She flinched at Thistle’s words and tried to get up. Her knees buckled.
Willow had the cradle cast across her hands now. She thrust it up in Thistle’s face: three clean diamonds. The strings did not shiver or twist, as they would have in the presence of the dead. “There’s nothing here,” Willow said. She pulled the yarn free of her fingers and coiled the loop in her palm. Then she reached down and took Otter’s hand. Otter felt the warmth and scratch of the yarns between them. Willow pulled; Otter came wobbling to her feet.
“Daughter,” said Willow, “those were strong knots.”
Otter was still breathing in weird gulps; they made her feel as if she were still laughing or beginning to cry. “Cricket?” she asked.
“He’s alive,” sniffed Newt. She seemed almost offended by the fact. Healer she might be, but Newt the bonesetter had not a soft spot in her whole body.
On the other hand, silent Kestrel was all soft, suddenly. Tears were running down her face.
“Alive,” said Otter, half in wonder.
“And you, daughter?” said Willow. “It is no small thing, the scaffold.”
“I’m alive,” said Otter. She spread her hands then, looking over her own skin for the mark of the dead. But there was nothing. “I’m alive,” she said.
The rangers scooped Cricket out of Kestrel’s arms and carried him toward the bonesetter’s lodge.
Otter turned in her mother’s arms and pulled Kestrel to her feet.
Thistle looked them up and down. “Come,” she said shortly. She had the manner of someone accustomed to being obeyed. Kestrel wrapped her fingers in Otter’s. They were both shaking. Surely they had no more need for courage. For surely they had no courage left.
“Come,” said Thistle, more sharply still. Willow laid a palm against each of their backs. “Ch’hhh,” she soothed them, soft as a breeze. “Best to.” So they went. They trailed behind the women carrying Cricket’s body like the drummers at the end of a funeral.
Inside the lodge, the rangers set Cricket wobbling on his feet. Newt pulled Cricket’s shirt off over his head. The boy tottered and tipped to his knees, groaning. There were marks on him: white. One just below his breastbone, one over his spine, as if something had burst from within him, back and front. He pushed both his hands over the mark on his chest — a scrabbling, desperate gesture, as if the white mark were a gaping wound. He folded forward over his knees. Otter held on to Kestrel and stared at Cricket’s bent back. The hunch. The spine like a cord with knots tied in it. The way the waist dipped inward that was different than the way a girl’s waist dipped. The panicked heave of the ribs.
“What shape had the gast?” Newt the bonesetter asked Kestrel. “Did it have hands?”
Otter’s heart skipped. The mark on Cricket’s back was formless, a blotch, but it was the right size to be a handprint. “No,” Kestrel said. “No hands.” It was not clear if she was saying what she remembered, or begging for what she hoped was true.
“Hmpf,” said Newt, and looked up at Otter. “Well? Did the dead thing have a shape?”
Otter said: “No shape. It had no shape.”
Thistle turned toward her. “Are you sure?”
Otter was not sure. She looked at Thistle, whose eyes were flint gray and hard. She looked at her mother, whose face was set and sad. “It was strong,” said Otter. “But we caught it — we held it. Surely it cannot have been …”
Kestrel tore herself from Otter’s side, then, and knelt with Cricket, wrapping her arms around him. “He is not turning,” said Kestrel, and this time it sounded like pure will. Newt seemed far too willing to see a handprint in that blotch — far too ready to cut Cricket’s throat with her healing knife. “It is not inside him. He will be healed.”
Otter looked around. The little space was full of women, looking carefully down at one gasping, trembling half-grown boy.
Otter knelt beside Kestrel. She put her hand over the white mark on Cricket’s back. “Cricket,” she said, and her voice broke, “it’s gone now. It’s not in you. It’s gone.”
For days they waited to see if it would be true.
They were not sure, not quite sure, what had touched Cricket.
The dead were of three kinds. The commonest were the slip. They had no more form than a clump of roots and earth. They had no more will than hunger. Their danger was that they gathered together: Where there was one, there were usually many.
The gast were different: They had form. A limb, sometimes. A way of turning that, though blunt and blind, suggested eyes. They had cunning too. Eyeless, but they could watch. Brainless, but they could wait. They were stronger, rarer. The thing in the corn, with its open mouth — gast, probably.
But they were not quite sure. Because they had not seen its hands.