Sorrow’s Knot (10 page)

“I will help you,” said Otter. She could say nothing else.

“Good,” said Fawn, and she slipped her fingers into the ward.

Fawn spread her fingers inside the crossed cords and they lifted and separated. Otter saw where her fingers should go and she slipped them into place, then slid them down into the tighter spots of the ward. She turned her wrist, making the cords shift and open: between her hand and Fawn’s hand, a small string figure danced.

The figure danced, and power with it, sliding back and forth down the cords.

Otter felt as if the ward were her heart, and her heart had left her body. She knew they were trying to undo it, and she thought that if she did, her heart would slowly come undone.

She looked through the strings and caught Fawn’s eye. The other binder’s eyes were round, showing white all around like a rabbit’s.

They untwisted the figure between them into three sets of crossed lines — into two — and then it was gone. Fawn gasped aloud.

And they went on.

What else, Otter asked herself later, could they have done?

They went on, while the children cried and the icy mist swirled around their knees. The day at Fawn’s back grew stark and blank, a cold day where the very brightness made it hard to see. Fawn would choose a place to put her fingers, opening the ward a chink, and Otter would slip in her hand. Over and over, the wild fear that Otter had built into the ward made their fingers lock and their arms tremble. It poured down their bodies like lightning into the ground. Otter was shaking, Cricket’s steady hand on her back. Fawn was alone.

Fawn chose slowly, then more slowly. The ward was down to its most powerful snarls now, and they didn’t seem to pulse — they seemed to lunge. Fawn looked at them. She looked at Otter. She was breathing with her mouth open. She picked a snarl, and put in her hand.

She tried to open her fingers.

The cords snapped closed.

And all at once, Fawn was swaying on her feet, sweat springing out on her face.

She put her other hand into the ward, trying to spread the cords.

Otter put her hand in too — and jerked it back. She hadn’t thought about pulling away, she’d just done it, her body snatching itself back as if it had touched fire. For the cords were fire now — they were raw power and raw pain and raw hunger. Their hunger was like the hunger of fire, which cannot be satisfied. Their hunger was like the hunger of the dead.

Fawn had both hands caught. She tottered.

Otter felt Cricket tense behind her, as if to reach into the ward, but he didn’t, couldn’t.

Otter braced herself and put her hand in. It caught fire. She yanked it back, gasped in air, put it in again.

Fawn fell.

She went forward, into the ward.

The weight of her body brought the last few cords down. The jerk of power through Otter’s hand brought her down too, and suddenly she was kneeling, Cricket’s arms wrapping her and pulling her back, and Fawn was in the dirt at her feet.

The little binder was tangled up. It was impossible that the ward, that handful of cords, should hold her. It was like a spider catching a rabbit. Impossible. Grotesque. It should not hold.

It held.

The cords — as Cricket dragged Otter back, the cords pressed into Fawn. Made lines in her like a spoon through soup.

“Let me go,” Otter spat, reaching. “Let me —”

“Don’t touch her,” said Cricket.

“Why?” cried Otter. “It’s my ward, it’s my fault, why —” Why shouldn’t she touch Fawn? Why shouldn’t she throw herself into that fire?

There was one cord across Fawn’s throat, the skin bulging around it. There was another slashing slantwise across her face. It had closed one eye and was snarling itself in her hair, pulling the braids.

The other eye was open.

As Otter struggled in Cricket’s arms, that eye finished widening. It grew blank as the sky.

“Why?” said Otter, pulling desperately at the hands that wrapped her. “Why didn’t you let me go?”

“Because,” said Cricket, softly, in her ear, “you are the only binder we have.”

For a while, Cricket and Otter sat there with Fawn’s body. They didn’t dare to touch it. They had not the heart to move. The children cried behind them, and no one came.

And then: Willow.

She came walking without a coat over the snow. She was wearing her fine blue shirt, her hair was undone, and she walked tall and easy, the white fringe swaying. To Otter, for just a moment, she was only
Mother
: only love and strength and safety, come to save them.

She was more than that, of course. And they did not know what.

Wordless, Willow knelt in the bright snow, her body a dark shape against the harsh light behind her. She looked at Otter and Cricket. She looked at the body of Fawn.

“Mother,” said Otter. Even in her own ears, her voice sounded broken.

Willow looked up, her face sane and sad. “There is no bottom to sorrow, is there?” she said. “No knot can hold it.”

She touched the cords around Fawn and they first stirred, and then lifted, curling away from the body like sprouts curling away from the used-up seed. Willow gathered them in one hand like flowers. They wrapped up her arm.

The buffalo robe Otter had clutched around herself when she stumbled to the door that morning was still on the ground behind them. Cricket passed it forward, and Willow lifted the little body onto it and tucked it in, as if tucking a child to sleep. “May her name forgive me. I did warn her. I did.”

“She was very brave,” said Cricket.

“A fine young woman,” said Willow, stroking down the sheared fur of the robe that had become Fawn’s shroud. “I was proud to call her daughter.” She looked up. “Come here, Otter.”

“Mother,” said Otter, and shuffled forward on her knees, into Willow’s arms, into the light.

Willow hugged Otter against her body, and Otter tucked her head under her mother’s chin as if she were an infant. “Mother,” she said, “I thought … We heard …” Against her ear, she could feel her mother’s heart, going fast. Her own body grew slowly stiff as the knowledge came to her — what she’d thought, what she’d heard: They might yet be true.

Coldness came to her.

She pulled away, hugging her arms around herself.

“Fawn thought they might take your arm,” said Cricket.

Willow lifted her arm. Now that Otter was in the light, she could see more than just the shape of it. She could see that the inside of Willow’s hand was white as if dipped in paint. White as bone.

“Thistle wanted to,” she said. “Almost I let her. To give her that hope.”

“But, not?” said Cricket.

“Little point.” And with her white hand, Willow pulled open the deep V of her shirt.

There was a white handprint over her heart.

Otter thought for a moment her own heart would stop.

Then she thought it would deafen her, pounding in her ears. Her throat grew tight.

Willow stood up and reached down to help Otter up — reached down with her white hand. Otter froze.

Cricket, behind her, took her under the armpits and lifted her to her feet.

Willow pretended not to notice. “Let us go,” said the binder. “Let us get out of this place.”

“Out of … Westmost?” said Cricket.

Willow looked up at the blank bright sky, her eyes watering. “Would that we could. Away from this lodge.” She rubbed at the skin between her eyes. “If it would burn, I would burn it.” She turned to them. “You have a home, do you not? Let us go — get away from the arrows of everyone’s eyes.”

Otter looked up. Yes. No one was approaching, but people stood here, there, in little knots. And all of them were watching. The arrows of their eyes. Movement caught her eye and she turned. It was Kestrel, coming toward them, leaning on her staff, weary as winter. Silent, she linked her arm with Otter’s. Cricket took her other elbow. The three of them went back to their home, and Willow, white-handed, followed them.

Willow sat on the fire bench, in the circle of light cast from the smokehole. No one came too near her.

“You are not mad,” said Cricket, cautious.

“Have been and will be,” said Willow. She steepled her hands in front of her face. Bone-white fingers laced with human fingers. “Tell me, Lord Story. How long does it take?”

Otter put her back to the wall and tried to breathe. The yarns around her wrists itched and tugged as if they were twisting in the presence of something strong and dead — but when she looked down, they were not moving.

“Lady Binder?” said Cricket.

“The thing that will eat its way out of me,” said Willow, her words coming faster. “How long does it take?”

“There are different tales,” said Cricket softly.

Willow’s look was pure irritation.

“If I had sureness, I would share it,” said the storyteller. “I do not.” He sighed. “Mad Spider — that is the strongest of the tales. Mad Spider was touched by the Hands on the stone in the middle of the stream. Do you know that story?”

Everyone knew that story.

“It is three times three days in that story,” said Cricket.

And Willow said: “Tell it.”

Cricket took a slow breath. Then he came and sat beside Willow. “Lady Binder, I will tell you anything you need. But first tell me what is happening to you. Because I think you are going to die. And I think there is a story that should not die with you.”

Otter looked at her mother. At her mother, who was alive. It would not last. Could not last. Otter stumbled forward and went to her knees at her mother’s feet. She took Willow’s unmarked hand.

There was a silence that went on longer than it would take an owl to cross the whole sky. Then Willow said: “I do not know how to start.”

Unexpectedly, it was Kestrel who answered her. The young ranger sitting on the sleeping platform, the cords of her staff loose and tattered, her hands shaking. “Tell us about Thistle,” she said.

“When I was a child,” said Willow. Then she opened her eyes. “Yes. Does it not always start so? When I was a child … When I was a child, my mother loved me. I was not alone, Otter — not like you. I had brothers, twins: Moon and Owl. They were trickster children, Red Fox’s children: mischief-makers, far-rangers. Older than me, three winters older. Our mother Thistle was a ranger. And I — I was a girl with knots.

“Once in the winter, I tied a line from wattle to wattle inside our lodge — just a drying line, it was to be, just something from which we might hang our coats, because the snow was thick that year. But it was — too strong. It pulled the lodge in.”

“The walls fell in?” said Otter.

That was what Mad Spider had done, when touched by the White Hands: She had turned her binding power backward, let it run wild. She’d pulled down the great poles that held up her lodge. She’d buried herself alive.

Willow put her hand on the upright pole beside her. Overhead, something creaked.

“Only in pieces,” said Willow, telling the story. “Where the ties were. One bit of wall fell onto my brothers’ pillow and they woke up sneezing and filthy with the dust. They were so dusty they looked half-made, like … like …”

“Like one of the dead,” said Cricket. “White Hands.”

“So I thought,” said Willow. “I had never seen one. For a drumbeat I was so frightened — and then I laughed. May their names forgive me.”

Something fell, soft as snow, soft as dust, around Otter’s face. She looked up. Above her, a wrist-thick grass rope held the canopy poles in the fork of the upright pole. From that rope bits of grass chaff drifted down, glittering.

May their names forgive me.
It was something that was said of the dead.

“Thistle told the pinch it was the weight of the hanging coats that pulled the walls in.”

“But there were no coats,” said Cricket.

“No. She knew then. My mother knew then. She didn’t speak of it, but there were other things: a string game, a lashing on a shirt. I was a girl of knots. Tamarack saw it. I was too young for the cords — only thirteen winters. But Tamarack came to Thistle in quiet, and said she would offer my belt at the great fire. And Thistle — my mother — she said no. ‘I am going to lose my boys this year,’ she said. ‘Let me keep my daughter.’”

“And Tamarack did,” said Cricket.

“She did.”

“Lady Binder,” said Cricket, without looking up, “what is happening to the knots above our head?”

There were bits of chaff falling all around them now, from all four corners of the canopy around which the lodge was built. It drifted down like snow into their hair. It fell into the fire and whirled up again, as brief red feathers of flame, as slow black feathers of ash.

Willow pulled her hand away from the pole, drifted to her feet. She turned her marked palm up, and let chaff fall into it. “It has always been too strong,” she said. “Before the Hand touched me, long before. Since I was a child. It has always been too strong.”

“What has?” said Otter.

“The binding. The knots.” She looked down at Otter with those mad desperate eyes, the ones that had said:
I will never hurt you
. “There’s something wrong with the knots. Oh, Otter — I wanted to save you from them. I wanted …” She swallowed, her eyes becoming softer. “I wanted you to be safe. I wanted you to be happy.”

She reached upward.

Willow was not a tall woman; she could not quite reach the point where the crossed canopy beams were bound in the fork of the upright, could not quite reach the golden, unraveling grass rope. But she had blue yarn wound around her arms: the yarn Otter had used to cast her first ward; the yarn that had killed Fawn. Willow reached up, and the yarn unwound and reached farther, winding upward as if toward the sun. It climbed into the canopy. It wrapped. It tied. It was impossible that yarn no thicker than an earthworm should hold a pole as thick as a thigh. But it held.

The groaning of the lodge stopped, and the last shards of grass fell glittering into the new silence.

“Tell me how long I have to live, Cricket,” said Willow.

“Nine days, then,” said Cricket, soft as a blessing. Soft as a killing snow. “Nine days by the story.”

Otter felt those words fall on her, and fall on her, and fall on her, until she was cold and buried.