, trying to change the tree to the scaffold. Her fingers were nearly numb. They would drop the cast — they would drop it and then …
The narrowed world was tiny now: Otter could see only the blue cords and the black eel of the dead thing pulsing and struggling inside them.
And then she saw other hands reaching into her pattern.
“Otter. Otter, give it to me.”
It was her mother’s voice: her mother, the binder, Willow. Willow’s fingers seemed to shine as they reached in and mirrored her fingers, slipping into all the right places. Otter’s vision was fading: She could see willful darkness pulse around the cords, and the cords themselves flaring like lightning and beating like red hearts. She knew she was close to passing out. Breathless, she managed the last twist — the one that would move her pattern from her hands onto her mother’s.
And then she found herself sitting on the cold wet earth.
Cricket was curled up on his side, with Kestrel still clutching both his hands. His mouth was black and dribbled with swallowed earth. That black mouth moved. For a moment Otter was frightened, but then realized it was good news, that moving mouth. Cricket was still breathing.
She was still breathing. She looked up and saw the blue cords of her casting on her mother’s hands. They were silhouetted against the pale spring sky — the whole sky looked fractured by them. Willow spread her fingers, pulling the scaffold pattern long. The thing inside them went long too. Willow made one more twist, turning the scaffold into a pattern called sky. The narrow black thing burst open, like birds from a tree, and was gone.
Otter blinked, and blinked again, and looked around her.
Help had come: the strong and quiet and practical women of Westmost. They stood tall among the cornstalks, that upright and almost that still. There were rangers in both inward-and outward-facing rings, their staffs held ready. There was Newt, the bonesetter, kneeling now by Cricket. There was Otter’s mother, Willow, who was casting a figure with Otter’s yarns. And there at her mother’s side was Thistle, looking weathered and strong as a digger pine.
“Get up,” said Thistle. “Let us see the earth.”
Otter had almost forgotten the danger they were in, sitting in shadows. All her life she’d known — everyone in that place knew — that any patch of shadow might be home to the dead. And yet, exhausted and terrified, she’d forgotten.