Sorrow’s Knot (12 page)

“May the wind take them into the wind,” said Willow, when they were done. “May the rain take them into the water. May the wood hold them away from this world. May the ravens fly them far.”

I’m sorry
, said Otter, in her heart.
I should not have done that to you, Fawn. I’m so, so sorry. I am sorry we bound you here, but please do not come back.

“Ah,” gasped Cricket, falling onto the bench beside the fire. “So, that is the greater world.”

“It is,” said Kestrel softly.

The hasty winter sun had been lowering as they came back to Westmost. Shadows had fallen across the frozen river, turning it the color of sage blossoms. The rangers had walked around the other three in an arrowhead, using their staffs to nudge back the boldest of the little dead.

They hurried like the hurrying sun. The round stones at the edges of the stream were wearing little hoods of snow, and their gray bases seemed to spill grayness like a stain onto the ice. Shadows, thicker than shadows should have been: slip.

And then they caught a flash of white, like the flare of a junco’s wing. A glimpse, in the dim forest, of something that might have been a lifted hand.

So they had gone quickly.

Back in Westmost, back inside the lodge, Cricket pulled the great funeral drum up into his lap and wiped his hand in circles across the surface, cleaning it of the little flecks of mud and ice. His hand was trembling slightly, just enough to graze stray voices up from the big drum. “The greater world,” he said. “You might have told me it was nothing but fear and strangeness. All this time I have been jealous,
okishae
: to go among the trees. New skies. New birds.” He fingered the thong that tied his braid. It was strung with beads and a present Kestrel had given him: the feathers of a woodpecker. It was the finest thing he owned, and he had worn it, Otter knew, for Fawn. There were streaks of tears on his face.

Had Otter herself wept? She could not remember. It had been so
wrong
. Even weeping seemed the wrong thing.

“It is beautiful too,” said Kestrel. “The world beyond the ward.”

“Is it?” said Cricket. “I missed that part.”

“Me too,” said Otter. Her mother was pacing — throwing herself from side to side of the tiny space like a fish in a box trap. That’s what Otter felt like: something trapped. Beautiful? No.

“Once we lived without a ward,” said Willow.

Cricket stopped his work — he had begun braiding a sweetgrass smudge, to smoke and bless the drum — and looked at her.

“We did,” she insisted. Her voice was like someone stepping on a dry branch: a crack, a breaking.

“Mad Spider made the first ward,” said Cricket, carefully.

“That story,” she said. “Tell it.”

“Lady Binder,” said Cricket, covering his eyes, “have mercy and let me find my breath. All day I have been the heartbeat of the world.”

“Lord Story,” she snapped. “I have eight days left. Tell it.”

So Cricket did. His head bent over the drum, he swallowed once, twice, three times. Then he began, softly, to speak. “In Eyrie, then. Warm and gentle Eyrie, where the lake lies dreaming; Eyrie the sunlit; Eyrie the high city. In Eyrie, in the days before the moons were named, in the days of the binder Hare, Eyrie had no ward.

“Gentle work, it must have been, to be a binder in the days of Hare. To bless the knots of
okishae
and tie the rangers’ staffs and hunters’ arrows. To lay to rest the restful dead. Gentle work; a soft place.

“But the blistering fever can come even into a soft place, and so it came to Eyrie. And so Hare died, and her daughter, Mad Spider, became binder in her turn.”

Cricket did not strike the drum. It was the funeral drum of Westmost, and it was not to be played except to walk out the dead. But he leaned close to it, and his breath played it. It echoed him; it thrummed and whispered.

Otter found herself growing very quiet, to hear what the drum might say.

“It was Mad Spider,” said Cricket, said the drum, “who made the first ward. She strung it through the birch trees. She strung it through the stones. It was made of rawhide, because there was not enough yarn, but it was blue as the cords of the weaver, blue as the cords of the sky. She wove it through six moons, from shoots to snow. Her hands grew hard and her hands turned blue.

“‘Little Spider,’ said the people, ‘what are you weaving?’

“‘Little Spider,’ said the people, ‘what do you want to catch in your great big web?’

“‘I am weaving a web to catch the dead,’ she said.

“And the people said: ‘The shadow ones are a trouble to us, but so are the wolves. Would you weave a web to catch them too?’

“And the people said: ‘Come now, Spider, you trap us too. You will make us into fish in a net, if you keep at this.’

“But Spider did not listen, and they called her Mad. Mad Spider, then: She tied and she cast until all of Eyrie was encircled.

“And the people said: ‘Take down your web, Mad Spider. We can live with the little dead.’

“And she said: ‘There is one who is not little.’

“And the people said: ‘It is of no use to keep out the dead. They are both in and out.’

“And she said: ‘There is one who is out.’

“And that night, in the dark of the moon, came the White Hand. First of its kind, and cloaked in horror.

“The people fell silent. And they left the ward standing. And if it has not fallen, then it stands there still, through the moons that no story counted, in the hot-spring steam of the lake, in the sunshine and snow, in the silence of Eyrie.”

He spoke the last word across the face of the drum, and it stirred and whispered through the lodge. Eyrie, the lost city. Mad Spider’s place. The first ward. Otter shivered.

“And does it?” Willow’s voice was sharp as a new knife.

The three young people looked at one another.

“Does … what?” said Otter.

“The ward. Mad Spider’s ward. Does it stand?”

Cricket looked at Kestrel, who said nothing, and then back at Willow. His voice was careful again, the certainty of his story gone. “That is the end of the tale.”

“Boy,” said Willow, “that is the beginning.”

And she snapped around and went out into the snow.

That became the pattern of it. Willow: restless, breathless, angry. She fell on stories as if she were starved for them.

Cricket told stories until his voice began to rasp, until a dry cough came to him even in his sleep. Mad Spider — that was what Willow wanted.

Cricket told her the smallest things, the silliest things. “Mad Spider and the Stuck Sheep,” about the bighorn caught by that first ward. “Mad Spider and the Men,” on how the Water Walkers had found a White Hand for the first time and tried to kill it with sticks. Willow ate the tales of the great binder as if they were things that could drip from her jaws.

And when she was full of them, she would turn and walk away.

Otter let her go, even if it was deep dark. What could touch her that had not touched her already? If she slipped in the snow, if the gast had her …

She had eight days. What did it matter?

But it did matter, because sometimes she was tender. With seven days to live she spent an hour brushing Otter’s hair.

And it did matter, because Otter was to be Westmost’s only binder. And Willow was the only one who could teach her.

So: It was six days before the Hand would hatch. Cricket was telling a story. Willow and Otter sat side by side on the sleeping platform, mother and child, warm together, a cold winter day. The knots in Otter’s hands, Willow’s murmuring voice, her slipping fingers. The secrets of the binder’s cord, whispering between them. It was everything Otter had dreamed of.

It was a nightmare. The whiteness spread in streaks up Willow’s arms like the streaks of blood infection. It spread from her heart, up her neck, like reaching branches.

And the way the cords moved under their own power, twitching against the soft places between Otter’s fingers: nightmare, purely. She knew what they could do. She knew they could pull the life out of the living. The deadness out of things that should be dead. They could do it — they wanted to do it. They had killed Fawn. The knots were powerful. They were willful.

They were mad.

And Otter could feel them, as if they were part of her. As if she held her own skin stretched and twisted into rawhide while still living, between her hands.

I’ve always wanted this,
she thought.

And now she was trapped. Willow was dying. The binder dying.

Her mother, dying.

And Fawn, dead.

And she was trapped.

I’ve always wanted this,
she thought.
And I was wrong.

Five days left. Cricket was running out of safe, soft tales. His voice was rough and low.

Otter was hardly listening to him, but suddenly she heard him say: “… and so she became full binder, while her hair was still fully black.”

Mad Spider,
she thought. It was the secret story, the story of the first White Hand.

Too young and too frightened,
she thought.
Mad Spider. My mother. Me.

Cricket coughed, then: a dry cough that shook him from teeth to hands. Kestrel was already sitting beside him on the sleeping platform, her hand rubbing circles between his shoulders. Now she braced him as he began to fold up. The turtle-shell rattle in his hand shook and clattered. Kestrel pounded on his back, as if to knock the air into him.

As the story stopped, Willow froze.

She and Otter had a cast spread between them: the scaffold, caught halfway to becoming the sky. Willow jerked to a stop halfway through a twist and the yarns moved so fast they burned against Otter’s fingers.

Willow stood up.

The casting tore upward on Otter’s fingers. It felt like something was being pulled out of the center of her, pulled out by the roots. She gagged as it moved out of her — and then it was gone, leaving her head filled with lights and echoes. She fell back, panting.

Willow loomed over her. The sky was spread between the binder’s fingers — her human-colored fingers, her white fingers. The blue cords seemed to glow in the dim light. Cricket, still coughing, lifted his head, his eyes wide. Kestrel reached sideways and put her hand on her staff.

“More,” said Willow. Her voice was hollow, like the moan and hiss of the wind across the smokehole. It was not her voice. “More. Don’t stop.”

“B-binder —” Cricket sputtered. “I —”

Willow — the thing that was Willow — pulled her fingers slowly apart. The yarn stretched — Otter felt it stretch — and then the crossings and tucks of the pattern came undone all at once. The sky pattern burst open.

Around the lodge, the old, dry blessing knots popped off the wattle.

Pop, plink, tick
— they fell one by one, like the first fat raindrops that herald a storm.

Willow took one step forward.

“Stop,” said Kestrel. Her voice was quiet. Her hand was on her staff. “Stop.”

Willow did not stop.

“Willow,” said Cricket. “Willow, tell me a story.”

And that, of all things, worked. The rain of knots stopped.

“Story,” said the thing, in that hollowed voice. And then Willow said: “What story?”

Cricket — sweating and shivering, his voice broken — straightened up. “‘Thistle said to Tamarack: I am going to lose my boys this year. Let me keep my daughter.’”

“And she did,” said Willow. “But the boys, she gave away. Moon and Owl. My brothers.”

And then she shouted — she screamed: “Thistle! Thistle!”